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Orhan Pamuk: A Novelist Where The Currents Cross

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  • Orhan Pamuk: A Novelist Where The Currents Cross

    ORHAN PAMUK: A NOVELIST WHERE THE CURRENTS CROSS
    by Peter Byrne

    Swans, CA
    July 3 2006

    (Swans - July 3, 2006) Sisli is an Istanbul neighborhood close to
    the water on the European side of the Bosphorus. It has all the
    smudged and outdated modern appurtenances you might find in a Balkan
    capital. But it differs in the zest of its dominant population, the
    brash new Turkish middle class. On December 16, 2005 there was more
    excitement in the air than that thrown up by the tangled, honking
    traffic. A noisy crowd had gathered in the rain to see a tall, boyish
    figure in a dark suit being escorted into the Sisli district criminal
    court. To judge by the jeering, his crime must have been a vile one.

    Inside the court he remained on his feet for forty-five minutes
    while the judge strove to keep order. It wasn't easy despite the
    great number of riot police in full regalia that stood about. The
    lawyers of the accused man argued that the case should be dropped;
    those of the prosecution that it should be pursued forthwith. The
    besieged judge finally got a word in and postponed the case until
    February 7, 2006. More important, he referred the decision whether
    to prosecute to the Minister of Justice in Ankara.

    A lawyer had punched the pink face of an elderly man who accompanied
    the accused. The same man, leaving the court, was kicked by an excited
    spectator who had been shouting "traitor." The presumed criminal was
    then set upon by a woman who struck him with a rolled-up folder. The
    crowd surged as he stumbled toward a waiting car. But the police
    stood back. Some of their number in plainclothes were busy inciting
    the crowd. A banner called the accused "a missionary child," an
    insult meaning foreign-bred, impure Turk. Shouts came of "Get out of
    Turkey." Stones were thrown. Eggs splattered the car windows as it
    pulled away.

    The man in the now-crumpled dark suit had just time to look out at
    the building opposite the court. It was a five-story block built in
    1951 and marked Pamuk Apartments. He had lived most of his fifty-three
    years there amongst family and relations. His name was Orhan Pamuk,
    and he was Turkey's most famous living writer. The former British
    Minister for Europe, Denis McShane -- he of the pink face -- had come
    to lend support with other campaigners for human rights.

    There's a short explanation of why Pamuk had to appear in court. He
    was quoted in the Swiss periodical Tages-Anzeiger of February 6,
    2005 as saying, "thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were
    killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it." This
    brought a charge in Turkey of "publicly denigrating Turkishness,"
    which could cost him from six months to three years in prison.

    Turkish laws enforce Turkish taboos.

    There's also just as short an explanation of why the judge could
    send the case to the Minister of Justice and how that cabinet member
    could avoid a prosecution. Article 159 of the old penal code was in
    effect when Pamuk made his statement. But by September 2005 when the
    district prosecutor filed an action against the writer, a revised
    penal code had been in force for several months. It was the new
    code's Article 301 that would cover the case. The old code, but not
    the new one, stipulated that the Minister of Justice must approve a
    similar charge. The Sisli judge therefore felt justified in asking
    the Minister for clarification. The response came on January 22,
    2006. The Minister of Justice said he was unable to consider a case
    concerning the former penal code, and the Sisli court was able to
    drop the case. Pamuk was acquitted, but on a technicality.

    However, short explanations can miss the point. At the moment a
    pro-European Islamist government rules in Turkey. It has staked
    its future on getting the country into the European Union. But
    overriding power in modern Turkey resides in the military establishment
    flanked by old-guard secularists, Kemalist authoritarians, enriched
    bureaucrats and small-time zealots who foam at the mouth outside of
    courtrooms. Nothing has changed in that respect since Mustafa Kemal,
    afterwards Ataturk, founded the Republic. This nationalist force
    suspended parliamentary government in 1960, 1971, and 1980, when
    things were not going its way. It would like to be free to intervene
    when it pleased in the future. Turkey's membership of the European
    Union would make such interference difficult. It would also endanger
    a vast system of special interests and privilege built up by this
    new elite since the 1920s.

    Enter the somewhat ingenuous figure of Orhan Pamuk. As a Turkish
    novelist he has attained unprecedented international fame. His last
    novel, Snow, had an initial printing of one hundred thousand copies,
    an unheard-of figure in Turkey. It goes without saying that both the
    moderate Islamists in power and the nationalists ready to pounce on
    them have always considered Pamuk suspect. He may have shied away
    from politics, but being a novelist in Turkey is quite enough to
    present a danger to men of power. Novelists at their best plumb their
    feelings and those of their countrymen to reveal what's really going
    on around them. Can there be a greater public peril? Imagine how the
    politicians of both sides were flummoxed by Pamuk's statement about
    Snow: "I'm not writing a political novel to make propaganda for some
    cause. I want to describe the condition of people's souls in a city."

    Nevertheless, Pamuk's renown abroad made him untouchable. The move to
    incriminate him over the Swiss interview came when the nationalists
    found that it would better serve their ends for Turkey to be seen
    as incapable of meeting Europe's standards on human rights. They
    hoped the indecision in Brussels on Turkey's entry would tip over
    into outright rejection and the nationalists could continue to run
    the Republic from behind the scenes as they always have. The ruling
    moderate Islamist Party of Justice and Development saw its interest
    in the opposite direction. Europe had to be convinced of Turkey's
    respect for human rights. That's why Prime Minister Erodgan's cabinet
    put an end to Pamuk's case before he was scheduled to appear in court
    again on February 7th.

    Pamuk was left on slippery ground. He'd experienced nationalist
    rage up close. There had been library purges, burning of his books,
    intimidation of booksellers, ritual destruction of his photograph,
    ostracism in the streets, goofy death threats, and other rites
    of voodoo fascism. At the same time he also felt uncomfortable in
    having been spared because of his fame while his colleagues suffered
    official persecution unnoticed by the world at large. But if he
    whooped up the abuse of free speech in Turkey -- as Salman Rushdie
    was doing from a perch in Manhattan -- it could well bar Turkey's
    way into the European Union. That's doubtless why at the time of his
    December 16th ordeal Pamuk had only said meekly: "It is not good for
    Turkey, for our democracy, for such freedom of expression cases to
    be prolonged." With the nationalists free of external restraint and
    bolstered by a backlash against Europe's rejection, they could easily
    resume the more brutal censorship of the past.

    Pamuk has often spoken more boldly. In 1999 he refused the honor of
    Turkish State Artist: "For years I have been criticizing the state
    for putting authors in jail, for only trying to solve the Kurdish
    problem by force, and for its narrow-minded nationalism. I don't
    know why they tried to give me the prize." He was the first writer
    from a Muslim country to support Salman Rushdie when Khomeni called
    for his death. Immediately after 9/11, Pamuk wrote in the New York
    Review of Books:

    We should try to understand why millions of people in poor countries
    that have been pushed to one side, and deprived of the right to decide
    their own histories, feel such anger at America.

    A foot in both worlds, Pamuk could set up no facile us-and-them
    dichotomies. He added:

    To debate America's role in the world in the shadow of terrorism that
    is based on hatred of the "West" and brutally kills innocent people
    is both extremely difficult and perhaps morally questionable. But
    in the heat of righteous anger at vicious acts of terror, and in
    nationalistic rage, some will find it easy to speak words that might
    lead to the slaughter of other innocent people. In view of this,
    one wants to say something.

    In accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade at the Frankfurt
    Book Fair of 2005, Pamuk waxed Dostoevskyan on the hatred generated
    by Turkey's 20th century modernization. The nationalists made the
    annihilation of tradition the gauge of progress. They attempted to
    create something from nothing by fiat. When the results inevitably
    fell short of Western norms, their pride suffered. Full of shame,
    they turned spitefully against their country's past and their hapless
    countrymen who embodied it.

    Pamuk delivered the inaugural PEN American Center Arthur Miller
    Memorial Lecture in April 2006. He recalled a visit of Miller and
    Harold Pinter to Istanbul after the military coup of 1980 that threw
    countless writers into jail. At that time most of the persecuted were
    leftists. He noted that at present half of these people are aligned
    with authoritarian nationalism, and remarked:

    Living as I do where, in a very short time, someone who has been
    a victim of tyranny and oppression can suddenly become one of the
    oppressors, I know also that holding strong beliefs about the nature
    of things and people is itself a difficult enterprise.

    Official attacks on free speech have diminished but by no means
    disappeared since Turkey has tried to measure up to the European
    Union. There are fifty writers, editors, and publishers now being
    prosecuted for what are nothing more than thought crimes. Pamuk
    hasn't failed to make use of his international prestige to defend
    them. In the London Guardian of June 3 he took up the case of
    Perihan Magden, an incriminated newspaper columnist. She irked the
    military by writing a column called simply "Conscientious Objection
    is a Human Right." (Conscription is obligatory in Turkey and there
    is no conscientious objection.) Magden considered the predicament
    of Mehmet Tarhan, a homosexual who faced conscription. His sexual
    orientation alone would have kept him out of the army since it
    considers homosexuality a grave physical disability. But Tarhan would
    not submit to the degrading physical examination required. He was
    consequently sent to a military prison for four years.

    Pamuk's midstream viewpoint came out in his comments. Ataturk had
    promised that the republic would give birth to a new independent
    woman of which Magden is certainly an example. But the same army that
    claims to guard Ataturk's heritage has done nothing but persecute
    the columnist. A dirty tricks campaign snooped on her private life
    and insinuated that as a divorced woman she couldn't be trusted. As
    a matter of fact, without male protection in a difficult country for
    women and on her paltry salary as a Turkish journalist, she managed
    to raise another independent woman, her daughter. Magden also writes
    novels, two of which have been translated: The Messenger Boy Murders,
    2004, and Two Girls, 2005. Her first hearing took place on place June
    7, with the usual group of jeering nationalists in attendance. The
    case was then adjourned to July 17 "to allow prosecutors to collect
    more evidence."

    There's irony in Pamuk's discomfort in a public role and his refrain
    about wishing only to get back to his novelist's desk. He did in
    fact begin writing twenty-five years ago with a definite bias against
    "social realism" and didacticism. He found the generation of Turkish
    writers who preceded him, which included the giants Nazim Hikmet
    and Yashar Kemal, to be excessively concerned with putting across
    political and moral doctrines. The emphasis on "social commentary"
    hurt their art. His idols were Henry James, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf,
    and Proust. He sojourned at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and eventually
    adopted an approach to the novel that fluently mixed the modern and
    the post modern.

    In a word, he was not going to be an early Dos Passos, populist
    Steinbeck, or the Malraux of La Condition humaine. From his first
    novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982, but finished eight years before,
    unpublished in translation) his perspective is clear. Turkey is ever
    on the move from East to West. It will probably never complete the
    voyage, but blotting out the starting point won't help.

    "That Turkey has two souls is not a sickness." This saga of three
    generations of an Istanbul bourgeois family much like his own will
    be Pamuk's only novel in the classical mode.

    The Silent House (1983, unpublished in translation) is a novel in five
    voices reminiscent of Virginia Woolf. In the 1970s-'80s, three siblings
    spend a summer at their dying grandmother's home outside Istanbul while
    leftists and rightists join battle in the city's streets. One tale
    within the novel goes back to the reign of the last Ottoman Sultan. A
    scholar-physician prepared an encyclopedia in forty-eight volumes that
    would at a stroke bring the ignorant peasant nation in line with the
    West. But the abrupt suppression of Ottoman script in 1928 -- "the
    Alphabet Revolution" -- rendered his work useless. Artist-scholars
    working on the edges where cultures meet risk futility.

    The White Castle (1985, translation 1990) plunged into the history of
    Turkish westernizing in a freewheeling postmodern way. Two 17th-century
    scholars, one an Ottoman Hoja or master, the other a captured Venetian,
    strive to prove the superiority of their respective civilizations. Both
    are ominously concerned with the science of warfare. But instead of
    East and West looming up as distinct realities, a gradual intermingling
    takes place in the characters of the two men. At the end, one has
    become the other.

    The Black Book (1990, a poor translation came out in 1994, but a new
    one will appear in the course of 2006) has only an intermittent story
    line. A young lawyer searches for his wife who has run off with a
    renowned journalist he idolized as a boy. The runaway couple perishes
    in an accident and the lawyer assumes the journalist's identity,
    his youthful dream realized. We read insertions of his writing and
    contributions by innumerable others. A fantastic Istanbul takes over
    as the lawyer questions who exactly he is and what it means to be
    a writer.

    The New Life (1995, translation 1997) tells how a student observes a
    girl engrossed in reading and falls in love with the reader and her
    book. It's that singular, momentous volume that when read changes
    both a life and the world. The two embark on a random tour of their
    country, everywhere scared by a gimcrack modernity and uprooted
    tradition. The young man ends by embracing the novel as an artistic
    form, "the greatest invention of Western culture," and will seek the
    New Life in the past of his country, which is "suffering from amnesia."

    My Name is Red (1998, translation 2001), for many the author's
    masterpiece, sees him enter into a larger dimension, and yet continue
    to portray the march toward the West. At the Sultan's Court in the
    16th century the introduction of Renaissance painting threatens the
    thriving miniaturist tradition come from Persia. The Italian painters
    bring perspective, realism, and personality, all of which challenge
    the role of Allah as unique creator. The traditionalists, validated by
    religion, do not yield easily and this is a story of murder, lust and,
    once more, the intense life of Istanbul.

    Snow (2002, translation 2004) for the first time looks closely
    at present day domestic politics. The scene is remote Kars, a city
    between two empires that the Russians occupied for forty years till
    1918. That may be why Pamuk here recalls Dostoyevski. Conflict rages
    between the secular nationalists and political Islam. A visiting poet,
    who has taken on a Western veneer, finds that a Turkish artist may feel
    a deep connection to both sides, but can give allegiance to neither. As
    Richard Eder (New York Times, September 2, 2001) has said of Pamuk:
    "He is not an ideologue or a politician or a journalist. He is a
    novelist and a great one. . . . . His job is not to denounce reality
    but to be haunted by it, as a medium is haunted."

    Turkey's greatest living writer can be said to be so close to the
    reality of his country that both bickering adversaries who claim to
    own it must denounce him. For one side he blasphemes against Ataturk
    and the authoritarian state in refusing to throw six centuries of
    Ottoman culture on the scrap heap. For the other he dares to speak
    without solemnity of religion, respecting it mainly as a social and
    cultural fact. Islamist intellectuals also accuse him of exploiting
    Turkish history and tradition for purely literary ends of a western
    stripe. For both sides he's "self-absorbed" and "obscure" because he
    doesn't peddle their doctrines or mouth their witless slogans. No
    wonder that harassed by government lawyers and the wagging fingers
    of the pious, Pamuk stopped writing fiction for a while to reassure
    himself he still had Turkish ground to stand on. In Istanbul: Memories
    and the City (2003, translation 2005) he tells us all about himself
    and his affection for his native place. It's as if he's shooing off
    the bluebottles of state and religion to be alone with his beloved.

    The post-modern stagger through Pamuk's novels furnishes breathless
    twists, turns and sudden startling vistas. But the reader can't be
    blamed for feeling relief that this book of very personal memories
    unfolds as straightforward and replete as a Sunday dinner down home.

    The numerous atmospheric black and white photographs encourage time
    travel and a contemplative mood. In Pamuk's boyhood, Istanbul was at
    its crumbling worst, and he had to scramble to find consolations. The
    stone mansions built by the pashas were derelict. When the distinctive
    old wooden houses of the city, or the magnificent yalis along the
    Bosphorus went up in flames, people stood stolidly by as if they were
    being relieved of shame. They seemed more concerned to cast off past
    failure than to welcome something in its place.

    The author points out that his differs from other worse-for-wear
    cities, like Delhi or São Paulo, in that the remains of a glorious past
    are everywhere amid the degradation. For him the history of the city
    after the destruction of the Ottoman Empire is the key to its mystery
    and the core of his book. For one thing, it begins to explain huzun,
    the peculiar melancholy of Istanbul, a communal black mood not only
    "conveying worldly failure, listlessness and spiritual suffering"
    but also "a state of mind that is ultimately as life affirming as it
    is negating."

    The boy Orhan was not immune to huzun or insensitive to the civic
    shambles around him. It couldn't have helped that his family was
    in no better shape than the city. His grandfather made a fortune
    in the first years of the Republic and afterwards his descendants
    worked full-time at frittering it away. His father's bankruptcies
    occurred as regularly as the family's stay each summer on an island
    in the Marmara Sea. His parents' marriage was a series of memorable
    battles with the belligerents regularly disappearing on their own,
    doubtless to replenish their forces. The five stories of the Pamuk
    Apartments, inhabited exclusively by family members, shook constantly
    with squabbles over property and nervous breakdowns induced by
    diminishing income.

    Orhan early found consolation in the Bosphorus. Looking out on it,
    he would one day write his novels. It was Istanbul's inbuilt aid to
    shouldering the weight of the ambient gloom. "If the city speaks
    of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy, and poverty, the
    Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure and happiness." The thrill of this
    strip of open sea running through the middle of the city has never left
    him. He would soon be working hard to make himself into a painter, his
    early choice of vocation that would render all his writing arrestingly
    visual. For the moment he was passionate to know what other artists had
    made of Istanbul. This led him to the work of Antoine-Ignace Melling,
    an 18th century German artist "who saw the city like an Istanbullu,
    but painted it like a clear-eyed Westerner."

    It also led him to a discovery. Ottoman artists had neither the
    technique nor interest in depicting their city.

    In a similar way, when he turned to writing, Pamuk would search for
    forerunners that shared his obsession with the city. Four earlier
    Turkish writers had been entranced by Istanbul life: Yahya Kemal,
    Kocu, Tanpinar, and A.S. Hisar. They had lived through the demise of
    empire and been left with a strong sense of the transitory nature of
    all civilizations. "What unites these four writers is the poetry they
    made of this knowledge and the melancholy attending to it."

    But when he looked closer it was the Melling phenomenon all over
    again. The four had taken their idea of literature from French
    writers. Their belief in pure poetry came from Verlaine, Mallarme,
    and Valery. Gautier taught them how to do verbal cityscapes. Though
    aware that this foreign view of Istanbul was not enough to make them
    original Turkish writers, the four found no other available at home.

    The contradiction hurt. But living in "a city littered with the ruins
    of the great fall" they had to settle for making its expression
    by western means their parcel of authenticity. "They are the ones
    who taught me how to reconcile my love for modern art and Western
    literature with the culture of the city in which I lived."

    One wonders how the late Edward Said would have sorted out this tangled
    episode of Orientalism. Had the natives of Istanbul waited for one
    of theirs, untainted by foreignness, to portray the city, they might
    still be waiting. (The technique in painting they possessed had come
    from Persia in compass-reversing Orientalism.) Republican France
    stepped in to help put imperial values in relief.

    Surely Said would have had to admit that each situation of cultural
    creation has its own rules and that these defy facile theorizing.

    Early 20th century Istanbul at the time Pamuk's four precursors wrote
    was a singular place. Tradition encountered Western culture, long
    established ethnic groups had their separate quarters and immigrants
    poured in from all sides. Orthodox Christians went undisturbed and
    there was a presence of their Roman brethren. Foreign Protestants
    pioneered higher education. Synagogues abounded. Sufi lodges dotted
    the city and the imperial mosques held sway over all. The variety was
    such that Pamuk finds "for the past hundred and fifty years, no one
    has been able to feel completely at home." But he wasn't complaining.

    The great joy of his boyhood was to accompany his mother to the shoe
    stores and pastry shops of Beyoglu still run by the descendants of
    the Byzantines who had lost out in the conquest of 1453 but were still
    hanging around. To see Istanbul from the different viewpoints of the
    variegated humanity who had contemplated it -- even the Orientalists --
    was for Pamuk to keep his connection to the place vital and vibrant.

    The book proceeds like an old-time provincial museum or, rather,
    cabinet de curiosites. The exhibits are short quick chapters. We might
    confront the author's grandmother who smoked ferociously and played
    afternoon poker with her cronies, one of whom had been a resident
    of the last sultan's harem. Or we could suddenly come up against
    Gustave Flaubert writing letters from the Bosphorus to his mother
    about the sorry state of his penis, syphilitic after five weeks in
    Beirut. A pile of old newspapers gets in the way and lets us guess
    at the contribution of columnists to smooth the city's manners.

    One of them counsels: "Don't walk down the street with your mouth
    open."

    And all the time the post-modernist on sabbatical gazes inward at
    his young self in rapture before the coming and going of the world's
    great ships that pass, as it were, at the bottom of his garden. He
    ransacks the past. If the republican regime has claimed the right
    to erase pre-1922 Turkey, why shouldn't a novelist have the right
    to recreate it? After all, to mention the deaths of Armenians and
    Kurds only writes in again what's been rubbed out. A friendly word of
    advice to the Humpty Dumpties on the high wall: Sic your regime book
    reviewers on a novelist if you like, but don't demean yourselves with
    threats of courts and prison.

    --Boundary_(ID_spUWSds/pw3Z3WowimngXg)--

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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