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[Thursday, October 12, 2006]
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Orhan
Pamuk by David Levine
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STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, whose uncommon lyrical gifts and uncompromising politics have brought him acclaim worldwide and prosecution at home, won the Nobel literature prize Thursday for his works dealing with the symbols of clashing cultures.
The selection of Pamuk, whose recent trial for ''insulting Turkishness'' raised concerns about free speech in Turkey, continues a trend among Nobel judges of picking writers in conflict with their own governments. British playwright Harold Pinter, a strong opponent of his country's involvement in the Iraq war, won last year. Elfriede Jelinek, a longtime critic of Austria's conservative politicians and social class, was the 2004 winner.
Pamuk, whose novels include ''Snow'' and ''My Name is Red,'' was charged last year for telling a Swiss newspaper in February 2005 that Turkey was unwilling to deal with two of the most painful episodes in recent Turkish history: the massacre of Armenians during World War I, which Turkey insists was not a planned genocide, and recent guerrilla fighting in Turkey's overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast.
''Thirty-thousand Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it,'' he said in the interview.
The controversy came at a particularly sensitive time for the overwhelmingly Muslim country. Turkey had recently begun membership talks with the European Union, which has harshly criticized the trial, questioning Turkey's commitment to freedom of expression.
The charges against Pamuk were dropped in January, ending the high-profile trial that outraged Western observers and cast doubt on Turkey's commitment to free speech.
The Swedish Academy said that the 54-year-old Istanbul-born Pamuk ''in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.''
Academy head Horace Engdahl said Pamuk's political situation in Turkey had not affected the decision.
''It could, of course, lead to some political turbulence, but we are not interested in that,'' Engdahl said. ''He is a controversial person in his own country, but on the other hand, so are almost all of our prize winners.''
He said Pamuk was selected because he had ''enlarged the roots of the contemporary novel'' through his links to both Western and Eastern culture.
''This means that he has stolen the novel, one can say, from us Westerners and has transformed it to something different from what we have ever seen before,'' Engdahl said.
Earlier Thursday, French lawmakers in the National Assembly in Paris approved a bill making it a crime to deny that the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during and after World War I amounted to genocide, a move that has infuriated Turkey.
Pamuk has long been considered a contender for the Nobel prize and he figured high among pundits and bookmakers. His works, written in Turkish, have been translated into languages, including English, French, Swedish and German.
Pamuk's prize marked the first time that a writer from a predominantly Muslim country has been honored for literature since 1988, when the award went to Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, who died in August.
In its citation, the academy said that ''Pamuk has said that growing up, he experienced a shift from a traditional Ottoman family environment to a more Western-oriented lifestyle. He wrote about this in his first published novel, a family chronicle ... which in the spirit of Thomas Mann follows the development of a family over three generations.''
''Pamuk's international breakthrough came with his third novel, 'The White Castle.' It is structured as an historical novel set in 17th-century Istanbul, but its content is primarily a story about how our ego builds on stories and fictions of different sorts. Personality is shown to be a variable construction,'' the academy said.
Engdahl said the ''The Black Book,'' was his personal favorite among Pamuk's works.
''He has a flowing imagination and impressive ingenuity,'' Engdahl told Swedish radio.
In winning the prize, Pamuk's already solid reputation will be boosted onto a global stage. He will also see out-of-print works returned into circulation and a sales boost. He will also receive a $1.4 million check, a gold medal and diploma, and an invitation to a lavish banquet in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of prize founder Alfred Nobel.
Associated Press writer Mattias Karen contributed to this report.
Visit the Orhan Pamuk web site.
Wikipedia entry on Orhan Pamuk.
To Wear a Head Scarf or Not to Wear a Head Scarf?
By: David Shasha
Orhan Pamuk, Snow, Knopf Books, 2004
Orhan Pamuk began publishing the most intriguing and elliptical novels back in the 1980’s. He was once a novelist who took his cues from Italo Calvino’s moody historical landscapes and from Franz Kafka’s oblique portraits of human beings at the edge of an abyss. In books like The White Castle and The Black Book, Pamuk earned a well-deserved reputation as a brilliant post-modern novelist whose themes and plot-lines – when a plot-line could be discerned – lightly touched the historical legacy of the Ottoman Empire, that magnificent multicultural entity that had so stymied Europe for centuries.
Pamuk was writing about a mythic past that lived uneasily in a present that had been constructed more or less in opposition to that past.
Turkey as a modern nation was created by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a vigorous and brutal Muslim reformer who denatured the religious and cultural traditions of the Ottoman civilization. Ataturk’s image stands at the very center of much of Orhan Pamuk’s fiction. In his previous novel, My Name is Red, Pamuk examined the court culture of Ottoman painters, called miniaturists, and wrote a post-modern allegory, along the lines of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, lightly portraying the massive conflicts that have been taking place in the Middle East and in Turkey regarding the role of religion and art and secularism in the march to modernity.
Ataturk’s aim was to integrate Turkey into Europe by adopting European modes of behavior. He outlawed the Arabic language and put severe restrictions on the traditional practice of Islam. The brutal establishment of a monocultural Turkish ethnic identity mirrored Hegelian European nationalism and was an implicit rejection of the syncretistic model of Ottoman convivencia that had been an important part of Sephardic Jewish life in the wake of the Spanish Expulsion in 1492.
Ottoman civilization in its classical period provided Jews from Spain and the Middle East not merely with a social and political haven from their European Christian persecutors, but enriched Sephardic Jewish life with its reiteration of the social and cultural values of Andalusia and Baghdad. Istanbul and Salonika became for early modern Jewish civilization what Cordoba and Cairo had once been for medieval Jewry.
The reforms of Ataturk hurt the religious and ethnic minorities of Turkey. Though his aim was to reform Turkey and make it a modern nation state, Ataturk’s reforms led to great and convoluted revolts and changes in a world that was now starting to become unhinged. In the wake of World War I, Turkey purged itself of its Armenian population and began to dissolve ethnic and religious identification among its minorities, as well as its Islamic traditionalists. The question of Turkey’s role during the Holocaust has been oft-debated and, given the traditional Ottoman fidelity to its Jewish minority, even this ambiguity displays troubling signs of an ethnocentric shift in the traditional openness and pluralism of Ottoman civilization.
Orhan Pamuk as a young novelist wrote in a highly elliptical fashion, eschewing the social realism of the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz – the greatest novelist in the modern Middle East. Slowly but surely, Pamuk has inched closer to a form of realism in each of his novels. In his latest Snow he has developed the theme of religious intolerance as seen through the lens of a Turkey whose own democratic and liberal principles have been deeply compromised by an authoritarian regime that uses its military and police as a mechanism to stifle dissent and free expression.
Pamuk is that rare writer who refuses to take sides in the hot button issues that haunt the Middle East. In Snow we are introduced to KA, an exiled Turkish poet who has left his homeland and gone to write and work in Germany, a common place of exile for Turkish artists and workers. KA has returned to Turkey at the behest of a German newspaper to write a story on the plague of suicides that has arisen in the religious community of Kars – a small town in the Turkish hinterland that is in the throes of battling the government over religious freedom and expression.
As we have seen in France, one of the primary issues that divide the religious fundamentalists from the secularists is the wearing of the head scarf. In Kars there has been a spate of suicides among young high school age girls who have been forcibly removed from their schools because they will not take the scarf off. In addition, a number of these girls have been contracted into marriages with older men that have also turned them depressive and sullen.
Here we see that Pamuk sets out to skewer both the traditionalists and the modernists on a rotating basis. KA is not presented as overtly siding with either group and as he begins to assimilate into this toxic environment, peopled with religious terrorists and government operatives, he tries his best to see the story in human terms rather than demonizing any one person or entity.
While working for the press, KA the poet finds an active propaganda war ongoing between the fundamentalists and the local TV and print media – some of the most important scenes in the book are broadcast live on television and become embedded in a war of rhetoric between the sides; each side trying to find some advantage in presenting itself to the public. Key pieces of information are laid out in the local paper leading to transformations and surprises in the development of the narrative.
KA’s existential odyssey leads him to fall in love with Ipek, the sister of Hanife – one of the head scarf girls. Ipek and Hanife are both linked to Blue, a fundamentalist who lives on the margins of this society and who is hell bent on restoring a “pure” Islam back into Turkish society.
Snow is layered into its various and varied elements: A love story, an intimate analysis of the issue of religious fundamentalism and an intricately plotted mystery that pits an artist against the vicious savagery of both the secularists as well as the Islamists.
The novel is a finely textured and realistically plotted work that is suffused with a sense of what we have been taught to see as the “Kafka-esque”; an upside-down world where things are not always as they seem. Young girls appear to be repressed by the government policy of no head scarves and yet we continue to see the crass manipulations of the Islamists and the confusions that have arisen due to the dehumanizing vulgarity of both the marketplace as well as the harshness of a political system, known in Turkey as Kemalism, that has sought to stifle freedom of religion and expression with an iron fist.
Throughout the novel we see KA moving through the town of Kars with the eye of a reporter and the heart and soul of a poet. KA is a sensitive artist who has been thrown into a maelstrom of atavistic forces – secular and religious – that have caused the hardening of Turkish society and its political culture.
The relationship of KA and Ipek is tenuous and we are never quite clear what it is that Ipek is really doing and why she is doing it. KA forms relationships with a number of the young men who live at the margins of this Islamist world – young men who have been brutalized by a nightmare society that has not opened itself to the true values of culture and democracy as we know those values here in the West.
Pamuk thus skewers the Turkish pretence to being a truly Western state and pines for the clarity that his characters lack. KA is a model for the tribulations of the Turkish humanist who frequently looks back at Ottoman history and sees more productive and regenerative models of culture and civilization. The motif of SNOW that permeates this richly textured and brilliantly written work is a model of the debilitation and the paralyzing stasis that has overtaken Turkish civilization at present.
As the SNOW falls throughout the novel, the palpable sense of dysfunction and danger increases. Even as people fall in and out of love and in and out of religion and culture, the novel tracks a burning failure at the heart of Turkish society, a failure that has yet to be acknowledged within the corridors of power in Istanbul and Ankara. Just like the French passion for secularist repression of religious expression, the Turkish traditions of Kemalism have cordoned off Islamic forms of expression as a sign of incipient terrorism and criminality.
And indeed, the fundamentalists have used the issue of the head scarf as a means to rally their “troops” and try to form a beachhead against the onslaught of the modern values of liberalism and pluralism. The fundamentalists will frequently use the values and tactics of democracy in order to destroy any democratic order.
And this is the genius of Orhan Pamuk’s writing: In My Name is Red and Snow he has written of a world that punishes freedom of thought from both the religious and secular standpoints. Pamuk shows the struggle of the artist against those who would have him silenced and suppressed. Pamuk thus fits into the paradigm of a Levantine Humanist as we have been expressing it in these pages: He demands a polyglot reality where human freedom is not limited and where repression can come from any angle and from any group.
Snow is a rich novel of ideas and of human characters who struggle to express their love, their humanity and their fear of what has debilitated them. It is a revolutionary work that seeks to look into the hearts and minds of ordinary people who are caught up in extraordinary circumstances. The style of the novel is a mélange of the atmospheric reflexivity of past Pamuk works, but it portends a greater engagement with realism than in his previous work. There is a richly detailed story, centered around KA and his relationship to Ipek and the plot lines that spin out of that love story, that is peopled with characters who exemplify the realities of the current Middle East; characters that are by turns venal, brilliant, vain and completely HUMAN. Pamuk shows that there are no easy answers; life in its staggering complexity leaves us as people with choices to make, choices that we do not always have the ability to understand and process completely. The characters of Snow have been caught in a punishing vortex of hate and war that has left them paralyzed and pathological.
Orhan Pamuk is a writer of rare perspicacity and stylistic brilliance in a Muslim world that has turned in on itself. There are no other writers in the Middle East with a comparable talent. His work echoes, as we have said, the elliptical tonality of Kafka and the post-modern narratology of Eco and Calvino. He frequently, as in this book, becomes a rhetorical presence in his own narratives; in Snow Orhan Pamuk is the narrator of the story and stands in for KA in the latter portions of the novel.
Pamuk is a writer who is deeply entrenched and suffused with the realities of both past and present. Rather than simply call him a historical novelist, it would be better to see him as a HUMANIST writer who has not closed himself off from the rich literary heritage of the spiritual greatness of Islam and the role that religion has in the lives of everyday people.
Pamuk is in this sense a truly OTTOMAN writer who has rejected key tenets of Kemalism and the false sense of security in Turkish modernism. Like Naguib Mahfouz, but in a far more elliptical manner, Pamuk has written an epic representation of the struggle of regular people dealing with their quotidian lives. While Mahfouz in his Cairo Trilogy wrote of the Egyptian middle class and their struggle against British imperialism, Pamuk writes of a post-modern, post-9/11 (the book was completed in December 2001) Turkish civilization that has not successfully modernized and has chucked what was once best about its past.
As we saw earlier this year in the Al Qa’da-linked bombings of Jewish Synagogues in Istanbul, the Ottoman traditions of religious tolerance have been decimated in this brutal war of attrition between the atavistic forces of secularism and religion. The values of pluralism that were once a central feature of Ottoman life have now been destroyed by the extremes of both sides. In Snow we heart that small still voice of a great novelist who tells a very simple yet awful story of human beings trying to live and love in a world that has been corroded by the fanaticisms of ideology.
Snow is one of the great novels of our time from a writer whose deep and abiding knowledge of the past has led him to evaluate life in the present with a rare prescience and sensitivity.
Snow is mandatory reading for those interested in how we live NOW – and how we can bring the Middle East back to the pluralism of its glorious past.
[Read a review of "Snow" by Michale McGaha.]
Interview with Orhan Pamuk: I Was Not a Political Person
By: Alexander StarOrhan Pamuk spoke with Alexander Star by telephone from his home in Istanbul.
ALEXANDER STAR: In your novel, Turkey is a somewhat surreal country, where secular nationalists and theocrats compete to impose what seem to be equally dubious ideas of how to force people to be free. Is this the Turkey you know?
ORHAN PAMUK: Well, that gap between my character's consciousness and the country's poetic reality is perhaps the essential tension of my novel. I wanted to go and explore both worlds and write about them as they are -- the Westernized intellectual's worldview coming to terms with the poorest, most forgotten and perhaps most ignored part of the country. The most angry part, too.
STAR: A key concern in ''Snow'' is the desire of many Muslim women to wear headscarves to school -- an issue that raises delicate questions about where you draw the line between, say, the tolerance of religion and the imposition of religion. The current Turkish government has, controversially, attempted to assist the graduates of religious schools. Do you feel that is a legitimate cause for them?
PAMUK: Look, I'm a writer. I try to focus on these issues not from the point of view of a statesman but from the point of view of a person who tries to understand the pain and suffering of others. I don't think there is any set formula to solve these problems. Anyone who believes there is a simple solution to these problems is a fool -- and probably will soon end up being part of the problem. I think literature can approach these problems because you can go into more shady areas, areas where no one is right and no one has the right to say what is right. That's what makes writing novels interesting. It's what makes writing a political novel today interesting.
STAR: And yet your novel expresses a lot of anxiety over whether it's possible to fully understand the misery and humiliation of people living in unfamiliar circumstances.
PAMUK: Spiritually and morally, I am close to my central character. As he goes to the poorest sections of Turkish society, he falls into the traps of representation -- talking in the name of the others, for the most poor. He realizes these issues are problematic. In fact, they may sometimes end up being immoral: the problem of representing the poor, the unrepresented, even in literature, is morally dubious. So in this political novel, my little contribution -- if there is any, I have to be modest -- is to turn it around a bit and make the problem of representation a part of the fiction too.
STAR: How did you come to write a political novel?
PAMUK: I was not a political person when I began writing 20 years ago. The previous generation of Turkish authors were too political, morally too much involved. They were essentially writing what Nabokov would call social commentary. I used to believe, and still believe, that that kind of politics only damages your art. Twenty years ago, 25 years ago, I had a radical belief only in what Henry James would call the grand art of the novel. But later, as I began to get known both inside and outside of Turkey, people began to ask political questions and demand political commentaries. Which I did because I sincerely felt that the Turkish state was damaging democracy, human rights and the country. So I did things outside of my books.
STAR: Such as?
PAMUK: Write petitions, attend political meetings, but essentially make commentaries outside of my books. This made me a bit notorious, and I began to get involved in a sort of political war against the Turkish state and the establishment, which 10 years ago was more partial to nationalists. Anyway, I said to myself, Why don't I once write a political novel and get all of this off my chest?
STAR: Did you have trouble publishing ''Snow'' in Turkey? How was it received by Islamists and others?
PAMUK: Before the publication of the book I told my friends and my publisher that I was finishing an outspoken political novel. Shall we show this to lawyers? And they said, No, no, no, now that Turkey is hoping to get in touch with Europe and now that you're nationally -- internationally -- ''famous,'' you don't need to do that. O.K. And after some time I gave my publishers the book. Here is the book, I said. And a week later they called me and said they'd read the book, loved the book, but they wanted my permission to show it to a lawyer. They were worried that the public prosecutor might open a case, or confiscate the book before its publication. The first printing was 100,000 copies. They were essentially worried about the economic side of the thing. For example, they hid the book in a corner, so if it were confiscated, they could keep some copies for themselves. But none of these pessimistic things happened. In fact, the country seriously discussed the book. Half of the political Islamists and people who backed the army attacked me. On the other hand, I survived. Nothing happened to me. And in fact it worked the way I hoped it would. Some of those radical Islamists criticized the book with very simplistic ideas, such as ''You're trying to describe Islamists but you have to know that an Islamist would never have sex with a woman without getting married.'' On the other hand, more liberal Islamists were pleased that at least the harassment they had been exposed to by the Turkish Army is mentioned.
STAR: When George Bush was in Istanbul recently for the NATO summit, he referred to you as a ''great writer'' who has helped bridge the divide between East and West. Citing your own statements about how people around the world are very much alike, he defended American efforts to help people in the Middle East enjoy their ''birthright of freedom.'' Did you think he understood what you meant?
PAMUK: I think George Bush put a lot of distance between East and West with this war. He made the whole Islamic community unnecessarily angry with the United States, and in fact with the West. This will pave the way to lots of horrors and inflict cruel and unnecessary pain to lots of people. It will raise the tension between East and West. These are things I never hoped would happen. In my books I always looked for a sort of harmony between the so-called East and West. In short, what I wrote in my books for years was misquoted, and used as a sort of apology for what had been done. And what had been done was a cruel thing.
STAR: Is the novel as a form something you think is alive and well in the Middle East or the non-Western world more broadly? Or do you feel you're doing something rather unusual?
PAMUK: No, the art of the novel is well. It's surviving. It has lots of elasticity. I'm sure it will continue to live in the West, in the United States and Europe. But it will have a very strange and new future in countries like China and India, where now there is an unprecedented rise of the middle classes. Legitimizing the power of these new middle classes creates problems of identity both in China and in India. This involves their nationalism when they are faced with the distinct identity of Europe and the West, and their Occidentalism when they are faced with the resistance of their poor people. I think the new modern novel that will come from the East, from that part of the world, will again raise these tensions of East-West modernity and the slippery nature of these rising middle classes in China and India. And also in Turkey, of course.
STAR: In ''Snow,'' the radical Islamist Blue remarks at one point that the best thing America's given the world is Red Marlboros. Would you agree with that?
PAMUK: I used to smoke them a lot when I was young. We distribute our personal pleasures in our characters. That's one of the joys of writing fiction.
Special thanks to David Shasha in New York for editing this report.