The Simon, CA
Sept 23 2005

Prosecuting Pamuk: Author and Narrator on Trial

Turkey’s foremost novelist, Orhan Pamuk, is charged with being a
national heretic. By extension, the narrator of Snow must also be
indicted.

By Alan Williams Sep 23, 2005

Two ideas usually hover closely around Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk,
author of My Name is Red, Snow, and, most recently, Istanbul, a
memoir. The first is the Nobel Prize, which he will doubtlessly
garner for the second idea, namely that his fiction is undeniably
`prescient.’ In a reversal of art imitating life that plays darkly
upon this prescience, Pamuk has been charged with insulting Turkish
national identity – a transgression that extremist characters pin on
Ka, the protagonist of Snow – and faces up to three years in prison.

When considering the nature of these charges in light of Snow
(written pre- and post-9/11 and published in Turkey in 2002, in the
U.S. last year, and in paperback this summer), Pamuk’s ability to
write politically-charged narrative whose themes haunt, and will
indefinitely plague, the globe is rendered all the more terrifyingly
sublime. The east versus the west, radical Islam versus right-wing
republican governments, belief in God versus secular atheism, poverty
versus so-called enlightenment, and national sovereignty versus
freedom of speech are a handful of dueling variegations in the novel,
in which Pamuk himself appears as a character. In certain ways, this
Orhan, revealed halfway through as the appearing and disappearing
first-person guide, will also be put on trial on December 16.

In an interview conducted with the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger
last February, Pamuk said, `Thirty-thousand Kurds and a million
Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk
about it.’ One almost senses that the last part of Pamuk’s statement
pissed off the country’s powers-that-be to condemn its greatest
writer and call him, in the language of Article 301/1 of the Turkish
Penal Code, `a person who explicitly insults being a Turk, the
Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly’ as much as the utterance
of figures and blame. Nobody but me dares to talk about it
practically explodes with an angry insistence rendered all the more
startling for its simplicity and self emphasis – a shout issued to
measure the magnitude of silence, a wake-up call whose gravity
transcends self-importance and haughtiness. Yet it is for these
qualities that Pamuk is regarded, and may be punished, by Turkey as a
national heretic.

Turkey does not deny the deaths of thousands of Armenians during
World War I. It asserts, however, that the number killed in what is
commonly known as the Armenian Genocide is grossly inflated and does
not warrant the damning genocide label, despite indictments from
Armenia and European countries that Ottoman forces systematically put
to death the Armenians living in the then Ottoman Empire.

Pamuk’s reference to 30,000 Kurdish deaths concerns those killed
since 1984 in the complicated conflict between Turkish forces and
Kurdish separatists whose main rebel terrorist group is the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party or P.K.K. The rebels called a ceasefire in 1999 even
though fighting has persisted, not surprisingly. Dialogues on Kurdish
issues and the Armenian death toll have been largely repressed
because of inflexible laws whose transgression involve interminable
lawsuits, fines, and prison sentences as penalties.

Pamuk’s remarks and trial come when Turkey has been conducting
serious introspection in order to win membership to the European
Union. Reforms to its penal code, extending rights to Kurds and their
language, and improving its human rights record by implementing
appropriate legislation have all been part and parcel of Turkey
transforming its image into a flexible, liberal, and secular country.
Clearly, as Pamuk has reminded us, there is much more work required
for it to be recognized as a player for humanism when it can hardly
acknowledge, much less thoughtfully address, the Armenian massacre,
and to be recognized as an arbiter of free speech when the governor
of Pamuk’s home province ordered the author’s books to be burned – the
very fiction that has almost single-handedly lifted the veil on the
culture, history, and social texture of today’s Turkey.

Reportedly, it is Turgay Evsen who filed the charges against Pamuk.
Evsen brought similar charges against Turkish-Armenian journalist
Hrank Dink and is seen in various leftist circles as a prosecutor
attempting to make a name for himself through nationalist
showboating. Given the crucial timing of the trial, Turkey’s
diplomatic contingent and friends could not be in favor of Pamuk’s
prosecution, but, considering the internal sway of the country’s
powerful nationalist right-wing factions, saying that the situation
is delicate or even thorny puts the situation mildly.

Indeed, much of Snow concerns the Islamic backlash to Turkey’s drive
to reconcile its way of life with that of contemporary Europe and the
West at large – a layered issue in most nations with a Muslim majority
and extremist strains. Reconciliation issues, of course, have been
faced by all European nations in the past decade as the EU has
leveled and united the economic playing fields of vastly idiomatic
cultures. For Turkey, however, the question has a near-schizophrenic
complexity given its competing internal ideologies, ethnicities, and
histories at odds with one another, not to mention that it regards
itself, and has been regarded for years as, Europe’s Other. Thus, at
the heart of this struggle lies not so much a threat to the loss of
character but a sometime brutal search for what characteristics
establish Turkish identity and who gets to determine for the record
what those may be.

The political novel in capital-L Literature is out of fashion due to
a general wariness of aesthetic soapboxes, but in many ways Snow
heralds its necessary return when the world’s political actions and
reactions impinge on everyday existence more and more. The book is
mind-expanding, for example, in its ability to plumb the
fundamentalist Islamic mind, showing how religion is an incendiary
pretext for economic and ideological struggles – a point not often made
so clearly in a range of media outlets.

On its cool surface, Snow traces the journey of Ka, a Turkish poet in
exile (whose name recalls Kafka and The Trial’s K. with good reason),
who travels to the isolated city of Kars to investigate a rash of
suicides by Muslim girls and to reunite with his lost love, Ipek,
only to get swept up in a blizzard of politics between the
pseudo-totalitarian republican government and Islamic
fundamentalists. Pamuk resuscitates the political novel by
transcending the layers of political examination with an ongoing
meditation on happiness and art. It is a great mediation of sorts,
which, as it turns out, is Ka’s main action in the novel. Given his
national, if controversial, writerly stature, he attempts the
impossible task of courting both sides of the battle, and negotiating
the flawed, self-protecting, and treacherous personalities in every
camp in between, in the hopes of safely delivering himself, Ipek, and
her family out of the fray.

The book is still much more than these intrigues and, despite its
bleak-sounding premise, combines tropes from farcical comedy and the
harrowing love story. Despite the tenuous nature of his many
pursuits, he is fiercely immersed in the world, actively observing
how the city and people are reduced to their essences by the constant
snow. He often stops by a teahouse when trekking to a covert meeting
to write a poem because, when it arrives like a snippet of music, the
poem must be transmitted to page instantly or lost forever. And just
as a poem revolves around an unknown, missing center (it is revealed
that all of Ka’s poems written in Kars go literally missing and are
ultimately unknown), it is Kars’ Armenian populace that is the
missing space in Snow.

The Armenian Genocide is referenced several times, directly and
indirectly. Ka trudges through snowdrifts by old homes and shops that
had belonged to Armenians long since gone. A detective questions
Orhan if he is in town snooping about an affair known as “the
Armenian thing.” When representatives from Kars’ multitude of
political views gather to sign a document about the military’s staged
coup and its ensuing aftermath, the lack of Armenian voice becomes
noticeable because of the very impossibility of having one. The
Armenian absence and silence, like the omnipresent snow, like the
hollows within the lines of a snowflake, permeate the novel.

For reasons that would spoil the book, Orhan assembles his friend
Ka’s activities, thoughts, justifications, and poem ideas from notes
and sources to tell the true story of what happened during Kars’
political upheaval when the city was made impassable by snow. It is
this idea of constructing a history for the record, insofar as
possible, out of a need for understanding all sides that gives Orhan
an empathetic yet journalistic authority. Subsequently, the novel
feels all the more real for being once removed from the public and
private events that it details and approximates, which, like the
people, cannot truly be understood by outsiders. It is the history
that transpires beneath the surface, when no one is looking, or no
one can see, that exerts itself on the larger scale in due time.

Since Snow is offered as a record-setting tale of fictional events in
a place that is haunted by the massacre of a minority populace, would
not Orhan the narrator also be on trial? Is Pamuk being indirectly
persecuted for highlighting such truths, and, more specifically, the
whitewashing of truths, in his fiction? The answers will come in
December.

Between the Covers is a biweekly book review and publishing analysis.