THE GLOBAL VIEW FROM ISTANBUL’S FAULT-LINE

The Independent
Published: Sep 07, 2007
United Kingdom

No other Turkish novelist has approached the international acclaim
that Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s only Nobel laureate, has achieved. While
his fame has brought him a global community of readers, it has
also dragged him into the political arena, bringing controversy and
political persecution at home (for comments he made in an interview
about the Armenian genocide) and imposing the duty to speak for the
nation abroad.

This autobiographical collection includes personal reminiscences,
a short story, literary analyses, political commentary and his
Nobel acceptance speech. Many essays provide a lyrical glimpse into
the intimacies of the writer’s life. Modestly quotidian but elusive
moments, from the happiness of sharing a carriage ride with his small
daughter to the uncanny sense of inanimate objects having intense
affections in the insomniac small hours, are beautifully evoked.

Literature is not only a vocation; it is a drug. Pamuk can’t live
without his "daily fix" of reading or writing. The imaginary landscapes
of the novel are as important as real places, and Pamuk reveals his
elective affinities with, among others, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann,
Thomas Bernhard, Sterne and Stendhal. At times his literary essays
provide a fascinating glimpse into the genealogy of his distinctive
style; at others he offers up more general introductions to an author’s
work. Regrettably, his essays on Turkish writers including Aziz Nesin,
Yasar Kemal and Tanpinar are not included here.

This is a grave omission although, given Anglophone cultural
insularity, it is unsurprising, and takes us to the crux of the
controversies that surround him at home. Global acclaim has resulted
in the accusation that Pamuk writes for an international rather than
a domestic audience, a resentment arising out of a sense of cultural
denigration by the West which pervades much Turkish literature. Many
essays engage with questions of the novelist’s imagined audience
and political responsibilities. In an essay on Mario Vargas Llosa,
he describes the Third World writer’s predicament, where exile is
"not so much a matter of geography as a spiritual state… of being
a perpetual foreigner".

Although his work has ventured beyond it, most notably on a
hallucinatory road-trip across Turkey in The New Life and to Kars in
Snow, Istanbul and the ghosts of that city are the wellspring of his
inspiration. In his observations on barbers, street food and family
holidays, Pamuk interweaves personal reminiscence and social history,
a strategy he employed so engagingly in Istanbul, shifting from a
historical perspective to moments of autobiographical complicity.

It is this devotion to the city and its frailties and decay that marks
him out as a Romantic writer as much as a postmodern one: "The city’s
collective memory is its soul, and its ruins are its most eloquent
testimony". Turkey rests uneasily on geographical and cultural fault
lines, and Pamuk returns in many essays to the natural and political
disasters, the earthquakes and cultural clashes that distract and
inspire the writer. The East-West question has always haunted him,
both because of the Turkish Republic’s history and because the novel
is a quintessentially European form. Yet, as he points out, many of
its greatest exponents are, like Dostoyevsky, not European.

Pamuk’s allegiances are to universal human rights and freedom of
expression, not to East or West. While these Enlightenment ideals
emerged out of European culture, he condemns the West for its
hypocrisy, bombing countries in the name of democracy. The Turkish
intellectual in Istanbul, that non-European European city, "depends on
the ideal of the West, rather than on the West itself". This collection
confirms Pamuk’s status as writer with global stature but a profoundly
and particularly Turkish perspective.

Alev Adil heads the department of creative and critical studies,
University of Greenwich