[Marxism] "Pamuk is a creature of Istanbul's haute bourgeoisie"

[Louis Proyect]

BELLE LETTRES
Pamuk: prophet or poseur?

CLAIRE BERLINSKI

December 22, 2007

OTHER COLORS
Essays and a Story
By Orhan Pamuk
Translated by Maureen Freely
Knopf Canada, 433 pages, $34.95

The novels of Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's most celebrated and controversial 
man of letters, have been translated into some 20 languages. His novels 
Snow and My Name is Red are widely considered world-class achievements. 
The themes of Pamuk's oeuvre include the conflict between the East and 
the West, the tension between Islam and modernity, and the intense 
melancholia of his native Istanbul. Admirers find his style complex, 
multilayered and allegorical; detractors find him faddish and 
incomprehensible.

On Sept. 11, 2001, writers treating the themes of East contra West and 
Islam contra modernity hit the literary jackpot. Pamuk - Eastern enough 
to write novels about Ottoman calligraphers and Islamic radicals, 
Western enough to write them in a postmodern, magic-realist style - 
became the darling of the Western literary establishment, serially 
winning the most prestigious and lucrative literary awards in the 
Western world: the IMPAC Dublin Award, the Peace Prize of the German 
Book Trade, the Prix Médicis étranger, the Premio Grinzane Cavour.

Then, in 2005, Pamuk remarked to a Swiss weekly newsmagazine that 
"thirty thousand Kurds, and a million Armenians were killed in these 
lands and nobody dares to talk about it." By "these lands" he meant 
Turkey. By "nobody," it is not quite clear what he meant; as far as I 
can tell - and I live in Turkey myself - nobody here will stop talking 
about it. But the sentiment in Turkey, generally speaking, is that the 
Armenians had it coming, and quite a few more Kurds want killing.

Pamuk seemed to be suggesting otherwise. The Turkish government brought 
criminal charges against him under the infamous Article 301, which 
forbids citizens from insulting Turkishness. Pamuk was in one stroke 
elevated from symbolist writer to symbol. The European Union's 
Enlargement Commissioner called Pamuk's case a "litmus test" of Turkey's 
commitment to European values; writers around the world rightly 
denounced the charges as an outrage against free expression. In the end, 
the case was dropped on a technicality.

Facing death threats at home, Pamuk sensibly decamped for New York. But 
his prosecution, combined with his status as ambassador at large for the 
westernized Islamic world, functioned like camembert in a mousetrap to 
the Nobel committee, which in 2006 awarded him the Nobel Prize for 
literature. Pamuk is a talented writer, but no one in his right mind 
believes this was an award based on literary merit.

Pamuk has for the past three decades been filling his notebooks with 
sketches, half-finished short stories, thoughts about literature and 
reflections on the travails of life as a writer and a Turk. He has 
compiled them, loosely edited, into Other Colors, "a book made of ideas, 
images and fragments of life that have still not found the way into one 
of my novels." Although it contains previously published works, such as 
his Nobel acceptance speech and the transcripts of various interviews he 
has granted over the years, it is mostly comprised of non-fiction essays 
written some years ago but only now seeing the light of day: literary 
criticism, reminiscences of his boyhood and particularly of his father, 
reflections on the challenges of quitting smoking, a discussion of his 
wristwatches, two short meditations on seagulls and their sad fates, 
ruminations on the pathos of being a Turk and the Turk's endless, 
resentful fascination with Europe. There are more descriptions of 
Istanbul in the melancholy vein of his previous memoir, Istanbul: 
Memories and the City.

But this book is about Pamuk himself, particularly the challenges of 
being a great writer and a severe depressive. The collection has been 
received with rapture by many critics, who celebrate this offering as a 
unique window into Pamuk's interior life. Indeed, it is precisely that. 
Unfortunately, it seems that Pamuk's interior life is largely that of a 
lugubrious poseur.

"In order to be happy I must have my daily dose of literature," Pamuk 
gravely introduces himself. "In this way I am no different from the 
patient who must take a spoon of medicine each day." If you didn't quite 
get the point, he repeats it again two sentences later: "For me, 
literature is medicine. Like the medicine that others take by spoon or 
injection, my daily dose of literature - my daily fix, if you will - 
must meet certain standards." If he is forced "to go a long stretch 
without his paper-and-ink cure," he feels "misery setting inside me like 
cement. My body has difficulty moving, my joints get stiff, my head 
turns to stone, my perspiration even seems to smell differently."

Is he serious? Yes, he is. For page upon page, Pamuk stresses in these 
self-enamoured tones that he is a man who really likes to read books. 
Good ones, too, by famous writers like Dostoyevsky and Borges - not, you 
know, easy ones. He's different from other Turks, you see. But he's not 
like the Europeans, either. He's an outsider, eternally apart, rejected 
by all, accepted by no one (the Nobel committee aside). Life hurts. A 
seagull croaks.

There is a fleeting moment of insight when he later remarks that he 
wants "to say a few things about my library, but I don't wish to praise 
it in the manner of one who proclaims his love of books only to let you 
know how exceptional he is, and how much more cultured and refined than 
you." He negates this half-hearted essay at modesty in the very next 
sentence: "Still, I live in a country that views the non-reader as the 
norm and the reader as somehow defective, so I cannot but respect the 
affectations, obsessions and pretensions of the tiny handful who read 
and build libraries amid the general tedium and boorishness."

Sentiments such as these may make the reader suspect that Pamuk was 
prosecuted in Turkey not because he spoke the truth about Armenia and 
the Kurds but because he is a patronizing pest. But let's not quibble: 
Pamuk needs to read or he will die. That, surely, is the mark of a 
particularly excellent reader. And he is, moreover, caught between East 
and West, which makes his affliction all the more acute.

Pamuk lived and wrote in Cihangir, a lovely neighbourhood on the 
European side of Istanbul. This happens to be where I now live and 
write. From Cihangir, if your window faces the Bosphorus, on a clear day 
you can see Asia. So I'm caught between East and West myself, not to 
mention caught between north and south, and caught, at least twice a 
day, between daytime and nighttime. (By the way, you would not know it 
from reading Pamuk, but it is usually a clear day here. Istanbul is a 
bright, vibrant, cheerful city.) It is physically impossible not to be 
caught between East and West, actually. We all are. So may I take this 
opportunity to beg Pamuk, everyone who writes about Pamuk, and indeed, 
everyone who writes about Istanbul, to retire forever the phrase "caught 
between East and West"?

Yes, Istanbul is located geographically between Asia and Europe. Yes, 
Turks tend to be rather aware of this. Turkey, as Pamuk observes - and 
if you think about it for even a second, it should not come as a 
surprise - exhibits both Oriental and Occidental qualities. But this 
"caught between East and West" business - how much more literary mileage 
does he plan to get out of it? First time: a fair observation. 
Thousandth time: 999 times too many. (Next up: New York is a melting 
pot; Paris is the City of Lights; there's nothing in Texas but steers 
and queers.)

Even the hamburgers of his youth were, for Pamuk, "like so much else in 
Istanbul, a synthesis of East and West." So were the frankfurters, in 
fact. And like everything in Istanbul, they made him feel gloomy. "I 
would look at myself standing there, eating my hamburger and drinking my 
ayran, and see that I was not handsome, and I would feel alone and 
guilty and lost in the city's great crowds."

For this is his ultimate subject: his very sad mood. Forget for a moment 
the literary accolades and imagine what it would be like to go on a date 
with this melancholy egomaniac. He shows up at the café wearing a black 
turtleneck, brandishing his annotated copy of Notes from Underground, 
making sure the title faces out. Within minutes he tells you that, 
unlike everyone else in Turkey, he reads. "Books are what keep me 
going," he says.

"Really? I like books too," you say politely.

"Let me explain what I feel on a day when I've not written well, am 
unable to lose myself in a book," he adds gravely. "First, the world 
changes before my eyes; it becomes unbearable, abominable."

"Oh," you say. "That sounds very painful."

"I feel as if there is no line between life and death," he continues. 
"It's worse than depression. I want to disappear. I don't care if I live 
or die. Or if the world comes to an end, even. In fact, if it ended 
right this minute, so much the better."

It is a bright spring day in Istanbul. He tells you that he hates the 
springtime.

Pamuk is a creature of Istanbul's haute bourgeoisie, a class of Turks 
much given to examining their own misery and alienation and finding them 
intensely significant, much in the way the 19th-century romantics 
admired their own tuberculosis. The Turkish elite is, as Pamuk is 
painfully aware, a parvenu class.

What seems to escape him is that in stressing how much he reads and the 
quality of his taste, he does not display his distance from the social 
cohort from which he emerged. Rather, he marks himself as its 
caricature. Young women from this social class dye their hair purple and 
weep a lot. The older women complain of migraines. The young men are 
sent by their parents to psychiatrists who trained in the United States; 
they wear black trench coats, rarely shave and tell everyone who will 
listen that no one in Turkey understands them.

"Time passes," Pamuk scribbles in his notebook. "There's nothing. It's 
already nighttime. Doom and defeat. ... I am hopelessly miserable. ... I 
could find nothing in these books that remotely resembled my mounting 
misery." I suppose sentiments like these are not uniquely Turkish; 
teenagers around the world fill their diaries with this kind of drivel. 
But usually they read those diaries when they grow up, cringe, then 
throw them out along with their old Morrissey albums.

Mind you, Pamuk is not all gloom; he is immensely cheered by the thought 
of his own moral gravity: "A novelist might spend the whole day playing, 
but at the same time he carries the deepest conviction of being more 
serious than others." He brightens up when he considers his own 
accomplishments, too: "Having published seven novels, I can safely say 
that, even if it takes some effort, I am reliably able to become the 
author who can write the books of my dreams." Sometimes he works, he 
tells us, "with the incandescence of a mystic trying to leave his body."

And did he mention that he really, really likes books? - although I do 
have to wonder, occasionally, just how carefully he is reading them; in 
his discussion of Nabokov, for example, he describes Humbert Humbert as 
a man who "searches for timeless beauty with all the innocence of a 
small child." Beg pardon? Humbert searches for timeless beauty by 
molesting an innocent small child. There is quite a difference.

There are, here and there, flashes of the gloomy talent for which he is 
rightly admired. Reading the vignette A Seagull Lies Dying on the Shore, 
I felt quite bad for the seagull (although I am pleased to report that 
those same seagulls, which I see from my window, look perfectly healthy).

And there is one excellent section, quite chilling for those of us who 
live here, about the great earthquake of 1999. Pamuk recalls wondering 
whether, come the next big quake, the minarets of the Cihangir mosque 
would fall on his roof. I live next door to that very mosque. I had not 
thought of that. His comment prompted me to step outside and contemplate 
those minarets with a certain unease. Discussing the aftermath of the 
earthquake, Pamuk for a brief moment removes his gaze from the mirror 
and observes his surroundings with interest and even a hint of irony: 
"One rumour had it that the earthquake was the work of Kurdish 
separatist guerrillas, another that it was caused by Americans who were 
now coming to our aid with a huge military hospital ship. ('How do you 
suppose they made it here so fast?' the conspiracy theory went.)" Yes, 
there at last is an honest line; it will certainly sound familiar to 
anyone living in Turkey these days.

But the rest of the book is the kind of thing you can only publish if 
you have won a Nobel Prize and feel entirely confident that no matter 
what you say, everyone will buy it and the critics will be too afraid to 
point out the obvious: Sometimes it is best to keep your interior life 
to yourself.

Claire Berlinski is a writer living in Istanbul. She is the author of 
Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis is America's, Too, and Lion 
Eyes, a novel set in Paris and Istanbul.

Oh so weary

I come home dead tired in the evenings. Looking straight ahead, at the 
roads and the pavements. Angry at something, hurt, incensed. Though my 
imagination is still conjuring up beautiful images, even these pass 
quickly in the film in my head. Time passes. There's nothing. It's 
already nighttime. Doom and defeat. What's for supper?...

What's on television? No, I'm not watching television; it only makes me 
angry. I'm very angry. I like meatballs, too - so where are the 
meatballs? All of life is here, around this table.

The angels call me to account.

What did you do today, darling?

All my life ... I've worked. In the evenings, I've come home. On 
television - but I'm not watching television. I answered the phone a few 
times, got angry at a few people; then I worked, wrote. ... I became a 
man ... and also - yes, much obliged - an animal.

What did you do today, darling?

Can't you see? I've got salad in my mouth. My teeth are crumbling in my 
jaw. My brain is melting from unhappiness and trickling down my throat. 
Where's the salt, where's the salt, where's the salt? We're eating our 
lives away. And a little yogurt, too. The brand called Life."

 From the essay Dead Tired in the Evening, in Other Colors.