'When I speak of writing', Orhan Pamuk said in his acceptance speech for
the Nobel Prize for literature he won last year, 'what first comes to my mind
is not a novel or poem or literary tradition. It is a person who shuts himself
up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inwards... To become
a writer, patience and toil are not enough: one must first feel compelled
to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary, everyday life and shut ourselves
up in a room.'
Pamuk is Turkey's best known novelist, and the first to be awarded a Nobel
Prize. He is very much a novelist of our times. His fluid, playful style brings
to mind Borges and Calvino, while the themes at the heart of his work - Islam,
secularism, the conflict between East and West, the clash of civilisations,
the collision between tradition and modernity - are also the themes that obsess
Western society today. Novels such as My Name is Red and Snow
speak very much to contemporary anxieties.
Even before 9/11 the West had been searching for voices from within the Muslim
world, authentic enough to understand the mysterious East, but not so authentic
as to be unable to render those mysteries explicable to the West. Even though
Pamuk declines to play that role, many in the West clearly see him as the
perfect dragoman. The Nobel Academy praised him for having 'discovered new
symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures'. After winning the German
book industry's peace prize in October 2005, he was praised for novels that
trace 'the imprints of the East on the West and those of the West on the East'.
I interviewed Pamuk recently in London for BBC radio's Nightwaves
programme. His perception of himself as a lonely, solitary figure, devoted
simply to the art of fiction sits oddly, I suggested, with both the themes
of his work and the reality of his public status.
'I care about literature, I don't care about political agendas', Pamuk replied.
'When I was young I used to read Jean Paul Sartre and believe in the role
of the writer. Today I am more Borgesian, I see political ideas as metaphors,
or simple false beliefs that make us rigid. Ninety-eight per cent of my time
goes to producing good-looking, nice prose. So I don't care much about politics.'
His reputation in both Turkey and the West rests, however, as much on his
political views as on his literary work. Pamuk’s criticism of the Turkish
government’s treatment of minorities has led to many clashes with the
authorities. Last year he was charged with ‘public denigration of Turkish
identity’ after he referred to the million Armenians killed by Turkish
forces in 1915, an issue still taboo within Turkey. The charges were dropped
at the last minute after international pressure.
Sometimes Pamuk revels in his outspokenness. 'I'm the only one who dares to
talk about it', Pamuk told a Swiss magazine about the Armenian massacres.
In fact, many others have been equally outspoken about the issue - the exiled
historian Taner Akcam, for instance, who received a ten-year prison sentence
for his activities, or the writer Elif Shafak, whose latest novel The
Bastard of Istanbul, touches on this very subject, and who, like Pamuk,
was charged last year with denigrating Turkishness.
At other times, Pamuk seems reluctant to see himself as being political in
any sense. 'I find myself in political troubles a lot', he told me. 'But I'm
not necessarily looking for these troubles. Defending freedom of speech, minorities,
democracy, these are things that I sometimes do. But if I want to sum up my
life I don't want to mention them. I care about the beauty of a page more
than these things, honestly.' So does he see writing as a way of withdrawing
from the world rather than of engaging with it? 'My first instinct when I
write a novel', Pamuk says, 'is not to change the world. It's more to please
people. Writing is a solitary job, you have to be alone in a room. Writing
is an act of going inward, of losing yourself.'
It is not just politics about which Pamuk appears ambivalent. He also equivocates
on how he views the relationship between East and West. There are times when
Pamuk talks as if there is a sharp divide between the two; if not a clash
of civilisations, at least a collision of different ways of understanding
the world. He has talked, for instance, of Turkey's 'schizophrenia', caught
between East and West, a schizophrenia in which Pamuk thinks Turkey should
revel. At other times, though, Pamuk dismisses such talk as an Orientalist
view of the world. Was he, I asked him, torn between these two ways of looking
the relationship between East and West?
'I think too heavy an insistence of seeing everything as rooted in civilisations,
and seeing the distinction as East and West is troubling. Fiction like mine
uses traditional stories from the Koran, from the fifteenth century mystics,
from the Arabian Nights and combines them with modern ways of narrating stories.
People think that if you pick up things from different roots and combine them
together, it's a sickness. My counter argument is that having two spirits,
having two roots, is not a sickness, it makes you wiser.'
Most contemporary writers who speak of East and West have been shaped by migration
or exile. Not Pamuk. He has lived virtually all his life in Istanbul - indeed,
he now lives in the same apartment block in which he grew up. His memoirs,
Istanbul, beautifully evokes the sense of ruin, both architectural and
figurative, that comes from being an Istanbuller. The melancholic decay of
a magnificent city and the sense of loss of a great Empire - these are emotions
that run through much of Pamuk's work. What it speaks of is a loneliness,
not just as a writer, but also as a Turk.
'Being a bit provincial', Pamuk says, 'sensing that the world has a centre,
and that centre is Western civilisation, and that I am out of that centre,
these are my sentiments that I have lived with all of my life. My whole work
is a reaction to being out of the centre. But I am also solitary because of
admiring, reading Western books, having a sort of semi-Western outlook, or
believing in the art of the novel, which is a Western thing. This makes you
different because you have different beliefs, strange aspirations, different
ways of representing the world you are living in.'
We ended our conversation by returning to the question of politics. The Turkish
political scientist Hasan Bulent Kahraman recently described Pamuk as the
latest link in a long chain of Turkish intellectuals who have challenged the
state and stood up for liberal values. Does Pamuk see himself in that tradition?
' I don't', he says. 'I have always been criticised by the previous generation
for being bourgeois, egoistic, only caring about the beauty of fiction. That
is partly true. There is this outspokenly political, socially committed tradition
in Turkey. I may, if you look from the outside, belong to it. But I don't
want to. I want to be more devoted to my fiction, be solitary in my room without
caring much what the community demands.'
But what about Turkey? Pamuk has been a staunch defender of secularism and
liberalisation in Turkey, and a passionate advocate of Turkish membership
of the European Union. Doesn't he want to engage with the future of Turkish
politics?
'I am not a banker investing money' he replied. 'I'm a writer writing books.
My work is rooted in Turkey because I write in Turkish and within Turkish
culture. But, on the other hand, I am not someone who is worried about the
future of the country or has political projects or pay attention to this kind
of thinking. My instincts are rather simple. I want to sit at my table every
day, write a page or two or three that will be a harmonious part of a good
novel.'
Pamuk is right that political polemics make for bad literature. But the best
literature is surely one that engages with the world, rather than shutting
itself off in the name of artistic purity. Indeed, it is its engagement with
contemporary fears, anxieties and hopes that makes Pamuk's own fiction so
vital. In part, of course, Pamuk's disavowal of politics is a means of protecting
himself from the threats he faces in Turkey. Yet his blanket dismissal of
political activism speaks to a deeper sense of disenchantment with the very
idea of politics and of cynicism about deeply held beliefs. That, too, makes
him a writer for our times.