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SNOWFLAKES AND DOUBLE AGENTS
Ranier Fsadni
Times of Malta, Malta
Sept 29 2005
Imagine setting out from Istanbul, Turkey's city in Europe, travelling
for three days deep into Asia, only to end up on a European border. The
town is Kars, 40 years ago a thriving Turkish commercial centre
on the border with Armenia, now in decay. Once part of the Russian
empire, its dilapidated Baltic architecture is still the occasion
for novelistic rhapsody. Should Turkey enter the EU, Kars would,
of course, represent a European border.
Kars is at the centre of the most recent novel by Orhan Pamuk, the
internationally acclaimed Turkish writer, now being prosecuted in
Turkey for affirming that the Armenian genocide, still officially
denied by his country (although the government has authorised a
national conference on the subject), did take place. The novel is Snow
(Faber and Faber). In Mr Pamuk's hands it ends up being an exploration
of Turkish identity that exploits all the ironies of the situation. In
view of the beginning of the EU's negotiations with Turkey next Monday,
and some European objections to Turkey's membership on the grounds
of identity, it is worth having a quick look at this complex novel.
What sets the events in motion is a blizzard that cuts off the town.
But what I am calling simply the events is a storm of plots and
subplots. The year is probably 1992. A poet, called Ka, who comes to
town in search of a woman he loves. An epidemic of suicides by young
girls who want to wear their Islamic headscarf - but whose suicides are
defying both the state and the Islamist leaders. A theatre director who
stages a coup. A novelist, called Orhan, who is trying to reconstruct
Ka's three-day visit four years after Ka left.
Islamists and secularists argue about whether being Muslim is backward
or the only possible dignified affirmation of identity. Some of the
arguments centre on whether poverty can explain religious adherence
at the end of the 20th century. But the real poverty that the novel
diagnoses is that of communication. Kars has lost its former wealth
because the borders are closed. Worse things have happened to human
communication.
This is a novel in which any act of persuasion is - and is perceived
to be - motivated by a hidden agenda. Ka notices that everyone speaks
in a double code - even when the woman he loves and her sister speak
to their father. One code is to be understood by everyone; the other,
secret one is aimed only at an inner secret circle.
To complicate matters, no hidden agenda is considered to be purely
personal. Ka is told by the Islamist agitator, Blue, that anyone
who tries to change anyone else's mind is an agent - an agent of the
Turkish state, the Islamists, atheist Europe, the nationalist Kurds
(a shadowy presence in the book). It turns out that even in death,
people are agents - no character involved in the central narrative dies
a natural death: they are murdered or executed (for being agents),
killed at random (transformed into victims of one side or another
in an attempted coup) or else commit suicide as a defiant gesture
against the state. At one point, Blue believes that the best way
in which he can outwit the coupists is by letting them kill him -
his death would make of him a hero and martyr, much more difficult
to control than if he took up a secret offer of safe escape.
Just as the town is swirling with snowflakes, the novel swirls with
lies, double agents, spies and informers. Lies and mimicry are the
tissue of such a social life, penetrating not just conversations but
also actions, gestures and personality. More than once, we are told
that a character strikes a pose straight out of a comic book. The
monuments to Ataturk are said to have been inspired by the poses
invented by a melodramatic actor, Sunay Zaim (the leader of the coup
in Kars, who has something of Gabriele D'Annunzio about him).
While most characters argue about identity, what becomes comically
clear is that their ideas about identity are false. The Islamists
have a mistaken idea of what Europe is - in one discussion it emerges
that only one person, apart from Ka, has visited it. Tellingly, for
all those Europeans who object to Turkey's membership on the grounds
of Europe's Christian roots, the Islamists object to Europe because
they consider it atheist; the only time Christianity is alluded to
is when the narrator says that like Ka he liked the "Protestant"
punctuality and service of German trains.
Meanwhile, the Turkish "secularists" emerge not as people who have
become Europeanised (as the Islamists accuse them, a charge which they
do not deny) but as Stalinists or totalitarians. Kars is portrayed
as a decayed border town infested with police informers and under the
eye of the central state's intelligence service, with the army at bay.
The impact of this poverty of communication is twofold. First,
although many of the characters, caught between the state machinery
and the rebel cells, strike a blow for their individuality (this is
how the serial suicides by the headscarf girls are explained), most
characters appear to us as almost interchangeable doubles: the woman
Ka loves and her Islamist sister; Ka and the novelist Orhan; Sunay
Zaim and Blue; the two Islamist-poet youths, Necip and Fazil... When
Ka and Necip die, Orhan and Fazil, because of their respective losses,
become doubles of each other. The novel leaves it up to us to decide
whether the special affinity between each pair is a sign of mystical
communion or whether each pair is really one schizophrenic person.
Second, this personal schizophrenia leads to Mr Pamuk's (the
author, not the character in the novel) portrayal of the country's
schizophrenia. The novel does not lend itself to the usual portrayal
of a Turkey divided between Europeanised secularists and Islam. The
Islamists in this novel turn out to have much in common with the
state apparatchiks: both groups speak and think like the secret police.
The real schizophrenia, as portrayed here, is that between the
mentality of a militarised, repressive, police state and an open
mentality that seeks love rather than security and which is here
represented not just by the secular protagonist but also by a shadowy
mystical Islamic (Sufi) master.
It is a schizophrenia that affects even how the novel is written.
Much of it is in the forensic style of a police report (and reports
about reports) or autopsy. But the most lyrical passages (at least
in the English translation) are those which concern the swirling snow
that covers the town. Ka comes to compare the human lifetime to that
of a snowflake; the 19 poems that his three days in Kars inspire
drift into him like snowflakes and he organises them according to
the structure of a snowflake in preparation for publication (although
the manuscript is lost).
For Mr Pamuk to use this novel to deliver a message about Turkey's EU
membership would have made him collude in the acts of propaganda that
the novel diagnoses with such melancholy. But what he has produced
is not just an interpretation of Turkey's identity. It is also a
novel that has much to say about the formation of identity, anywhere,
in today's world.
Ranier Fsadni
Times of Malta, Malta
Sept 29 2005
Imagine setting out from Istanbul, Turkey's city in Europe, travelling
for three days deep into Asia, only to end up on a European border. The
town is Kars, 40 years ago a thriving Turkish commercial centre
on the border with Armenia, now in decay. Once part of the Russian
empire, its dilapidated Baltic architecture is still the occasion
for novelistic rhapsody. Should Turkey enter the EU, Kars would,
of course, represent a European border.
Kars is at the centre of the most recent novel by Orhan Pamuk, the
internationally acclaimed Turkish writer, now being prosecuted in
Turkey for affirming that the Armenian genocide, still officially
denied by his country (although the government has authorised a
national conference on the subject), did take place. The novel is Snow
(Faber and Faber). In Mr Pamuk's hands it ends up being an exploration
of Turkish identity that exploits all the ironies of the situation. In
view of the beginning of the EU's negotiations with Turkey next Monday,
and some European objections to Turkey's membership on the grounds
of identity, it is worth having a quick look at this complex novel.
What sets the events in motion is a blizzard that cuts off the town.
But what I am calling simply the events is a storm of plots and
subplots. The year is probably 1992. A poet, called Ka, who comes to
town in search of a woman he loves. An epidemic of suicides by young
girls who want to wear their Islamic headscarf - but whose suicides are
defying both the state and the Islamist leaders. A theatre director who
stages a coup. A novelist, called Orhan, who is trying to reconstruct
Ka's three-day visit four years after Ka left.
Islamists and secularists argue about whether being Muslim is backward
or the only possible dignified affirmation of identity. Some of the
arguments centre on whether poverty can explain religious adherence
at the end of the 20th century. But the real poverty that the novel
diagnoses is that of communication. Kars has lost its former wealth
because the borders are closed. Worse things have happened to human
communication.
This is a novel in which any act of persuasion is - and is perceived
to be - motivated by a hidden agenda. Ka notices that everyone speaks
in a double code - even when the woman he loves and her sister speak
to their father. One code is to be understood by everyone; the other,
secret one is aimed only at an inner secret circle.
To complicate matters, no hidden agenda is considered to be purely
personal. Ka is told by the Islamist agitator, Blue, that anyone
who tries to change anyone else's mind is an agent - an agent of the
Turkish state, the Islamists, atheist Europe, the nationalist Kurds
(a shadowy presence in the book). It turns out that even in death,
people are agents - no character involved in the central narrative dies
a natural death: they are murdered or executed (for being agents),
killed at random (transformed into victims of one side or another
in an attempted coup) or else commit suicide as a defiant gesture
against the state. At one point, Blue believes that the best way
in which he can outwit the coupists is by letting them kill him -
his death would make of him a hero and martyr, much more difficult
to control than if he took up a secret offer of safe escape.
Just as the town is swirling with snowflakes, the novel swirls with
lies, double agents, spies and informers. Lies and mimicry are the
tissue of such a social life, penetrating not just conversations but
also actions, gestures and personality. More than once, we are told
that a character strikes a pose straight out of a comic book. The
monuments to Ataturk are said to have been inspired by the poses
invented by a melodramatic actor, Sunay Zaim (the leader of the coup
in Kars, who has something of Gabriele D'Annunzio about him).
While most characters argue about identity, what becomes comically
clear is that their ideas about identity are false. The Islamists
have a mistaken idea of what Europe is - in one discussion it emerges
that only one person, apart from Ka, has visited it. Tellingly, for
all those Europeans who object to Turkey's membership on the grounds
of Europe's Christian roots, the Islamists object to Europe because
they consider it atheist; the only time Christianity is alluded to
is when the narrator says that like Ka he liked the "Protestant"
punctuality and service of German trains.
Meanwhile, the Turkish "secularists" emerge not as people who have
become Europeanised (as the Islamists accuse them, a charge which they
do not deny) but as Stalinists or totalitarians. Kars is portrayed
as a decayed border town infested with police informers and under the
eye of the central state's intelligence service, with the army at bay.
The impact of this poverty of communication is twofold. First,
although many of the characters, caught between the state machinery
and the rebel cells, strike a blow for their individuality (this is
how the serial suicides by the headscarf girls are explained), most
characters appear to us as almost interchangeable doubles: the woman
Ka loves and her Islamist sister; Ka and the novelist Orhan; Sunay
Zaim and Blue; the two Islamist-poet youths, Necip and Fazil... When
Ka and Necip die, Orhan and Fazil, because of their respective losses,
become doubles of each other. The novel leaves it up to us to decide
whether the special affinity between each pair is a sign of mystical
communion or whether each pair is really one schizophrenic person.
Second, this personal schizophrenia leads to Mr Pamuk's (the
author, not the character in the novel) portrayal of the country's
schizophrenia. The novel does not lend itself to the usual portrayal
of a Turkey divided between Europeanised secularists and Islam. The
Islamists in this novel turn out to have much in common with the
state apparatchiks: both groups speak and think like the secret police.
The real schizophrenia, as portrayed here, is that between the
mentality of a militarised, repressive, police state and an open
mentality that seeks love rather than security and which is here
represented not just by the secular protagonist but also by a shadowy
mystical Islamic (Sufi) master.
It is a schizophrenia that affects even how the novel is written.
Much of it is in the forensic style of a police report (and reports
about reports) or autopsy. But the most lyrical passages (at least
in the English translation) are those which concern the swirling snow
that covers the town. Ka comes to compare the human lifetime to that
of a snowflake; the 19 poems that his three days in Kars inspire
drift into him like snowflakes and he organises them according to
the structure of a snowflake in preparation for publication (although
the manuscript is lost).
For Mr Pamuk to use this novel to deliver a message about Turkey's EU
membership would have made him collude in the acts of propaganda that
the novel diagnoses with such melancholy. But what he has produced
is not just an interpretation of Turkey's identity. It is also a
novel that has much to say about the formation of identity, anywhere,
in today's world.