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The novel of ambiguity
Are the transformations effected in Orhan Pamuk's novels an extension
of their author's own positioning, asks Elias Khoury*
Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt
Oct 19-25 2006
Last year, at the Goteborg Book Fair, where dozens of writers from
the four corners of the globe meet at the Swedish dining table that
offers a main course called the Nobel Prize, I sat down to breakfast
at my hotel with Orhan Pamuk. The Turkish novelist looked distracted,
worn down with waiting. The newspapers were full of the news of the
legal charges brought against him on account of his statements about
the genocide of Armenians and rumours were rife among journalists and
other gossips that he was a likely candidate for the Nobel. I jokingly
said that anxiety did no good and that waiting for the award may mean
that it will never come. I went over the well-known story concerning
the prominent Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal who was led to believe that
renting a house in Stockholm would place him on the scene and the award
jury would, as a consequence, find him hard to overlook. The result was
that the prize eluded him; he became a prime example of miscalculation.
Pamuk made no comment and contented himself with a smile. It was the
first time his name had been mentioned among possible nominees. I
suggested that nomination by the newspapers was not a good sign and
that the prize usually goes to a name not bandied about in the media.
He asked me about Adonis and I said that in the Arab world we
considered that he had long ago won the award and was no longer in
any need of it.
I was wrong and Pamuk was right. His anxiety was well-placed: the
prize that passed him over last year has now been awarded him, thus
consecrating Turkish literature in its modernist and postmodernist
modes. Yashar Kemal had written stunning pastoral novels relying
on popular heritage and folk tales. Pamuk, on the other hand, has
produced modernist novels that border on the Borgesian text, playing
with fantasy and rereading the past in the language of the present.
The crux of the Pamukian novel is ambiguity: of identity, of
styles, of positionality. He is a European writer because, since
the Ataturk revolution, Turkey has been stricken by a frenzy of
Europeanisation, casting off the Ottoman tarbouche and rushing to
embrace secularisation, forgetting that the tarbouche is not indigenous
but had come from Austria and that secularisation, albeit one of the
hallmarks of the French Revolution, remains riddled with ambiguity
in many European countries.
Last Thursday, as I watched an Armenian demonstration in the Place
des Martyres in Beirut against Turkey's participation in UNIFEL,
soon after the announcement that Pamuk had won the Nobel, I could
not help but think of his novel The White Castle. The story, which
centres on the ambiguity of identity, is about a trader from Venice
who falls captive to the Turks and becomes the slave of a Turkish
scholar who fervently wishes to learn astronomy, manufacture gunpowder
and construct a giant cannon. The story is not about the way the Turk
employs his European slave in his primitive scientific research but
about the resemblance between the two men, a resemblance so close that
they look like twins. The novel becomes a space in which memories are
exchanged, ending up as the site for the exchange of the present. The
Turk becomes a Venetian and the Venetian a Turk.
The game of the novel is pivoted on the personality of its author.
The reader wonders which one wrote the book, the Turk or the Italian?
It recalls similar ambiguities in the main character in Tayib Saleh's
novel Season of Migration to the North. Who is Mustafa Saeed? Did he
really exist or is he the exotic facet of the narrator's personality?
While The White Castle can be read as variation on Saleh's novel
and a rewriting of it, it goes further in sounding out a latent
Borgesian inspiration that surfaces in all of Pamuk's novels then
disappears behind a truncated detective game in The Black Book,
behind questions about the relationship between heritage and imported
European Renaissance art in My Name is Red, behind a fierce realism
and overwhelming imaginative flow in Snow or behind the labyrinth
of a passion occasioned by a book as in The New Life. But what is
the relationship between the Armenian demonstration in Beirut and
Pamuk's literary texts?
No Armenian writer has won the Nobel Prize, nor has the Armenian
genocide entered Turkish literature. Pamuk, whose criticism of
the Turkish position that does not admit its responsibility for the
Armenian genocide raised hell in his homeland has not written a novel
about the Armenians, satisfying himself instead with the position
publicised in the media. It was a comment by Nedim Gèrsel about the
Nobel Prize being awarded to his colleague that turned the Armenian
demonstration in my eyes into an event related to the prize.
Did Pamuk receive the award in his capacity as an alternative to an
Armenian writer? Has the game of doppelgangers and the interlocking
of identities now overtaken the novelist himself, turning him into
the hero of a novel he did not write? The game of the writer's
transformation into the hero of a novel he has not penned fascinates
me because it is one of the signs of the text's revenge on the writer
who considers that his intelligence allows him to pass over the very
chalice he has given to the heroes of his novels to drink. Was this
not the fate of Salman Rushdie, Kafka and Emile Habiby, among others?
Pamuk's game is played between the poles of popular commercial
and high literature. Despite being an experimental writer, his
experimentation does not include the breaking of new ground. He has
contented himself with a measuring of the pulse of experimentation,
constructing modernist narratives that go beyond realism to the
fantastic, build literary texts on literature, are enthralled by the
book, return to long-forgotten centuries without abandoning their
contemporaneity and are pivoted on Istanbul as a point of intersection
between memory and imagination. He is a writer whose ability to treat
current issues in his country and in the world singles him out for
popularity. He measures the pulse of the media then turns it into
literature, without lapsing into cliche or triteness.
Within the text it is intelligence that takes precedence over all other
aspects. The narrative is vivid, brilliant, and the writer resides in
flagrant ambiguity. As Pamuk never tires of saying, he is European by
inclination -- Turkey joined Europe when the Italian merchant became
a Turkish scientist -- a writer who rebelled against the realism of
his literary forefathers and who is a modernist in all things. He
does not live outside Istanbul because he has become its author.
* The writer is Editor-in-Chief of the weekly literary supplement of
the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar , and distinguished professor of Middle
Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He has published
11 novels, of which five have been translated into English : Little
Mountain ( 1989 ), Gates of the City ( 1993 ), The Journey of Little
Gandhi ( 1994 ), The Kingdom of Strangers ( 1996 ) and Gate of the Sun
( 2006 ).
--Boundary_(ID_ef7LgGXTMR2yq3KZUslZgA)--
Are the transformations effected in Orhan Pamuk's novels an extension
of their author's own positioning, asks Elias Khoury*
Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt
Oct 19-25 2006
Last year, at the Goteborg Book Fair, where dozens of writers from
the four corners of the globe meet at the Swedish dining table that
offers a main course called the Nobel Prize, I sat down to breakfast
at my hotel with Orhan Pamuk. The Turkish novelist looked distracted,
worn down with waiting. The newspapers were full of the news of the
legal charges brought against him on account of his statements about
the genocide of Armenians and rumours were rife among journalists and
other gossips that he was a likely candidate for the Nobel. I jokingly
said that anxiety did no good and that waiting for the award may mean
that it will never come. I went over the well-known story concerning
the prominent Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal who was led to believe that
renting a house in Stockholm would place him on the scene and the award
jury would, as a consequence, find him hard to overlook. The result was
that the prize eluded him; he became a prime example of miscalculation.
Pamuk made no comment and contented himself with a smile. It was the
first time his name had been mentioned among possible nominees. I
suggested that nomination by the newspapers was not a good sign and
that the prize usually goes to a name not bandied about in the media.
He asked me about Adonis and I said that in the Arab world we
considered that he had long ago won the award and was no longer in
any need of it.
I was wrong and Pamuk was right. His anxiety was well-placed: the
prize that passed him over last year has now been awarded him, thus
consecrating Turkish literature in its modernist and postmodernist
modes. Yashar Kemal had written stunning pastoral novels relying
on popular heritage and folk tales. Pamuk, on the other hand, has
produced modernist novels that border on the Borgesian text, playing
with fantasy and rereading the past in the language of the present.
The crux of the Pamukian novel is ambiguity: of identity, of
styles, of positionality. He is a European writer because, since
the Ataturk revolution, Turkey has been stricken by a frenzy of
Europeanisation, casting off the Ottoman tarbouche and rushing to
embrace secularisation, forgetting that the tarbouche is not indigenous
but had come from Austria and that secularisation, albeit one of the
hallmarks of the French Revolution, remains riddled with ambiguity
in many European countries.
Last Thursday, as I watched an Armenian demonstration in the Place
des Martyres in Beirut against Turkey's participation in UNIFEL,
soon after the announcement that Pamuk had won the Nobel, I could
not help but think of his novel The White Castle. The story, which
centres on the ambiguity of identity, is about a trader from Venice
who falls captive to the Turks and becomes the slave of a Turkish
scholar who fervently wishes to learn astronomy, manufacture gunpowder
and construct a giant cannon. The story is not about the way the Turk
employs his European slave in his primitive scientific research but
about the resemblance between the two men, a resemblance so close that
they look like twins. The novel becomes a space in which memories are
exchanged, ending up as the site for the exchange of the present. The
Turk becomes a Venetian and the Venetian a Turk.
The game of the novel is pivoted on the personality of its author.
The reader wonders which one wrote the book, the Turk or the Italian?
It recalls similar ambiguities in the main character in Tayib Saleh's
novel Season of Migration to the North. Who is Mustafa Saeed? Did he
really exist or is he the exotic facet of the narrator's personality?
While The White Castle can be read as variation on Saleh's novel
and a rewriting of it, it goes further in sounding out a latent
Borgesian inspiration that surfaces in all of Pamuk's novels then
disappears behind a truncated detective game in The Black Book,
behind questions about the relationship between heritage and imported
European Renaissance art in My Name is Red, behind a fierce realism
and overwhelming imaginative flow in Snow or behind the labyrinth
of a passion occasioned by a book as in The New Life. But what is
the relationship between the Armenian demonstration in Beirut and
Pamuk's literary texts?
No Armenian writer has won the Nobel Prize, nor has the Armenian
genocide entered Turkish literature. Pamuk, whose criticism of
the Turkish position that does not admit its responsibility for the
Armenian genocide raised hell in his homeland has not written a novel
about the Armenians, satisfying himself instead with the position
publicised in the media. It was a comment by Nedim Gèrsel about the
Nobel Prize being awarded to his colleague that turned the Armenian
demonstration in my eyes into an event related to the prize.
Did Pamuk receive the award in his capacity as an alternative to an
Armenian writer? Has the game of doppelgangers and the interlocking
of identities now overtaken the novelist himself, turning him into
the hero of a novel he did not write? The game of the writer's
transformation into the hero of a novel he has not penned fascinates
me because it is one of the signs of the text's revenge on the writer
who considers that his intelligence allows him to pass over the very
chalice he has given to the heroes of his novels to drink. Was this
not the fate of Salman Rushdie, Kafka and Emile Habiby, among others?
Pamuk's game is played between the poles of popular commercial
and high literature. Despite being an experimental writer, his
experimentation does not include the breaking of new ground. He has
contented himself with a measuring of the pulse of experimentation,
constructing modernist narratives that go beyond realism to the
fantastic, build literary texts on literature, are enthralled by the
book, return to long-forgotten centuries without abandoning their
contemporaneity and are pivoted on Istanbul as a point of intersection
between memory and imagination. He is a writer whose ability to treat
current issues in his country and in the world singles him out for
popularity. He measures the pulse of the media then turns it into
literature, without lapsing into cliche or triteness.
Within the text it is intelligence that takes precedence over all other
aspects. The narrative is vivid, brilliant, and the writer resides in
flagrant ambiguity. As Pamuk never tires of saying, he is European by
inclination -- Turkey joined Europe when the Italian merchant became
a Turkish scientist -- a writer who rebelled against the realism of
his literary forefathers and who is a modernist in all things. He
does not live outside Istanbul because he has become its author.
* The writer is Editor-in-Chief of the weekly literary supplement of
the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar , and distinguished professor of Middle
Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He has published
11 novels, of which five have been translated into English : Little
Mountain ( 1989 ), Gates of the City ( 1993 ), The Journey of Little
Gandhi ( 1994 ), The Kingdom of Strangers ( 1996 ) and Gate of the Sun
( 2006 ).
--Boundary_(ID_ef7LgGXTMR2yq3KZUslZgA)--