Bookplanet: Nobel for Pamuk - what has it got to do with politics?

A Writer Above Politics – by RANDY BOYAGODA

THE writer Orhan Pamuk of Turkey has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, and the timing would appear to be uniquely auspicious.

The divide between the West and Islam seems to be growing at an alarming pace. A series of troubling events, from the furor over a German opera performance to the violent reaction to the pope’s remarks about Islam, have resulted in recriminations and frustrated attempts at renewed dialogue and understanding. Anti-Islamic sentiments have shifted from the far right to the center of European political life.

And now a writer of Orhan Pamuk’s concerns and ambitions gains global prominence. In the Swedish Academy’s prize citation, he is commended as an artist who “has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”

No doubt, the latest Nobel laureate’s books will be taken up with immediate interest by thoughtful readers searching for wisdom about the violent crosscurrents of religion, politics, history and culture whipsawing our world. But one can only hope that this rush to conscript Mr. Pamuk as a literary mediator in the clash of civilizations will fail.

If it doesn’t, we risk missing the core insight of his work: that the chaos of cultural upheaval, and equally the harmony of intercultural connection, is always secondary to what Mr. Pamuk’s fellow Nobel laureate, William Faulkner, described as “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.”

To be sure, Mr. Pamuk’s books touch on the themes for which the Nobel committee cites him. Mr. Pamuk is a resident of Istanbul, a city that has for centuries been a complex amalgamation of East and West, empire and nation, tradition and modernity, faith and patriotism. His evocations of this city, like those of his work’s wider terrain, provide compelling meditations on the encounter between European and Ottoman civilizations, between believers and infidels of various stripes from the 16th century to the early 21st. In “My Name is Red,” a group of Muslim miniaturists are ordered to violate Islamic doctrines on representing human figures. In “Snow,” a poet gets caught up in a military coup and terrorist plot while searching for a lost love. And in “Istanbul: Memories and the City,” Mr. Pamuk describes what he sees as his native city’s “greatest virtue”: “its people’s ability to see the city through both Western and Eastern eyes.”

But Mr. Pamuk’s books are less about politics than they are about the longing to move beyond them — to transcend the limitations of history, culture and religion. Mr. Pamuk’s characters resist these forces out of private motives: artistic ambition, romantic love, the simple desire to contemplate the moody beauty of a storied city without recourse to the geopolitical implications of that beauty.

To reduce Mr. Pamuk’s work to its politics is in a sense to treat him as the Turkish authorities have done: as the purveyor of a message about “Turkishness” or its relation to Europe, about Islam and the West, rather than as a literary artist of the highest order. Perceiving the significance of his work along these lines inadvertently allows the bruising forces of the world at large to overcome the attempts of ordinary people to endure and prevail against such forces. This is a grim parallel to what transpires at the most tragic moments in the books themselves.

In reading Mr. Pamuk’s books for their resonance with our political and cultural preoccupations of the day, we narrow his significance as a writer to the very categories his work marks as secondary — and at the very moment that he gains unrivaled notice for his efforts.

(Randy Boyagoda, the author of the novel “Governor of the Northern Province,” is a professor of literature at Ryerson University.)


2. Neighbourhoods
For Orhan Pamuk, the idea of "neighbourliness" is double-edged: in international relations, it signals peace and cultural engagement, but in society, particularly in the Turkish tradition, it implies provincialism and suspicion. Addressing the Eurozine network, Pamuk holds that cultural journals' role should be to promote non-conformism.
By Orhan Pamuk

There is nothing I like more than to grab two or three new issues of cultural journals, withdraw into my study and start to read. What do I then expect as a reader? To me, cultural journals constitute a space where culture resists. Or should resist. I find it highly disturbing when cultural journals try to compete with – and are influenced by – the language and interests of the mainstream media. Cultural journals should reject the issues brought up by the big media and instead insist on dwelling on their own problems, their own concerns. Sometimes the language of the big media appeals to us; sometimes the tabloids catch our attention, which we might like. Nevertheless, cultural journals shouldn't be pursuing issues covered by the bigger papers and television, who cater to a large audience. Unfortunately, it's exactly this development that we've been forced to follow in recent years, especially in some of the more significant cultural journals. To attract readers' interest, they too pursue the issues raised, investigated, and blown up by the big media. Perhaps in doing so they do even attract some interest – temporarily. But in the long run they just become like the big media. What I'd like to see when I open one of these journals is exactly those things I can't find anywhere else.

Another concern of mine regarding cultural journals is that they are too much under the influence of the Anglo-Saxon world. Cultural journals should be communicating much more intensely with other cultures, cultures close by, and with the culture in which they are embedded and which they address. They could counter the general tendencies of the culture industry; they could and should point to other ways, to alternatives to the hegemony of Anglo-American culture.

We are here to talk about "neighbourhoods", a concept that for Turkey should include the European Union. However, we haven't yet become a fully-fledged neighbour of the EU. Moreover, among neighbouring countries, it's only Greece with whom we're on reasonably good terms. We're improving, but can't really claim to have good relations with our neighbours. Instead, we're in a constant state of conflict with them. One might almost say that we're solving our problems with our European neighbours simply to get into the EU.

"Neighbourliness" is usually regarded to be something intrinsically good. And yes, in this meeting we may extol, celebrate, and believe in neighbourly behaviour; to do so would certainly be correct. For international peace, neighbourhood is an important concept and good neighbourly relations are necessary. However, I'd still like to question a certain concept of neighbourliness that is well established in our culture and passed on through wise sayings and proverbs.

Yes, Turkey does need to get along well with its neighbours. But in the cultural context, I have some problems with neighbourhood, as I'm sure you have too. For me, living in a modern city essentially means being free from the pressure that comes from having neighbours. The neighbour is a person we should love, and who, if we don't, informs on us, polices us, denounces us for faults in our attitude and behaviour. The dominant discourse in our culture, which says that one should get along with one's neighbours, is very much about accommodating to the neighbour (let's get along with him or her so he or she doesn't denounce us). The discourse makes us think that this is the sensible thing to do.

Modernity, or the yearning to escape from the provincial, to some extent represents a wish to avoid the neighbour, to avoid the prying and controlling eyes of the community.

In international relations, I do find neighbourhood an important concept. I value it. I think Turkey should get along with its neighbours. But those of us who live in big cities should be glad, in contrast to small-town dwellers, that we are rid of our neighbours. Of course, from time to time we knock on our neighbour's door when we run out of coffee and ask to borrow some. As pleasant as this might be, it also means opening our door to the control mechanisms of society.

In Turkish, there's the saying that "a neighbour knows what a neighbour feels". Here, we think of a neighbour as someone who incessantly keeps a check on the other, who oversees, who reports to others whatever excesses he observes, scribbling them down in a notebook and saving them there only to bring them up again at a bad moment. Underlying this is the custom in Ottoman society where the state assigned the task of finding the culprit of a crime to the community; where the representative of state authority could not infiltrate the community, in the way we know from Western culture and literature; where a community culture existed in which everyone was policeman and informer; where communities were transformed by Ottoman society – which attributed great importance to the millet system – into environments in which everyone policed everyone else. That is where the concept of neighbourhood comes from, a concept that we cherish greatly even today. We Turkish people celebrate the concept of "neighbourliness", we take great care to get along with our neighbours. However, it's important to note that, because of the communal society, this also means getting along well with the state, with the police, with the army. Because of neighbours, because of concern with the question "What would the neighbours say?", everyone keeps their controversial thoughts, their dissent, to themselves.

Let's love our neighbour, let's love Greece, Iran, Syria. Let's enter the EU and live in peace. But let's not abandon our own thoughts, our own identity, our own personality just because we're worried about "what the neighbours would say", just because we should be getting along well with our neighbours.

Cultural journals essentially address the most developed and refined people in a society, the ones with the highest level of education and income. The culture of neighbourhood, on the other hand, is a concept that serves the needs of people who can't survive alone in a modern city, who need the moral, even the cultural and religious support of their neighbours to keep a hold in the modern urban environment. Of course we should be on good terms with our neighbour, but let's not therefore sacrifice our thoughts, our controversial ideas. When our parents quarrel at home, it may be okay to caution "Shh, shh, what would the neighbours think?", but the fear of the neighbour could lead us to forsake our ideas and to think like everybody else. To come back to where I started, what we expect from cultural journals is that they shouldn't lead us to think in conformity with the rest.

I expect this conference, as well as the accession of Turkey into the European Union, to proceed along these lines. Each one of us should be thinking a little differently; we shouldn't resemble one another; we should take pride in our neighbourly difference, not in our resemblance. Our neighbour shouldn't question our difference. That's the kind of world we yearn for. And that's the reason why the concept of neighbourhood is in the title of this meeting: because we want to live in a world of diversity.

(Orhan Pamuk delivered this speech as the opening address at the 18th European Meeting of Cultural Journals in Istanbul from 4 to 7 November 2005.)