The Innocence of Memories

by Orhan Pamuk

  I still go for walks in Istanbul. One of the joys of having a bodyguard is that you can walk anywhere, to dangerous streets, through threatening neighbourhoods where you would not go by yourself at night, and discover remote, gloomy places you wouldn’t otherwise be able to visit. I love these long walks; after all, I’m a novelist. Thanks to my bodyguard, I can see new and distant parts of the city I wouldn’t have the courage to explore alone. Or when I walk past the inner courtyard of a building I’ve never seen before, I might think to myself, ‘So what if it’s private property, I can still go in, I’ve got my bodyguard with me.’ We’ve developed an understanding now. Sometimes I’ll walk ahead and he’ll fall back – fifty metres, five metres, thirty metres – to a distance determined by our surroundings. There are some places where I’d be embarrassed to be seen with a bodyguard, so I’ll ask him to ‘please hang back for a while’; showing up with a bodyguard to the neighbourhood I lived in for years would feel like something to be ashamed of, a kind of failure. But sometimes we’ll walk side by side and talk. I suppose we’ve become friends. I’ll tell him about the way the city used to be, just as I would tell my readers. ‘They knocked that building down,’ I’ll say, ‘and they built this in its place, and these streets used to look completely different …’ We’ve often gone about the city like a pair of tourists. The bodyguard is essential for any night-time trips to more isolated and unfamiliar neighbourhoods. In fact, his presence has encouraged me to go on even more walks and explore more places. I have learned to enjoy having a bodyguard behind me as I discover the city’s hidden nooks, its strange chemistry, its inner silences and enchantments.

  The Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky had a theory that what we call a story is actually a line that joins the moments, scenes, and subjects we wish to describe. Just like the line that, according to Aristotle, joins up moments to form Time. The novel too is a line that joins up moments into a story. When I walk in the city I see reminders of my past in the landscapes, objects, buildings, shop windows, trees, walls, and images around me, each loaded with its own particular memories. These visions run through my mind like scenes from a novel. Walking briskly through the city, in the daytime or at night, I feel sometimes as if I were wandering around inside the first draft of a novel I’ve written myself.

  On days when I feel emboldened to experience something different, I head for Istanbul’s new districts, telling myself, ‘This road will surely lead me in the right direction.’ Or we might make plans with friends – ‘Let’s meet in Taksim Square,’ or ‘See you at the pier’ – and instead of going the same old way, I’ll pick a different street I’ve never used before. I guess everyone does that every now and then. But sometimes all I want is to feel safe, so I’ll choose the route I’ve taken a hundred times before, perfectly happy to take it a hundred and one times if necessary. It’s the same with Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. There are certain scenes from my favourite novels of theirs that I’ve probably read a hundred times and would happily read again. They are a source of security and strength. Being a novelist is about seeking out what feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable, finding new topics, and constantly challenging yourself to evolve. But the urge to write is also connected to a yearning for home, for the feeling that you are treading on solid ground, in the place which forms the core of your existence.

  ART–MELANCHOLY

  My youthful ambition to become a painter was a defining moment in my life. I still paint. I’m a relatively visual writer. I tell my stories through images, and envision them at first as scenes and tableaux. A painting is the visual manifestation of a moment: the passage of time does not apply. Between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, I took photographs out on the streets of Istanbul so I could later paint what I saw. I have published a selection of these photographs in my book Istanbul. Every time I went out into the city to take these preparatory photographs, I would feel myself becoming imbued with a specific emotion. I decided that this emotion should lie at the heart of my book. I am talking, of course, of hüzün, the ‘Turkish melancholy’ described in that book. As Baudelaire and his nineteenth-century colleagues discovered and described at length, the way we are affected by the representation of a landscape depends on the emotions we associate with that landscape.

  In Istanbul, I sought to deconstruct the sense of melancholy the city emanated during my youth. I have always tried, in my books, in the photographs I’ve taken, and the paintings I’ve made, to identify and capture the kinds of scenes that make us feel melancholy. My work as a writer and an artist is founded on a commitment to finding the sources of the emotions the city makes us feel, and to immortalise these through writing, painting, and photography.

  There is a social dimension to our so-called Turkish melancholy, relating to an awareness of our distance from Europe while finding its economic and cultural prosperity to be lying just beyond our reach. The sense of an ongoing failure to match our neighbours’ achievements leads to a kind of withdrawal, a bitterness and resentment towards life. But in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton argues that melancholy can be a source of pride, an idiosyncrasy, an inspiration for art and nonconformity. The hüzün I describe in Istanbul, though, is a force that engenders a sense of community, a feeling of resignation, of looking inward, and not venturing and manoeuvring for success. This sentiment forges a collective spirit and enables us to share the same meals, the same emotions, the same joys and woes. Rather than the unique melancholy felt by the individual, what I describe in Istanbul is the hüzün we all experience.

  In The Museum of Innocence and other books, I have tried to connect the city’s many neighbourhoods through their communal feeling of melancholy. The Museum of Innocence and Istanbul in particular have much in common; these two books – both of which I published recently, and which are especially connected to Istanbul – seek in the city a mirror for the characters’ emotions.

  I had hoped to display some of Füsun’s own paintings in the Museum of Innocence. I wished I could become Füsun and paint them myself. It hasn’t happened yet, but that doesn’t mean it won’t some day. The Museum of Innocence opened in 2012. I will be expanding it with new pictures, new cabinets and displays until the day I die. Right now, I’m working on Füsun’s bird sketches. Like her, I too wanted to be a painter. I wrote in Istanbul of how, from when I was seven up until I turned twenty-two, my family encouraged me to become an engineer, while the engineers in my extended family advocated for me to become a painter. So I grew up thinking that was what I would do. Then one day, when I was twenty-two, a screw came loose in my head and I declared, ‘Never mind painting, I am going to be a novelist.’ I forgot – or tried to forget – about painting. Now, thirty years later, the hidden painter inside me has come back to life and created the Museum of Innocence.

  I still paint now, and feel that I have a talent for both painting and literature – ‘sister arts’, as they were once known. I am much happier and more fully myself when painting, and if I’ve had a glass of wine beforehand, it can almost feel as if my hand were drawing of its own accord while I watch and wonder at its motion. My mind works a lot harder when I am writing novels, and I am less happy. I have to put more effort into it. But I am more satisfied with the results. Sometimes I think that if I exercised my mind more while painting, and wrote novels more light-heartedly, I’d be both a better writer and a better painter. Painting and literature seem to me essential elements of our basic humanity. I understand why artists paint, and often wish I could be in their place. Now that I’m a famous writer, I’ll take any opportunity to be introduced to the artists I admire. I visit their studios, talk to them, try to enjoy their daily lives and humanity. I see in each of them the person I secretly wish I could be.

  DOGS AND THE CITY

  In the years between 1973 and 1996, I was a nocturnal writer, and on my way home at night I would always encounter packs of stray dogs. My Name Is Red opens with a monologue from a street dog in Istanbul in the 1590s. Istanbul at night used to be
dominated by dogs. Ottoman sultans and pashas who were particularly eager to imitate the West would regularly embark on the mass slaughter of these dogs. Doctors and public health officers would provide some convenient scientific justification for these culls. During the day these dogs would ambush pedestrians, soil the streets, and roam around in total freedom, in a manner considered unbefitting of the European lifestyle. So the dogs would periodically get picked off the streets and exiled to the remote island of Hayırsızada, in the Sea of Marmara. In those days it was a common occurrence for strays to be rounded up thus and dumped onto uninhabited islands, or eliminated in genocidal massacres. Deprived of their strays, the public would react by rallying together to petition the sultan: ‘We want our dogs back.’ The sultan would change his mind, or a new government, less ambitious about its westernisation project, might meanwhile come to power, and eventually the hapless dogs would be allowed to return. But if you ask me, the true existential threat to these dogs has emerged in the last twenty-five years, and the specimens we see now will be the last of their kind. The problem is that garbage containers have been modernised. In the past, dogs would knock bins over and survive on the rubbish that spilled out. That was why I would always see stray dogs when I wrote at night. Their lives revolved around knocking over trash cans. But now bins have lids that won’t open, and come in big black containers made of metal or plastic, the final phase in the annihilation of these dogs. I love looking at the city through these dogs’ eyes, though I do have some distressing childhood memories about them. More recently, in the 1990s, I was cornered by a pack of strays and bitten, and had to get a rabies shot at the infectious diseases hospital in Sultanahmet. Nevertheless, I have a cordial rapport with street dogs. Not that you must have a good relationship with someone in order to write about them effectively. I’m still scared of them. Perhaps it’s this fear that compels me to write about them.

  Like the hero of A Strangeness in My Mind, the novel I am finishing now, I always tell myself when I come across these dogs that there is nothing to be afraid of. But I fear them anyway, I find myself thinking about them, and as I do I gradually begin to identify with them.

  WRITING BY HAND

  Sometimes I think I must be the last person left who still writes by hand. But I know there are other writers like me who still do that. When I was younger, I thought typewriters were for journalists, and as I was a writer, I needn’t bother. By the time computers appeared, I’d been writing for a long time, and I didn’t want to change my habits. I write very slowly. I can toil for a day and come away with half a page or a page at most. I didn’t want to spend all day staring at a computer as if it were a miniature aquarium. The first computer screens made my eyes water. Maybe that’s why I never managed to make the switch. But I’m all right with that.

  I write by hand, patiently, my eyes always on the page. I take pleasure in watching the pen advance over the page like a paintbrush, in the smell of ink and paper, in the sight of the scattered sheets, erasers, and scraps of paper around me. I write a little, and then I go back over it to make corrections. When the page becomes too messy, I tear it off and write it out again, and again, and again. Writing, for me, is about rewriting, patience, endless deliberation over what to say next, and conserving what I’ve already written. That’s the work ethic I’ve adopted.

  In the Ottoman era, poets were respected figures. Not every Ottoman sultan was a poet, but about a third of them thought about producing a collection of poetry, perhaps written with the help of well-paid master poets of the time. There was an abundance of poets in the upper echelons of Ottoman society, among ministers, grand viziers, and religious scholars. Putting together a divan, a collection of poetry, signalled a certain level of education, refinement, and cultural elevation. That explains why so many Ottoman sultans wrote poetry regardless of whether they had any talent for it: to demonstrate that they had mastered the poetic conventions of their time. They would write poetry collections to prove they were able to write something meaningful while still respecting those conventions, and in doing so would bolster their intellectual credentials. No wonder being a poet in Ottoman times was a source of distinction. To this day, being a novelist, a storyteller, is not deemed as prestigious an occupation. When I first started writing, novelists in Turkey were perceived as being ‘basically like clerks who sit and write all day’. Poets, on the other hand, were seen as venerable figures with important things to say, who received their words straight from God. Those who wrote novels were not so gifted, and had to labour instead like patient ants, marathon runners on a never-ending course. Writing novels was also seen as a less innovative occupation. This, together with the familiarisation of the classic nineteenth-century novel, and a disdain for the more unconventional and experimental, modern and postmodern kind of writing I favoured, has resulted in fiction writers being regarded as lesser beings compared to poets. That suits me. When I first started writing, even I saw myself as a kind of clerk, and my ambition was to take the things I saw around me and place them in orderly fashion within the framework of a longer narrative. Sure, I wanted to experiment. But I’ve always eschewed the exalted roles, the vigorous intellectual stances our poets have traditionally embraced.

  CIGARETTES AND SUGGESTIVE HAND GESTURES

  I smoked a lot of cigarettes during my first twenty years as a novelist. I rapidly burned through my God-given quota, and then gave up. I’ve struggled against cigarettes all my life. Like giving up smoking, writing is a test of willpower. Everything seems to tempt you away from your desk: meeting up with friends, a party at your neighbours’, a film at the cinema, and the latest televised scandal. The book you are writing might be unhelpfully complicated. But you must will yourself to keep writing, just as you would to give up smoking. I’ve been writing all my life; it’s been more than forty years now. And I’ve always known that my greatest strengths are discipline, perseverance, and resolve.

  We smoke ‘like Turks’. There are endless implications to how we talk and gesticulate while we smoke, enough to keep any anthropologist busy. ‘Here, have a cigarette,’ we’ll say as an overture of friendship, or as the starting point of any communication among Turkish men. If they hesitate to take the proffered cigarette, we’ll quickly produce a lighter – both to show it off, and to demonstrate how obliging we are as a sign of our deepening friendship. Then there is the manner in which we stub out the cigarette: with one of Füsun’s irritable gestures, or flicking it away just so, like a proper existentialist might, or carelessly tossing it to the floor. A cigarette can be crushed furiously underfoot. There are cigarettes for the wealthy, and cigarettes for the poor: the local Birinci brand, and smuggled American cigarettes of the seventies and eighties … In the years when The Museum of Innocence is set, only Turkish cigarette brands could legally be sold in Istanbul. Other brands were only available through illicit channels. This is something I touch upon in the novel. Carrying Marlboros became a marker of prestige, proof that one had the means to find and acquire them. Smoking for me used to be at once a vice and an anthropological investigation. An accomplished novelist must master the act of lighting a cigarette and the range of significant meanings it can convey before setting out to describe these to the reader. In the Museum of Innocence, every cigarette Füsun smokes, every cigarette she lights, is paired with an expression, a movement, a gesture – all recreated in appositely recorded videos – that reveals something about the heroine’s state of mind in that moment. In the museum, we show Füsun smoking. Kemal collected more than 4,200 cigarette butts she discarded, gave them all to me, and told me how each one should be captioned. In the summer of 2011, I did what was expected of me: I wrote underneath each cigarette a few words that would reflect Füsun’s various moods as witnessed and relayed to me by Kemal, and in keeping with the spirit of the novel.

  We’ve discussed how every object in the Museum of Innocence corresponds to a particular moment. Every cigarette stub Kemal retrieved and took away from the ashtray or the tab
le where Füsun had left it was in some way emblematic of Füsun’s relationship with Kemal, or of Füsun’s mood in that moment, or of the things she said and did while she smoked. Here’s how Füsun felt while she smoked this cigarette; here is what was happening in that moment. So in the context of our Aristotelian conception of time, cigarette butts are displayed in the museum as a sign of that moment.

  When you stand back and look at the cigarettes on display, you might think, ‘These all look the same to me.’ But if Kemal and Füsun could visit the museum, they would notice all their nuances and various accompanying feelings. Each of those cigarettes is a new turn, a new phrase, a new paragraph in a story whose complexion seems to endlessly shift, and in doing so to keep its readers’ interest alive.

  ON FÜSUN

  If Füsun were alive today, I would like to think of her as a beautiful, slightly preoccupied woman, working in an office somewhere, with ambitions to rise through the ranks of the company, bold but wary of predatory men, and striving ultimately for happiness. Füsun’s distressing story is in some ways the story of all Turkish women. Men crush women under the force of their love. They use their love to justify their oppressive demands. ‘I love you too much to let you leave the house,’ they’ll say; always ‘I love you too much …’ They refuse to let women develop their own identities. And it doesn’t just happen in Turkey. Over in this half of the world, men who wield any sort of authority over the women they love will try to force them into certain roles. Füsun hopes to exploit the roles these men offer her. She tries to get what she wants by way of what men want; unfortunately, what she wants is to become a Yeşilçam film star. Not by accident, her husband is a film director. I’ve thought a lot about Füsun. But when I’ve tried to picture her, or to put myself in her place, I’ve found my gaze and my insight limited by my gender. This is the moral dilemma that makes writing novels such an attractive proposition. A novel isn’t just a vehicle through which to write about yourself. It also requires you to write about those who are not like you, who are, for whatever reason, a little different – in class, gender, culture, or religion. The talent of any novelist is based on their will and the ability to write their own story as if it were someone else’s, and someone else’s story as if it were theirs.