by Orhan Pamuk
At the same time, in one part of our minds, we can pinpoint our location on the map exactly, just as we can remember the point toward which we are traveling. Even at those times when I surrender unconditionally to the wind, I am able—at least according to some other writers I know and admire—to retain my general sense of direction. Before I set out I will have made plans: divided the story I wish to tell into sections, determined which ports my ship will visit and what loads it will carry and drop off along the way, estimated the time of my journey, and charted its course. But if the wind, having blown in from unknown quarters and filled my sails, decides to change the direction of my story, I will not resist. For what the ship most ardently seeks is the feeling of wholeness and perfection in plying its way under full sail. It is as if I am looking for that special place and time in which everything flows into everything else, everything is linked, and everything is aware, as it were, of everything else. All at once, the wind will die down and I will find myself becalmed in a place where nothing moves. Yet I’ll sense that there are things in these calm and misty waters that will, if I am patient, move the novel forward.
What I most long for is the sort of spiritual inspiration I described in my novel Snow. It is not dissimilar to the sort of inspiration Coleridge describes in “Kubla Khan.” I long for inspiration to come to me (as poems did to Coleridge—and to Ka, Snow’s hero) in a dramatic way, preferably already formed as scenes and situations that might sit well in a novel. If I wait patiently and attentively, my wish comes true. To write a novel is to be open to these desires, winds, and inspirations, and also to the dark recesses of our minds and their moments of mist and stillness.
For what is a novel but a story that fills its sails with these winds, that answers and builds upon inspirations that blow in from unknown quarters, and seizes upon all the daydreams we’ve invented for our diversion, bringing them together into a meaningful whole. Above all else, a novel is a vessel that carries inside it a dream world we wish to keep, forever alive and forever ready. Novels are held together by the little pieces of daydreams that help us, from the moment we enter them, forget the tedious world we long to escape. The more we write, the richer these dreams become and the broader, more detailed, more complete seems that second world inside the vessel. We come to know this world through writing, and the better we know it, the easier it is to carry it around in our heads. If I am in the middle of a novel and writing well, I enter easily into its dreams. For novels are new worlds into which we move happily through reading or even more fully by writing: A novelist shapes his works in such a way as to most easily carry the dreams he wishes to elaborate. Just as these works offer happiness to the attentive reader, so, too, do they offer the writer a solid and sound new world in which to lose himself and seek happiness at any hour of the day. If I feel able to create even a tiny part of such a miraculous world, I feel content the moment I reach my desk, with my pen and paper. In no time at all I can leave behind the familiar boring world of every day for this other, bigger place and wander freely; most of the time I have no desire to return to real life or to reach the end of the novel. This feeling is, I think, related to the response I am happiest to hear when I tell readers that I am writing a new novel: “Please make your novel really long!” I am proud to boast that I hear this a thousand times more often than the publisher’s perennial entreaty: “Make it short!”
How is it that a habit drawing on a single person’s joys and pleasures can produce a work that interests so many others? Readers of My Name Is Red like to recall Shekure’s remarks to the effect that trying to explain everything is a sort of idiocy. My own sympathies in this scene are not with Orhan, my little hero and namesake, but with the mother, who is gently poking fun at him. If, however, you will permit me to commit another idiocy and act like Orhan, I’d like to try to explain why dreams that work as medicine for the writer can serve the reader the same way: Because if I am entirely inside the novel and writing well—if I have distanced myself from the ringing phone, from all the troubles and demands and tedium of everyday life—the rules by which my free-floating heaven operates recall the games I played as a child. It is as if everything has become simpler, as if I am in a world where I can see into every house, car, ship, and building because they are all made of glass; they have begun to reveal to me their secrets. My job is to divine the rules and listen: to watch with pleasure the goings-on in each interior, to step into cars and buses with my heroes and travel about Istanbul, visiting places that have come to bore me, seeing them with new eyes and, in so doing, transforming them; my job is to have fun, be irresponsible, because while I’m amusing myself (as we like to tell children) I might just learn something.
An imaginative novelist’s greatest virtue is his ability to forget the world in the way a child does, to be irresponsible and delight in it, to play around with the rules of the known world—but at the same time to see past his freewheeling flights of fancy to the deep responsibility of later allowing readers to lose themselves in the story. A novelist might spend the whole day playing, but at the same time he carries the deepest conviction of being more serious than others. This is because he can look directly into the center of things the way that only children can. Having found the courage to set rules for the games we once played freely, he senses that his readers will also allow themselves to be drawn into the same rules, the same languages, the same sentences, and therefore the story. To write well is to allow the reader to say, “I was going to say the same thing myself, but I couldn’t allow myself to be that childish.”
This world I explore and create and enlarge, making up the rules as I go, waiting for my sails to fill with a wind from an unknown quarter, and poring over my map—it is born of childlike innocence that is at times closed to me. This happens to all writers. A moment arrives when I get stuck, or I will go back to the point in the novel where I’ve left off sometime before and find I am unable to pick it up again. Such afflictions are commonplace, though I may suffer from them less than other writers—if I can’t pick up where I left off, I can always turn instead to another gap in the novel. Because I’ve studied my map very carefully, I can begin writing in another section; I needn’t work in the order of reading. Not that this is so important. But last autumn, while I was grappling with various political matters and running into a similar problem of getting stuck, I felt as if I’d discovered something that also bears on novel writing. Let me try to explain.
The case that was opened against me, and the political quandaries in which I then found myself, turned me into a far more “political,” “serious,” and “responsible” person than I wanted to be: a sad state of affairs and an even sadder state of mind—let me say it with a smile. This was why I was unable to enter into that childlike innocence without which no novel is possible, but this was easy to understand; it didn’t surprise me. As the events slowly unfolded, I would tell myself that my fast-vanishing spirit of irresponsibility, my childish sense of play and childish sense of humor, would one day return and I would then be able to finish the novel I’d been working on for three years. Nevertheless, I would still get up every morning, long before Istanbul’s ten million other inhabitants, and try to enter into the novel that was sitting unfinished in the silence of midnight. I did this because I so longed to get back into my beloved second world, and after exerting myself greatly, I’d begin to pull bits of a novel from my head and see them playing out before me. But these fragments were not from the novel I was writing; they were scenes from an entirely different story. On those tedious, joyless mornings, what passed before my eyes was not the novel on which I’d been working for three years but an ever-growing body of scenes, sentences, characters, and strange details from some other novel. After a while, I began to set down these fragments in a notebook, and I jotted down thoughts I had never before entertained. This other novel would be about the paintings of a deceased contemporary artist. As I conjured up this painter, I found myself thinking just as much about his paintings
. After a while, I understood why I’d been unable to recapture the child’s spirit of irresponsibility during those tedious days. I could no longer return to childishness, I could return only so far as my childhood, to the days when (as I describe in Istanbul) I dreamed of becoming an artist and spent my waking hours doing one painting after another.
Later, when the case against me was dropped, I returned to The Museum of Innocence, the novel on which I had already spent three years. Nevertheless, today I am planning the other novel, which came to me scene by scene during those days when, unable to return to pure childishness, I half returned via the passions of my childhood. This experience taught me something important about the mysterious art of writing novels.
I can explain this by taking “the implied reader,” a principle put forward by the great literary critic and theorist Wolfgang Iser, and twisting it to my own ends. Iser created a brilliant reader-oriented literary theory. He says that a novel’s meaning resides neither in the text nor in the context in which it is read but somewhere between the two. He argues that a novel’s meaning emerges only as it is read, and so when he speaks of the implied reader, he is assigning him an indispensable role.
When I was dreaming up the scenes, sentences, and details of another book instead of continuing the novel I was already writing, this theory came to mind, and what it suggested to me by way of corollary was this: For every unwritten but dreamed and planned novel (including, in other words, my own unfinished work) there must be an implied author. So I would be able to finish that book only when I’d again become its implied author. But when I was immersed in political affairs or—as happens so often in the course of normal life—my thoughts were too often interrupted by unpaid gas bills, ringing phones, and family gatherings, I was unable to become the author implied by the book in my dreams. During those long and tedious days of politicking, I could not become the implied author of the book I longed to write. Then those days passed, and I returned to my novel—a love story that takes place between 1975 and the present, among the rich of Istanbul or, as the papers like to call it, “Istanbul society”—and to my former self just as I had so longed to do, and whenever I think how close I am to finishing it, I feel happy too. But having come through this experience, I now understand why, for thirty years, I have devoted all my strength to becoming the implied author of the books I long to write. It is not difficult to dream a book. I do this a lot, just as I spend a great deal of time imagining myself as someone else. The difficult thing is to become your dream book’s implied author. Perhaps all the more so in my case because I only want to write big, thick, ambitious novels, and because I write so very slowly.
But let’s not complain. Having published seven novels, I can safely say that, even if it takes some effort, I am reliably able to become the author who can write the books of my dreams. Just as I’ve written books and left them behind, so too have I left behind the ghosts of the writers who could write those books. All seven of these implied authors resemble me, and over the past thirty years they have come to know life and the world as seen from Istanbul, as seen from a window like mine, and because they know this world inside out and are convinced by it, they can describe it with all the seriousness and purposeful abandon of a child at play.
My greatest hope is to be able to write novels for another thirty years and to use this excuse to wrap myself up in other new personas.
CHAPTER TWO
My Father
I came home late that night. They told me my father had died. With the first stab of pain came an image from childhood: my father’s thin legs in shorts.
At two in the morning I went to his house to see him for the last time. “He’s in the room at the back,” they said. I went inside. When I returned to Valikonaği Avenue many hours later, just before dawn, the streets of Nişantaşi were empty and cold, and the dimly lit shop windows I had been passing for fifty years seemed distant and alien.
In the morning, sleepless and as if in a dream, I spoke on the phone, received visitors, and immersed myself in the funeral arrangements; and it was while I was receiving notes, requests, and prayers, settling small disputes, and writing the death announcement that I came to feel I understood why it is that, in all deaths, the rituals become more important than the deceased.
In the evening we went to Edirnekapi Cemetery to prepare the burial. When my elder brother and my cousin went into the cemetery’s small administrative building, I found myself alone with the driver in the front seat of the taxi. That was when the driver told me he knew who I was.
“My father died,” I told him. Without forethought, and much to my surprise, I began to tell him about my father. I told him that he had been a very good man and, more important, that I had loved him. The sun was about to set. The cemetery was empty and silent. The gray buildings towering over it had lost their everyday bleakness; they radiated a strange light. While I spoke, a cold wind we could not hear set plane trees and cypresses swaying, and this image engraved itself on my memory, like my father’s thin legs.
When it became clear that the wait would be much longer still, the driver, who by now had told me that we shared a name, gave me two firm but compassionate slaps on the back and left. What I’d said to him, I said to no one else. But a week later, this thing inside me merged with my memories and my sorrow. If I didn’t set it down in words, it would grow and cause me immense pain.
When I’d told the driver, “My father never once scowled at me, never even scolded me, never hit me,” I’d been speaking without much thought. I’d omitted to mention his greatest acts of kindness. When I was a child, my father would look with heartfelt admiration at every picture I drew; when I asked his opinion, he would examine every scribbled sentence as if it were a masterpiece; he would laugh uproariously at my most tasteless and insipid jokes. Without the confidence he gave me, it would have been much more difficult to become a writer, to choose this as my profession. His trust in us, and his easy way of convincing my brother and me that we were brilliant and unique, came from a confidence in his own intellect. In his childishly innocent way, he sincerely believed that we were bound to be as brilliant, mature, and quick-witted as he, simply by virtue of being his sons.
He was quick-witted: He could, at a moment’s notice, recite a poem by Cenap Şahabettin, take pi to the fifteenth digit, or offer up a brilliantly knowing guess about how a film we were watching together would end. He was not very modest, relishing stories about how clever he was. He enjoyed telling us how, for example, when he was in middle school, still in short pants, his math teacher had called him into a class with the oldest boys in the lycée, and how—after little Gündüz had gone to the blackboard and solved the problem that had stumped these boys three years older than he and the teacher had commended him with a “Well done”—the little boy then turned to the others and said, “So there!” In the face of his example, I found myself caught between envy and a longing to be more like him.
I can speak in the same way about his good looks. Everyone was always saying that I resembled him, except he was formed more handsomely. Like the fortune left to him by his father (my grandfather) that he had never, despite his many business failures, quite managed to exhaust, his good looks allowed a life of fun and ease, so that even in the worst days, he remained naïvely optimistic, afloat on good intentions and an unrivaled, unshakable sense of self-worth. For him, life was not something to be earned but to be enjoyed. The world was not a battlefield but a playing field, a playground, and as he grew older he came to feel slightly annoyed that the fortune, brains, and good looks he had enjoyed so fully in his youth had not magnified his fame or power as much as he might have wished. But, as in all instances, he did not waste time worrying about it. He could shrug off frustration with the same childish ease as he dispensed with any person, problem, or possession that brought him trouble. So even though his life went downhill after he reached thirty, leading to a long succession of disappointments, I never much heard him complain. When he wa
s an old man, he had dinner with a renowned critic who, when next we met, exclaimed with some resentment, “Your father has no complexes whatsoever!”
His Peter Pan optimism delivered him from fury and obsession. Although he had read many books, dreamed of becoming a poet, and had, in his time, translated quite a few of Valéry’s poems, I believe he was too comfortable in his skin, and too assured about the future, ever to be gripped by the essential passions of literary creativity. In youth he had a good library, and later he was happy for me to plunder it. But he didn’t read the books as I did, voraciously and dizzy with excitement; he read them for pleasure, to divert his thoughts, and mostly he left off reading them midway. Where other fathers might speak in hushed tones of generals and religious leaders, my father would tell me about walking through the streets of Paris and seeing Sartre and Camus (more his kind of writer), and these stories made a big impression on me. Years later, when I met Erdal İnönü (a friend of my father’s from childhood and the son of Turkey’s second president, who was Atatürk’s successor) at a gallery opening, he told me with a smile about a dinner at the presidential residence in Ankara that my father, then twenty, had attended; when Ismet Pasha brought the subject around to literature, my father asked, “Why don’t we have any world-famous authors?” Eighteen years after my first novel was published, my father somewhat bashfully gave me a small suitcase. I know very well why finding inside it his journals, poems, notes, and literary writings made me uneasy: It was the record—the evidence—of an inner life. We don’t want our fathers to be individuals, we want them to conform to our ideal of them.