by Orhan Pamuk
In the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire began to feel itself overshadowed by an ever more dynamic West, suffering repeated defeats at the hands of European armies and seeing its power slowly wane, there emerged a group of men who called themselves the Young Turks. Like the elites that would follow in later generations, not excluding the last Ottoman sultans, they were dazzled by the superiority of the West, so they embarked on a program of Westernizing reforms. The same logic underlies the modern Turkish Republic and Kemal Atatürk’s Westernizing reforms. And underlying the logic itself is the conviction that Turkey’s weakness and poverty stem from its traditions, its old culture, and the various ways it has socially organized religion.
Coming as I do from a middle-class Westernized Istanbul family, I must admit that I too sometimes succumb to this belief, which is, though well-intended, narrow and even simpleminded. Westernizers dream of transforming and enriching their country and their culture by imitating the West. Because their ultimate aim is to create a country that is richer, happier, and more powerful, they also tend to be nativist and powerfully nationalistic; certainly we can see these tendencies in the Young Turks and the Westernizers of the young Turkish Republic. But as part of westward-looking movements, they remain deeply critical of certain basic characteristics of their country and culture; though they might not do so in the same spirit and the same style as Western observers, they too see their culture as defective, sometimes even worthless. This gives rise to another very deep and confused emotion: shame.
I see shame reflected in some responses to my novels and to perceptions of my own relations with the West. When we in Turkey discuss the East-West question, when we talk of the tensions between tradition and modernity (which to my mind is the essence of the East-West question), or when we prevaricate over our country’s relations with Europe, the question of shame is always lurking. When I try to understand this shame, I always try to relate it with its opposite, pride. As we all know, wherever there is too much pride, whenever people act too proudly, there is always the specter of their shame and humiliation. For wherever another people feels deeply humiliated, we can expect to see a proud nationalism rising to the surface. My novels are made from these dark materials, from this shame, this pride, this anger, and this sense of defeat. Because I come from a nation that is knocking on Europe’s door, I am only too well aware of how easily these emotions of fragility can, from time to time, take flame and rage unchecked. What I am trying to do here is to speak of this shame as a whispered secret, as I first heard it in Dostoyevsky’s novels. For it is by sharing our secret shames that we bring about our liberation: This is what the art of the novel has taught me.
But it is at the moment of liberation that I begin to feel in my heart the complicated politics of representation and the moral dilemmas of speaking in another’s name. This is a difficult undertaking for anyone, but particularly for a novelist who is himself riddled with such emotions as I was just describing. The freewheeling world of the imagination can seem treacherous, and never more so than in the mirror of a prickly and easily offended novelist consumed by nationalist pride. If we keep a reality secret, it will—we hope—shame us only in silence, but that hope is betrayed when a novelist uses his imagination to transform that same reality, to fashion it into a parallel world demanding notice. When a novelist begins to play with the rules that govern society, when he digs beneath the surface to discover its hidden geometry, when he explores that secret world like a curious child, driven by emotions he cannot quite understand, it is inevitable that he will cause his family, his friends, his peers, and his fellow citizens some unease. But this is a happy unease. For it is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are.
We have all known the joy of reading novels; we have all known the thrill of going down the path that leads into someone else’s world, engaging with that world body and soul, and longing to change it, engrossed in the hero’s culture, in his relationship with the objects that make up his world—in the author’s words, in the decisions he makes, and in the things he notices as the story unfolds. We know that what we have been reading is both the product of the author’s imagination and of an actual world into which he has taken us. Novels are neither wholly imaginary nor wholly real. To read a novel is to confront both its author’s imagination and the real world whose surface we have been scratching with such fretful curiosity. When we retire to a corner, when we lie down on a bed, when we stretch out on a divan with a novel in hand, our imaginations travel back and forth between the world in that novel and the world in which we still live. The novel in our hands might take us to a world we have never visited, never seen, and never known. Or it might take us into the hidden depths of characters who seem on the surface to resemble people we know best.
I am drawing attention to each of these possibilities singly because there is a vision I entertain from time to time that embraces both extremes. Sometimes I try to conjure up, one by one, a multitude of readers hidden away in corners, nestled in their armchairs with their novels; I try also to imagine the geography of their everyday lives. Then, before my eyes, thousands—tens of thousands—of readers will take shape, stretching far and wide across the streets of the city, and as they read they dream the author’s dreams, imagine his heroes into being, and see his world. So now these readers, like the author himself, try to imagine the other; they too are putting themselves in another’s place. These are the times we feel humility, compassion, tolerance, pity, and love stirring in our hearts, for great literature speaks not to our powers of judgment but to our ability to put ourselves in someone else’s place.
As I imagine all these readers using their imaginations to put themselves in someone else’s place, as I conjure up their worlds, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, all across the city, a moment arrives when I realize that I am really thinking of a society, a group of people, an entire nation—what you will—imagining itself into being. Modern societies, tribes, and nations do their deepest thinking about themselves by reading novels; through reading novels, they are able to argue about who they are. So even if we have picked up a novel hoping only to divert ourselves, relax, and escape the boredom of everyday life, we begin, without realizing it, to conjure up the collectivity, the nation, the society to which we belong. This is also why novels give voice not just to a nation’s pride and joy but also to its anger, its vulnerabilities, and its shame. It is because they remind readers of their shame, their pride, and their tenuous place in the world that novelists can arouse such anger, and what a shame it is that we still see outbursts of intolerance—that we still see books burned and novelists prosecuted.
I grew up in a house where everyone read novels. My father had a large library, and when I was a child he would discuss the great novelists I mentioned earlier—Mann, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy—the way other fathers discussed famous generals and saints. From an early age, all these novelists—these great novelists—were linked in my mind with the idea of Europe. But this was not just because of my family, which believed fervently in Westernization and therefore longed, in its innocence, to believe itself and its country far more Western than they really were; it was also because the novel was one of the greatest artistic achievements to come out of Europe.
The novel, like orchestral music and post-Renaissance painting, is in my opinion one of the cornerstones of European civilization; it is what makes Europe what it is, the means by which Europe has created and made visible its nature, if there is such a thing. I cannot think of Europe without novels. I am speaking now of the novel as a way of thinking, understanding, and imagining and also as a way of imagining oneself as someone else. In other parts of the world, children and young people first meet Europe in depth with their first ventures into novels; so
it was for me. To pick up a novel was to step inside Europe’s borders; to enter a new continent, a new culture, a new civilization; to learn, in the course of these explorations, to express oneself with new desire and new inspiration; and to believe, as a consequence, that one was part of Europe—this is how I remember feeling. Let us also remember that the great Russian novel and the Latin American novel also stem from European culture … so just to read a novel is to understand that Europe’s borders, histories, and national distinctions are in constant flux. The old Europe described in the French, Russian, and German novels in my father’s library is, like the postwar Europe of my childhood and the Europe of today, a place that is forever changing. So, too, is our understanding of what Europe is. I have one vision, however, that is constant, and that is what I shall speak of now.
Let me begin by saying that Europe is a very delicate, very sensitive subject for a Turk. Here we are, knocking on your door, asking to come in, full of high hopes and good intentions but also feeling rather anxious and fearing rejection. I feel such things as keenly as do other Turks, and what we all feel is very much akin to the “silent shame” I was describing earlier. As Turkey knocks on Europe’s door, as we wait and wait and Europe makes promises and then forgets us, only to raise the bar—and as Europe examines the full implications of Turkey’s bid to become a full member—we’ve seen a lamentable hardening of anti-Turkish sentiment in certain parts of Europe, at least among certain politicians. In recent elections, when they took a line against Turks and Turkey, I found their style just as dangerous as that adopted by certain politicians in my own country.
It is one thing to criticize the democratic deficits of the Turkish state or find fault with its economy; it is quite another to denigrate all of Turkish culture—or those of Turkish descent here in Germany whose lives are among the most difficult and impoverished in the country. As for Turks in Turkey: When they hear themselves judged so cruelly, they are reminded yet again that they are knocking on a door and waiting to be let in, and of course they feel unwelcome. It is the cruelest of ironies that the fanning of nationalist anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe has provoked the coarsest of nationalist backlashes inside Turkey. Those who believe in the European Union must see at once that the real choice we have to make is between peace and nationalism. Either we have peace, or we have nationalism. I think that the ideal of peace sits at the heart of the European Union, and I believe that the chance for peace that Turkey has offered Europe will not, in the end, be spurned. We’ve arrived at a point where we must choose between the power of a novelist’s imagination and the sort of nationalism that condones burning his books.
Over the past few years, I have spoken a great deal about Turkey and its EU bid, and often I’ve been met with grimaces and suspicious questions, so let me answer them here and now. The most important thing that Turkey and the Turkish people have to offer Europe and Germany is, without a doubt, peace; it is the security and strength that will come from a Muslim country’s desire to join Europe, and this peaceable desire’s ratification. The great novelists I read as a child and a young man defined Europe in terms not of its Christian faith but of the yearning of its individuals. It was because these heroes were struggling to free themselves, express their creativity, and make their dreams come true that their novels spoke to my heart. Europe has gained the respect of the non-Western world owing to the ideals it has done so much to nurture: liberty, equality, and fraternity. If Europe’s soul is enlightenment, equality, and democracy, if it is to be a union predicated on peace, then Turkey has a place in it. A Europe defining itself in narrow Christian terms will, like a Turkey that tries to derive its strength only from its religion, be an inward-looking place divorced from reality, bound more to the past than to the future.
Having grown up in a Westernized secular family in the European part of Istanbul, it is not at all difficult for me—or people like me—to believe in the European Union. Don’t forget, since childhood, my football team, Fenerbahçe, has been playing in the European Cup. There are millions of Turks like me who believe wholeheartedly in the European Union. But what is more important is that most of today’s conservative and Muslim Turks, and with them their political representatives, also want to see Turkey in the European Union, helping to plan Europe’s future, dreaming it into being and helping to build it. Coming as it does after centuries of war and conflict, this gesture of friendship cannot be taken lightly, and to reject it outright would be cause for huge regret and chagrin. Just as I cannot imagine a Turkey without a European prospect, I cannot believe in a Europe without a Turkish prospect.
I would like to apologize for speaking at such great length about politics. The world to which I seek foremost to belong is, of course, the world of the imagination. Between the ages of seven and twenty-two, my dream was to become an artist, and so I would go out into the streets of Istanbul to paint cityscapes. As I describe in my book Istanbul, I gave up painting at the age of twenty-two and began to write novels. I now think that I wanted the same thing from painting as I did from writing: What drew me to both art and literature was the promise of leaving behind this boring, dreary, hope-shattering world for one that was deeper, richer, and more diverse. To achieve this other magical realm, whether I expressed myself in lines and colors, as I did in my early life, or in words, I’ve had to spend long hours by myself every day, imagining its every nuance. The consolatory world I have been constructing for thirty years as I sit alone in my corner is most certainly made from the same materials as the world we all know—from what I’ve been able to see of the streets and interiors of Istanbul, Kars, and Frankfurt. But it is the imagination—the imagination of the novelist—that gives the bounded world of everyday life its particularity, its magic, and its soul.
I shall close with a few words about this soul, this essence that the novelist struggles all his life to convey. Life can only be happy if we can manage to fit this strange and puzzling undertaking into a frame. For the most part, our happiness and unhappiness derive not from life itself but from the meaning we give to it. I’ve devoted my life to trying to explore that meaning. Or, to put it differently, all my life I’ve wandered through the clatter and roar of today’s chaotic, difficult, fast-moving world, thrown this way and that by life’s twists and turns, looking for a beginning, a middle, and an end. In my view, this is something that can only be found in novels. Since my novel Snow was published, every time I’ve set foot in the streets of Frankfurt, I’ve felt the ghost of Ka, the hero with whom I have more than a little in common, and I feel as if I am truly seeing the city as I have come to imagine it, as if I have somehow touched its heart.
Mallarmé spoke the truth when he said, “Everything in the world exists to be put into a book.” Without doubt, the sort of book best equipped to absorb everything in the world is the novel. The imagination—the ability to convey meaning to others—is humanity’s greatest power, and for many centuries it has found its truest expression in novels. I accept the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in recognition of my thirty years of loyal service to this sublime art, and I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
On Trial
In Istanbul this Friday—in Şişli, the district where I have spent my whole life, in the courthouse directly opposite the three-story house where my grandmother lived alone for forty years—I will stand before a judge. My crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.” The prosecutor will ask that I be imprisoned for three years. I should perhaps find it worrying that the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was tried in the same court for the same offense, under Article 301 of the same statute, and was found guilty, but I remain optimistic. For, like my lawyer, I believe that the case against me is thin; I do not think I will end up in jail.
This makes it somewhat embarrassing to see my trial overdramatized. I am only too well aware that most of the Istanbul friends from whom I have sought advice have at some point undergone much harsher interro
gation and lost many years to court proceedings and prison sentences just because of a book, just because of something they had written. Living as I do in a country that honors its pashas, saints, and policemen at every opportunity but refuses to honor its writers until they have spent years in courts and in prisons, I cannot say I was surprised to be put on trial. I understand why friends smile and say that I am at last “a real Turkish writer.” But when I uttered the words that landed me in trouble, I was not seeking any such honor.
In February 2005, in an interview published in a Swiss newspaper, I said that a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey; I went on to complain that it was taboo to discuss these matters in my country. Among the world’s serious historians, it is common knowledge that a large number of Ottoman Armenians were deported, allegedly for siding against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, and many of them were slaughtered along the way; Turkey’s spokesmen, most of whom are diplomats, continue to maintain that the death toll was much lower than the academics suggest, that the slaughter does not count as genocide because it was not systematic, and that in the course of the war Armenians killed many Muslims too.
This past September, however, despite opposition from the state, three highly respected Istanbul universities joined forces to hold a conference of scholars open to views not tolerated by the official Turkish line. Since then, for the first time in ninety years, there has been public discussion of the subject—this despite the specter of Article 301.