by Orhan Pamuk
That the state is prepared to go to such lengths to keep the Turkish people from knowing what happened to the Ottoman Armenians qualifies the fact as a taboo. My words certainly caused a furor worthy of one: Various newspapers launched hate campaigns against me, with some right-wing (but not necessarily Islamist) columnists going as far as to say that I should be “silenced” for good; groups of nationalist extremists organized meetings and demonstrations to protest my treachery; and there were public burnings of my books. Like Ka, the hero of my novel Snow, I discovered how it felt to have to leave one’s beloved city for a time on account of one’s political views. Because I did not want to add to the controversy and did not want even to hear about it, I kept quiet at first, drenched in a strange sort of shame, hiding from the public and even from my own words. Then a provincial governor ordered a burning of my books; following my return to Istanbul, the Şişli public prosecutor opened the case against me; and I found myself the object of international concern.
My detractors were not motivated just by personal animosity, nor were they expressing hostility to me alone; I already knew that my case was an instance of a problem worthy of discussion in both Turkey and the outside world. This was partly because I believe that what denigrated a country’s “honor” is not the discussion of the black spots in its history but the preclusion of any discussion at all. It was also because I believed that the prohibition against discussing the Ottoman Armenians was a prohibition against freedom of expression in Turkey today, and indeed that the two matters were inextricably linked. Comforted as I was by the interest in my predicament and by the generous gestures of support, there were also times when I felt uneasy about finding myself caught between my country and the rest of the world.
The hardest thing was to explain why a country officially committed to entry into the European Union would wish to imprison an author whose books were well known in Europe, and why it felt compelled to play out this drama (to use Conrad’s expression) “under Western eyes.” This paradox cannot be explained away as simple ignorance, jealousy, or intolerance, and it is not the only paradox involved. What am I to make of a country that insists that the Turks, unlike their Western neighbors, are a compassionate people, incapable of genocide, while nationalist political groups are pelting me with death threats? What is the logic behind a state’s complaints that its enemies spread false reports about the Ottoman legacy all over the globe, while it prosecutes and imprisons one writer after another, thus propagating the image of the Terrible Turk worldwide? When I think of the professor whom the state asked to present his findings on Turkey’s minorities and who, having produced a report that failed to please, was prosecuted, or the news that between the time I began this essay and embarked on the sentence you are now reading, five more writers and journalists have been charged under Article 301, I imagine that Flaubert and Nerval, the two godfathers of Orientalism, would call these incidents bizarreries, and rightly so.
That said, the drama we see unfolding is not, I think, a grotesque and inscrutable drama peculiar to Turkey; rather, it is an expression of a new global phenomenon that we are only just coming to acknowledge and that we must now begin, however carefully, to address. In recent years, we have witnessed the astounding economic rise of India and China, and in both these countries the rapid expansion of the middle class, though I do not think we shall truly understand the people who have been part of this transformation until we have seen their private lives reflected in novels. Whatever you call these new elites, the non-Western bourgeoisie or the enriched bureaucracy, they, like the Westernizing elites in my own country, feel compelled to follow two separate and seemingly incompatible lines of action in order to legitimatize their newly acquired wealth and power. First, they must justify the rapid rise in their fortunes by adopting the idiom and the attitudes of the West; having created a demand for such knowledge, they then take it upon themselves to tutor their countrymen. When the people berate them for ignoring tradition, they respond by brandishing a virulent and intolerant nationalism. The disputes that an foreign observer might call bizarreries may simply be the clashes between these political and economic programs and the cultural aspirations they engender. On the one hand, there is the rush to join the global economy; on the other, the angry nationalism that sees true democracy and freedom of thought as Western inventions.
V. S. Naipaul was one of the first writers to describe the private lives of the ruthless, murderous non-Western ruling elites of the postcolonial era. When I met the great Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe in Korea, I heard that he too had been attacked by nationalist extremists after stating that the ugly crimes committed by his country’s armies during the invasions of Korea and China should be openly discussed in Tokyo. The intolerance shown by the Russian state toward the Chechens and other minorities and civil-rights groups, the attacks on freedom of expression by Hindu nationalists in India, and China’s discreet ethnic cleansing of the Uighurs—all are nourished by the same contradictions.
As tomorrow’s novelists prepare to narrate the private lives of the new elites, they are no doubt expecting the West to criticize the limits that their states place on freedom of expression. But these days the lies about the war in Iraq and the reports of secret CIA prisons have so damaged the West’s credibility in Turkey and in other nations that it is more and more difficult for people like me to make the case for true Western democracy in my part of the world.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Who Do You Write For?
Who do you write for? Over the last thirty-odd years—since I first became a writer—this has been the question I’ve heard most often from both readers and journalists. The motives depend on the time and the place, as does the extent of their curiosity, but they all ask in the same suspicious, supercilious tone of voice.
In the mid-seventies, when I first decided to become a novelist, the question reflected the widely held philistine view that art and literature were luxuries that a poor non-Western country struggling to join the modern age could ill afford. There was also the suggestion that someone “as educated and cultivated as yourself” might serve the nation more usefully as a doctor fighting epidemics or an engineer building bridges. (Jean-Paul Sartre gave credence to this view in the early 1970s when he said he would not be in the business of writing novels if he were a Biafran intellectual.)
In later years, those questioners were more interested in finding out which sector of society I hoped might read and admire my work. I knew this to be a trick question, for if I did not answer, “I write for the poorest and most downtrodden members of society!” I would be accused of protecting the interests of Turkey’s landowners and its bourgeoisie—even as I was reminded that any pure-minded, good-hearted writer who claimed to be writing for peasants, workers, and the indigent would be writing for people who were barely literate. In the 1970s, when my mother asked who I was writing for, her mournful and concerned tone told me she was really asking, How are you planning to support yourself? And when friends asked me who I wrote for, the tinge of mockery in their voices was enough to suggest that no one would ever want to read a book by someone like me.
Thirty years on, I hear this question more frequently than ever. This has more to do with the fact that my novels have been translated into forty languages. Especially during the past ten years, my ever more numerous interviewers seem worried that I might take their words the wrong way, so they are inclined to add, “You write in Turkish, so do you write just for Turks or do you now also have in mind the wider audience you reach through your translations?” Whether we are speaking inside Turkey or outside it, the question is always accompanied by that same suspicious, supercilious smile, leaving me to conclude that, if I wish my works to be accepted as true and authentic, I must answer, “I write only for Turks.”
Before we examine the question itself—for it is neither honest nor humane—we must remember that the rise of the novel coincided with the emergence of the nation-state. When the great novels of the
nineteenth century were being written, the art of the novel was in every sense a national art. Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy wrote for an emerging middle class, who could in the books of its respective national author recognize every city, street, house, room, and chair; it could indulge in the same pleasures as it did in the real world and discuss the same ideas. In the nineteenth century, novels by important authors appeared first in the art and culture supplements of national newspapers, for their authors were speaking to the nation. In their narrative voices we can sense the disquiet of the concerned patriot whose deepest wish is for his country to prosper. By the end of the nineteenth century, to read and write novels was to join a national discussion on matters of national importance.
But today the writing of novels carries an entirely different meaning, as does the reading of literary novels. The first change came in the first half of the twentieth century, when the literary novel’s engagement with modernism won it the status of high art. Just as significant have been the changes in communication that we’ve seen over the past thirty years: In the age of global media, literary writers are no longer people who speak first and only to the middle classes of their own countries but are people who can speak, and speak immediately, to readers of “literary novels” all the world over. Today’s literary readers await a new book by García Márquez, Coetzee, or Paul Auster the same way their predecessors awaited the new Dickens—as the latest news. The world audience for literary novelists of this cohort is far larger than the audience their books reach in their countries of origin.
If we generalize the question—For whom do writers write?—we might say they write for their ideal reader, their loved ones, themselves, or no one. This is the truth, but not the whole truth. For today’s literary writers also write for those who read them. From this we might infer that today’s literary writers are gradually writing less for their own national majorities (who do not read them) than for the small minority of literary readers in the world who do. So there we have it: The needling questions, and the suspicions about these writers’ true intentions, reflect an uneasiness about this new cultural order that has come into being over the past thirty years.
The people who find it most disturbing are the opinion makers and cultural institutions of non-Western nations. Uncertain as they are about their standing in the world, unwilling as they are to discuss current national crises or the black marks in their history in international arenas, such constituencies are necessarily suspicious of novelists who view history and nationalism from a nonnationalist perspective. In their view, novelists who do not write for national audiences are exoticizing their country for “foreign consumption” and inventing problems that have no basis in reality. There is a parallel suspicion in the West, where many readers believe that local literatures should remain local, pure, and true to their national roots; their secret fear is that becoming a “world” writer who draws from traditions outside his own culture will cause one to lose one’s authenticity. The one who most acutely feels this fear is a reader who longs to open a book and enter a foreign country that is cut off from the world, who longs to watch that country’s internal wrangling, much as one might witness a family argument next door. If a writer is addressing an audience that includes readers in other cultures speaking other languages, then this fantasy dies too.
It is because all writers have a deep desire to be authentic that—even after all these years—I still love to be asked for whom I write. But while a writer’s authenticity does depend on his ability to engage with the world in which he lives, it depends just as much on his ability to understand his own changing position in that world. There is no such thing as an ideal reader unencumbered by social prohibitions and national myths, just as there no such thing as an ideal novelist. But—be he national or international—it is the ideal reader for whom all novelists write, first by imagining him into being, and then by writing books with him in mind.
MY BOOKS ARE MY LIFE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The White Castle Afterword
There are some novels that, though they might come to a satisfying finish, contain characters who continue their adventures in the author’s dreams. Certain nineteenth-century writers would fill two or three additional volumes with such dreams, while others, not wishing to entrap themselves in the world of a previous novel, go to the other extreme: So intent are they on shutting down these dangerous afterlives that they sum them up in a hasty postscript, noting that “Years later Dorothea and her two daughters returned to Alkingstone” or “In the end, Razarov arranged his affairs, and now he has quite a good income.” Then there is another class of writer, who returns to the world of an old novel not to relate the new adventures of his old characters but simply because the life of the story itself demands it. Memories, missed opportunities, perceived responses of readers and close friends, and new ideas may cause the book to change shape in the author’s mind. A point arrives when his image of the book is utterly different from the book he originally intended—not to mention the book that is on sale in bookshops—and it is when that happens that the author wants to remind this strange and elusive new beast where it came from.
The inspiration for The White Castle visited me in its initial ghostly form as I was finishing my first novel, a long family saga set in the first half of the twentieth century entitled Cevdet Bey and Sons. It took the form of a soothsayer, called to the palace, walking down blue streets at midnight. That was my name for the novel then. My soothsayer was a well-meaning man of science who, seeing how little enthusiasm there was for science in the palace, set himself up as an astrologer—an easy switch, thanks to his interest in astronomy—and though his original idea had been to win others at court over to the cause of science, his head was soon turned by the power and influence his predictions brought him, and he began to use his art to devious ends. That was all I knew. In those days, I had begun to shy away from historical subjects; I had grown so tired of being asked why I wrote historical fiction that it had ceased to interest me.
Earlier—when I was twenty-three—I’d written three historical stories, and people even called my first novel historical; to understand my interest in history, it seemed I would need to examine not just my literary tastes but my childhood predilections. Once, when I was small—eight years old—I left the apartment where I lived with my family and went upstairs to visit the gloomy rooms of my grandmother’s apartment, where every object and every bit of radio chatter duplicated our own, and as I searched among the yellowing newspapers and the medical books that once belonged to the uncle who had gone to America, never to return, I happened onto a large illustrated volume by Reşat Ekrem Koçu. For days I read the story of the wretched monkeys that people would buy from the monkey stores in Azapkapi and that were later strung from trees for committing immoral acts. On laundry days, as the washing machine wailed and angry grown-ups darted to and fro, boiling water and soft soap, I would crawl into a corner and look at black-and-white drawings of Where-Angels-Fear-to-Tread Street, where the harlots were punished with bubonic plague. While waiting for the great clock in the hallway to announce the next hour, a fearful impatience would grip me as I read the story of the condemned criminal whose legs and arms were broken so that he could be stuffed into the mouth of a cannon and shot into the sky.
After finishing The Silent House, my second novel, I found myself again preoccupied with daydreams drawn from history. Why don’t I write something short between the long novels? I’d say to myself, since my story was already clear in my head. So to serve my soothsayer I happily immersed myself in science and astronomy books. Adnan Adivar’s amusing and unrivaled The Science of the Ottoman Turks gave me the colors I was looking for (as did books like Acaib-ül Mahlûkat’s strange animal tales, which Evliya Çelebi liked so much). It was from Professor Süheyl Ünver’s Istanbul Observatory that I first learned of the famous Ottoman astronomer Takiyüddin, who once tried to explain comets to the sultan; having read of this exchange and wa
tched him instruct my hero by illuminating his scientific notes (which have since been lost), I could begin to understand just how blurred the line was between astronomy and astrology.
In another book I read this about astrology: “To advance a guess that the order of things might be disturbed is not a bad way of undermining the order of things.” Later, when I turned to Naima, one of the most dramatic and readable Ottoman historians, I learned that the head soothsayer Huseyin Efendi had, like all politicians, made energetic use of this, the soothsayer’s golden rule.
My reading had no other aim than to gather background detail for the story I meant to write, and from the books I had at hand emerged a theme that is very popular in Turkish literature: a hero who is aching to do good and help others! In some of those books, the noble and good-hearted hero is constantly up against evil traitors. In the better class of novel, we read that it is through suffering evil that he is able to change. Who knows, I may have been planning to write something along the same lines, but I could not find the source of his “virtue,” nor could I trace the origins of his enthusiasm for science and discovery. Later, I decided that my soothsayer would acquire his science from a “Westerner.” The slaves that came in shiploads from distant countries would serve my purposes perfectly. This was how the Hegelian master-slave relationship came into play. I thought my master and an Italian slave would have a great deal to tell and teach each other; to give them time to talk, I put them together in a room in a city bathed in darkness. The affinity and the tension between this pair at once became the book’s imaginative center. I discovered that master and slave looked much alike. Perhaps it was my analytical side taking over, but this was how I happened onto the idea of their being identical. From then on I did not have to expend too much effort to immerse myself in that most celebrated of literary themes: identical twins changing places.