by Orhan Pamuk
PAMUK
That began with The Black Book, though I had read Borges and Calvino earlier. I went with my wife to the United States in 1985, and there I first encountered the prominence and the immense richness of American culture. As a Turk coming from the Middle East, trying to establish himself as an author, I felt intimidated. So I regressed, went back to my “roots.” I realized that my generation had to invent a modern national literature.
Borges and Calvino liberated me. The connotation of traditional Islamic literature was so reactionary, so political, and used by conservatives in such old-fashioned and foolish ways, that I never thought I could do anything with that material. But once I was in the United States, I realized I could go back to that material with a Calvinoesque or Borgesian mind frame. I had to begin by making a strong distinction between the religious and literary connotations of Islamic literature, so that I could easily appropriate its wealth of games, gimmicks, and parables. Turkey had a sophisticated tradition of highly refined ornamental literature. But then the socially committed writers emptied our literature of its innovative content.
There are lots of allegories that repeat themselves in the various oral storytelling traditions—of China, India, Persia. I decided to use them and set them in contemporary Istanbul. It’s an experiment—put everything together, like a Dadaist collage; The Black Book has this quality. Sometimes all these sources are fused together and something new emerges. So I set all these rewritten stories in Istanbul, added a detective plot, and out came The Black Book. But at its source was the full strength of American culture and my desire to be a serious experimental writer. I could not write a social commentary about Turkey’s problems—I was intimidated by them. So I had to try something else.
INTERVIEWER
Were you ever interested in doing social commentary through literature?
PAMUK
No. I was reacting to the older generation of novelists, especially in the eighties. I say this with all due respect, but their subject matter was very narrow and parochial.
INTERVIEWER
Let’s go back to before The Black Book. What inspired you to write The White Castle? It’s the first book where you employ a theme that recurs throughout the rest of your novels—impersonation. Why do you think this idea of becoming somebody else crops up so often in your fiction?
PAMUK
It’s a very personal thing. I have a very competitive brother who is only eighteen months older than me. In a way, he was my father—my Freudian father, so to speak. It was he who became my alter ego, the representation of authority. On the other hand, we also had a competitive and brotherly comradeship. A very complicated relationship. I wrote extensively about this in Istanbul. I was a typical Turkish boy, good at football and enthusiastic about all sorts of games and competitions. He was very successful in school, better than me. I felt jealousy toward him, and he was jealous of me, too. He was the reasonable and responsible person, the one our superiors addressed. While I was paying attention to games, he paid attention to rules. We were competing all the time. And I fancied being him, that kind of thing. It set a model. Envy, jealousy—these are heartfelt themes for me. I always worry about how much my brother’s strength or his success might have influenced me. This is an essential part of my spirit. I am aware of that, so I put some distance between me and those feelings. I know they are bad, so I have a civilized person’s determination to fight them. I’m not saying I’m a victim of jealousy. But this is the galaxy of nerve points that I try to deal with all the time. And of course, in the end, it becomes the subject matter of all my stories. In The White Castle, for instance, the almost sadomasochistic relationship between the two main characters is based on my relationship with my brother.
On the other hand, this theme of impersonation is reflected in the fragility Turkey feels when faced with Western culture. After writing The White Castle, I realized that this jealousy—the anxiety about being influenced by someone else—resembles Turkey’s position when it looks west. You know, aspiring to become Westernized and then being accused of not being authentic enough. Trying to grab the spirit of Europe and then feeling guilty about the imitative drive. The ups and downs of this mood are reminiscent of the relationship between competitive brothers.
INTERVIEWER
Do you believe the constant confrontation between Turkey’s Eastern and Western impulses will ever be peacefully resolved?
PAMUK
I’m an optimist. Turkey should not worry about having two spirits, belonging to two different cultures, having two souls. Schizophrenia makes you intelligent. You may lose your relation with reality—I’m a fiction writer, so I don’t think that’s such a bad thing—but you shouldn’t worry about your schizophrenia. If you worry too much about one part of you killing the other, you’ll be left with a single spirit. That is worse than having the sickness. This is my theory. I try to propagate it in Turkish politics, among Turkish politicians who demand that the country should have one consistent soul—that it should belong to either the East or the West or be nationalistic. I’m critical of that monistic outlook.
INTERVIEWER
How does that go down in Turkey?
PAMUK
The more the idea of a democratic, liberal Turkey is established, the more my thinking is accepted. Turkey can join the European Union only with this vision. It’s a way of fighting against nationalism, of fighting the rhetoric of Us against Them.
INTERVIEWER
And yet in Istanbul, in the way you romanticize the city, you seem to mourn the loss of the Ottoman Empire.
PAMUK
I’m not mourning the Ottoman Empire. I’m a Westernizer. I’m pleased that the Westernization process took place. I’m just criticizing the limited way in which the ruling elite—meaning both the bureaucracy and the new rich—had conceived of Westernization. They lacked the confidence necessary to create a national culture rich in its own symbols and rituals. They did not strive to create an Istanbul culture that would be an organic combination of East and West; they just put Western and Eastern things together. There was, of course, a strong local Ottoman culture, but that was fading away little by little. What they had to do, and could not possibly do enough, was invent a strong local culture, which would be a combination —not an imitation—of the Eastern past and the Western present. I try to do the same kind of thing in my books. Probably new generations will do it, and entering the European Union will not destroy Turkish identity but make it flourish and give us more freedom and self-confidence to invent a new Turkish culture. Slavishly imitating the West or slavishly imitating the old dead Ottoman culture is not the solution. You have to do something with these things and shouldn’t have anxiety about belonging to one of them too much.
INTERVIEWER
In Istanbul, however, you do seem to identify with the foreign, Western gaze over your own city.
PAMUK
But I also explain why a Westernized Turkish intellectual can identify with the Western gaze—the making of Istanbul is a process of identification with the West. There is always this dichotomy, and you can easily identify with the Eastern anger too. Everyone is sometimes a Westerner and sometimes an Easterner—in fact a constant combination of the two. I like Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism, but since Turkey was never a colony, the romanticizing of Turkey was never a problem for Turks. Western man did not humiliate the Turk in the same way he humiliated the Arab or Indian. Istanbul was invaded only for two years and the enemy boats left as they came, so this did not leave a deep scar in the spirit of the nation. What left a deep scar was the loss of the Ottoman Empire, so I don’t have that anxiety, that feeling that Westerners look down on me. Though after the founding of the Republic, there was a sort of intimidation because Turks wanted to Westernize but couldn’t go far enough, which left a feeling of cultural inferiority that we have to address and that I occasionally may have.
On the other hand, the scars are not as deep as other nations that were occupi
ed for two hundred years, colonized. Turks were never suppressed by Western powers. The suppression that Turks suffered was self-inflicted; we erased our own history because it was practical. In that suppression there is a sense of fragility. But that self-imposed Westernization also brought isolation. Indians saw their oppressors face-to-face. Turks were strangely isolated from the Western world they emulated. In the 1950s and even 1960s, when a foreigner came to stay at the Istanbul Hilton it would be noted in all the newspapers.
INTERVIEWER
Do you believe that there is a canon or that one should even exist? We have heard of a Western canon, but what about a non-Western canon?
PAMUK
Yes, there is another canon. It should be explored, developed, shared, criticized, and then accepted. Right now the so-called Eastern canon is in ruins. The glorious texts are all around but there is no will to put them together. From the Persian classics, through to all the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese texts, these things should be assessed critically. As it is now, the canon is in the hands of Western scholars. That is the center of distribution and communication.
INTERVIEWER
The novel is a very Western cultural form. Does it have any place in the Eastern tradition?
PAMUK
The modern novel, dissociated from the epic form, is essentially a non-Oriental thing. Because the novelist is a person who does not belong to a community, who does not share the basic instincts of community, and who is thinking and judging with a different culture than the one he is experiencing. Once his consciousness is different from that of the community he belongs to, he is an outsider, a loner. And the richness of his text comes from that outsider’s voyeuristic vision.
Once you develop the habit of looking at the world like that and writing about it in this fashion, you have the desire to disassociate from the community. This is the model I was thinking about in Snow.
INTERVIEWER
Snow is your most political book yet published. How did you conceive of it?
PAMUK
When I started becoming famous in Turkey in the mid-1990s, at a time when the war against Kurdish guerrillas was strong, the old leftist authors and the new modern liberals wanted me to help them, to sign petitions—they began to ask me to do political things unrelated to my books.
Soon the establishment counterattacked with a campaign of character assassination. They began calling me names. I was very angry. After a while I wondered, What if I wrote a political novel in which I explored my own spiritual dilemmas—coming from an upper-middle-class family and feeling responsible for those who had no political representation? I believed in the art of the novel. It is a strange thing how that makes you an outsider. I told myself then, I will write a political novel. I started to write it as soon as I finished My Name Is Red.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you set it in the small town of Kars?
PAMUK
It is notoriously one of the coldest towns in Turkey. And one of the poorest. In the early eighties, the whole front page of one of the major newspapers was about the poverty of Kars. Someone had calculated that you could buy the entire town for around a million dollars. The political climate was difficult when I wanted to go there. The vicinity of the town is mostly populated by Kurds, but the center is a combination of Kurds, people from Azerbaijan, Turks, and all other sorts. There used to be Russians and Germans too. There are religious differences as well, Shia and Sunni. The war the Turkish government was waging against the Kurdish guerrillas was so fierce that it was impossible to go as a tourist. I knew I could not simply go there as a novelist, so I asked a newspaper editor with whom I’d been in touch for a press pass to visit the area. He is influential and he personally called the mayor and the police chief to let them know I was coming.
As soon as I had arrived I visited the mayor and shook hands with the police chief so that they wouldn’t pick me up on the street. Actually, some of the police who didn’t know I was there did pick me up and carried me off, probably with the intention of torturing me. Immediately I gave names—I know the mayor, I know the chief…. I was a suspicious character. Because even though Turkey is theoretically a free country, any foreigner used to be suspect until about 1999. Hopefully things are much easier today.
Most of the people and places in the book are based on a real counterpart. For instance, the local newspaper that sells 252 copies is real. I went to Kars with a camera and a video recorder. I was filming everything and then going back to Istanbul and showing it to my friends. Everyone thought I was a bit crazy. There were other things that actually occurred. Like the conversation I describe with the editor of the little newspaper who tells Ka what he did the previous day, and Ka asks how he knew, and he reveals he’s been listening to the police’s walkie-talkies and the police were following Ka all the time. That is real. And they were following me too.
The local anchorman put me on TV and said, Our famous author is writing an article for the national newspaper—that was a very important thing. Municipal elections were coming up, so the people of Kars opened their doors to me. They all wanted to say something to the national newspaper, to let the government know how poor they were. They did not know I was going to put them in a novel. They thought I was going to put them in an article. I must confess, this was cynical and cruel of me. Though I was actually thinking of writing an article about it too.
Four years passed. I went back and forth. There was a little coffee shop where I occasionally used to write and take notes. A photographer friend of mine, whom I had invited to come along because Kars is a beautiful place when it snows, overheard a conversation in the little coffee shop. People were talking among themselves while I wrote some notes, saying, What kind of an article is he writing? It’s been three years, enough time to write a novel. They’d caught on to me.
INTERVIEWER
What was the reaction to the book?
PAMUK
In Turkey, both conservatives—or political Islamists—and secularists were upset. Not to the point of banning the book or hurting me. But they were upset and wrote about it in the daily national newspapers. The secularists were upset because I wrote that the cost of being a secular radical in Turkey is that you forget that you also have to be a democrat. The power of the secularists in Turkey comes from the army. This destroys Turkey’s democracy and culture of tolerance. Once you have so much army involvement in political culture, people lose their self-confidence and rely on the army to solve all their problems. People usually say, The country and the economy are a mess, let’s call in the army to clean it up. But just as they cleaned, so did they destroy the culture of tolerance. Lots of suspects were tortured; a hundred thousand people were jailed. This paves the way for new military coups. There was a new one about every ten years. So I was critical of the secularists for this. They also didn’t like that I portrayed Islamists as human beings.
The political Islamists were upset because I wrote about an Islamist who had enjoyed sex before marriage. It was that kind of simplistic thing. Islamists are always suspicious of me because I don’t come from their culture, and because I have the language, attitude, and even gestures of a more Westernized and privileged person. They have their own problems of representation and ask, How can he write about us anyway? He doesn’t understand. This I also included in parts of the novel.
But I don’t want to exaggerate. I survived. They all read the book. They may have become angry, but it is a sign of growing liberal attitudes that they accepted me and my book as they are. The reaction of the people of Kars was also divided. Some said, Yes, that is how it is. Others, usually Turkish nationalists, were nervous about my mentions of Armenians. That TV anchorman, for instance, put my book in a symbolic black bag and mailed it to me and said in a press conference that I was doing Armenian propaganda—which is, of course, preposterous. We have such a parochial, nationalistic culture.
INTERVIEWER
Did the book ever become a cause célèbre in the Rush
die sense?
PAMUK
No, not at all.
INTERVIEWER
It’s a terribly bleak, pessimistic book. The only person in the whole novel who is able to listen to all sides—Ka—is, in the end, despised by everyone.
PAMUK
I may have been dramatizing my position as a novelist in Turkey. Although he knows he is despised, he enjoys being able to maintain a dialogue with everyone. He also has a very strong survival instinct. Ka is despised because they see him as a Western spy, which is something that has been said about me many times.