Orhan Pamuk’s (political) suitcase
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Orhan Pamuk
Interesting blog post - over at the Britannica Blog (Thanks, Tom) - by J.E. Luebering about the disappointing (for some) absence of explicit political content in Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel lecture. Luebering scours the text for “oblique” political references and reconstructs a political narrative that is both “submerged and obvious.”
It is true that the content of the speech is (surprisingly) simple, the simple story of a son and a father, what united them, what separated them, a father’s suitcase containing hidden literature and a son’s body of work publicly honoured and, added to all that, musings on the difficult life of a writer and the process of writing, and what it all means. The result is powerful. Very powerful. A moving tribute to the father who gave the son more than just life, but approval to live the life he wanted, the writing life. A tribute to a relationship that was characterised by strong, strong ties, and yet utter freedom. The father’s suitcase, kept tightly shut for the most part of the speech, added such dramatic force that, when it was finally opened, proved so moving to me that I brought out my box of tissues and basked, for those moments, in the warmth of the sublime! Yes, literature is power.
Last year’s speech by Harold Pinter was equally moving but for different reasons. Or maybe, in the end, for the same reasons. For the powerful voices of writers who can string words together and effect change, personal and global. Whatever they say, whether explicit or in the form of allegory, is political, because it has such rhetorical power. (Read politically Pamuk’s lecture touches upon the issues of authority/government (Turkish society), democratic ideals (the easy-going freedom-loving father), censorship (the suitcase and the hidden writing), freedom of speech (the father’s approval of the son’s writing).
Luebering is right to say that the “political content [in Pamuk’s speech] is both submerged and obvious.”
And I’d like to argue that the political content in Pamuk’s lecture is expressed by the voice that Luebering would like to accuse of “excessive sentimentality.” This voice narrates the moving story of the writer talking (simply) about the life of a writer and the son remembering (quietly) the life of a father. This is the voice that contains the political force of Pamuk’s speech.
The voice narrating the lecture belongs to two identities: the writer and the man (the son). The writer’s voice, depending on where he is situated, is always political. (And for Pamuk, Istanbul is the “centre of his world” and Istanbul is very politicized right now because of EU and Armenian genocide talk.) The man’s voice is also political for where else are politics born if not in the family, and by extension, in race, heritage, country? The ‘excessively sentimental’ voice of Pamuk’s lecture is the political voice whether its content is explicitly so or not.
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leave a comment How Pamuk Is Political
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Orhan Pamuk
A sound-bite rippled through the major news outlets last week when Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk was announced as the new Nobel Laureate for Literature. ”It’s a political statement”, we heard from all sides, because Pamuk had recently faced a well-publicized trial in his home country…
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4 commentsDead Beat Congratulates Orhan Pamuk but Chides the Dampening of the Nobel Honour
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Orhan Pamuk
Dead Beat has been sounding off about literary awards (see Pandering to the Parade) - he who is shameless about promoting his own few meagre accolades! That being said he is delighted to see that Orhan Pamuk has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for…
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Pamuk and the Bloggers
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Orhan Pamuk
» Apparently Columbia University is dominating more than Upper West Side real estate market: Mr. Pamuk is on board in the departments of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures and the School of the Arts. More coverage at the Complete Review, along with Orthofer’s list of press reactions.
» Despite his great coverage, few are forgiving Mr. Orthofer for claiming Pamuk too young for the Nobel, and Prufrock Two points out that Rudyard Kipling was the youngest laureate at 42.
» Maud Newton and the h20boro lib blog have some good Pamuk links.
» BLogographos fears that in the “praising and lauding of Pamuk the political figure” the fact that he is “perhaps one of the five finest post-war prose stylists in the world” will be lost.
» Buddha Smiled has a thoughtful piece here at MetaxuCafé and his site where he says:
I read My Name is Red & Istanbul before I visited Istanbul. But Pamuk’s writing had painted a glorious picture for me, had opened my eyes to the multifarious realities that make up that uber-city, had prepared me for the schizophrenia that was to confront me at every step.
» See the comments of my Nobel announcement post (where I mentioned James Marcus’s coverage of Pamuk’s Pen speech this year) for more. Also the Words Without Borders Blog opened up to comments and has pages of them to sift through for the gems.
» karen! has a friend who met Pamuk this year - and has a picture to prove it, probably confirming what Darby says, that Pamuk “sort of look[s] like the kind of guy you’d like to go shoot the breeze with over a couple cups of really good coffee?”
» If you’re interested in an unfiltered view and potentially exposing yourself to those non-MetaxuCafé philistines, there were 156 blog posts on Pamuk within the last day, according to Sphere (a far better than Technorati search tool).
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Orhan & his Istanbul
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Orhan Pamuk
The Swedish Academy announced today that it had awarded the 10 million Swedish kroner Nobel Prize for Literature to controversial Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. Of the many writers who were out there and notable contenders for the Nobel, I could not think of a more…
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Reading the World: An Interview with Dubravka Ugresic
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Orhan Pamuk
Dubravka Ugresic is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Ministry of Pain” and a collection of essays called “Thank You for Not Reading,” among other books. James Marcus sat down with her during the recent Pen World Voices Festival [MetaxuCafé coverage]. Her latest novel is featured in the Reading the World program and is being discussed at the Words Without Borders blog this month.
Dubravka Ugresic left the former Yugoslavia in 1993, as her disintegrating homeland was engulfed in war and ethnic cleansing. She had already begun publishing fiction and essays during the previous decade. But in the wake of her move to Amsterdam, much of work--including her novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and a sardonic spin on the literary life, Thank You For Not Reading--has found an appreciative audience in English. Her latest novel, The Ministry of Pain, takes a fresh look at one our era’s perennial topics: the trauma of exile and displacement. I began our conversation by asking her about the novel’s essayistic texture.
Dubravka Ugresic: Other people have noted the essayistic tone. Well, the novel is all about language. The narrator is an educated person, she’s a teacher of literature--she’s supposed to know how to be articulate. But she bears the trauma of war, and her language is fundamentally an invalid language. In many places she says: I feel like I am a student in a Croatian language course. She’s appalled by how formulaic her sentences are.
James Marcus: But does that change as the novel progresses?
Ugresic: Yes, it does. The language gets richer. And then she starts dreaming: there are some surreal passages in there, and at one point she finishes a chapter inside the novel of an 18th-century Croatian author. I don’t know if you remember, it’s very kitschy language--
Marcus: I do recall that.
Ugresic: As the language gets richer, she becomes more free. And finally she has this realization about immigrants: they express themselves by sound rather than language. They like to shout, to scream.
Marcus: Like the two little boys who assault her with the toy knife, and then let loose with a weird, almost metaphysical howling.
Ugresic: Or adults with firecrackers. That’s in the novel as well.
Marcus: Was this concept of evolving language (and also, in a sense, devolving language) present from the beginning?
Ugresic: It’s hard to say. But at one point the narrator suggests that when you are traumatized, there are two possible reactions. Either you’re authentically silent about it, or you talk about it, but in a mechanical way.
Marcus: Let’s move on to what you call Yugonostalgia: the yearning for a country and culture that have vanished into the maw of history. Are you as afflicted with this yearning as your characters?
Ugresic: Yes, I am. I’ve written about it elsewhere, in The Culture of Lies. The problem is that once Croatia become independent, the old, Yugoslav reality was prohibited. It is so difficult to imagine. It is like your worst nightmare. These people had to build their new identity very quickly, and from scratch, and they had to find some explanation for the war. So: “We killed in the name of our country,” or, “We killed in the name of our identity.” The trouble is, the Croats had only one short period of independence. That was during the Second World War, when they were a Nazi puppet state. But once they broke away in the early Nineties, they had to justify fifty years of Yugoslavism, and they behaved like bad film directors--they simply edited out everything from 1944 to 1991!
Marcus: That’s a pretty dramatic splice.
Ugresic: Look, I realize the terrain is very small. I mean, who cares about Croatia? Three or four million people, that’s all. But for me, it was so interesting, because I saw how you can train human beings to think differently within a year: they all change. It is a chemical reaction, as if you dipped people into some kind of acid and pulled them out again.
Marcus: With a new personality.
Ugresic: Exactly. Now they claim they saw what they didn’t see, they claim to remember what they can’t possibly remember, and they forget what they’re even lying about. So everything is gone. Foods, for example: overnight you could no longer find a kebab in a restaurant. Why? Because kebab was considered a Serbian dish.
Marcus: So it’s banished from the menu.
Ugresic: Right. Every product that had a logo or label from Belgrade--gone! Book burnings. Ethnic cleansing at the library. A new language. My poor mother had a favorite television program, and suddenly it’s gone.
Marcus: So you lose everything. And the worst part is that you’re supposed to pretend that it was never there in the first place.
Ugresic: The worst part is that you have this phantom pain.
Marcus: Do you go back very frequently?
Ugresic: Oh, yes. I still have family there.
Marcus: And do your trips back cause that sense of nostalgia to modulate?
Ugresic: Bit by bit, they’re letting the Yugoslav era back in. But not very much. And do you know what? All that fantastic art, that subversive art, that existed during the Communist era in Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, and so forth—all of that is gone. Because people associate it with Communism, even though it was anti-Communist. People are so stupid.
Marcus: I went to see Orhan Pamuk kick off the festival the other night. And one of the things he talked about in his speech was the way in which the Turkish dissidents of a generation ago are now the strident nationalists of today. It reminded of a passage in The Ministry of Pain, where you write: “Perhaps that now defunct country had in fact been inhabited exclusively by victims and victimizers. Victims and victimizers who periodically changed places.”
Ugresic: Well, of course this behavior is not exclusive to my country. But Croatia is a good example, you know, because it’s small, it’s approachable, it’s like a village--
Marcus: You can see the whole picture at once.
Ugresic: That’s right.
Marcus: Let me move on to the issue of translation. Has Michael Henry Heim translated all of your books?
Ugresic: Unfortunately not.
Marcus: Do you work very closely with him on the translations?
Ugresic: I don’t. He’s a unique person--first of all, he speaks so many languages. Second, he’s an educated person, so when you mention Lili Brik in your novel, he knows exactly who that was. Michael is simply overeducated. He’s fantastic.
Marcus: When I interviewed Czeslaw Milosz a few years ago, I asked whether he had ever considered transforming himself into an English-language poet. His answer: “I believe that by changing language we change our personality, and I wanted to remain faithful to the tradition in which I grew up.” Could you imagine ever writing in a language other than Croatian?
Ugresic: You know what? If I were younger, I would immediately, without hesitation, switch to writing in English. But at this point, my English would be terribly blunt--for practical reasons, I don’t have time to get involved in writing in a new language. So I’m sticking with Croatian, because it’s my mother tongue.
Marcus: So in your daily life you speak Dutch and English?
Ugresic: No. My Dutch is almost nonexistent.
Marcus: How long have you lived in Amsterdam?
Ugresic: I’ve lived in Amsterdam for a long time, but in fact I haven’t arrived yet. [Laughs] I’m all the time somewhere else. I went to language class when I first moved there, but then I was in the States for six months, and by the time I returned, I had forgotten everything.
Marcus: It’s interesting to compare the playful postmodernism of Lend Me Your Character or Thank You For Not Reading with the more melancholic voice of The Ministry of Pain. Is this an evolution of style?
Ugresic: Well, the chronology is confusing. Because Thank You For Not Reading is a newer book, and one of my older books, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, is in a darker vein.
Marcus: So we’re really talking about an alternation of moods.
Ugresic: Yes. But there’s another thing. I belong to that group of writers whose books are all different. I myself am bored by writing all the time the same thing. You have such writers, and some of them are very good, but it is basically one book.
Marcus: One last question, which is actually a confession. In Thank You For Not Reading, you acerbically note that the New York Times Book Review rolled out the red carpet for Ivana Trump when she published a novel: “I wouldn’t have noticed it if Joseph Brodsky hadn’t received in the very same issue an unjustly malicious review of his latest book Watermark. One reviewer vilified Brodsky for his language ‘jammed with metaphors,’ and the other praised Ivana for her analytical intelligence.” Well, I was the guy who wrote the Brodsky review. It wasn’t really that negative!
Ugresic: [Laughs] Well, I didn’t have the review in front of me when I wrote the essay! But even it was not true, that doesn’t matter--it was possible, it was believable. And it gets more believable all the time.
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Orhan Pamuk’s Freedom to Write Speech
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Orhan Pamuk
Via Maud and The Literary Saloon, I see that the New York Review of Books has published Orhan Pamuk’s ”Freedom to Write” speech that he delivered last week at Cooper Union to kick off the Pen World Voices Festival. I was there among other friends…
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The Global City at PEN World Voices
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Orhan Pamuk
&uotPlease visit my blog to see the photos from this event. Saturday was a very busy day for me festival-wise. I had an interview with Helen Oyeyemi at 10 am, the Idols and Insults event at 1, The Global City at 5, and A Believer…
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Orhan Pamuk at the Pen World Voices Festival
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Orhan Pamuk
by James Marcus
Literature, as we all know, is supposed to be ailing. Some might even call it moribund. But to judge from the crowd last night at Cooper Union, which snaked completely around the block in a light drizzle, reports of its death have been highly exaggerated. This legion of bibliophiles had turned out to see Orhan Pamuk deliver the first Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture. The Turkish novelist was, of course, an ideal speaker for the occasion, having just dodged a jail sentence for publicly rattling some of the skeletons in his own nation’s closet. Yet the atmosphere in the Great Hall at Cooper Union was far from sober. There were cameras everywhere, and a sort of fizzy anticipation more typical of American Idol than your average PEN event. Indeed, when the three stars of the evening--Pamuk, Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie--entered from stage right, I almost expected them to burst into a Supremes medley, so rapturous was the applause.
Rushdie kicked off the evening (and the PEN World Voices Festival) with a few words of welcome. From where I sat, he was perfectly eclipsed by one of the hall’s structural columns. Yet his disembodied voice adverted first to the late Arthur Miller, then to the awards his fellow authors had won. “Orhan is the winner of the heaviest award in the world,” he told the capacity crowd. “The IMPAC. You can kill somebody with it.” Atwood, on the other hand, had bagged the coveted Swedish Humor Award. (No doubt Rushdie will be picketed for that one, if not actually pelted with dried herring.) On a more serious note, he expressed his hope that the festival “would reopen the dialogue between America and the rest of the world,” and turned the podium over to Pamuk.
Given the diffident tone of his prose, I was eager to hear what Pamuk sounded like. His voice was light but assertive, with a Turkish accent and an audible relish for paradox. What he discussed, first of all, were the dark days of 1980, when a bloodless coup by the Turkish military made a hash of civil liberties throughout the country. On that occasion Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller flew into Istanbul as a gesture of solidarity with Turkey’s persecuted writers--and their guide, selected for his fluent English, was a young novelist named Orhan Pamuk.
Even then, Pamuk had mixed feelings about this descent into the political trenches: “I felt an equal and opposite desire to protect myself from all this, to do nothing in life but write beautiful novels.” He also noted the sad fact that many of the victims of government persecution have managed, a generation later, to turn the tables. “Twenty years on,” he said, “half of these same people align themselves with nationalism.” Still, he defended freedom of expression as a human necessity--and advised authors not to muzzle their characters, either, in the interest of political correctness. “I am the kind of novelist who makes it his business to identify with all his characters,” he insisted. “Especially the bad ones.”
This was, perhaps, preaching to the choir. Still, it was a lively sermon. And Pamuk wrapped it up by denouncing the debacle in Iraq, which “has brought neither peace nor democracy” to the region. “This savage and cruel war is the shame of America and the West,” he argued. “It is PEN, and writers like Arthur Miller, who are its pride.” No mincing words there. The audience rose to its feet, and Pamuk now adjourned to a table in the center of the stage for his conversation with Margaret Atwood.
Dressed, like Pamuk, in basic black--they looked like a pair of undertakers--Atwood settled into her chair and removed a list of questions from her tote bag. She began by asking him about the intertwined roles of shame and pride in his fiction. “It is very productive,” he replied, “for a novelist to carry around two different ideas.” There is, Pamuk added, “a constant civil war in each person’s head,” and a good novelist inevitably fights for both sides at once. The reader, conversely, should take no side at all. Instead Pamuk prefers to immerse his audience in a productive state of confusion--or, as he calls it, “the entire galaxy of situations.”
Next Atwood asked him about the act of composition. What happens when he sits down to write? “The world of telephones and gas bills, the usual tedious details of life, disappear,” Pamuk replied. “Leaf by leaf, street by street, window by window, I make a whole new world, in which I feel much more secure than in the world of gas bills and tedium.” This sounded like the most glowing endorsement of escapism since J.M. Barrie cranked out Peter Pan. Yet a few minutes later, Pamuk summed up his creative process in more pharmaceutical terms: “I have to be alone every day, and take this pill of the imagination.” At that point every novelist in the crowd was doubtless asking the same, envious question: is this pill available over the counter?
Now Atwood moved on to the question of vocation, which Pamuk treated at length in his most recent book, Istanbul: Memories and the City. At Cooper Union, he was more concise: “Bookish boys in my part of the world want to be poets. You have to write bad poetry in order to become a good novelist.” But hadn’t he, as Atwood put it, undertaken his literary career in order to “write Turkey into being?” Pamuk, who seems like a genuinely modest man, batted away any such grandiosity. “I have described the adventures of my nation in various ways,” was all he would say, without acknowledging that you could apply the very same formula to Leaves of Grass or The Divine Comedy.
As an interlocutor, Atwood was perfectly okay. At times I wondered whether Rushdie himself--no novice when it comes to fictional explorations of shame and pride--might have been more in synch with Pamuk, more able to tease out what makes him so distinctive. Yet there was one moment that seemed to comically encapsulate Pamuk’s tone, with its murmuring disclosures and meaningful silences. “I’m going ask you a personal question,” Atwood said, “but you don’t have to answer it.” The guest of honor paused. Then he replied: “Okay. If I answer, you don’t have to listen.”
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On Pamuk
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Orhan Pamuk
I don’t have favorite authors. Only the trite play that game. But I must confess that when I do succumb to the dubious charms of idolatry, my obesiances as directed as often as not towards the remarkable figure of Orhan Pamuk. A magister, a mesmerist,…
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Charges dropped against Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk
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Orhan Pamuk
The charges against Orhan Pamuk for insulting Turkey have been dropped. But it hardly represents an official Turkish change of heart on the subject of free speech. Far from it. It is partly to appease the EU, which Turkey hopes to join, but it could…
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Pamuk and Werfel
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Orhan Pamuk
&As most of you will know, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk (author of Snow, Istanbul and My Name is Red) today stands trial for "denigrating Turkishness". His crime? To have spoken out against the ongoing killing of Kurds in Turkey's south-eastern provinces and the 1915 massacres of Ottoman Armenians.
The only literary work that I know of that deals with the Armenian massacre is Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which ;would be a great book if only read as a story of human heroism. It is more than that, with its overtones of Old Testament character and of modern politics. It gives such life to the long Armenian struggle as it has never had in Western literature; and raises the name of Franz Werfel to new dignity in European letters." Which is praise indeed. My copy lies, unread, in the big bookcase at the foot of the bed. I'll dig it out this weekend.
And David Barsamian says:
I recommend that you all read the chapter Interlude of the Gods from Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. It is based on the historical record of a conversation between a German missionary Johannes Lepsius and Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha. The genocide of the Armenians in 1915 was state organized and sponsored. Of that, there can be no doubt. If you can read the whole book you won't be disappointed. Werfel went to Syria after the genocide and heard the stories from survivors that form the basis of his novel. Werfel, an Austrian Jew, is famous for Song of Bernadette ... Incidentally, attempts to make the novel into a Hollywood film some years ago were blocked by the Turkish government.
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