The Addiction of our Time: Orhan Pamuk and the Nobel Prize
By Marinos Pourgouris
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Brown University
On October 12, I woke up to the news that a Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Later that day, I spoke to a Turkish acquaintance about Pamuk and his work. Though she was happy that, at long last, a Turkish writer was awarded the Nobel Prize, she also felt somewhat uneasy about it. There were, she explained, exceptional writers in Turkey whose work is not being acknowledged because it is not infused with the controversy that has followed Pamuk. She saw Pamuk as a Westerner writing in Turkish. (One recalls here the words of Professor Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy: “[Pamuk] has stolen the novel, we can say, from us Westerners and transformed it into something else.”) I objected to the criticism; regardless of any political motives that informed the decision of the Swedish Academy, regardless of Pamuk’s controversial statements on the Armenian genocide, his work speaks for itself. But most importantly, it gives scholars and students of literature the opportunity to approach the East and Islam, to approach Turkish culture, in ways more complex and insightful; his voice is refreshing today, at a time when, for many, Huntington’s baseless predictions on the “clash of civilizations” are gaining the day.
Yet, there was an inherent irony in our conversation. There she was, a Turkish scholar skeptical about the only Nobel Laureate of Turkey; and there I was, a Greek-Cypriot scholar ready to defend Pamuk’s work. This irony is in fact reflective of the wider reaction to the award in Europe, on the one hand, and Turkey on the other. The Swedish Academy’s announcement in Stockholm, in a room full of journalists, was followed by a sudden burst of cheers.ii European leaders came out to the praise of Pamuk: the French president, Jacques Chirac, called his views on society “intelligent, strong and liberal” and Olli Rehn, the European Union Enlargement Commissioner, hailed the decision as “good news for all those who want to speak, search, learn the truth, pursue dialogue, exchange thoughts and knowledge – not just in Turkey but everywhere else.” He continued on to say that artists “need freedom of expression as desperately as life needs water and air. Orhan knows more than others how precious and fragile such freedom is.” (Note that Rehn comfortably addresses Pamuk as “Orhan” – one cannot help but link this feeling of familiarity to the wider European comfort with what Pamuk represents).
As was extensively reported in news media around the world, the announcement of Pamuk’s Nobel award came on the same day that France attempted to pass a law making the denial of the Armenian genocide a crime (as is the case of the existing law concerning the Holocaust). About a year earlier, in June 2005, criminal charges were brought against Pamuk in Turkey for statements he made to a Swiss periodical regarding the Armenian genocide: “Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands” he had stated, “and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” Prosecutors based the case on the controversial article 301 that makes it illegal to make statements that insult “Turkishness.” Though the charges were eventually dropped, in the months leading to the trial, Pamuk became one of the most controversial public figures in Turkey; on the contrary, he was repeatedly praised by European leaders who kept pressuring Turkey to drop the charges and who sent envoys to Turkey to observe the process (the trial was explicitly connected to Turkey’s prospects of joining the EU). In light of this controversy, the undertone of Jacques Chirac and Olli Rehn’s statements regarding the Nobel Prize are representative of Europe’s ambivalent position towards Turkey. In other words, what they suggest is that his views are “strong” and “liberal” (Chirac), or he knows how fragile the freedom of expression is (Rehn), precisely because he stood up against Turkish law; it is a praise of a Turkish author on the one hand, and a critique against Turkey on the other.
The scenario that was acted out on the day of the announcement of the Nobel Prize is in fact hardly new. Shortly after Pamuk’s prosecution in Turkey in 2005 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (a Frankfurt Book Fair award). About a month later, in November, he was awarded the Prix Medicis étranger (France) for his only explicitly political novel Snow and more recently, in September 2006, he was honored with the Le Prix Méditerranée étranger (France). The point is not that these awards are in any way connected to Pamuk’s trial in Turkey, or that one should doubt the quality of Pamuk’s work (on the contrary). At a time when Europe is searching for its own identity at the prospect of welcoming a nation of seventy million Muslims, Pamuk has come to represent, to the uneasy Europeans, not the foreign Other but rather, the ideal Other: the Eastern Huckleberry Finn who is ‘civilized’ by the West. Pamuk writes about Ottoman Turkey and Islam but he is not a practicing Muslim; he looks towards the West and Turkey’s accession to the EU, but he is deeply rooted in his native city of Istanbul. One begins to understand here the Turkish uneasiness, not so much with Pamuk the writer, but with the Europeans’ reading of Pamuk as a symbol and a cultural ambassador of Turkey to the West. His appropriation in the West left many Turks feeling betrayed by one of their own: “Et tu, Brute, have sided with Western critics of Turkey?” (It is significant here that the statements concerning the Armenian genocide were made to a Swiss newspaper.) To state the obvious, such misreadings fuel the tension between the European Union and Turkey. Orhan Pamuk has never ceased to state that he is a Turkish author, writing in the Turkish language and exploring Turkish identity and culture. He has certainly challenged Turkish law and defended the freedom of expression in Turkey but he has done the same with the French decision to criminalize the denial of the Armenian genocide: “Freedom of expression is a French discovery and this law is contrary to the culture of freedom of expression. We must not pass a law forbidding freedom.” Like some of the characters in his novels, he is caught between the Western wishful projections on Turkey and Turkey’s own split between secularization and Muslim identity.
I am reminded here of the characters of Hoja and the Venetian narrator of his novel White Castle (in yet another moment of synchronicity, my students finished reading this novel on the week of the Nobel announcement). The Venetian is captured by the Ottoman fleet and finds himself working under Hoja. His purported knowledge of Western Science makes Hoja curious and, as the plot progresses, a strange – often sadomasochistic – relationship unfolds between the two characters. Hoja is determined to discover what makes people different and what constitutes the Self: how is this Westerner different from myself, or how are Christians different from Ottomans? But also: how are the people in the Sultan’s court – the ‘fools’ as he calls them – different from us (himself and the Venetian who are interested in Science)? One of the most striking points in the novel is that the Hoja and the narrator resemble each other, in appearance, like twin brothers. Thus, at the end of the book, as the Ottomans are in war with the Poles, a switch takes place: Hoja escapes to Italy where he assumes the identity of the Venetian and the Venetian stays back assuming the identity of Hoja. The two are fully immersed in their new roles: the Venetian (the new Hoja) becomes the Imperial Astrologer and a well known Ottoman scholar and Hoja (the new Venetian), lectures in Italian Universities about the Ottoman Empire (at a time, as the author tells us, when it was fashionable to do so). The book is indeed a challenge to the rigid Huntingtonian definitions of West and East that superficially suggest, as Edward Said sarcastically remarks, “the West is the West, and Islam Islam.”iii In White Castle, lines are blurred, stereotypes are challenged and identity emerges as a complex network of exchanges, cross cultural influences, and personal experiences.
Unfortunately, what is forgotten in the politicization of Pamuk’s figure is his creative work. The empty rhetoric that we have seen directed against him by extremists in Turkey, as well as the West’s imaginary projections, have shifted the focus from what he writes to what he represents. In 1953, the Greek-Orthodox church filed charges against Nikos Kazantzakis for his books Freedom or Death and The Last Temptation. Remarkably, the latter had not been published in Greece at the time. Months later, the book was placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books. The same scenario was played out with Martin Scorsese’s film- adaptation of the book in 1988: demonstrations outside theaters, boycotting, threats etc. One wonders how many of Pamuk’s critics have read his novels or have considered them beyond the pre-established notions of his position as the apple of discord between the East and West. And one hopes that after the dust of this controversy settles, this first Nobel Prize to a Turkish author will prompt readers to engage with Pamuk’s novels, and will revive the interest in contemporary Turkish literature. With this in mind, my colleague Elliott Colla and I are offering a course on three Levantine cities: Alexandria, Athens, and Pamuk’s native Istanbul (Fall 2007). What we hope to achieve is a reconsideration of local writers in the context of their own geographical setting, their mapping of cultural space, their exploration of national identity, and the multidirectional encounter between cultures. To the Swedish Academy’s credit, the justification of this year’s Nobel Prize focused precisely on what makes Pamuk a Turkish writer in these times, when we tend to “see everything as connected with everything else.” The announcement of the Nobel Foundation reads: “To Orhan Pamuk, who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”
i “The addiction of our times” is a line from Pamuk’s White Castle: The fictional author of the preface, Faruk Darvinoglu, writes: “Readers seeing the dedication at the beginning [For Nilgun Darvinoglu, a loving sister (1961-1980)] may ask if it has a personal significance. I suppose that to see everything as connected with everything else is the addiction of our time. It is because I too have succumbed to this decease that I publish this tale.” See Orhan Pamuk, White Castle. New York: Vintage International, 1998. 12.
ii In 2003 and 2004, when the Nobel Prize went to John Coetzee (South Africa) and Elfriede Jelinek (Austria) respectively, there was no reaction in the press-room. On the contrary, when Harold Pinter’s Nobel was announced last year there was, as in the case of Pamuk, an emphatic burst of cheers. This detail is only interesting inasmuch as it points to the ‘objectification’ of the author; the author, in other words, becomes the embodiment of a certain ideology (i.e. Harold Pinter’s award was a symbolic but powerful blow to the politics of George Bush and Tony Blair).
iii See Edward Said, “The Clash of Ignorance.” The Nation (October 22, 2001 issue).