Not since Boris Pasternak refused the
Nobel Prize for literature in 1958 has a Nobel
laureate regarded the award with such mixed
feelings as Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. He set
out to be a political dilettante, as befits a
postmodern European novelist, and to his profound
consternation has had to become a man of
principle. That in no way diminishes the poignancy
of Pamuk's position, but it makes him more
interesting than the average martyr, in a
postmodern sort of way.
I reviewed his
most important book Snow two years ago, [1]
and
have
just read it again, working through a box of oval
Turkish cigarettes. Unlike Austrian pornographer
Elfriede Jelinek, 2004's winner, or last year's
laureate, the tedious Harold Pinter, Pamuk richly
deserves his award. British playwright and critic
Simon Gray produced the definitive critique of
Pinter, who wrote gnomic verses and sent them to
various literati. Pinter sent a poem to Gray that
reads in its entirety: "I saw Len Hutton in his
prime/Another time/Another time." After some weeks
he called Gray to ask his opinion; Gray returned,
"I am sorry, Harold, but I haven't finished it
yet."
Whatever the political motivations
of the Swedish Academy might have been,
Snow is an indispensable tale of
civilizational tragedy. The pity is that Pamuk's
own case would have made an even better novel; in
the best self-referential fashion, he has become
the protagonist of his own fiction in the theater
of the real. Jorge Luis Borges would have been
amused.
When Pamuk told a Swiss
interviewer in February 2005 that Turkey had
massacred "a million Armenians" during World War I
(the actual number was more than twice that), he
joined a number of Turkish academics who broached
the great taboo of Turkish history. But he
underestimated his country's swing toward
political Islam under Prime Minister Recep
Erdogan. The following June, Turkey enacted the
notorious Article 301 making it a crime to "insult
Turkishness", and Pamuk was charged retroactively.
A storm of international protest persuaded the
Turkish government to drop the charges, but Pamuk
now lives in effective exile in New York, where
Columbia University shelters him with a visiting
professorship.
During a June 2004 visit to
Turkey, US President George W Bush offered:
The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk has
said that the finest view of Istanbul is not
from the shores of Europe, or from the shores of
Asia, but from a bridge that unites them, and
lets you see both. His work has been a bridge
between cultures, and so is the Republic of
Turkey. The people of this land understand, as
that great writer has observed, that "what is
important is not [a] clash of parties,
civilizations, cultures, East and West". What is
important, he says, is to realize "that other
people in other continents and civilizations"
are "exactly like you".
The bridge has
fallen, leaving Pamuk gasping for breath on the
Western shore. Turkey's Western loyalties were
founded upon a secular nationalism that sought to
bury Islam under modernizing reforms. Pamuk's
theme in Snow is the horrible emptiness of
secular Turkey, with its poverty, inertia,
bureaucratic sclerosis and official brutality.
Thoroughly secular in upbringing and outlook,
Pamuk nonetheless evinces profound sympathy for
the Islamic loyalties of the Turkish poor, as well
as the terrible attraction that political Islam
holds for Turkey's disappointed elite.
The
poet Ka, the novel's protagonist, has fled Turkey
for Germany after a military cracked down on
left-wing intellectuals. His poetic faculties dry
up in Germany, but reawaken during a winter's
journey to the eastern border city of Kars, where
he has traveled to report on a wave of suicides by
young women. Depression lies as heavy upon eastern
Anatolia as the snow that isolates Kars from the
rest of the world. Dead-eyed, the jobless spend
their days watching television in tea-houses.
Young women expelled from schools for refusing to
remove the Islamic headscarf in keeping with
Turkey's secular law hang themselves in protest.
Kars, as I noted in my 2004 review, was an
Armenian city when World War I broke out. The
Armenians were butchered, and their churches, some
a thousand years old, remain as a ghastly
admonition to the impoverished and largely idle
Turkish inhabitants. "The Turks of Kars," I wrote,
"live on foreign ground, buffeted by the
Westernizing ideas of Kemal Ataturk and the Arabic
ideas of the Koran. Ultimately they have nothing
of their own, and dwell on the idea of suicide."
There is a museum of "Armenian massacres", Pamuk's
narrator notes dryly, which surprises the odd
foreign visitor, for it represents the genocide as
Armenian murder of Turks.
Ka has an
ulterior motive, to seek out the beautiful Ipek, a
schoolmate who recently divorced and might be
available. Her former husband Muhtar has become
the leader of the local Islamist party, and tells
Ka about his conversion from secular leftist to
impassioned Muslim:
Years went by, the military took
over and we all went to prison, and like
everyone else, when I was released I drifted
like an idiot. The people I had once tried to
imitate had changed, those whose approval I once
wanted had disappeared, and none of my dreams
had come true, not in poetry or in life ... It
was as if I'd been erased from history, banished
from civilization. The civilized world seemed
far away [from Kars] and I couldn't imitate it.
Muhtar resolves to die by freezing,
but is interrupted by followers of a Sufi sheikh
whom he meets and resolves to follow. His poetic
faculty returns and he reverts to politics, but as
an Islamist rather than a Marxist.
Contact
with people of Islamic faith rekindles Ka's
long-dead poetic voice as well. He becomes
embroiled in the vicious intrigues between the
Islamists and the local security forces, who use
him to flush out a notorious Islamist terrorist
nicknamed "Blue". Blue, it emerges, has dallied
with Ka's beloved Ipek. Wearing a tape recorder
with the police on his heels, Ka meets with Blue.
He tells the terrorist, "Before I got here, I
hadn't written a poem in years ... But since
coming to Kars, all the roads on which poetry
travels have reopened. I attribute this to the
love of God I've felt here."
Blue
responds, "In a place like this, if you worship
God as a European, you're bound to be a
laughing-stock. Then you cannot even believe you
believe. You don't belong to this country; you're
not even a Turk anymore. First try to be like
everyone else. Then try to believe in God."
The security forces kill Blue in a night
of grotesque violence. Ipek abandons Ka in
disgust. Ka returns to Germany distraught, where
he is gunned down in the street some time later.
The cycle of poems Ka has composed in Kars is lost
forever. At first this struck me as an irritating
conceit: if poetry is the subject of the novel,
one might expect the author to provide some actual
poems. But there is a deeper and more disturbing
point. There is no "there" in modern Turkey, Pamuk
seems to say. The Islamism of Muhtar and even Blue
is not the Islam of the past, but a vehicle for
ex-Marxists who have lost their intellectual
compass. The Islam of the brutalized and brutal
Anatolian peasants is a protest against a world in
which they have no place.
Blue, the doomed
terrorist, demands that Ka "be like everyone else"
rather than masquerade as a Turk while his soul
resides in Europe. But Blue is as globalized as
Ka, or indeed the author. He eschews the
cigarettes of his own country in favor of Marlboro
Reds, an expression of globalized American taste
as insipid as California Zinfandels or Ralph
Lauren suits. Blue not only smokes them, but
praises them in panegyrics: "Ah, the best thing
America ever gave the world were these red
Marlboros. I could smoke these Marlboros for the
rest of my life." That is as close to poetry as we
get in Orhan Pamuk's Snow.
Note 1. In defense of Turkish
cigarettes, August 24, 2004.
Snow by Orhan Pamuk. Faber and Faber Ltd,
August 2004. ISBN: 057121830X. Price: 17 pounds
(US$31.85), 448 pages.
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