WSJ: Orhan Pamuk's Reality

by Melik Kaylan

When the Turkish controversialist (and novelist) Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for literature, no doubt the awarding committee felt the usual frisson of delight as they watched the world quarrel, yet again, about their choice. They certainly know how to push buttons. Last year, they chose Harold Pinter, who had written nothing of consequence for decades. Instead he'd turned his life into an extended political rant against the U.S., and that clearly appealed to the Swedes. The award itself, one might conclude, became an act of agitprop. Still, in his heyday, Mr. Pinter did do great things for the language and literature of theater, no matter how long ago. So what has Orhan Pamuk done?
If the Nobel jurists, in awarding their prize, droned rather opaquely about Mr. Pamuk's qualities -- he has "discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures" -- who can blame the committee? I have read Mr. Pamuk's novels in both English and Turkish and I couldn't tell you now, or even while reading, what happens in most of them. Mine is scarcely a unique reaction. Maureen Freely, one of his translators, cheerfully avowed in a recent interview that you need a good memory to follow the plot of "The Black Book." Or did she mean "My Name Is Red," in which a coin, a tree, a dog and a dead man (among others) internarrate an impenetrable mystery over hundreds of pages? She could equally have meant "The White Castle" -- Kafka, anyone? -- where the Sultan's chief engineer tries, with Sisyphean longueurs, to relocate a giant cannon up a hill for an entire book. I believe that's what happens. You're not really supposed to know. You are only the reader. The text refers to itself and to other texts; we are merely eavesdroppers. Horace Engdahl, the Nobel Committee's chairman, has commented fearlessly about his own preferred criterion for selection, namely, "literature that has witnessed reality." Reality?
All of which, one might say, adds up to the literary equivalent of Enron Syndrome: Nobody knows what's going on but they're in the temple of smartness and too ashamed to admit their stupidity before the next guy. Mr. Pamuk's obscuration is the more impressive for being utterly beyond one's ken; the percipient Nobel selector compliments himself by discerning the "reality" we cannot.
The pity of it all is that Turkey desperately lacks a writer to explain itself to the world. Deplored by other Muslims for being too Western, and by the West for being neither Iran nor Switzerland, Turks remain a worrisome mystery to others. In "Snow," his last fiction work, Mr. Pamuk talks most clearly about contemporary Turkey, with its religious-secular-ethnic rifts, but he does so with so much Kafka/Borges/post-Theory tomfoolery that it reveals more his literary ambitions than his country.
Which is why his political adventures ring so false. Some months ago, he was prosecuted and subsequently acquitted of the crime of "insulting Turkishness" for talking publicly about the mass deaths of Armenians and Kurds in years past -- something that, as he sees it, nobody else in Turkey dares to do. Here then is Mr. Engdahl's "witnessed reality": It has nothing to do with literary quality, everything to do with politics. Trouble is, all Turks already know and talk about these issues; and for many Americans, that's all they know about Turkey. (One wonders how well Mr. Pamuk would be tolerated if he "insulted" Iraqis, or Russians, or Syrians, or Iranians, as an inhabitant of those neighboring countries.) So, many Turks long ago realized that Orhan Pamuk writes in Turkish for foreign plaudits. He hasn't taught anyone anything they didn't already know, but he has made precisely the right noises that the "progressive" arbiters of taste in Europe like to hear. And it flatters their own semi-informed sense of activism to reward him for it.

Mr. Kaylan, born in Istanbul, is a writer in New York.