Perspective
My name is Pamuk
MEENAKSHI MUKHERJEE
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Like his city and his country, Pamuk's works touch upon the dialectics of a double heritage.
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PHOTO: AP
No comforting resolutions: Pamuk with his novel Snow.
IN January when I was reading my first Orhan Pamuk novel — with astonishment at the richness of his imagination — I had no idea that I would actually be walking the streets of Istanbul within a couple of months. The domes and minarets of the mosques still mark the skyline of the old city; the palaces of Ottoman sultans, the manuscript library in Topkapi, the lanes and coffee houses outside the royal quarters, all conjured up for me the ambience of My Name is Red — a murder mystery set in the 16th Century. The chrome and glass buildings and the five star hotels around Taksim Square on the other hand evoked another Istanbul — where the narrator of The New Life begins his story and Galip the lawyer in The Black Book searches for his lost wife.
Whether I wanted it or not, Pamuk mediated my impression of the city and as everybody knows, reading about a place in fiction confers on it the kind of vividness that a book of history or geography can never match. V.S. Naipaul once said "landscapes do not start to be real until they have been interpreted by an artist" — so too, cities gain imaginative validity only after they have been described by a novelist. Naipaul was conscious that by naming actual streets and shops of Port of Spain he was imbuing the city with the kind of solid reality that Dickens' London had for him.
Dymanics of a civilisation
But there is a difference. Port of Spain was virgin literary territory. It had never served as the location of a novel until Naipaul began to write. Istanbul or Constantinople on the other hand has long been a bustling metropolis — the hub of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires — a city that figured in literary texts for centuries, not only in Turkish but in Persian and Arabic as well. It is only my ignorance as a reader that I am talking about here. Turkey was at the unexplored fringe of my literary world until I discovered Orhan Pamuk in English translation. Not only is my colonial education responsible for this lack of awareness, the more recent waves of postcolonial studies have also bypassed this region because Turkey has never been a European colony. But sailing down the Bosphorous Strait on a windy February morning, with Europe on one side and Asia on the other, I suddenly realised how central this city has been in history, and how the constant interface of East and West constitutes the continuing dynamics of its civilisation. It is an unresolved but creative tension and even the recent debate about Turkey's entry into the European Union hinges on the country's ambivalent location. That the Turkish language is written in Roman script is a further reminder of its dual allegiance.
Directly or indirectly, four of Pamuk's five novels available in English translation touch upon this dialectics of double heritage — the clash and fusion of Europe and Asia. In My Name is Red (Turkish original: 1998, English 2002) the focus is on the aesthetics of miniature painting. It catches a moment when the stylised Islamic heritage of manuscript illustration, in which figurative representation, drawing of the human form and individual signature of the artist are heresies, was coming under the seductive spell of European styles of realism. The Sultan has commissioned the illustration of a manuscript — but one after another two of the artists working on this project are killed and the clues for the crime can be discovered only by poring intently on unfinished paintings of horses and illuminated manuscripts preserved in the dark vaults of the royal library. Except for Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose I cannot think of another novel set in the past where philosophical reflections and the suspense of a whodunit blend seamlessly to keep the reader hooked till the end. In Pamuk's novel there is also a strand of a sizzling love story to liven up the dark deeds.
Not easy to classify
If art is the central concern here, an earlier novel by Pamuk, The White Castle (1985), had focussed on scientific knowledge. In early 17th Century, a young Italian scholar/ engineer is captured by the Turks and brought to Istanbul to become the slave of a minor courtier of the Sultan who happens to be the Italian's exact double. The master is obsessed with proving the superiority of the Ottoman Empire over the Europeans by having access to their science and forces the slave to give him lessons in western science and technology. But Pamuk's narratives have a way of taking unexpected turns. The White Castle becomes at some point a study of psychological role reversal centred around its doppelganger motif.
In Snow (2002), Pamuk's most recent novel, the concerns are contemporary and relevant to some of the issues that engage us today in India. The conflict between the secularists and the religious fundamentalists is seen through the eyes of a poet who is basically apolitical. On his return from Germany after 10 years, he has been sent by an Istanbul paper to a small northeastern Turkish town to investigate the epidemic of suicides among young girls there after the state has banned the wearing of headscarves to school. The plot gets complicated with conspiracies by insurgent groups, a live television show turning into the site of a military coup, the murder of an earnest student who wanted to be the first Islamist science fiction writer, a newspaper editor who specialises in reporting the events that are to happen the next day — all tied together by the hopeless love story of the poet. The narrative acquires a surreal quality because it snows incessantly as the action unfolds and all access to the town are blocked. When the book was first published in Turkey, it is said to have infuriated both the Westernised secular people of the country as well as the orthodox Muslims.
Pamuk is a difficult writer to pigeonhole and his novels resolutely resist simple oppositions or comforting resolutions. The most allegorical presentation of the conflict between two ways of life is The New Life (Turkish 1994, English 1997), which begins with the simple sentence, "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed." The handful of people who have read this magical book tend to slide off the normal course of their lives to pursue dangerous quests. A university student in Istanbul starts on a journey after reading the book and thereafter it becomes a labyrinthine road novel — incorporating numerous bus journeys, in which fantasy jostles with vividly etched details of plastic billboards and neon signs on the highway, old American films being shown on the TV screen of the running bus, pigeon droppings on the statues of Kemal Ataturk in town squares, and endless glasses of raki drunk in roadside bars. The reader never gets to know what is actually written in that mysterious book, but the novel tantalisingly hints at a secret that could transform reality.
Art as religion, art as philosophy, art as a faithful record of the world, art as individual self-expression — all these conflicting perspectives are explored in My Name is Red, a novel that uses multiple voices. There are nearly a dozen narrators. Miniature artists with cryptic names like Black, Olive, Stork etc., two women (one of whom is Jewish), a horse, a dog, a tree and even a corpse take turns to tell the story. Pamuk experiments endlessly with the form of the novel. In The New Life the narrator playfully blames "this new-fangled plaything called the novel which is the greatest invention of Western culture" for his difficulties. "That the reader hears the clumsiness of my voice.. [is] the result of the fact that I still have not quite figured out how to inhabit this foreign toy."
Enticing frame
Orhan Pamuk may well be one of the most dexterous and original wielders of the toy called the novel in the world today. My Name is Red grows on the reader gradually and I found myself deliberately slowing down towards the end of this sumptuous, 415-page book, reluctant to come out of its frame. Although it is rooted in Istanbul, the city with which Pamuk imaginatively identifies himself (his recently published autobiography is titled Istanbul) My Name is Red also reaches out beyond its boundaries of Istanbul to take in the world. The Persian painter Bihzad is the undisputed master of all the Istanbul practitioners of art; the elongated eyes of the women in the miniature paintings carry traces of the Chinese impact; Queen Elizabeth I of England sends the Ottoman Sultan a large clock with life-size statues that spin around as the clock chimes. Eventually it is destroyed by the Sultan "because it symbolised the power of the infidel". A minor detail that strikes me at the end of this novel is that one of the miniature painters of Istanbul, caught in the conflict between the old Persian masters and the Frankish masters of Europe, attempts to escape to India where "Akbar, the sultan of Hindustan ... is trying to gather in his court the most talented artists of the world. It is quite apparent that the book to be completed for the thousandth year of Islam will not be prepared here in Istanbul, but in the workshops of Agra." The artist, so eager to be part of this new enterprise was however beheaded before he could board the ship to India.
Abundant inventiveness
Serdar, our young guide in Istanbul who talked about Turkish history and architecture with the knowledge of an expert, was not very well up on literature. He knew about Orhan Pamuk of course, and even showed us the street where he lived, but was not very sure about his status as a writer. "I hear he is praised a lot in America. Must be writing things against us." This is not an unexpected response — especially after the events of 9/11 have bifurcated the world. It is only natural for Serdar to be wary of a writer who gets good reviews in New York Review and Washington Post. But those who have actually read him (he has written seven novels in Turkish) would know that Pamuk has done more to destabilise preconceived notions about Islam than perhaps any other writer of our time, although that is not the most important aspect of his work. The western press invariably refers to his religion and likes to project him as a builder of bridges between Islam and the West. For an Indian reader, it is possible to go beyond such simplification and think of Orhan Pamuk as an outstanding novelist of our time whose abundant inventiveness can turn abstract inquiries into vividly realised human situations. Islam is not his central concern. He happens to write about a society where most people are Muslims.
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