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Literary Review
Prose
At the frontline
SHELLEY WALIA
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Other Colours is about Pamuk’s location in the realm of imagination.
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Other Colours: Essays and a Story, Orhan Pamuk, Faber and Faber, p.400, Rs. 495.
Other Colours resounds with the inspiration and uncompromising literary sense that we have seen behind Orhan Pamuk’s novels, especially his masterpiece Istanbul: Memories of a City. Interestingly, colour has always been Orhan Pamuk’s obsession. We saw it in a number of his novels whose titles have white, red or black in them, colours that indicate a deeply vibrant force. Whereas in his novels he comes across as a passionate writer, in these impressionistic essays he strikes the reader as a sensitive human being who is touched by common experiences. The delicacy and receptiveness of Pamuk so visible here metamorphoses into an intense and honest confrontation with life lived at the frontline of imagination. Personal reminiscences intertwine with the historical perspective. Schizophrenia becomes his creative impulse.
Eclectic views
The collection consists of discerning essays on writers like Mario Vargas Llosa, Dostoevsky and Rushdie, critiques of his own novels, a few rather elegiac autobiographical pieces as well as his speeches delivered on various occasions. “The White Castle Afterward” is an interesting comment on the sources behind the novel and the reasons why he wrote it. “The Implied Author”, the speech he gave at the University of Oklahoma, is remarkable for its critical sense and for the praise of the Western novel for its inherent potential of throwing light on human relationship. The world is his playfield, a place which “becomes a process of becoming”. Not to remain immersed in a world of fiction, he often moves into the political as is clear in his reaction to 9/11, so well expressed in another piece “The Anger of the Damned”.
The interview published in the Paris Review in 2005 is about his persecution for his “irreverence” for the State, especially his condemnation of the large-scale killing of Kurds and Armenians. In his own words, he is a spokesman “for those who cannot speak for themselves, whose anger is never heard, and whose words are suppressed”. People such as Pamuk, who value their freedom and stand up against any curb on independent thought and expression, care enough for their rights as well as for the rights of others. Such views would finally win him international acclaim, but at the cost of Istanbul’s delay in entering the European Union. Nevertheless, the essays in Other Colours explicitly bring out his location more in the realm of imagination than in the prosaic world of politics. Borges and Calvino are intellectual companions he would not give up for the world.
In the story “To Look out of the Window” which is also included in the collection, Pamuk’s skill as a writer strikes us deeply, especially the convincing portraiture of his upper-class family in Istanbul through the eyes of a seven-year-old child. He is blatantly truthful, unmindful of the consequences or the wrath of his family members. The child in Pamuk cannot but speak the truth, a trait that goes well with his theory of political responsibilities of a writer and fiction as a means of searching truth. The outcome of such a nature is clear later on in his life when he turns into a dissident writer who has risen above mere academic debate to challenge with passion and verve the government policy in Turkey. He has supported the rights of the minorities and can be compared with the inspirational examples of socially committed writers that he loves and analyses. For Pamuk, injustice must be exposed and rational politics and freedom of expression must challenge the status quo.
A significant section in this collection is called “My Books are my Life”. And rightly so when we see him so deeply immersed in his study endeavouring to confront the “world” with the “word”. These individual “word pictures” are collected for the reason of showing how they matter to him as a writer and to the final product of his craft, though he asserts that the ideas behind them “have still not found their way into [his] novels”. For him writing becomes “our only defence against life’s cruelties”: “For it is by reading novels, stories and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world…”
Stepping out
In his writings, one can see him stepping beyond Turkish literature to Russian literature, Latin American as well as Indian literature, like a true cosmopolitan who engages with the Third World writer facing his state of exile “not so much as a matter of geography but as a spiritual state…of being a perpetual foreigner”. He is burdened by the question of the cultural clash between the West and the East and yet he loves the novel which is a Western creation even though it has been skilfully used by non-Western writers like Dostoevsky. There is a conspicuous thread running through the essays that are replete with the cultural memory and political disasters that underpin Turkish history. The perspective thus is singularly from Istanbul, though the appeal of his thought is significantly transcultural. He is the link between Asia and Europe like the bridge that he views from the window that joins the two worlds. Islamic past juxtaposes with modern Europe. Like a true post-modern, Pamuk straddles two worlds, one itching to move on, and the other immersed in national, cultural politics. What emerges out of this book is a refusal to be slotted under some singular label. Multiplicity is his lifeline and the source of his creativity, located as he is at the border country.
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