My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
(Faber, £10.99)
Istanbul is a world-city, straddling two continents, Europe and Asia. It was the capital of two empires, eastern Roman and Ottoman. It looms large in the history of the civilised world, actively as a great political centre, passively as the object of great power politics. Its monuments-Santa Sophia, the mosques of Ottoman Sultans-are landmarks in architectural history; the handicrafts it produced and amassed-from Byzantine ivories to Islamic china-are a precious part of our artistic heritage. But, since the middle ages, Istanbul has not been at the heart of intellectual creativity. Its culture became provincial long before it lost its status as Turkey's capital. The city's place in our literary canon is slight; it figures in few literary masterworks, it has produced even fewer. The west has been at the frontier of thought since the Renaissance. Istanbul was in the rear of progress.
This fact was recognised by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. He spoke of the "black cloud of ignorance" hanging over his country. In 1933, on the tenth anniversary of the republic, he announced his aim to catch up and then overtake contemporary civilisation. This, the Turkish foreign minister Ismail Cem, said recently, is the challenge of Turkey's history. It has not been easy to meet.
Western culture had of course reached Turkey long before Atatürk. For a long time Istanbul was home to a big European community. It also had a large indigenous middle class: Christian and Jewish merchants and professionals, Muslim administrators. By the middle of the 19th century, this middle class adopted European culture, mainly through the medium of French, the lingua franca of the Levantine bourgeoisie. Abdülhamid II, the last absolute Ottoman sultan, commissioned an Italian architect to build a theatre and had a photographic laboratory in his palace. His predecessor Murad V was ousted on the grounds of insanity and whiled away his confinement composing polkas and mazurkas. The last Caliph, Abdülmecid II, was a competent painter in the European classical style. Turkish writers, still using the language and prosody of Islamic culture, were inspired by European models.
But Atatürk banished the Islamic stock from this process. After encouraging "national architecture," which turned out to be European colonial-oriental, he opted for German brutalism. Turkish folk culture was Europeanised. The new language was "pure" Turkish, Frenchified. Composers were encouraged to incorporate Turkish folk melodies in western-style symphonies and operas. Official encouragement was not, in any case, essential: Turkish writers, musicians, painters, architects were ravished by western models. Where, in the neighbouring Soviet Union, official ideology demanded a culture socialist in content, but national in form, Turkish culture was largely national in content, but western in form. It did produce work of merit, but it seldom achieved the international recognition it craved. As Atatürk had hoped, Turkish culture did join the mainstream of civilisation, centred on the west, but added little to it.
There were a few exceptions. The communist poet, Naz?m Hikmet, was more than a Turkish Mayakovsky. His was a personal and at the same time national voice which inspired similarly-minded romantic revolutionaries worldwide. Although little-known outside Turkey, the short-story writer Sait Faik wrote of the "little people" of Istanbul in the manner of Chekhov, and he deserves a place in the canon of world literature. The first Turkish novelist to win a reputation in the west was Yashar Kemal. His sources of inspiration were Gorky, Sholokhov, Steinbeck, Silone and other idols of the progressive pantheon. But his style was that of Turkish popular storytellers and their tales of outlaws.
Today, western influence continues to permeate Turkey. But there is a contrary tendency at work. It is known as "making peace with the past"-the Ottoman past repudiated by Atatürk. The Turkish bourgeoisie has fallen in love with Ottoman interior design, cuisine, festivities. Often the Ottoman past is seen through western eyes; often it is reproduced with an eye to the west. As Atatürk admitted, even to study Islam one has to know French, English and German, for "these people have studied our religion more than we have." Similarly, the academic study of Ottoman history, architecture and arts started in the west, where it is still actively pursued. But Turks are now making a real contribution. Turkish intellectuals do not recoil from acknowledging their debt to western masters, while striving, in Atatürk's spirit, to equal and eventually to surpass them. But where Turkish businessmen and other professionals have achieved real international recognition, the intellectuals and artists have been less successful. Novelist Orhan Pamuk is one of the few to make a mark.
Pamuk grew up in an upper middle-class family in a district of Istanbul favoured by well-to-do Turks who had moved from the Balkans. Situated there among art nouveau blocks of flats was the English school, the American hospital and a grandiose, unfinished Italian embassy (now part of the Technical University). The district was both Turkish-few foreigners lived there-and European, and Pamuk was brought up there as a very European Turk. After abandoning architecture, he graduated from the school of journalism at Istanbul University before devoting himself to fiction. His brother Shevket, who became a distinguished economic historian, taught for a time in the US and Orhan spent some time there. He read the world classics and modern literature, either in English or Turkish translation. It is easy to keep up with modern literature in Istanbul, where every book that enjoys success in the west is published in translation.
Pamuk's first novel, published in 1982 when he was 30, dealt with the transformation of the way of life of a Turkish family from Ottoman times to this day. His second novel had a similar theme. Although both books won literary prizes in Turkey, the local critics found his style too foreign. Readers thought otherwise. In his third novel, Beyaz Kale (The White Castle), Pamuk went back in Ottoman history. His theme was the interaction between western and Islamic culture, as seen in the relationship between a Venetian slave and his Ottoman master. Then came Kara Kitap (The Black Book), where present and past mingled together. The present is symbolised by the Istanbul press and its popular columnists, the past by the striking conceit of the Bosphorus drying up to reveal the relics of the city's inhabitants through the centuries. His next book, Yeni Hayat (The New Life), went through six editions in its first month of publication (October 1994) and established him as Turkey's favourite writer.
The New Life is set in the 1980s, after the military had put an end to a near-civil war between young enthusiasts of left-wing and right-wing ideologists. The author's style-episodic and picaresque-had settled down; his favourite themes had emerged-the quest for the beloved (as in classical Islamic literature) and the incongruity of indigenous and foreign influences in Turkish life. The same themes are projected back into Ottoman history in his latest novel, Benim Adim Kirmizi (1998), published in English as My Name is Red. This story of the conflict between tradition and western innovation in the imperial studio of miniaturists in 16th-century Istanbul is, once again, accompanied by an artist's quest for his beloved. Allegories and allusions abound. Turkish readers will recognise the reference to the country's current runaway inflation in a passage on the depreciation of Ottoman coinage, a subject studied by the author's brother. Orhan himself, his brother, mother and wife all appear in the book alongside 16th-century historical figures and invented characters. Events are seen successively through the eyes of several characters. In addition to humans, animals and colours are also given a voice. Like its predecessor, the novel will be described as post-modern.
Western critics have praised the book and seen it as a reflection on Turkey's uncertain identity, torn between east and west. But Turks have a strong identity simply as Turks, and they want to be accepted as such by the west. What Pamuk reflects on is not identity but originality and authenticity. After all, traditional Ottoman miniature painting had been imported from the east-from Persia and, ultimately, China. It was no more indigenous than the western painting with which the Ottoman court became familiar after the Turkish conquest of 1453. The question which preoccupies Pamuk is whether an artist on the periphery of two civilisations in the past, and of the one universal civilisation today, can find an authentic voice. He has shown that it is possible. The influences on his work are easily discerned: Umberto Eco, Latin American magic realism, modern art films. The local ingredients of traditional story-telling and Istanbul as a theme are also there. The impress of this city of 9m inhabitants-in parts spectacular, in parts grey and dreary-is visible throughout.
Will Pamuk remain a world-class author in a provincial environment? Istanbul has much in its favour. Television channels and universities are multiplying; creative foreigners are finding their way to it; its established ironic disposition is turning to a determination to achieve world class in the arts and sciences. The city elite has always been knowing; it is becoming more knowledgeable. The tensions produced by political, social, economic and cultural change invite creative thinking, as they did in 19th-century Russia. The distance between Istanbul and the cities in the west, where the frontiers of thought are being pushed forward, is shrinking. Conditions seem propitious. Nevertheless, the emergence of a new cultural centre in the world is a miracle whose occurrence cannot be predicted.
