Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in Istanbul, where he still lives. His family made a fortune in railroad construction during the early days of the Turkish republic, and Pamuk attended Robert College, where the children of the city's elite received a western-style education. Early in life he developed a passion for the visual arts, but while at college studying architecture he decided he wanted to write. He is now Turkey's most widely read literary author.
His first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, was published in 1982. It was followed by The Silent House (1983), The White Castle (1985; his first book translated into English, in 1990), The Black Book (1990; translated 1994 and again in 2006) and The New Life (1994; translated 1997). Then, in 1998 (translated 2001) came My Name is Red, a murder mystery set in 16th-century Istanbul and narrated by multiple voices, which in 2003 won the international Impac Dublin literary award. The novel explores themes central to Pamuk's fiction: the intricacies of identity in a country that straddles east and west, sibling rivalry, the existence of doubles, the value of beauty and originality, and the anxiety of cultural influence. Snow (2002, translated 2004) was the first of Pamuk's novels to confront political extremism in contemporary Turkey, and it confirmed his standing abroad even as it divided opinion at home. Pamuk's most recent book is Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003, translated 2005), a double portrait of himself in childhood and youth, and of the place he comes from.
This interview was conducted last year over two sessions in London, with clarifications discussed by correspondence. In February, two months before the second session, Pamuk had declared in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Der Tages-Anzeiger, "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it." Since the Turkish government persists in denying the 1915 genocidal slaughter of Armenians in Turkey, and has imposed laws restricting discussion of the ongoing Kurdish conflict, Pamuk's remarks set off a campaign against him in the nationalist press.
But happier times lay ahead. On 12th October, the Swedish Academy announced that Pamuk was to be awarded the Nobel prize in literature. In its citation, it praised an author "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."
Ángel Gurría-Quintana: You've generally received a positive response to your books in Europe and the US. What is the critical reception in Turkey?
OP: The good years are over now. When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author.
ÁGQ: When you say the previous generation, who do you have in mind?
OP: The authors who felt a social responsibility; authors who felt that literature serves morality and politics. They were flat realists, not experimental. Like authors in so many poor countries, they wasted their talent on trying to serve their nation. I did not want to be like them, because even in my youth I had enjoyed Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Proust—I had never aspired to the social-realist model of Steinbeck and Gorky. The literature produced in the 1960s and 1970s was becoming outmoded, so I was welcomed as an author of the new generation.
After the mid-1990s, when my books began to sell in amounts no one in Turkey had ever dreamed of, it became clear that my honeymoon with the Turkish press and intellectuals was over. From then on, critical reception was mostly a reaction to the publicity and sales, rather than the content of my books. Now, unfortunately, I am notorious for my political comments—most of which are picked up from international interviews, and shamelessly manipulated by some Turkish nationalist journalists to make me look more radical and politically foolish than I really am.
ÁGQ: Where do you write?
OP: I have always thought the place where you sleep or live with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me. The domestic, tame daily routine makes the longing for the other world—which the imagination needs to operate—fade away. So for years I always had an office or a little place outside the house to work in. I always had different flats. Ten years ago I found a flat overlooking the Bosphorus with a view of the old city. It has, perhaps, one of the best views of Istanbul. It is a 25-minute walk from where I live. It is full of books and my desk looks out on to the view. Every day I spend, on average, some ten hours there.
ÁGQ: Ten hours a day?
OP: Yes, I'm a hard worker. People say I'm ambitious, and maybe there's truth in that. But I'm in love with what I do. I enjoy sitting at my desk like a child playing with his toys. It's essentially work, but it's also fun and games.
ÁGQ: Orhan, your namesake and the narrator of Snow, describes himself as a clerk who sits down at the same time every day. Do you have the same discipline for writing?
OP: I was underlining the clerical nature of the novelist as opposed to that of the poet, who has an immensely prestigious tradition in Turkey. To be a poet is a popular and respected thing.
ÁGQ: When you were young, you wanted to be a painter. When did your love of painting give way to your love of writing?
OP: At the age of 22. Something happened in my head—I realised that a screw was loose—and I stopped painting and immediately began writing my first novel… As far as I remember, I wanted to be a novelist before I knew what to write. In fact, when I did start writing I had two or three false starts. I still have the notebooks. But after about six months I started a major novel project that ultimately got published as Cevdet Bey and His Sons. It is essentially a family saga, like the Forsyte Saga or Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. Not long after I finished it, I began to regret having written something so outmoded, a very 19th-century novel. Around the age of 25 or 26, I began to impose on myself the idea that I should be a modern author. By the time the novel was finally published, when I was 30, my writing had become much more experimental.
ÁGQ: When you say you wanted to be more modern, experimental, did you have a model in mind?
OP: At that time, the great writers for me were no longer Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Stendhal or Thomas Mann. My heroes were Virginia Woolf and Faulkner. Now I would add Proust and Nabokov to that list.
ÁGQ: When you're experimenting with ideas, how do you choose the form of your novels? Do you start with an image, with a first sentence?
OP: There is no formula. But I make it my business not to write two novels in the same mode. I try to change everything. This is why so many readers tell me, I liked this novel of yours, it's a shame you didn't write others like it; or, I never enjoyed your novels until you wrote that one—I've heard that especially about The Black Book.
The subject matter of a book may come from various sources. In My Name is Red, I wanted to write about my ambition to become a painter. I had a false start; I began to write a monographic book focused on one painter. Then I turned the painter into various painters working together. The point of view changed, because other painters were talking. At first I was thinking of writing about a contemporary painter, but then I thought this Turkish painter might be too derivative, too influenced by the west, so I went back in time to write about miniaturists.
ÁGQ: Many novelists will never discuss a work in progress. Do you also keep that a secret?
OP: I never discuss the story. On formal occasions, when people ask what I'm writing, I have a one-sentence stock reply: it is a novel that takes place in contemporary Turkey. I open up to very few people, and only when I know they won't hurt me. What I do is talk about the gimmicks—I'm going to make a cloud speak, for instance. I like to see how people react to them. It is a childish thing. I did this a lot when writing Istanbul. My mind is like that of a little playful child, trying to show his daddy how clever he is.
ÁGQ: Critics often characterise your novels as post-modern. It seems to me, however, that you draw your narrative tricks primarily from traditional sources. You quote, for instance, from The Thousand and One Nights and other classic texts in the eastern tradition.
OP: That began with The Black Book. I went with my wife to the US in 1985, and there I first encountered the immense richness of American culture. As a Turk coming from the middle east, trying to establish himself as an author, I felt intimidated. So I regressed, went back to my "roots." I realised that my generation had to invent a modern national literature.
Borges and Calvino liberated me. The connotation of traditional Islamic literature was so reactionary, so political, and used by conservatives in such old-fashioned and foolish ways that I never thought I could do anything with that material. But once I was in the US, I realised I could go back to it with a Calvinoesque or Borgesian mind frame. I had to begin by making a strong distinction between the religious and literary connotations of Islamic literature, so that I could easily appropriate its wealth of games, gimmicks and parables. Turkey had a sophisticated tradition of highly refined, ornamental literature. But then the socially committed writers emptied our literature of its innovative content.
ÁGQ: Let's go back to before The Black Book. The White Castle is the first book where you employ a theme that recurs throughout the rest of your novels—impersonation. Why does this idea of becoming somebody else crop up so often?
OP: I have a very competitive brother, who is only 18 months older than me. In a way, he was my father—my Freudian father, so to speak. It was he who became my alter ego, the representation of authority. On the other hand, we also had a brotherly comradeship. I wrote extensively about this in Istanbul. I was a typical Turkish boy, good at soccer and enthusiastic about all sorts of games and competitions. He was very successful in school, better than me. I felt jealous towards him, and he was jealous of me too. He was the reasonable and responsible person, the one our superiors addressed. While I was paying attention to games, he paid attention to rules. We were competing all the time. It set a model. Envy, jealousy—these are heartfelt themes for me. I always worried about how much my brother's strength or success might have influenced me. This is an essential part of my spirit. I am aware of that, so I can put some distance between me and those feelings. I know they are bad, so I have a civilised person's determination to fight them. I'm not saying I'm a victim of jealousy. But this is the galaxy of nerve points I try to deal with. And of course, in the end, it becomes the subject matter of all my stories. In The White Castle, for instance, the almost sado-masochistic relationship between the two main characters is based on my relationship with my brother.
On the other hand, this theme of impersonation is reflected in the fragility Turkey feels when faced with western culture. After writing The White Castle, I realised that this jealousy—the anxiety about being influenced by someone else—resembles Turkey's position when it looks west. You know, aspiring to become westernised and then being accused of not being authentic enough. Trying to grab the spirit of Europe and then feeling guilty about the imitative drive. The ups and downs of this mood are like the relationship between competitive brothers.
ÁGQ: Do you believe the constant confrontation between Turkey's eastern and western impulses will ever be peacefully resolved?
OP: I'm an optimist. Turkey should not worry about having two spirits, belonging to two different cultures. Schizophrenia makes you intelligent. You may lose your relation with reality—I'm a fiction writer, so I don't think that's such a bad thing—but you shouldn't worry about your schizophrenia. If you worry too much about one part of you killing the other, you'll be left with a single spirit. That is worse than the sickness. This is my theory. I try to propagate it in Turkish politics, among politicians who demand that the country should have one consistent soul—that it should belong to either east or west.
ÁGQ: How does that go down in Turkey?
OP: The more the idea of a democratic, liberal Turkey is established, the more my thinking is accepted. Turkey can join the EU only with this vision. It's a way of fighting against nationalism, against the rhetoric of "us" against "them."
ÁGQ: Yet in Istanbul, the way you romanticise the city seems to mourn the loss of the Ottoman empire.
OP: I'm not mourning the Ottoman empire. I'm a westerniser. I'm pleased that westernisation took place. I'm just criticising the limited way in which the ruling elite—meaning both the bureaucracy and the new rich—had conceived of westernisation. They lacked the confidence necessary to create a national culture rich in its own symbols and rituals. They did not strive to create an Istanbul culture that would be an organic combination of east and west; they just put western and eastern things together. There was, of course, a strong local Ottoman culture, but that was fading away, little by little. What they had to do was invent a strong local culture, which would be a combination of the eastern past and the western present. I try to do the same kind of thing in my books. New generations will probably do it, and entering the EU will not destroy Turkish identity but make it flourish, and give us more freedom and self-confidence to invent a new Turkish culture.
ÁGQ: In Istanbul, however, you do seem to identify with the foreign, western gaze over your own city.
OP: But I also explain why a westernised Turkish intellectual can identify with the western gaze—the making of Istanbul is a process of identification with the west. There is always this dichotomy, and you can easily identify with the eastern anger too. Everyone is sometimes a westerner and sometimes an easterner—a combination of the two. I like Edward Said's idea in Orientalism, but since Turkey was never a colony, the romanticising of Turkey was never a problem for Turks. Western man did not humiliate the Turk in the same way he humiliated the Arab or Indian. Istanbul was invaded only for two years, so this did not leave a deep scar. What did was the loss of the Ottoman empire. So I don't have that anxious feeling that westerners look down on me. Though after the republic there was a sort of intimidation, because Turks wanted to westernise but couldn't go far enough, which left a feeling of cultural inferiority that we have to address, and which I occasionally may have.
ÁGQ: Do you believe that there is a canon, or that one should even exist? We have heard of a western canon, but what about a non-western canon?
OP: Yes, there is another canon. It should be explored, developed, shared, criticised and then accepted. Right now, the so-called eastern canon is in ruins. The glorious texts are all around, but there is no will to put them together. From the Persian classics, through to all the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese texts, these things should be assessed critically. As it is now, the canon is in the hands of western scholars. That is the centre of distribution and communication.
ÁGQ: The novel is a very western cultural form. Does it have any place in the eastern tradition?
OP: The modern novel, dissociated from the epic form, is essentially a non-oriental thing. The novelist is a person who does not belong to a community, who does not share the basic instincts of community and who is thinking and judging with a different culture than the one he is experiencing. Once his consciousness is different from that of the community he belongs to, he is an outsider. And the richness of his text comes from that outsider's voyeurism.
Once you develop the habit of looking at the world like that and writing about it in this fashion, you have the desire to disassociate from the community. This is the model I was thinking about in Snow.
ÁGQ: Snow is your most political book yet published. How did you conceive of it?
OP: When I started becoming famous in Turkey in the mid-1990s, at a time when the war against Kurdish guerrillas was strong, the old leftist authors and the new modern liberals wanted me to help them, to sign petitions—they began to ask me to do political things unrelated to my books.
Soon the establishment counterattacked with a campaign of character assassination. They began calling me names. I was very angry. After a while I thought: what if I wrote a political novel in which I explored my own dilemmas—coming from an upper-middle-class family and feeling responsible for those who had no political representation? I believed in the art of the novel. It is a strange thing how that makes you an outsider. I told myself: I will write a political novel. I started it as soon as I finished My Name is Red.
ÁGQ: Why did you set it in the small town of Kars?
OP: It is notoriously one of the coldest towns in Turkey. And one of the poorest. In the early 1980s, the whole front page of one of the major newspapers was about the poverty of Kars. Someone had calculated that you could buy the entire town for around $1m. The political climate was difficult when I wanted to go there. The vicinity of the town is mostly populated by Kurds, but the centre is a combination of Kurds, people from Azerbaijan, Turks and all other sorts. There used to be Russians and Germans too. There are religious differences as well, Shia and Sunni. The war the Turkish government was waging against the Kurdish guerrillas was so fierce that it was impossible to go as a tourist. I could not simply go as a novelist, so I asked a newspaper editor I knew for a press pass to visit the area. He is an influential editor and he personally called the mayor and the police chief to let them know I was coming.
As soon as I arrived, I visited the mayor and the police chief so that they wouldn't pick me up on the street. Actually, some of the police who didn't know I was there did pick me up, probably with the intention of torturing me. Immediately I gave names—I know the mayor, I know the chief… I was a suspect character. Because even though Turkey is theoretically a free country, any foreigner used to be suspect until about 1999. Hopefully things are much easier today.
Most of the people and places in Snow are based on a real counterpart. For instance, the local newspaper that sells 252 copies is real. I went to Kars with a camera and a video recorder. I was filming everything, and back in Istanbul I showed it to my friends. Everyone thought I was a bit crazy.
ÁGQ: What was the reaction to the book?
OP: In Turkey, both conservatives—or political Islamists—and secularists were upset. Not to the point of banning the book or hurting me. But they wrote about it in their newspapers. The secularists were upset because I wrote that the cost of being a secular radical in Turkey is that you forget you also have to be a democrat. The power of the secularists comes from the army. This destroys Turkey's democracy and culture of tolerance. Once you have so much army involvement in political culture, people lose their self-confidence and rely on the army to solve their problems. People say, the country and the economy is a mess, let's call in the army to clean it up. But as they cleaned, so did they destroy the culture of tolerance. Suspects were tortured, 100,000 people were jailed. This paves the way for military coups; there was a new one every ten years. So I was critical of the secularists for this. They also didn't like the fact that I portrayed Islamists as human beings.
The political Islamists were upset because I wrote about an Islamist who had enjoyed sex before marriage. It was that kind of simplistic thing. Islamists are always suspicious of me because I don't come from their culture, and because I have the language, attitude and even gestures of a more westernised and privileged person. They have their own problems of representation, and say, he doesn't understand us, how can he write about us anyway?
ÁGQ: Your commitment to fiction has got you into trouble. It has meant severing emotional links. It's a high price to pay.
OP: Yes, but it's a wonderful thing. I need this imaginary life. When I'm travelling, and not at my desk, I get depressed. I'm happy when I'm alone in a room and inventing. More than a commitment to the art, it is a commitment to being alone in a room. I need solitary hours at a desk with paper and a fountain pen as a person needs a pill for his health.
ÁGQ: For whom, then, are you writing?
OP: As life gets shorter, you ask yourself that question more often. I've written seven novels. I would love to write another seven before I die. But then, life is short. What about enjoying it more? Sometimes I have to really force myself. Why am I doing it? What is the meaning of all of it? First, as I said, it's an instinct to be alone in a room. Second, there's an almost boyish competitive side in me that wants to attempt to write a nice book again. I believe less and less in eternity for authors. We are reading very few of the books written 200 years ago. Things are changing so fast that today's books will probably be forgotten in 100 years. In 200 years, perhaps five books written today will be alive. Am I writing one of those five? But is that the meaning of writing? Why should I be worrying about being read in 200 years? Shouldn't I be worried about living more? I think of all these things, and I continue to write. I don't know why. But I never give up. This belief that your books will have an effect in the future is the only consolation you have in this life.
ÁGQ: You are a bestselling author in Turkey, but your sales abroad outnumber those at home. You have been translated into 40 languages. Do you now think about a wider global readership when writing?
OP: I am aware that my audience is no longer an exclusively national one. But even when I began writing, I may have been reaching for a wider group of readers. My father used to say behind the backs of some of his Turkish author friends that they were only addressing the national audience. There is a problem of being aware of one's readership, whether it is national or international. I cannot avoid this problem now. My last two books averaged more than half a million readers over the world. I cannot deny that I am aware of their existence. On the other hand, I never feel that I do things to satisfy them. I also believe that my readers would sense it if I did. I've made it my business, from the very beginning, that whenever I sense a reader's expectations I run away. Even the composition of my sentences—I prepare the reader for something and then I surprise him. Perhaps that's why I love long sentences.
ÁGQ: Istanbul conveys the sense that you have always been a lonely figure. You are certainly alone as a writer in Turkey today. You grew up, and continue to live, in a world from which you are detached.
OP: Although I was raised in a crowded family and taught to cherish the community, I later acquired an impulse to break away. There is a self-destructive side to me, and in bouts of fury I do things that cut me off from the pleasant company of the community. Early in life I realised that the community kills my imagination. I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work. And then I'm happy. But being a Turk, after a while I need the consoling tenderness of the community, which I may have destroyed. Istanbul destroyed my relationship with my mother—we don't see each other any more. And I hardly ever see my brother. My relationship with the Turkish public, because of my recent comments, is also difficult.
ÁGQ: How Turkish do you feel yourself to be, then?
OP: First, I'm a born Turk. I'm happy with that. Internationally, I am perceived to be more Turkish than I actually see myself. I am known as a Turkish author. When Proust writes about love, he is seen as talking about universal love. But when I wrote about love, especially at the beginning, people would say that I was writing about Turkish love. When my work began to be translated, Turks were proud of it. They claimed me as their own. I became more of a Turk for them. Once you get to be internationally known, your Turkishness is underlined first internationally, then by Turks themselves, who reclaim you. Your sense of national identity becomes something that others manipulate. It is imposed by other people. Now they are more worried about the international representation of Turkey than about my art. This causes problems in my country. Through what they read in the popular press, a lot of people who don't know my books are beginning to worry about what I say to the outside world about Turkey. Literature is made of good and bad, demons and angels, and more and more they are only worried about my demons.
