While reading Pamukh

January 30th, 2008 | by Vijayaraghav |

 

 

While reading Pamukh   

 

For the longest time the bookshelves creaked and groaned.  I was lying on the bed in the back room, a book in my hand, watching the naked light-bulb sway above me.  That my library should conspire in the earthquake’s wrath.  This frightened me.  I decided to punish my library.  This is Pamukh’s words from his beautiful essay “How I got rid of some of my books”.  I was just going through his latest book Other Colors.  After reading this I got a mad idea of punishing my bookshelf by taking out some of his books.  I took out some and punished my bookshelf with some amount of uneasiness because I can’t visualize my bookshelf without his books.  It has become a part of my life and my thinking process. 

 

No wonder I have decided to write about him in this blog.  It will be a pleasure for each and every reader or writer to know about his works and his passion. The main thing is the inspiration you get  from  his words when he bequeath it to the entire generation with  unmatched devotion. 

 

Orhan Pamukh won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006 December.  From December 2006 onwards I was searching for his books and got hold of some.  I consider him as my best writer and enjoyed reading his books with great admiration.   

 

In his book about his Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk describes how, as a young man, he was enraptured by a magnificent volume of early 19th century engravings depicting the erstwhile capital of the vast Ottoman Empire. The artist was German, embodying European landscape painting techniques and outlook — that combination of daydreaming and curiosity about the world that we call the picturesque and that was still alien to Turkish culture. But it was with genuine Istanbulite knowledge that the painter, after many years working in the city, saw the palaces, streets, throngs and the play of light on the Bosporus waters. He had to be both Easterner — to understand what he was seeing — and Westerner to have the method to portray it. Orhan Pamuk is describing here his own double view of reality, where the person we identify with can at any moment meet himself as a stranger, advancing from another direction, from another life or another culture. 

 

In My Name is Red, Pamuk uses a sultan’s painters of miniatures in 1590s Istanbul to stage a conflict between Western individualism and Eastern traditionalism. As the novel presents it, the classic Muslim standpoint is that paintings must illustrate familiar stories. To portray only what the eye sees in nature is a blasphemy. Ideally, one should paint from memory, painting the essence of the object and not its appearance, discarding everything extraneous and elevating oneself to Allah’s view of the world. To leave traces in the work that can be identified as personal style was seen by the ancient masters as proof of ineptitude. For them, Western portraiture expressed a sinful desire to show pride before God. Anyone who would allow himself to be thus portrayed, believes himself to be singularly important and positions himself at the world’s centre, as does the deliberately original artist with his style. Such a person will no longer bow to authorities but assumes the right to doubt everything and anything. That unique brushstroke, when the painter’s hand obeys only his gaze, is a movement that threatens to topple every holy truth. He questions whether the unique stroke actually exists. Do not both love and art imply the imitation of gestures we have seen in others? 

 

In Pamuk’s major work, The Black Book, civilization appears as a boundless plagiarism where people flee into each other’s imagined lives to be free from themselves and experience love. You become what you describe. The Black Book is an odyssey through a night-time Istanbul full of genies and semi-beings, a city where invented stories attract more credibility than the true, and truth is a shadow on the wall. A dream world and a metaphor for the cosmos. Man’s helpless need for narration has seldom been described more tellingly. Like Oscar Wilde pointing out that the Thames fog was imitating Turner’s painting, Pamuk shows that the real Istanbul exists only because of its fabulists.  

 

In his novel Snow, Pamuk travels to a forgotten town on a remote Turkish border. This displacement, no less drastic than a journey from Earth to Moon, gives him the opportunity to take a geological core sample of all levels of Turkish society, from the loyal state establishment to disappointed leftist intellectuals, Islamic fundamentalists, Kurds and the mystically suicidal girls fighting for the right to wear veils. In the centre of the story stands a Western-influenced poet looking for a way back from exile. Snow has been called a political novel, but more than the expression of an opinion, it is, like Dostoyevsky’s Demons, a criticism of politics and its impact on the human mind. The fanatic’s conviction stems from blindness to the motivations of others. Against this, Pamuk puts the writer’s emphatic identification with all his figures, beyond good and evil. The inherent irony of the events is the only judgment that he passes. The novel’s charismatic fundamentalist, who terrifies the authorities and bewitches the woman the poet wants to love — on a mystic level, their struggle is Orpheus’s defeat by Dionysus — this death-defying terrorist first of all strives to have his threats against Europe published in one of the big German newspapers so that the West will pay him notice. In the end, Snow is a book about the right to uncertainty and vacillation, about love as a lifelong defeat and about the longing for God. 

 

The marvelous among all is his Nobel lecture which gave us an aura of experiencing his splendid mind. Given below are the excerpts from his Nobel lecture which I consider as a valuable input for all of us. 

 

To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.The writer’s secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love – and I understand it, too. In my novel, My Name is Red, when I wrote about the old Persian miniaturists who had drawn the same horse with the same passion for so many years, memorizing each stroke, that they could recreate that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew I was talking about the writing profession, and my own life.

 

If a writer is to tell his own story – tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people – if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art – this craft – he must first have been given some hope. The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favors’ the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing – when he thinks his story is only his story – it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him stories, images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination – that another power has found them and generously presented them to me. 

 

To become a writer, patience and toil are not enough: we must first feel compelled to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary, everyday life, and shut ourselves up in a room. We wish for patience and hope so that we can create a deep world in our writing. But the desire to shut oneself up in a room is what pushes us into action. I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who – wherever they are in the world, in the East or in the West – cut themselves off from society, and shut themselves up with their books in their room. The starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his room with his books. 

 

But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people’s stories, other people’s books, other people’s words, the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people’s stories and books. 

 

As for my place in the world – in life, as in literature, my basic feeling was that I was ‘not in the centre’. In the centre of the world, there was a life richer and more exciting than our own, and with all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. Today I think that I share this feeling with most people in the world. In the same way, there was a world literature, and its centre, too, was very far away from me. Actually what I had in mind was Western, not world, literature, and we Turks were outside it.  

 

For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing. 

 

A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader is visiting a world at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end to hone his craft – to create a world – if he uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he knows it or not, putting a great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble each other, that others carry wounds like mine – which they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble each other. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a centre. 

 

I know from experience that the great majority of people on this earth live with these same feelings, and that many suffer from an even deeper sense of insufficiency, lack of security and sense of degradation, than I do. Yes, the greatest dilemmas facing humanity are still landlessness, homelessness, and hunger … But today our televisions and newspapers tell us about these fundamental problems more quickly and more simply than literature can ever do. What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kind … Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies and nations outside the Western world – and I can identify with them easily – succumbing to fears that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their fears of humiliation and their sensitivities. I also know that in the West – a world with which I can identify with the same ease – nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid. 

 

We all give too much importance to the idea of a world with a centre. Whereas the thing that compels us to shut ourselves up to write in our rooms for years on end is a faith in the opposite; the belief that one day our writings will be read and understood, because people all the world over resemble each other. But this, as I know from my own and my father’s writing, is a troubled optimism, scarred by the anger of being consigned to the margins, of being left outside. The love and hate that Dostoyevsky felt towards the West all his life – I have felt this too, on many occasions. But if I have grasped an essential truth, if I have cause for optimism, it is because I have traveled with this great writer through his love-hate relationship with the West, to behold the other world he has built on the other side.

 

All writers who have devoted their lives to this task know this reality: whatever our original purpose, the world that we create after years and years of hopeful writing, will, in the end, move to other very different places. It will take us far away from the table at which we have worked with sadness or anger, take us to the other side of that sadness and anger, into another world. Could my father have not reached such a world himself? Like the land that slowly begins to take shape, slowly rising from the mist in all its colors like an island after a long sea journey, this other world enchants us.  

 

What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man: for me the centre of the world is Istanbul. This is not just because I have lived there all my life, but because, for the last 33 years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days and its nights, making them part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived. That was when all these people and streets, objects and buildings would seem to begin to talk amongst themselves, and begin to interact in ways I had not anticipated, as if they lived not just in my imagination or my books, but for themselves. This world that I had created like a man digging a well with a needle would then seem truer than all else. 

 

As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf.  

 

I write because it is exciting to turn all of life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy. 

 

Though it took me almost 5 pages to overload his emotions,  I feel this is going to be valuable for all of you. 

 

All the best.