by Matt Hanson

originally published in Flak Magazine

            A poet or novelist is in a precarious position, socially speaking. Scribblers and sages tear their hair out nightly to try and fashion something memorable within the social whirlpool. Art cannot change the world. The sun shines on the just and the unjust alike, the bad sleep well, and no prose piece or snatch of song is going to change this for long. To make matters worse, words are notoriously tenuous, being small pieces of experience and intellect torn out from the root and laid out for all to see. Impractical though it is, the world needs this more than it may wish to admit. 

            It's not too surprising that wordsmiths run afowl of the authorities. Plato did, after all, ban poets from his ideal state. Franco's forces took to the streets shouting "death to the intellect! Long live death!" The list of persecuted and executed artists stretches from here to eternity. The near casualties of Power, local and international, make up a long, sad list — Thomas Paine missed execution by a hair, Voltaire banished to the Bastille, Lorca shot in the back of the head in fascist Grenada. It's easy to get discouraged. We have been given ample reason — as readers, Americans and citizens of the world — to be intimately aware of what nationalism, theocracy, and tribalism can do to those who choose to raise their voice. What we have in the case of Turkey's Orhan Pamuk is a fresh instance of a victory. 

            It all started in February 2005 in an interview with a Swiss magazine where he referred to the 1915 Armenian genocide, where "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it." Four months later, Turkey introduced Article 301 to its laws, stating that any Turk who explicitly insulted Turkishness would be subject to imprisonment. Paumk was charged retroactively. Because of this, his case did not recieve approval, and was formally dropped — to an extent. His accusation of having "insulted Turkishness" remained in play. The European Union, Amnesty International, and several of the world's most respected writers began to make their disapproval known. Turkey's justice ministry decided not to re-open the case on Jan. 22, 2006, which probably had a little to do with the fact that it was going to be investigated by the EU as part of Turkey's bid for entry within the week. 

            Eight months later, Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize. 

            Reading him, it's easy to see why. He writes in lush, vivid, circuitous examples of personal (and necessarily political) negotiation. Characters wander labyrinthine cities, among the snow-shrouded statues of Kemal Ataturk, seeking a transcendent encounter of love or friendship. He loves to tell the story that grows out of itself. His puzzles wrap around themselves as the reader slowly uncovers them. Characters lose people and words the way we lose daylight at evening time. In the hands of a lesser writer, this would be cause enough to chuck the book outright in a frazzle. Pamuk makes you feel like you're dreaming. His books play with your mind without putting you off. It's a little like Borges (but not as ethereal), a little like Kafka (but not as forbidding) and a lot like Garcia Marquez, but his magic takes a soft tack from surrealism. 

            His epigraphs (one of the telling signs of a writer's philosophy) are just as comfortably taken from Sufi mysticism, the Koran, Robert Browning, or Flaubert. As he said himself, in strong English, in his post-Nobel interview, culture itself is a mix. The Black Book has already been claimed by the people of Turkey — a runaway bestseller! — as The New Life had been claimed before that. There's something undeniable and unrelenting about a popular author breaking through into the culture in such a way. It's unfortunate that both novels were originally written quite awhile ago, and have been slowly unveiled in translation over the past few years. 

            Orhan Pamuk is an inspiring example of an unbowed scribbler trying to look his country, his history, and his spirit full in the face. It's difficult to speak of talent or genius in a materialistic age, like the one proliferating constantly everywhere. The novels of Orhan Pamuk are not merely cultural productions, or manifestations of social discharge. The same country that gobbled up his books when they first appeared in the early ninties contains reactionary elements which clamour for his punishment. The nation of Turkey doesn't write his words for him any more than his pen does. And as for the much ballyhooed "death of the author", well, it might be more worthwhile to pay suitable attention to a very conspicuously living one. In January 2007 Paumk was one of nine Turks who had also faced trial under article 301 to have armored guards assigned to him. 

            William Carlos Williams once wrote that

it is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably everyday

for lack

of what is found there. 

            As Pamuk himself said, as part of his Nobel prize acceptance speech: 

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. 

            This is the mix of culture, the tension of the international, and the bread and butter of civilization. The overlap and dialectic of our partitioned planet. It's exactly what the world needs in a writer right now. Let's hope he remains alive long enough to keep saying it. Art doesn't change the world, until it does.