Turning Novel Ideas Into Inhabitable Worlds

The Nobel laureate, with Georgetown's John DeGioia, says the novelist speaks for "those who cannot speak for themselves, whose anger is never heard." (By Michael Williamson -- The Washington Post)

"Contrary to what most people assume," he said, "one's politics as a novelist have nothing to do with the societies, parties and groups to which one might belong, or even dedication to any political cause. A novelist's politics arise from his imagination -- his ability to imagine himself as someone else." This "makes him a spokesman for those who cannot speak for themselves, whose anger is never heard and whose words are suppressed."

A bit later, Pamuk made the context for all this more specific.

"Now we are approaching the subject of the East-West question," he said. "Journalists are exceedingly fond of it. But when I see the connotations it carries in some parts of the Western press, I'm inclined to think that it would be better not to speak of the East-West question at all. Because most of the time it carries an assumption that the poor countries of the East should defer to everything the West and the United States might happen to propose."

Pamuk was brought up in a well-to-do Turkish family whose intellectual and cultural inclinations were toward Europe, but that doesn't mean he can't understand his country's traditionalists. He talked about Turkey's early-20th-century impulse toward "westernizing reforms" as something that sent a message to many that their culture was "defective."

This message "gives rise to a very deep and confused emotion: shame," he said. "Whenever a people feels deeply humiliated, we can expect to see a proud nationalism rising to the surface."

Pamuk thinks novels are our best hope to understand the unique history of other peoples.

"Obviously we cannot hope to come to grips with matters this deep merely by reading newspapers and magazines or by watching television," he said.

Near the end of his talk, the novelist spoke of "a vision that I entertain from time to time." Sometimes, he said, he tries to "conjure up one by one a multitude of readers hidden away in corners, nestled in their armchairs with their novels."

Then, before his eyes, "thousands, tens of thousands of readers will take shape, stretching far and wide, across the streets of the city, and as they read, they dream the author's dream, imagine his heroes into being and see his world. So now these readers, like the author himself, try to imagine 'the other' -- they are putting themselves in another's place."

By the end of this vision, Pamuk said, he sees his novel readers as "an entire nation . . . imagining itself into being."