Turning Novel Ideas Into Inhabitable Worlds
Orhan Pamuk, Honored by Georgetown, Speaks of a Power Inherent on the Page

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 30, 2007; C01

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk gave an impassioned political speech yesterday at Georgetown University -- but it wasn't the overt kind Washington audiences are used to hearing.

The 2006 Nobel laureate, here to receive an honorary degree on what happened to be the 84th birthday of the Turkish Republic, said not a word about his country's treatment of Armenians or Kurds, the subject that got him arrested in 2005 for the "public denigrating of Turkish identity." (The charge eventually was dropped.)

Nor did he mention the war in Iraq, though he told a New York audience last year that "the heartless and tyrannical murder of almost a hundred thousand people has brought neither peace nor democracy" to that country but "has served to ignite nationalist anti-Western anger."

Instead, Pamuk talked of the "literary globalization of the world" and outlined the way the novelist's imagination -- when employed to evoke "the other, the stranger, the enemy that resonates inside each of our heads" -- can be a powerful, liberating force.

Late afternoon sunlight turned Gaston Hall's stained glass a golden red as Georgetown made Pamuk a doctor of humane letters in a full-pomp ceremony. Provost James O'Donnell welcomed him back as "an old friend." Pamuk first spoke at Georgetown in 2002, when all entering freshmen were required to read "My Name Is Red," his novel about the 16th-century clash between Eastern and Western ways of seeing and painting.

President John DeGioia introduced him by noting that "just as Turkey links and bridges Europe and Asia, Orhan Pamuk's work often touches on the encounter between East and West, between tradition and modernism, between the European and the Islamic."

Pamuk, 55, whose latest book is a collection of short pieces called "Other Colors," began by describing himself as a kind of literary hermit. "When I think of a writer, I think of a person who locks himself up in a room," he said, and patiently builds bridges of words to express himself, "just like a mason builds bridges with stones."

Then he talked about the research he did for his 2002 novel "Snow," which took him out of his room to Frankfurt, Germany, and the remote Turkish city of Kars.

Both are places inhabited by Ka, the protagonist of "Snow." Wanting to better know Ka and the people he would encounter, Pamuk "roamed around where Frankfurt's Turks have made their homes" and explored Kars "street by street, shop by shop," conversing with, among others, "the unemployed men who spend their time in coffeehouses without even the hope of ever finding another job."

He was telling the story, he explained, as a way into a subject he considers central to the art of the novel: How does a writer transform the "other" into someone with whom both he and his readers can identify? How can a novelist fully imagine "this creature . . . who is nothing like us, who addresses our most primitive hatreds, fears and anxieties" -- and by doing so, escape "the confines of his self"?

Here comes the political part.

Because evoking "the other" is -- by Pamuk's definition -- an inherently political act.

"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."