Orhan Pamuk

He couldn’t be anything else but a writer. Tall, bespectacled, slightly unease with – or at least at an angle to – his environment, Turkey’s leading novelist and 2003 IMPAC literary award winner Orhan Pamuk places his journal to one side and settles into his chair in the Shelbourne tea-rooms like a jigsaw piece in the wrong puzzle. English being his second language, his speech patterns have a somewhat formal aspect, although he’s not beyond the odd stab at wry humour, especially when it comes to politics.

The previous night Pamuk had received his award and a cheque for 75,000 euros (a further 25,000 going to translator Erdag M. Goknar) for his sixth novel My Name Is Red. The book has become something of an international literary event since its publication in Turkey in 1998 and the rest of the world three years later, a topic of dinner party conversation on a par with to Memoirs of A Geisha or The Secret History, or the work to which it has most frequently been compared, Umberto Eco’s The Name Of The Rose.

Like Eco’s masterpiece, My Name Is Red is a murder mystery in an arcane setting, in this case 16th century Constantinople under the Ottoman Empire, and it tells the story of Black, a failed illustrator who returns to the city from a 12 year exile in the provinces after being rejected by his beautiful cousin Shekure. The girl’s father is involved in the compilation of an illuminated book for the sultan, but the book’s use of realistic Renaissance techniques inflames Islamic fundamentalist hatred for western art, resulting in one of the illustrators being murdered. Black finds himself descending into the city’s demimonde of coffee houses trying to identify the killer while also attempting to woo back his former love. More than that though, the book plays on themes such as the schism in Turkey’s national identity, the devaluing of cultural as well as monetary currency, the notion of idiosyncratic style as a defect in art, plus the dynamics of love and family.

Five years in the writing, My Name Is Red is a labyrinthine, multi-voiced tale, but not a difficult one. Pamuk is above all a patient writer, but he’s also versatile, pulling off impressive feats of narrative ventriloquism expressed in prose that can veer from the poised and prudent to the blue-aired bawdy. His work is the product of a country that crackles with the electricity of contradiction: between east and west, secular and Islamic, ancient and modern, operating out of a modern consciousness that has spent the last few decades trying to suppress its own history.

"As Freud says, what is suppressed comes back," Pamuk has written. "I sometimes make a joke and say I am that which comes back."

Peter Murphy: When and why did you decide to become a writer?

Orhan Pamuk: It’s not that I had something inside me that I had to express; it’s more that between seven and 22 I wanted first of all to be a painter, this idea of being alone in a place, either with colour or paper. Then at 22, just like that, I switched to writing novels. I can’t do an office job. I have to be independent, I have to be alone in a room like a child playing with his toys; I have to play with this material, that is why I became a writer. Once you begin doing that . . . I walk around writing very stupid things in these notebooks, not necessarily anything meaningful, and that’s sort of like taking a pill, that makes me happy, and if I don’t do that for one or two days I’m unbalanced.

PM: So it’s almost a neurosis.

OP: It’s not so dramatic. If I travel with people, after a while I have to leave them and go to a lonely place. I started playing with the words, reading and writing, then I found the subjects, but the essential motivation is to be alone in a room with paper. I can write describing this (table) or writing about what I’m thinking, any silly thing, but I have to do it. It starts with the fun; then you try to master the art.

PM: Last night you received the IMPAC award, but you’ve rejected some of the Turkish government’s highest cultural accolades on the grounds that there is no way you reconcile yourself with a regime that puts authors in jail. Have you had first hand experience of censorship over the course of your career?

OP: Not censorship. Self-censorship perhaps. Let me put it this way. Turkey is a semi-democracy. (To) censor is where you write your book and then show it to an authority before publishing – we don’t have that. We publish it, but then you may be in trouble. If you want to avoid trouble you make a by-pass, walk around it. But now that I’m a known author, internationally and in Turkey, there isn’t much that I cannot write in my fiction. In my journalistic political commentary, which I do two or three times a year, that’s walking on a tightrope, but that’s what makes it interesting – maybe I wouldn’t be writing about these issues if everything was free to write about anyway.

The western outsider’s attitude to democracy, censorship, book banning, is a bit naïve and romantic. Most of the time people think, "Oh, are there subjects that you cannot write about?" It’s not like that. I can perfectly write my books in my own way, but there are of course subjects someone may go to jail with. But these are the subjects that, once they are banned, then authors are angry and want to move to those murky waters, dangerous waters. Outsiders think that it’s the other way around. In fact, authors always push themselves to those forbidden subjects, pushing the limits, enlarging the boundaries of freedom.

PM: That’s even more romantic.

OP: Yeah, it’s more romantic in a way, but it’s not that I fancy writing about my rose garden but we cannot have roses in Turkey, it’s not like that. You learn that you cannot write about rose gardens, and then (think), "Oh, I will write about roses, they’re very interesting." And let us not forget that Dostoyevsky was censored; he wrote all these wonderful novels while under the political repression in the Tsar’s Russia. The problem comes in Turkey if you’re not too famous, an unknown political commentator.

PM: Although hardly on the same scale, self-censorship has become more of an issue in the west since September 11. It’s much harder to get a movie made or a book published that deals with subjects such as radical fundamentalism or terrorism.

OP: I wrote a political novel about Islamist fundamentalists, trying to understand it, not seeing them as terrorists, which will come out both here and in the United States in a year. I wonder what will happen.

PM: Do you think that the European and American success of a book like My Name Is Red can help establish a climate of understanding or at least increased awareness of Eastern or Islamic culture?

OP: It can do that, but that’s not why I write. First of all, Turkish awareness of this Ottoman past was as empty as Western awareness, so when I wrote about these subjects, very little people knew all the details. Often I’ve been asked this question: "Well, your Turkish audience would be more understanding of your books because they have access, but what about your Dutch reader?" (And I say) "No, no, no, Turkish readers are as ignorant about the Ottoman past, there’s almost no difference."

So secularised modern republican Turks also had a simplistic and vulgar representation of the Ottoman past as Islamic, backward and old-fashioned, and they wanted to be European or Occidentalists. My point being, interest in this vast, very delicate subject doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be an Islamist or whatever. It’s not the subject itself but the way you look at it that is interesting. In fact, the whole 30 or 40 years of the Turkish republic was forgetting and suppressing the Islamic and Ottoman past, and my joke is that Freud says what is suppressed comes back in disguise, and I’m that, or my books (are), but in a post-modern cloak. If I would be coming back with a religious face, saying, "Oh, what a lovely past we had", no one would like it. But with this post-modern form and also international recognition, I can come back.

PM: The post-modernist tag has stayed with you, but some of your descriptive passages are straight out of 19th century literature. Also, the narrative devices in My Name Is Red are quite traditional.

OP: I agree the structure of the book is a bit playful. The narrative voice is the voice of a comfortable 19th century novelist – leisurely, relaxed, humourous. The book has that aspect, but this is the happiest book I ever wrote. While the story may not have a happy ending, the colours, the self-confident embracing of the details of life, the acceptance of how life is, these are aspects of the book that make it a happier book than my other problematical and nervous books.

PM: In some of its explorations of art theory, the book addresses differences between western notions of individual style and the Islamic idea of the artist as an instrument of Allah, to the point where a blind master could draw from memory. It reminded me of the medieval monks in The Name Of The Rose, their desire to be transparent, a vessel for the creative or holy spirit.

OP: The distinction is not between east and west but between modernity and medieval.

PM: Sam Shepherd once said that the place for an artist to be is right in the middle of a contradiction. Turkish culture seems suspended between absolutes; secular and Islamic, military and religious.

OP: What I have learned from writers like Borges and Calvino is these things look contradictory if you have a Hegelian view of history, which says every way of seeing and writing things can necessarily be related to a stage of history. But look at all these texts, traditional or modern, conservative or experimental – in a way they are all ways of doing things unrelated to each other; just pick out whatever you like and use them for your purposes, then all these ideas of contradictions between east and west, old and new, disappear. These things that I use from various sources, I use them for my purposes and do not see any contradiction where others see.

PM: Do you feel as a writer that you’re trying to put order on your own internal universe?

OP: Well, the theory of the novel says so, but that’s not my instinct when I write a novel. A story is not a solution to the contradictory things in life. The solution to a book I have in mind is putting a shape to the imaginary galaxy of ideas. The reality is more complicated.

PM: How did elements of your own family history make it into what is essentially an historical novel?

OP: I began writing this book about a painter, but then realised that I don’t want this novel to be contemporary, but to be more pure, to go back to essentials and set the story in the 16th century. Then my attempts turned out to be more scholarly, reading other books, and I felt that the book was getting away from me, getting to be more artificial, more theoretical. So I tried to reclaim the book and had the story of me, my older brother and my mother, very autobiographical, including the names. My father used to disappear for say, two years, not to go to war with Persians but to the cafes of Paris in the ’50s. And so we had this protective mother and two siblings fighting with each other. That delicate relationship is almost scene-by-scene copied from my life, from reality, so I it was interesting to put my autobiography in a novel set in the 16th century.

PM: How did your family deal with it?

OP: My brother was a bit hurt, but my mother liked it. Although she didn’t like the sexy scenes!

PM: Did writing from the point of view as a painter give you a license to include every idea you’d ever had about the aesthetics of art?

OP: Yes, I’m that kind of person; I like deep encyclopaedic novels or ambitious big novels like Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, in which the story unfolds slowly. The desire to gratify the reader is not imminent; the story has its own dignity so to speak. But in the long run these major encyclopaedic books gratify the reader in a more complex manner, giving a sense of time, and as you read these books you feel the richness of life and the author’s determined acceptance of it. My models are those kind of books.

PM: David Remnick described you in the New Yorker last year as "a novelist who holds a position in Turkey rather like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s in Colombia – he is the house postmodernist". I thought that was interesting given that Turkish people often invoke the spectre of South American countries as examples of what they could become if the economy fails. Just a few months ago the IMF granted Turkey a 17 billion bailout – is the dread of debt still looming large over the country?

OP: It is. Look, the state and the country owe the International Financial System 100 billion dollars. With that shadow darkening the country, that will be a problem for Turkey for the oncoming decade. That pessimistic moment at the end of November has passed away, but not radically. It’s a good moment in the Turkish economy because the economy is booming, but that debt should be paid if you don’t want to be like Argentina, and the country understands that. And it’s hard to manage a democracy where the expectations are so high while you cannot satisfy them with this debt. The irony of it is everyone talks about, "Let’s not be like Argentina" but poor Argentina did not have an example before that!

PM: What did you make of the Islamist idea that one of the reasons the EU rejected Turkey last year is because it would mean the European superstate would be bordered with Syria, Iraq and Iran – a "bad neighbourhood"?

OP: First, they did not reject Turkey, but they are saying, rightfully, "Look, if you want to join, there is so much homework to do with your human rights record, shape your economy, keep your minorities well," and so forth. So Turkey is lagging behind and doesn’t do these things fast enough, it doesn’t show enough will that it is committed to do these things although it gives lip service. If Turkey had done these things and was rejected, then I would be looking for excuses. So I don’t want to argue that there are prejudiced people in Europe who don’t want Turkey, there may be these people, but I can’t argue with these people because there are other reasons to refuse Turkey, which are right.

PM: In a piece published in The Guardian in September 2001, you wrote about the idea that America, through a kind of obliviousness to its own power and wealth, rubs the noses of poorer nations in their own humiliation. You said, "Nothing can fuel support for ‘Islamists’ who throw nitric acid at women because they reveal their faces as much as the west’s failure to understand the damned of the world."

OP: You know, I don’t want to judge the United States as one single unity. I’d rather make a harsh statement about the Bush government and their agenda of bullying around poorer nations, bombing them with the idea of proving to the rest of the world the hegemony and power of the United States, and also addressing the American voters, saying, "I’m conservative and a nationalist and a fighter and a Rambo – give me votes." I think that the essence of the whole project is to address the nationalistic sentiments of the American people and to sharpen the antagonism between confused and lesser people of the Third World nations, be they Islamic people or Buddhists or Chinese or Russians. And also to prove to the world that America is an unsurpassed patron of the world militarily and politically and doesn’t care about the United Nations and the objections of Europe. And they are successfully doing that; the war (on Iraq) was all about that.

PM: How aware were Turkish people of western dissent against the attacks on Iraq, and how cowed many people feel in a climate where to voice any protest is to be labelled either unpatriotic or anti-American?

OP: The dissenting voices are not voices, they are scared whispers; no one hears them. They are not taking risks. Turkish people are not aware of anything that the American intellectuals do, maybe some Turkish intellectuals are, but essentially there is resentment towards the United States because it is attacking a neighbour country – which Turks don’t have any sympathy with – but they don’t want to go into this war.

PM: The war on Iraq seemed to highlight a brazen disregard for the will of the people on the part of the British and Irish governments.

OP: I think one respect of it is that, although there is this grand idea of the European Union as a political umbrella, it’s not strong enough, so all these European nations faced with the Unites States, they feel alone. In fact, they feel happy when they have some recognition from Bush or Powell, backslapping, and this is the result of the fact that the United States is the major power in the world, the Cold War is dead, and there is not another centre of power where other nations question America’s hegemony. So although the peoples of these countries resent the United States, their prime ministers feel a dilemma that if they listen to their own people they suspect that economically, militarily and politically, the United States will have revenge and then even their voters would not sympathise with them.

Demands of the voters are always self contradictory – they want their prime ministers to resist this war, but after two months they also might want their prime minister help to deliver a wonderful economic relationship with the United States. So that’s why I use the term "resentment". All the nations of the world, even the British or Irish, have a resentment for the United States, while on the other hand it’s not a systematic way of thinking. So although I have no sympathy with that betrayal – it was an ugly thing done by Blair for example – in the long run he had an eye for the sentiments of the people.

PM: So the voters need to put their monies where their mouths are.

OP: Yeah, but they never do that!