Strangely enough I just got this email from my Dad. Must be 'cause I mentioned to my mum the other day that I was reading Snow. I have to say that I don't especially agree with a lot of what is in the article (although he is arguing the same side as me) but I thought it might be of interest:
"Thought this would be of interest to you. It was sent to me by a chap who
was on holiday with us. He saw it in the Wall Street Journal/
Read this article in today’s Wall Street Journal. Having read Pamuk’s
Istanbul, I did not really like it. This article reflects my exact sentiment
about the latest Nobel Prize winner for literature.
By Melik Kaylan (Wall Street Journal)
When the Turkish controversial (and novelist) Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel
Prize for literature, no doubt the awarding committee felt the usual frisson
of delight as they watched the world quarrel, yet again, about their choice.
They certainly know how to push buttons. Last year, they chose Harold
Pinter, who had written nothing of consequence for decades. Instead he’d
turned his life into an extended political rant against the US, and that
clearly appealed to the Swedes. The award itself, one might conclude, became
an act of agitprop. Still, in his heyday, Mr. Pinter did do great things for
the language and literature of theatre, no matter now long ago. So what has
Orhan Pamuk done?
If the Nobel jurists, in awarding their prize, droned rather opaquely about
Mr. Pamuk’s qualities – he has “discovered new symbols for the clash and
interlacing of cultures” – who can blame the committee? I have read Mr.
Pamuk’s novels in both English and Turkish and I couldn’t tell you now, or
even while reading, what happens in most of them. Mine is scarcely a unique
reaction. Maureen Freely, one of his translators, cheerfully avowed in a
recent interview that you need a good memory to follow the plot of “The
Black book.” Or did she mean “My name is Red,” in which a coin, a tree, dog
and a dead man (among others) internarrate an impenetrable mystery over
hundreds of pages? She could equally have meant “he White Castle” – Kafka,
any one? - where the sultan’s chief engineer tries, with Sisyphean
longueurs, to relocate a giant cannon up a hill for an entire book. I
believe that’s what happens. You’re really not supposed to know. You are
only the reader. The text refers to itself and to other texts; we are merely
eavesdroppers. Horace Engdahl, the Nobel Committee’s permanent secretary,
has commented fearlessly about his own preferred criterion for selection,
namely, “literature that has witnessed reality.” Reality?
All of which, one might say, adds up to the literary equivalent of the Enron
Syndrome: Nobody knows what’s going on but they’re in the temple of
smartness and too ashamed to admit their stupidity before the next guy. Mr.
Pamuk’s obscuration is the more impressive for being utterly beyond one’s
ken; the percipient Nobel selector compliments himself by discerning the
“reality” we cannot.
The pity of it all is that Turkey desperately lacks a writer to explain
itself to the world. Deplored by other Muslims for being too Western, and by
the West for being neither Iran nor Switzerland, Turks remain a worrisome
mystery to others. In “Snow,” his last fiction work, Mr. Pamuk talks most
clearly about contemporary Turkey, with its religious-secular-ethnic rifts,
but he does so with so much Kafka/Borges/post-Theory tomfoolery that it
reveals more his literary ambitions that his country.
Which is hwy his political adventures ring so false. Some months ago, he was
prosecuted and subsequently acquitted of the crime of “insulting
Turkishness” for talking publicly about the mass deaths of Armenians and
Kurds in years past –something that, as he sees it, nobody else in Turkey
dares to do. Here then is Mr. Engdahl’s “witnessed reality”: It has nothing
to do with literary quality, everything to do with politics. Trouble is, all
Turks already know and talk about these issues; and for many Americans,
that’s all they know about Turkey. (one wonders how well Mr. Pamuk would be
tolerated if he “insulted: Iraqis, or Russians, or Syrians, or Iranians, as
an inhabitants of those neighboring countries.) So, many Turks long ago
realized that Orhan Pamuk writes in Turkish for foreign plaudits. He has
taught anyone anything they didn’t already know, but he has made precisely
the right noise that the “progressive” arbiters of taste in Europe like to
hear. And it flatters their own semi-informed sense of activism to reward
him for it.
(Mr. Kaylan, born in Istanbul, is a writer in New York.)"
