[BRIEF] Orhan Pamuk, the Writer

Art is not politics. It might deal with political issues, as they are part of life, and art deals with life; but art - or literature, in this case - is life, not politics. The natural-born writer (of literature), the one who has to write, whether or not anyone will ever read upon his works, for whom writing is his way of existing, is almost naturally attuned to this, with a sensitivity to the complexities of existence that would make it unbearable for him to limit his mind to the narrow furrows of politics. But I am sure that there are many amputee writers as well - self-amputated, sadly - who cut off their writing bones, or wings, to fit some ideology, imposed or impressed on them, in school or in society. But the true writer needs to talk, and to talk about everything, as it is. But more on this some other time.

Source: www.orhanpamuk.net

Right now, an interview with Orhan Pamuk on The Diane Rehm Show. Orhan Pamuk is a true writer, there is not much he can do about it. Some of this tension between the intricacy of existence (which is the life and blood of the writer's work) and the amputated versions of it, characteristic (today) of the "news media" and, certainly, of politics, becomes apparent at various times in this interview, although it does not reach a clashing point  (which I would have expected). Take, for example, Pamuk's mention of his depiction of extremists in some of his early novels, and then the necessary addition from the moderator, "...but fundamentalists in the Middle East..."; two different approaches, two different understandings. One simply talks about a society, as it is, messy - with everyday people, hungry, unshaven, chain-smoking; confused every morning about what they have to do and why they do it; all sorts of deformities in their minds, in their ideas; just like the limps and diseases in their bodies, which they carry daily, so it is in their minds; and yet they are the people, they are you and me. This is the material of the writer - reality, human reality, the all-too-human reality. On the other hand you have whichever ideology or approximation of it, as reflected in the public sphere, in politics, by the media; reality simplified, curated, pickled and packaged; fragments of news that become strong ideas with no correspondence to the everydayness of human life.

However, the interview discussion is good, pleasant, and Pamuk is full of solicitude and sincerely glad to communicate, and Diane Rehm and her show are, as usual, one of the the more valuable things on the radio today (in the U.S.).

Here is the interview - listen:
Orhan Pamuk on the Diane Rehm Show

Something else. When I read it, Orhan Pamuk's Snow strongly reminded me of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is interesting, both main characters - and, I dare say, both authors - exhibit the same weakness of being that is characteristic to the postmodern condition; indecision as the late-modern way of living out the (inherently) contemplative nature of the intellectual; indecision and philosophical (-anthropological)  rootlessness.

View from Cihangir (Pamuk's neighborhood)

Another wonderful trait (and a very relatable one, for me) of Orhan Pamuk is his interest in the everyday life  of other societies, but especially his "other" society, namely the past. Thus he established The Museum of Innocence, which is a true physical building, a true museum, yet also a companion piece to his eponymous book, which presents everyday life in the period 1950-2000 (corresponding to Orhan's life-span). It is a museum of everyday life, the way it was; in a way, the museum of our childhood - the porcelain bibelots (knickknacks), the radio dad listened to, the yearly brought out Christmas ornaments, the wrappers and brands, the cars... "Read all about it!" - here.

He also wrote Istanbul: Memories and the City, an "evocation" of a lived place, one that he has lived in and through (and his attraction to cities is also very germane to me). And another novel, My Name Is Red, about life and art in the Ottoman Empire of (very) old - an issue that still continues to interest him, as he says in the interview: how was life, real life, then?

Oh, and, of course, one has to - just has to! -  mention that he won the Noble Prize for literature a few years ago... no, that is truly not that important. But I invite you to listen to the interview, you will enjoy it.

The Ages of Man

I always felt that every age has its own atmosphere, its own "air." Correspondingly, there are ages that feel akin, and others that repulse me.

I have no definite sense of Greek antiquity. Mostly, it leaves me cold. It seems mostly cold. Dead, even - in the way the eyes of its sculptures look dead, with the original paint peeled of. Their problems, dilemmas, drives, reasons, values and orientations - it all seems alien. The city-state and its arrangements, the physicality / muscularity of its culture, its images of the "other world" (Hades, the world of shadows, Charon crossing with the boat)... It is not crepuscular, but it is a world of twilight and savagery.

The Roman period inclines even more towards worldly "virtues" - honor and debauchery, war and commerce, and what looks like a boring, bourgeois everyday life.

Skipping abruptly to the end of Renaissance and then to the Enlightenment. Here the centuries start acquiring their own distinct identity (to my affective memory). The 1500s might be a turning point, as after 1600 it all becomes - slowly, surely, unidirectionally - tired and emptied of truth.

The seventeenth century has too many elegant clothes. The English routines of tea and church start being only about tea; a slow, gradual transformation, which achieves its culmination in our day (just visit an Anglican place). The philosophers of the 17th are already too far removed from the essence of things, to be able to say anything worth dusting off. Plastic arts - painting, sculpture - move strongly towards academism; the freshness of the discoveries of the preceding centuries is gone; we have acquired the techniques, we improve on them, but we immerse ourselves only in touches and dabs of paint, here, and there, and here again. The Dutch lose all opening to the cosmos and to the skies, and succumb into domesticity. Interiors, only interiors - little light, not much air, too much furniture.

The eighteenth century goes on in the same manner, just more so. The flame becomes almost extinguished.  We spend our time in this-worldliness, a sophisticated yet utterly vain pastime (all is vanity). And yet this is supposed to be the Enlightenment, but what I see are dimming lights. Or, rather, homes lit by candles, and there is nobody on the streets; everybody is inside, slightly afraid of living out existence. An oppressive existence.

Jan Davidsz De Heem: A Table of Desserts (1640)

The least appealing century, the nineteenth. There is almost nothing to which I can relate, except for the last twenty to twenty-five years - and just because they lead to something else. Everything seems so empty; it passes with a bang, and bangs are gone as fast as all sounds are, even the loud ones. Sounds are not remembered, either - not in the collective memory.

The turn of the century brings again exciting, burning times; for me, Vienna, symbolist poetry; it all becomes modern, but in a conflicted, adult way. Sentences become shorter, paint on the canvas braver, yet differently than before. It starts becoming my/our time.

But before going into the twentieth, let us make that short excursion to the middle ages. Glowing with embers, simple huts of men, really living and really dying. It is as if the following centuries (17th-19th) have accumulated so much civilizational ballast, so much commentary, that lives were lived afterward in what we ourselves made up, and not in the dust and water (and passion) of reality. (Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and their states of nature, and their inferences from it - what a cosmic-sized yawn!)

Civilization is commentary on existence; given our imaginative capacities, it can walk a close line along reality, or get farther and farther removed from it. Our openness to the truth of what there is (out there and in us) is reflected in how we live our daily life. Do we draw the curtains, do we live inside, or do we step outside, fearful and hopeful at the same time - fears as visceral as the hope for the beatific vision is strong.

The Middle Ages were real, mud as well as stone; Romanesque architecture expresses it best: simple, ascetic, yet more alive than any other style. Of course, early Middle Ages were less exciting - too much darkness, too much awakening, before we dared to grab a hold of the hand that builds, of the thinking mind, before we dared to confront the world and to integrate it into our this-world/ that-world complex.

Renaissance is like a heightened Middle Ages; all those early tendencies, discoveries of the Middle Ages, like young, strong plants, giving their first buds and daring flowers during the Renaissance; still fresh, still alive, still hopeful, not yet fallen into the stuffy domesticity of garden bushes.

Back to the beginning of the twentieth century.. what a century of horror to follow! And yet, very much alive; if not on the surface, then immediately beneath; not in the governing forces, but in the resistance. True life did not happen at the surface; the surface was terrible. Example of touches and swaths of living fire: in France, from Claudel to Bernanos, from Maritain to Frossard; or the underground currents suddenly coming back to the surface as fresh, new sources, in Britain - from Chesterton to Tolkien to Waugh. Also, civilization pure and simple - for example, an urban culture that has shed the sooth and grime of early Industrialization. Jazz!

The short century. It started in 1918, which signaled the end of classical civilization (as embodied in classical Europe) with a grand war of nations and nationalisms, of strong monarchs and personal alliances. Post-1918 we wake up to find that the world has been disenchanted - which, however, does not stop us from making up our own realities as we go (fantasy wars & al.). We continue to lose in the plastic arts and in the world of sounds; by now, there seems to be little left to say, and equally little to de-compose, destruct, smash through; but the middle of the century is just in the middle of it, so still alive with it. A horrific century of oppressive rules that tried to change human nature - in a natural follow-up to the 17th and 18th and their making up of reality as we go, and of the 19th with the freeing of man to become the abject subject of other men and of their ideas. The twentieth century, which started in 1918, ends in 1989, by which time cold wars of many types lose their grounds of existence. Idle men will try to come up with new reasons for new wars, hot or languid.

But the twentieth century is too close for me to be able to form any precise impression of its nature, of its air; it is very much alive, since I was living it.

No clear color, besides confusion, to the still very young twenty-first century.

Willem de Kooning  - Easter Monday (1955–56)