Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature by Gloria Fisk

Abstract

Reviewed by: Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature by Gloria Fisk Yuqian Cai Fisk, Gloria. Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 2018. Pp. 280. US$65.00 hardcover, US$64.99 ebook. What is “the good” of world literature? To begin with, it must be “good” world literature; following Pamuk in holding high standards for the “global” novel, Gloria Fisk considers literary merit a prerequisite for anything to qualify as world literature. But for Americans, “world literature” usually means just “world literature (in English or English translation).” Whereas New York and London are the present headquarters for what Pascale Casanova calls “the world republic of letters,” writers in languages other than English, especially non-Western writers such as Pamuk, are subjugated to “uneven processes of translation, circulation, and judgment” in the West, which Fisk’s scholarly debut tackles. Thanks to her experience in Turkey, Fisk includes a Turkish perspective on Pamuk and problematizes the Western point of view. Reading Pamuk as her central case study along with other Nobel laureates, Fisk defends these writers’ literary value and autonomy against political imposition and instrumentalization, and she probes what good the global novel and novelist, and American literary critics, can do. From the onset, Fisk is concerned with author-reader relations in an uneven trans-national sphere. Introducing Pamuk as a global novelist who engages a literary public “as rich in cultural capital as it is far-flung,” Fisk reads Pamuk’s canonization as a “Rorschach test” to see what it takes for a non-Western writer to become an author of world literature accessible to Western readers. Put simply, Pamuk is appreciated by the Western public not so much for his craft as for his service as a “bridge between East and West,” who brings cultural and political good, such as solidarity among strangers, to audiences unfamiliar with a world that they expect a national spokes-person or native guide to reliably show, albeit through fiction. Pamuk was further rewarded with a Nobel Prize soon after he touched on “the Armenian issue,” which remade him into a public figure and brought against him a criminal charge for his “insult to Turkishness.” The polarized reception of Pamuk in Turkey and the West highlights the politicization of international prizes and the asymmetries in world-literary formation. It also reflects a Western penchant for fusing the aesthetic with the political as the criterion for literary merit, as Fisk discerns, while in the US, [End Page 382] after multiculturalism won the canon wars, world literature has become what David Damrosch calls “windows into foreign worlds” without necessarily demonstrating the quality of masterpieces. That means, for Fisk, that in the West, especially America, the literary value of non-Western and multicultural texts is too often made contingent on political utility. Despite her insistence on aesthetic quality, Fisk mainly inquires into the cultural and political uses of world literature. She divides her book into three sections: “What Good Can a Novel Do?” “What Good Can a Novelist Do?” and “What Good Can World Literature Do?” The first section is further divided in two, the titles of which indicate the educational functions of the global novel: to teach Western readers about “other people” and “other people’s history.” This may seem commonplace, but what Fisk does is to analyze Pamuk’s own claims and writings, together with the testimonies of the “culture brokers of Western literary institutions” such as Margaret Atwood and the Swedish Academy, and with the critiques of Turkish readers who find in Pamuk a “betrayal of their national identity” or a “purveyor of the Orientalist propaganda.” Pamuk is more sophisticated than what he is typically praised for or accused of. In Snow (2002), for example, the characters embody a “full range of ideological factions” and express all kinds of viewpoints, including some that protest Western hegemony and doubt the odds of cross-cultural understanding. Fisk points out that Snow represents a version of Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and of Rebecca Walkowitz’s “comparison literature,” and one might add that it also corroborates Adam Kirsch’s belief in the global novel’s capacity to encompass and...