Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, by Gloria Fisk

Abstract

Gloria Fisk’s Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature (2018) is a timely book, not only because it contributes to the continuing debate on world literature that has occupied literary academic circles since the 1990s but also because it sets out to uncover the immense impact of neoliberalism on academia in the United States. In meeting these two challenges, Fisk chooses to focus on the reception of the work of Orhan Pamuk, who, after being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006 for peering “into the melancholic soul of his native city,”1 was canonized by US academia as one of the iconic authors of world literature.In the introduction, Fisk warns the reader not to expect a monograph on a single author. Instead, she takes Pamuk’s oeuvre as a case study in order to ask a set of broader questions concerning “the conditions by which Western literary cultures expand to their east” (22). She makes this choice based on the novelist’s reception in the West less as a literary figure than as a political negotiator. Fisk maintains that Pamuk is usually praised not for the aesthetic pleasure that readers derive from his novels but “for the infrastructural work he performs between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic East, providing a bridge where one is needed, a diplomat between warring parties, a window from one side of the world to another” (2).The main argument of Fisk’s study thus becomes an in-depth critique of the kind of pragmatism that advocates the instrumental use of literature as a source of cross-cultural understanding. By urging us to think about the processes of translation and publication, and the function of world literature in college curricula, she asks whether literature produced in the non-Western world can be regarded as an aesthetic form independent from the interests of the Western cultural and educational institutions that publish, review, and circulate it. While problematizing the view that world literature is meant for cross-cultural enlightenment, Fisk implies that this is not a reciprocal process because it offers Anglophone readers admission to worlds to which they would otherwise have no access, while the world of such readers remains inaccessible to non-Western writers.2 This position raises the question of whether novels marketed as “world literature” face the risk of being read as glorified travel books or polished guides to the “real” lives of people living in distant foreign countries. In both cases, the outcome is the same: world literature remains open to misreadings or, even worse, to cultural assimilation.Fisk undertakes the task of responding to this question in the three sections of her book. In the first section (“What Good Can a Novel Do?”), she refers to the English translations of The Black Book (2006), Snow (2004), and The Museum of Innocence (2009) in order to show “how Pamuk constructs his authority to convey nonfictional truth about Turkish people and their history to the West” (22). In the second (“What Good Can a Novelist Do?”), she focuses on Pamuk’s public personae as literary celebrity and political figure. In the third (“What Good Can World Literature Do?”), she focuses on the theoretical framework and institutional practice of world literature as it is taught at universities in the United States and Turkey.The first section opens with a question: Why has a novel as complicated and ambiguous as Orhan Pamuk’s Snow become so popular among North American readers? Fisk suggests that the author himself nurtures ambiguity by “inject[ing] layers of doubt around everything that Western readers have learned from his long, detailed, and deeply political novel” (49). She questions whether the novel’s greatness lies in its potential to bring Western readers “into its Turkish characters’ thoughts and feelings and, more precisely, into their perspective on a world that is politically structured” (34); she concludes by saying that Pamuk’s readers come to him with the expectation that he will reveal “what actual Turkish people think” (36). Fisk thinks that this expectation has to do with the fact that the author has been praised by “the culture brokers of Western literary institutions” (such as Margaret Atwood, John Updike, and the members of the Swedish Academy) for what Fisk identifies as “his representation of the Turkish people with mimetic accuracy.”The discussion of the use of voice and perspective in Snow constitutes one of the most interesting aspects of Fisk’s argument on Pamuk’s reception in the Western world. Fisk shares with the reader her observation that Ka, the Western-educated and alienated protagonist of the novel who, like his creator, “wears a magician’s cape but carries a reporter’s notebook” (65), performs “a journalistic function” within the novel. While reporting to his Anglophone readers, he also describes “what our [the Anglophone readers’] gaze feels like from the other side” (42). Fisk refers to an instance in Snow when Ka remembers walking the streets of Frankfurt, singling out a lone German, and wondering what that man sees when he looks at him. This internalized Western gaze is what Meltem Ahıska (2003: 351) refers to as “Occidentalism,” a term that describes the complex interiority of the modern Turkish individual: “Once it found itself in the wake of Western modernity, Turkey has been engaged in a constant reconstruction of the image of the ‘West’ as well as an effort to regenerate the long lost ‘East.’” Fisk, however, maintains that Pamuk uses this narrative device in order to indulge “the narcissistic desire of Western observers to see their self-reflection” (42). She further argues that this perspective leads the author to perform a role not unsimilar to that of “native informant”: “It is the role of the domestic informant, perhaps, who tells hegemonic powers what it feels like to live inside them, unseen” and who, unlike the native informant, voices a critique “of the blinding effects of hegemonic power on the people who enjoy it” (43). But engaging with the hegemon can involve certain risks, as Fisk also acknowledges. She warns us against the danger of a form of narration that attempts to cure Western readers of their blindness to the world but that may also lead them to think “that the minds of Turkish people lie within the reach of our collective imagination—that we can enter them if we try, with the novel’s help” (44). Fisk recognizes the possibility that such narration may re-create the hegemonic relation that it has come to criticize in the first place. Still, her distinction between the “native informant” and the “domestic informant” remains rather vague and confusing.Fisk’s analysis of Pamuk’s estranged character Ka as someone who feels like an alien both in Berlin and in Kars, prepares the reader for the discussion of exile later in the book. Fisk does not agree with Kader Konuk on the temporal aspect of the author’s exilic consciousness but instead compares Pamuk with James Joyce, quoting Edward Said, who wrote that Joyce “chose to be in exile: to give force to his artistic vocation” (126 [see, also, Konuk 2010: 15; Said 2001: 137]). However, when Fisk suggests that we read Pamuk’s self-imposed exile in the same vein, she seems to ignore the possibility that his choice may be based on the realization that “home” has become an exile in its own right, especially when one considers the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey. To her credit, though, in the section where she writes on Pamuk’s public persona as a political figure, Fisk goes to great lengths to explain to the non-Turkish reader the reasons behind Pamuk’s persecution by nationalist extremists. She also includes a paragraph in her introduction on the violation of human rights in Turkey since the coup d’état of 2016, which ended with the dismissal and detention of more than 100,000 civil servants, including teachers, judges, and academics. “Those pressures,” she admits, “put Turkish academics in 2017 in a position akin to Orhan Pamuk’s in 2006” (29).Problematizing Pamuk’s role as a medium of “cross-cultural understanding,” Fisk also underlines instances in his novels that remain opaque to the Anglophone reader, such as the headscarf controversy in Snow. She points to Elif Batuman’s (2011) observation that many reviewers (such as Margaret Atwood and Christopher Hitchens) misremember it as a novel about girls who commit suicide because the state prevents them from wearing headscarves in school, even though most of the suicides remain unexplained in the novel. Fisk concludes that the Anglophone reader’s lack of knowledge of Turkish history is to blame for such misreadings: “They come to Pamuk’s novels without the education we would need to question his representations of historical realities we don’t know” (77).Reading Fisk on Pamuk’s reception in the West, one has the impression that Western readers encounter obscurities that may complicate the reading of the texts, particularly foreign words and expressions that look alien and “representations of historical realities” about which they have no prior knowledge. But isn’t this always the case when one reads novels set in other countries, epochs, and cultures? Fisk attributes to the Western reader a political naivete that can be overcome by going beyond the reading of the text as a “national allegory”3 and engaging in the multiple layers that Pamuk’s novels usually offer. However, instead of regarding Western readers as individuals responsible for their lack of historical knowledge, Fisk shifts the burden to Pamuk, who, she claims, is no different from the poets banished from Plato’s Republic because of their power to mislead readers: “Pamuk performs exactly that kind of manipulation on his Western readers, who lack sufficient knowledge about Turks and Turkey to check the mimetic quality of any cultural logic he constructs” (83).In the final section, Fisk voices her suspicion that the primary problem is not world literature itself but, rather, the contrast between the impact of the global market for such literature in academia and the discourse that US-based academics adopt against capitalism. According to Fisk, to be able to address the real problem, academics should first admit that they are “ontologically inseparable” from global capitalism: “As the world is governed by global capital, and as the university is neoliberal, so are we” (192). In order to face the problem, they have to give up the illusion of the academy as the locus of anticapitalist critique and adopt what she calls “a more honest critical discourse,” which would place literary criticism “squarely in the institutions and markets that enable it within and beyond the university, so literary critics could launch critiques from that admittedly compromised position—just as Orhan Pamuk locates his literary oeuvre in the market where it is bought and sold” (186).This final remark comes as a surprise if one considers the strong critical attitude that Fisk assumes all through the book against the ideological tools of neoliberalism in academia. Apart from labeling Orhan Pamuk as an author compromised by the global market, if not as someone who is reproducing and benefiting from its hegemonic workings, Fisk also seems to advocate the view that academia can produce this “honest critical discourse” only if it comes to terms with the existing system. She argues at length, and convincingly, to show that academia is already tainted and needs to acknowledge this fact but ends up saying that the only solution is “to admit that structural dependency as an unavoidable fact of life in late capitalism” (191).There are several problems inherent to this position. First of all, even if we agree with Fisk, there is a difference between being aware of the fact that one’s writing is not totally independent from political and economic realities and completely surrendering to the mechanisms of global capitalism. When Fisk urges US critics to consider “ceding the possibility of political perfection to look for better ways to do political good,” she seems to ask them to yield to the kind of pragmatism she criticizes earlier in the book. She sides with the critic who is “rhetorically more pragmatist than zealot” and claims that, if we assume this position, we (scholars) “become better able to work from the desire we broadly share to chip away at the structural sources of hegemony and domination” (193). Another point Fisk makes is that the critics of world literature, once they admit their structural dependency to the neoliberal system, may then be able to devise the rhetorical models that engage “with the sources of real suffering in the world” (192). Yet she does not explain why they should do so, given that they must concentrate on their own survival within the system.Fisk urges us to think about the “costs and benefits” (194) of the discourses surrounding world literature determined by the “local interests of the humanists” at US-based universities. “Those interests are not irredeemably bad,” she notes, “but they fit poorly together with the more global aims that bring Western readers to Pamuk.” These global aims must also have to do with the marketing strategies to be developed in light of this new discourse because, Fisk thinks, we need better answers to “questions that have nothing to do with the best way to interpret literature that travels to its readers from far away,” such as, “why research in the humanities is worth the trouble and the money.” This brings us to the last and most important problem: by reinforcing the idea of a structural dependency on capitalism, Fisk seems to have given up on the ultimate goal of academia: the production of independent critical thinking. While it is true that “everybody needs money to live” (189), including scholarly critics who have to make compromises “to maintain [their] livelihoods” (194), the biggest compromise would be to yield to the idea that scholars are bound solely to their work as a means of survival. If this is the case in US academia, it calls for resistance rather than acceptance and integration.Going back to the central question of Fisk’s book—namely, “What is the good of world literature?”—one feels obliged to voice the same concern: How can we hope to create a better world if we agree to surrender art and literature to an ever stronger capitalist orientation toward pragmatism? My suggestion is that we follow the footsteps of the late novelist Ursula K. Le Guin (2014), who reminds us that literature is one of our primary tools in nourishing this hope: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”