THE LANDSCAPE OF FICTION: The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 2009. By ORHAN PAMUK

Abstract

In Orhan Pamuk's most recent novel, The Museum of Innocence (2009), the narrator comes to believe that ‘for most people life was not a joy to be embraced with a full heart but a miserable charade to be endured with a false smile’. The book is set in 1970s Istanbul, where the rich middle classes must play out their illicit passions in secret, guarded from the moral codes of a Westernising but still religious society. Lionel Trilling, in his own Charles Eliot Norton lectures (published as Sincerity and Authenticity, 1972), argued that the great nineteenth century novelists demonstrated the ‘social inauthenticity’ of society. The Museum of Innocence similarly shows up the gap between illusion and reality in 1970s Turkey. Since Pamuk read all the major nineteenth century French novelists during his formative years as an aspiring writer (as he recalls in these lectures), their influence on him is hardly surprising. (There was little tradition of novel-writing in Turkey.) Pamuk's critical thinking on fiction, both in these lectures and in his earlier book, Other Colours (2007), is directed in great part by his early immersion in those realist writers. Pamuk believes that when a novel is successful ‘we feel that the fictional world we encounter and enjoy is more real than the real world itself’, and that ‘the real measure’ of the novel's value is its ‘power to evoke the sense that life is indeed exactly like this’. Pamuk has also explored this idea in his fiction. In My Name is Red (2001) the Sultan is ‘seized by a kind of panic’ when he suspects that the book he is reading recounts not merely a story ‘but what was most unbefitting a book: reality itself’. And it is here that the terms ‘naïve’ and ‘sentimental’ – taken from Schiller's essay ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ (1795-6) – have their part in the argument. No good reader, according to Pamuk, is wholly carried away by the force of the novel's reality. While the ‘naïve’ element in the reader delights in the illusion cast by the authenticity of detail and character, the ‘sentimental’ part (which Schiller and Pamuk hold to be the reflective part) is at the same time ‘fascinated by the artificiality of the text and its failure to attain reality’. Reading well, then, ‘involves a continual oscillation between these two mindsets’, just as ‘the art of the novel relies on our ability to believe simultaneously in contradictory states’ (that is, in its authenticity and in its illusory side). Pamuk here uses ‘the art of the novel’ to mean both the art of reading and the art of writing novels. He contends that novelists should be naive in their playfulness and in their capacity to identify with other people, but that they should also be sentimental in their absorption in novelistic techniques of representation.