Knocking on Fiction’s Door

But he is keenly aware of the combined weight of these writings. He writes, “I gathered up these pieces to form a totally new book with an autobiographical center.” These pieces are, as his readers have come to expect from him, laid out with a challenge and a wink: “I am hardly alone in being a great admirer of the German writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin. But to the anger of one friend who is too much in awe of him, I sometimes ask, ‘What is so great about this writer? He managed to finish only a few books, and if he’s famous, it’s not for the work he finished but the work he never managed to complete.’ My friend replies that Benjamin’s oeuvre is, like life itself, boundless and therefore fragmentary, and this was why so many literary critics tried so hard to give the pieces meaning, just as they did with life. And every time I smile and say, ‘One day I’ll write a book that’s made only from fragments too.’ This is that book, set inside a frame to suggest a center that I have tried to hide. I hope that readers will enjoy imagining that center into being.”

Long acquaintance with Pamuk’s writing would reveal that “imagining” is not a shortcut — it is the whole point of the reading/writing experience for him. Imagination is not a distancing from reality or a flight into fantasy. This collection is a story of how Pamuk imagined his profile as a writer into being.

These essays on places, people (his immediate family and chance encounters), writers, culture, art and politics are valuable on their own. But placed in this frame, they give us Pamuk’s manifesto as a writer. Here is a version of it, constructed from fragments in assorted essays. A writer, for him, is formed by solitude, application, imagination and impersonation. “When I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid the shadows, he builds a new world with words… with patience, obstinacy and joy.”

Integral to this building of a new world is a deep awareness of where he’s coming from, from a society that is deeply conflicted between East and West. For instance, as he explained in an interview to the Paris Review, in the writing of The Black Book he harnessed “a sophisticated tradition of highly refined ornamental literature”, which had been emptied of its innovative content by an earlier generation of “socially committed writers” in Turkey, in a mind frame suggested by Borges and Calvino.

His country’s dilemmas are also his as a writer. For a writer who has been exposed to the Western literary canon and can still only speculate the contents of an Eastern canon, he must confront the idea of being an intellectual on the periphery: “For people like me, who live uncertainly on the edge of Europe with only our books to keep us company, Europe has always figured as a dream, a vision of what is to come; an apparition at times desired and at times feared; a goal to achieve or a danger. A future — but never a memory.”

But Turkey, he says in a revealing insight into his own imagination, should not worry about “having two spirits, belonging to two different cultures, having two souls. Schizophrenia makes you intelligent.”

In any case it is by allowing contradictions — and shame and anxieties — to breathe life into imagined, impersonated characters, that novelists achieve their aim. As writers and readers. “For it is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled by our families, our schools and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are.”

And from this process of the writer imagining the “other” comes a kaleidoscope: “Sometimes I conjure up, one by one, a multitude of readers hidden away in corners, nestled in their armchairs with their novels; I try also to imagine the geography of their everyday lives. Then, before my eyes, thousands — tens of thousands — of readers will take shape, stretching far and wide across the streets of the city, and as they read they dream the author’s dreams, imagine his heroes into being, and see his world. So now these readers, like the author himself, try to imagine the other; they too are putting themselves in another’s place.”
Carry this book with you for a while, it will take you to so many places and people. And books.