Interviews
A Bit of Irresponsible Reading: Introduction
Orhan Pamuk begins his memoir Istanbul with a meditation upon his "ghostly other": "From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: Somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double. I can't remember where I got this idea or how it came to me. It must have emerged from a web of rumors, misunderstandings, illusions, and fears." Readers of his work encounter other versions of Orhan throughout, for example in My Name is Red and in Snow. On November 27th, 2006, one of these Orhans would receive the inaugural Distinguished Humanist Medal, part of annual Center for Humanities celebration of the book at Washington University, and in December he would receive the Nobel Prize in Stockholm. But hours before the first award, and a few weeks before the second, the communities of Washington University and St. Louis had the ability to catch a glimpse of several Orhans. In Hurst Lounge of Duncker Hall, Pamuk discussed his work with a panel of four faculty members and two graduate students. Sometimes jovial and animated, at other times intense and passionate, he spoke at length about Orhan the irresponsible reader and Orhan the bookish writer.
Born in Istanbul in 1952, Pamuk has lived most of his life in the city of his birth. In Istanbul, Pamuk writes of his relationship to the city: "Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul-these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness. My imagination, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am." Pamuk is often described as a Turkish novelist, and his words in Istanbul show the importance of his home in both his writing and his sense of personal identity, but as has become apparent in the past two decades, this writer transcends national boundaries. Like his native Istanbul, a city straddling two continents and joining East and West, Pamuk's work bridges worlds and takes inspiration from sources as diverse as Borges and Sufi poetry.
During the panel discussion, Pamuk repeatedly refers to his encounters with Western literature, such as Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Calvino, and Borges, and he also talks about the importance of his time spent in America. He spent three years (1985-1988) in the United States as a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York, and was for a short time attached to the University of Iowa. As he made clear in our panel discussion, this was when Pamuk began to question his "Turkishness" and to read Sufi poetry with the help of Borges and Calvino. This experimentation led to The Black Book (1990), most of which he wrote while in the United States.
His other works include Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982), his first novel, which follows three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family not unlike his own. It won him the Orhan Kemal and Milliyet Prizes, and in 1983 he followed his first novel with The Silent House, which later won the 1991 Prix de la Découverte Européenne for its French translation. The White Castle (1985) was published the same year Pamuk left for the United States. With The New Life (1994) and My Name Is Red (1998), the 1990s saw the rising international popularity of Pamuk's work. He followed these works with the novel Snow (2002), his most political novel, and the book Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003), which ultimately led to the Nobel.
Pamuk's novels and memoir do the important work of exploring questions of culture, religion, identity, internal and external struggle that have become even more vital to all of us in the twenty-first century. Our question and answer session last year provided members of the Washington University community with the opportunity to sit down and discuss some of these issues as well as the thought process behind them with the author himself. On October 12, 2006, Professor Horace Engdahl of the Swedish Academy announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature would be awarded to Orhan Pamuk, "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures." This comment by Engdahl highlights much of the media attention that swirls around the political reception of his work. But in the discussion in Hurst Lounge, Pamuk excitedly addressed questions about history, identity, translation, the influence of Sufi poetry in his work, not to mention the ever-elusive writing process.
What follows is the transcript of the first five questions from the panel. After the panel discussion Pamuk graciously accepted questions from the audience, which ranged from further questions about the literary Orhan to the more complicated aspects of the political.
By Robert Hakan Patterson and Richard Godden