Pamuk's Interview on NTV--Observations and Afterthoughts

Pamuk was on TV just a minute ago for an interview about his latest release, a collection of essays previously published (or unpublished) in various written media. This writing attempts to record the observations and afterthoughs he gave rise to.

Throughout the interview, I felt Pamuk was careful to stay within the realm of literature and sound as a man of letters above all. While talking about politics, he mostly voiced a writer's sensitivity.

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I believe it was very meaningful that Pamuk was compared to Ara Guler, a prominent photography artist who is famed for his nostalgic Istanbul B&Ws. It was obvious how Pamuk took this comparison suggested by the interviewer with happiness. Pamuk wanted to become a painter when he was young, and at university he ended up as a student of architecture. He has the attitude of a chronicler in his novels and it seems this attitude was latent in his relationship to his surroundings since he was very young. The intention to record things using colours and sketches, and the intention to record things using words have a similar source of inspiration and a similar aspiration, if you like. Comparing him to Ara Guler, or rather his art to Ara Guler's, has revealing connotations. The most obvious one is that Pamuk's oeuvre can be read as an archaeology of emotions that were brought by modernization in Turkey. When Pamuk said in today's interview that he saw the Istanbul of his childhood when looking at photography by Ara Guler, he was already hinting the connection: Ara Guler recorded in 'emulsion particles' what Pamuk meant to record via colours, or later, via words. This common aspiration created the most wonderful outcome in Istanbul, a delightful read contributed equally by Guler's visuals and Pamuk's words belonging to a nostalgic/melancholic Istanbul.

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Pamuk heralded the topic of a new novel he was preparing to write. Pamuk will write about a street vendor "bozaci" and as far as I could discern from what he said, he will be chronicling the modernization tensions again through tensions between local ways of doing things and new forms of doing things with the advent of capitalist market practices. My personal expectation is that he will attempt to draw a map of Istanbul through the walks of this street vendor and echo James Joyce's way of mapping Dublin in Ulysses.

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It was impressive when he said he personally and emotionally hates the September 12 Legacy first of all as a writer for what it has done emotionally to people of this country as a whole.

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The connection he drew among Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Ask-i Memnu was kind of inspiring to re-consider these novels in terms of their major women characters and their relation to their husbands and the common values these husband figures represent.

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He emphasised a very important issue when he underlined that literature world is dominated by English speaking world and its market. He pointed out that not many cultures are represented in the realm of a so-called meta-national world of literature. This for him is to blame for easily fabricated lies and myths about these cultures that remain under-represented. One of his crucial sentences stated that it was very easy to make people believe lies so long as they remain ignorant about a culture, or people. I thought how some people take ignorant pride in denigrating Persian culture without knowing anything about what it comprises, and how I loathe such an attitude.

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It was kind of a relief when he mentioned that he had always been a lonesome writer without much lifetime friends around--that means probably nothing is wrong with me; at least increased my hopes to think that way. Another relief was when he said he got his first book published at the age of 30--that means I have two more years to publish a book! :) Though I get a bit upset when I know that he wrote Cevdet Bey when he was only 23.

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I read in newspaper yesterday that Pamuk's recent book includes a drawing of the house in My Name is Red--I adore the fact that he has never actually given up his graphic tendencies even though he committed himself to writing. The way he uses architecture in composing his novels is just adorable...