orhan pamuk @ PEN World Voices

Tuesday night I went to hear Orhan Pamuk deliver the "Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture" at the opening of the PEN World Voices festival. Pamuk was introduced by Rushdie and had a discussion on stage with Margaret Atwood afterwards, and it's no surprise that any event featuring three literary superstars would be popular. However, I hadn't expected it to sell out a week beforehand, and as a result, would up without a ticket. I set off anyway in hopes of a standby, and found a massive line of people (already ticketed) snaking all the way round the Cooper Union building, and another sizable line of people there to pick up their tickets, and a minor media frenzy taking place on the steps. It's gratifying to see such a rock-concert display in the queue for a bookish event. After meeting assorted familiar faces (fellow participants from the Turkish Studies pre-conference at MESA, some Turkish faculty at NYU) and interesting new people (particularly a Turkish-Armenian woman also ticket-hunting) and watching things get increasingly disorganized, I stationed myself in front of the line, dug out a notebook (this is why, friends, you should always carry pen & paper) and made a sign: EXTRA TICKET??? It wasn't long before a nice man (thank you, Chris) nodded yes.

The event itself wasn't long, possibly because it started so late. Rushdie gave a quick and cheerful introduction, referencing a Gunter Grass story about a group of writers meeting in the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War, and observing also that he felt such a gathering of writers was especially important given the need "to re-open the dialogue between America and the rest of the world that the current administration has done so much to damage." He also wins hearts & flowers from me for pointing out to the audience that although Pamuk's case was dropped severla other Turkish writers, journalists, and publishers continue to face charges under Article 301, and mentioned some of them by name.

Pamuk spoke briefly and quite elegantly about the importance of freedom of expression, the novel as a tool for exploring the contradictory nature of the modern mind, and about the intertwined sensations of "shame and pride" that shape his mixed feelings about being both a novelist and a political figure. He recalled an experience from twenty years past: in 1985, Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter came to Istanbul as representatives of PEN, to interview writers and publishers about the repression of freedom of speech that was occurring in the wake of the 1980 coup and the subsequent period of military rule (although control was returned to civilians in 1983, the repression of the coup era lingered much longer). Pamuk, then a young and largely apolitical novelist, was asked to be the guide for the two visitors, on account of his literary interests and decent English. (As an aside, his English has improved since I last heard him speak--though still accented and halting, it was spirited and eloquent). In the course of their journeys around Istanbul, through "room after room of troubled and chainsmoking men," a sense of "guilt and solidarity" drove him to question his decision to eschew politics and stick to novel-writing alone. As a result he became increasingly vocal about political matters over the following decade, although he did not address Turkish politics particularly directly in his novels (until Snow). Indeed, he said, he felt awkward about taking on a political role because to do so requires a certain level of clarity and certainty that contradicts the ambiguity he likes to pursue in his fiction: "I am the kind of novelist who makes it his business to identify with all of his characters, especially the bad ones." He talked a bit about why he enjoys writing fiction--"The pleasure of writing novels comes from exploring the contradictory nature of the modern mind" and went on to say that it was because of this uncertain modernity that freedom of expression mattered so much, and returning again to the theme of shame and pride. He thanked PEN for its assistance in his court case, and mentioned that although problems persisted, "in the Turkey of ten years ago" there were far more things a writer could not say than today. Finally, he ended with a trenchant statement of opposition to the Iraq war: "My part of the world is not any more democratic after all of these killings.....this brutal war is the shame of the West; authors like Pinter and Miller are its pride."

If it weren't for my longstanding affection for her poetry and novels, I'd have been left distinctly turned-of by Margaret Atwood's participation in the "conversation" thereafter. The conversation-interview before an audience can be an awkward format, but she was a particularly odd interlocutor, at times giggly and simplistic. Still, they wound through a number of interesting topics, and Pamuk expressed himself well (although it was clear he didn't always get what she was trying to say, due to her occasional reliance on colloquial terms and pop culture references. The Dixie Chicks?) The best parts were his remininsces about his disjointed early career path (familiar to anyone who's read his memoir Istanbul)--teenage years as a devoted painter intending a future in art, sent to architectural school by a family that had hoped for an engineer, but was willing to settle on architecture as a halfway point. When he dropped out, though, he didn't turn directly to novels, but--under the influence of a longstanding cultural tradition--to poetry, instead: "You have to write bad poetry to be a good novelist in my part of the world." And after a stopgap year or two of bad verse, he was on his way.