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‘When you are in love, you’re also egoistic and calculating’

Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel The Museum Of Innocence is a magnificent love story that describes an affair between a 30-year-old aristocrat and an 18-year-old shop girl.

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Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel The Museum Of Innocence is a magnificent love story that describes an affair between a 30-year-old aristocrat and an 18-year-old shop girl. In an exclusive interview with DNA, Pamuk, who is on a whirlwind trip to Mumbai, talks about his attempts to explore what happens to us when we fall in love

The first thing Orhan Pamuk does you meet him is to take your picture, which can be a little unsettling for a journalist come to interview, and photograph him. He lovingly refers to his latest novel, The Museum Of Innocence, as his ‘baby, and when he speaks, he often interrupts himself to mentally google for the right word, sometimes asking you for suggestions, before returning to complete his sentence hanging patiently in the air. In Bombay to promote his novel, Pamuk, 57, spoke to DNA about his novel, about love (in great detail), about Islam, and how he needs solitude like a diabetic needs his pills. Excerpts:

Istanbul figures prominently in your works. Do you see many similarities between Istanbul and Mumbai?
Yes, I see in both the melancholy ruins of modernity. There is this great attempt to be modern, which is imposed by the state or by the ruling elites -- be it the colonizer or the local national elites. And over a period of time, it begins to decay; it forms a certain texture which suggests a sort of melancholy that I write about in my books. I see the decay of Ottoman modernity in the decayed surfaces of colonial India. The presence of the past, the glories of the past, is perceptible in the ruins of the past, and it suggests a kind of sadness. I grew up in Istanbul in such an atmosphere, and this is also linked to the idea that we had a great history, but now-we-are-not-doing-well kind of feeling. We’re not at the centre of the world, the world is Europe, the West, and we are out of it, powerless and poor. These feelings I had in my childhood, and I also feel them somehow in Bombay, in India.

Did the alluring protagonists in The Museum of Innocence, Kemal and Fusun, come to you fully formed or did they take shape in the process of writing?
No fictional character can come to you just like that, fully formed. Characters, like scenes, develop as you rewrite, rethink. A novel, just like a tree, grows from a seed. First I had some little idea about the novel. But it took me 11 years to fully realise, and execute this novel.


 
What’s the idea behind introducing yourself as a character in The Museum…?
So many people are asking me this that I sometimes regret putting myself in my novel. Borges makes an appearance in his fiction, and it’s considered to be Borgesian -- it has ontological, philosophical, metaphysical connotations. For me, it’s not that important. In some of my books, in Snow, and in this one, I make an appearance just to pull the story together after the main characters exit, and also to give a sense that this is a novel, and thus an artificial construct — but without making too much of a fuss over post-modernism. But it is more of a cute thing, like Hitchcock appearing in his movies, than a Borgesian philosophical thing.


The Museum
… is a love story. When all around you, there is war, recession, poverty, and terrorism, not to mention climate change threatening the planet, how can you possibly sit down to write a love story?
This is exactly what, in the 1970s, my friends in Turkey — my Marxist, Maoist friends — would tell me. They would give me belittling glances. In a way, they were right, and in a way they were wrong. Those were the years, in the 1970s, when Jean Paul Sartre in France said, “If I were living in Biafra, I would never write books.” But this statement was also an insult, implying that, if you are coming from the Third World, you don’t even open your literary notebook — meaning, literature is only for us, and about us, the rich, Western man. This is not only untrue, it is also humiliating and condescending. Literature is something that addresses the human heart, and even if you are living a life of extreme deprivation, literature is still a way of representing, and of communicating between peoples, and my books attempt to do just that.


Do you find it strange that while
India has been battling religious fundamentalism, Turkey has had to grapple with secular fundamentalism of sorts?
I would use another term: religious or secular authoritarianism. This is a symptom of intolerance, and the sign of an undeveloped democracy lacking in egalitarianism. This is the case in Turkey definitely. Whether you are a religious conservative or a secularist is not important -- these are not problems of ‘religion in general’, as an American would say. Americans like to say, “your problem is Islam, blah-blah-blah.” But the real problem is intolerance, and the weakness of civil society. But civil society is now growing in strength in both India and Turkey, and that makes me more hopeful about the future of democracy in these two countries.


You have said, “I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.” What is it about writing that makes you happy?

I have to be alone in a room for 5-6 hours everyday. And I need this solitude just like diabetics need some pills everyday. And if I write one-two pages every day, I am so happy – even the worst trouble is not important. I wrote The Museum… in bad times, when there was lot of political pressure on me, and I was changing jobs, changing cities, and people ask me, how did I write this novel of 600 pages, but writing it was my happiness everyday – whether I was in a hotel room somewhere, in an American university, or in a room in Istanbul.


You have spoken of the continuity of thought among old Marxists and today’s political Islamists. Do you think radical Islam is the Marxism of the 21st century, the big Other of Western liberalism?

Radical Islam, as an enemy that America, needs, has definitely taken the place of Marxism or communism. Also, radical Islam is more of an American invention than communism, because it is manipulated. Let us not forget that the Taliban or Osama bin Laden have also co-operated with the US in the Afghanistan war. Also, they were formed in co-operation with, and in negation against, America. During the Cold War, communism was also formed in negation with America. Marxism and radical Islam do not resemble each other as philosophical thought; but more deeply, they are alike in their anti-western attitudes — in their cultural conservatism, and in their anxiety over losing their identity.


But were Marxists cultural conservatives?

Yes, surely, a lot of anti-imperialist Marxism has a cultural nationalist side to it, and so does Islamic fundamentalism or Hindu fundamentalism. You see it in the resistance to the forms and cultures and symbols that come from the west. Both Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism have assumed the form of cultural nationalisms.

We have seen, with the end of the Cold War, Western liberal capitalism triumphing over communism. Do you think it will also eventually triumph over, if not succeed in domesticating, the forces of radical Islam that it has defined as its enemy?
I don’t like such general, fancy descriptions of what’s happening in the world. I don’t care about Islamism or liberalism or capitalism. I care about the human heart. My subjects may be fundamentalists, communists or capitalists, and you may think of some of them as good and consider others as bad. But for me, they are all human beings, and I try to see the world through their pain, their passion, their resentment, their anger, and their tolerance. This is my subject, rather than the fate of Islam or capitalism or whatever. In fact, this is a trap that a novelist can easily fall into, believing that he is a thinker or an ideologue. I address the human heart first, and readers will transcend these abstractions and clichés and see the picture for themselves through the novels.


In your last visit to Mumbai about a year ago, when you were asked if you were hopeful about a better future under President Obama, your answer was, “I don’t invest my future hopes on American presidents anyway.” One year down the line, do you feel vindicated?

Actually, I did feel some hope when he was elected. But I am disappointed, especially with his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, with his using the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting war — that was all bad. For me, today he is just another ‘normal’ American president.


Getting back to your novel, The Museum…, Fusun is an ordinary girl, isn’t she? And in many ways Kemal’s love for her is extraordinary. Isn’t it strange that an extraordinary love can fix itself upon a person who is rather ordinary – isn’t that a bit of a paradox?

Kemal never thinks at the beginning that his love will be extraordinary. He has an opportunistic, egoist side, and if he had known that it would cost him his entire life, maybe he wouldn’t have done all that he did. And this is what is interesting about love. We think we are going to get out of it and return to our normal life, but then this happens and that happens, and some of us cannot get out of it that easily. Also, even when we are romantically in love, we are also very egoistically calculating, to extract from love what we want. The human heart is capable of developing contradictory, even foolish reactions, thoughts, and imaginations. The Museum… is an attempt to understand what happens to us when we fall in love -- how we deceive ourselves, how we have hopes, how we feel humiliated, how we also take pleasure in humiliating…


Last week, when the Dutch feminist and critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was in India, she said that she renounced Islam because she did not believe Islam could be ‘reformed’. Can you comment on that?
Ayaan Hirsi is under a lot of pressure, she’s been receiving death threats. So we must defend her right to express herself. But what she says when she expresses herself, is not a proper representation of the problems of people in Islamic countries. I don’t think she understands those issues. But I think it is far more important to defend her right to free speech first, so that she can say whatever foolish things she wants (laughs). What is important is that she has become a symbol of lack of free speech in that part of the world.

 Which part of the world?
Oh, whichever part of the world she goes, she is in trouble. She was in trouble not only in Islamic countries, but also in Holland!

 You’ve spoken of the modern writer as some kind of a secular saint--
The poet, especially.

Not the novelist?
Yeah, sure, why not?

So do you aspire to such sainthood?
I was referring primarily to poetry, but I guess it also applies to the novel. Yes, when I am writing a novel, I also want to achieve that patience, dedication and devotion that we ascribe to religious saints or poets. A poet is a person who is not very popular, nobody reads him too much, he burns his life with his determination to dig up beautiful prose from the material of everyday life, and when a person lives like a poet, we, especially in cultures where poetry has been so important — the Ottoman empire, the Mughal empire, in China, Japan, generally in the East — we ascribe a saint-like aura to poets. But this doesn’t sit well with the writing of prose, where you don’t really have to be possessed by transcendental powers, by god or whatever. Prose is more of hard labour. 

In Turkey of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, the attitude was that a poet was a person who is almost possessed by god, and god is speaking through him or her, while a novelist is more like a clerk who is writing everyday, looking at his watch, counting his words, and making money. To be sure, there is some truth in that, but I also think that modern fiction should have poetic moments, as well.

But hasn’t poetry become irrelevant in popular culture today? Poetry is unfortunately – or fortunately, I don’t know – being marginalized. This also has something to do with the prominence of the art of the novel. Wherever, in the last 150 years, the novel has grown and established itself, it has marginalized all other literary forms. Today, the global literary form is definitely the novel.

Do you think the global popularity of the novel may have something to do with the fact that it is somehow less threatening to the establishment?
I can see you don’t have a high opinion of novels (laughs). Why should young people go to less threatening things? It is in the nature of youth that they would go to threatening things. So this can only mean that you don’t have a high opinion either of the novel or of young people (laughing).

Finally, how do you use the word “innocence” in the title of a novel about adultery?
The novel does begin as a light adultery novel, but then it changes gear. It is a serious discourse on love, on attachment, and like in the great 19th century novels, I wanted to address questions such as, what is life, what is important in life — is it the family? Is it culture? Tradition? Solidarity? Belonging to a community? Is it leading the life that your community/family wants from you, or pursuing an idiosyncratic or strange ideal – be it an ideology or a girl or whatever? In the end, in The Museum… as it happens in countries where the sense of community is strong, it is very hard to leave one’s community — either for a girl or for an ideal. This novel is ultimately about the development of individuality in Kemal. At the beginning, he is just like any of his fanciful, wealthy, upper class, friends. But by the end, he has, I think, become a different person. To find out in what way he becomes different, you have to read the book!

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