Of a strained and outer edge of Turkey

I haven't been to Ani for more than twenty five years now, but when I did go it had only recently been opened to visitors with cameras. A few months earlier, as we had heard from some friends who had gone there before the Berlin Wall came down, you could walk through the grass and the ruins, and even look out very briefly (if you dared) over the river towards the isolated Soviet military towers on the hills beyond. But you couldn't take photographs of anything you saw -- whether of the hills across the river or of the stones in the abandoned city -- because of the likelihood of being shot at by border guards. Of course, I took lots of photographs when I went there -- or at least as many as I thought I could afford to take, given the cost of film to such parsimonious travellers as we were then. And yet even so -- despite the sense that I had, at the time, of the ruins and the river and the hills and the stones being somehow camera virgins -- and hence abundantly fresh to this sort of gaze -- I can see now that this freshness hasn't dissipated -- that there is nothing in terms of freshness that differentiates my much earlier and but otherwise undistinguished photographs from the bleakly beautiful images in Francis Alÿs's 2015 film, The Silence of Ani. The haunted gap that is Ani, and lies between what Ani had been once and might yet still be, seems very much the same.

In Alÿs's film, we learn that probably local, and very much private or privileged -- that is, Özel -- school children -- children with noticeably Turkish-sounding names, like Ayşegül and Gürkhan and Turğçe -- had been invited to participate in a work that attempts to bring some sort of life to the once thriving city that was abandoned after repeated invasions in the eleventh century by Seljuk warriors from the east. Some minutes into the film, the eerie stirring of wind in the tree-less hills is interrupted by the intermittent sounds of what could be the calls of isolated birds, but which turn out to be the curiously hollow notes of whistles, played by those Turkish teenagers, in imitation of the birds that are no longer there. As I continued to watch this film, I couldn't help thinking of some very different teenagers that I had once seen among those ruins -- jumping over the boulders and hiding in the grass, just as the kids in the film were doing -- even though those earlier kids weren't ethnically Turkish -- and hardly Özel -- school-going teenagers -- but rather colourfully, if shabbily dressed, Kurds whose main interest had been cadging a few coins from us or any other foreigner. And, for some reason, this small note of difference between the film and my memories disturbed me. Where were the Kurdish children now? Did they no longer hang around so hopefully in this ghost town? And I began to remember how confusing both the identity and feel of Ani had been even then, at the turn of the last decade of the twentieth century: for instance, how, at the gates of the site, the official signs had described the place as a ruin of a Turkish rather than an Armenian city, as if the clearly church-like buildings that we could see had somehow been built by the Seljuk themselves. And I remembered how this sort of Turkifying signage had been visible here and there throughout the whole of the east of Turkey, at least wherever any remnants of the distinctly reddish-bricked ruins of ancient Armenian buildings could be found nestled among the long grasses of the yayla, or high plateau.

Kars, the city that is closest to the ruins -- and from which most expeditions to Ani begin -- was a city, then, that closed early under curfew. It was a city, too, where my partner and I were categorically refused accommodation together in the Teachers' House because we did not have what was then known as a marriage passport even though we had been legally married for years; a city where, the instant we had stepped out with some new acquaintances from the bus that had brought us there from the garrison town of Van, we were dispersed by the terrifyingly hoarse cries of a man who was chasing another with a foot-long butcher's knife through the crowds. This was a city where my partner and I bargained in a basement with what felt, at the time, to be our scrawny-necked lives and for what might have looked, to anyone else, to be little more than a dull bit of rug that had been woven, merely, from the differing natural tones of wool from the local sheep -- a bargaining event that ended, surprisingly, with a cheer; a city whose taut and muffled ambiance accompanies a memory of being wordlessly dragged away from my partner as we emerged from buying nuts and fruit in a tiny shop -- after the curfew, as we later discovered. This subdued ambiance is what Orhan Pamuk presses carefully -- from the perspective of the exiled Turkish loner, Ka -- into the darkened corners of an evocation, in his novel Kar or Snow, of a strained and outer edge of Turkey; a feeling or state that elsewhere he calls hüzün. In what other way, he seems to be asking in Snow, can anyone possibly even begin to make sense of a place like this if not through a protagonist who, himself, is a little alien, and who continues to stumble around among the many differing claims and contradictions of this part of the world, most of the time confused?

From this perspective, I can see that when these several Özel school-aged Turkish "bird" callers participate in a film about Ani and its lost liveliness -- a film that is leached of any distinguishing colours -- leached, therefore, of any problematic colours -- they stand in, in fact, for so much more than a few once-citified birds.

To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain

Although, as Mary Oliver observes in her nearly twenty-year-old guide to writing, A Poetry Handbook, 'in the world of writing it is originality that is sought out, and praised, while imitation is the sin of sins', the role of imitation in the development of voice is decidedly under-valued. In fact, '[t]he profits are many,' she writes, 'the perils few.' (p. 13) And later: 'Emotional freedom, the integrity and special quality of one's own work -- these are not first things, but final things. Only the patient and diligent, as well as the inspired, get there', (p. 18) with the practice of imitation, we infer, making up the more inspired moments of this long drudging. Proust would agree, and it could be said that the entire oeuvre of Orhan Pamuk meditates on the problem and, indeed the necessity, of imitation when it comes to being yourself, as he would call it. There is something shilly-shallying in this word 'imitation', however -- even in her own handling of the word as it occurs within a couple of pages. When addressing the concern of apprentice poets to stay contemporary by only reading current publications she writes:

...perhaps you would argue that, since you want to be a contemporary poet, you do not want to be too much under the influence of what is old, attaching to the term the idea that old is old hat -- out-of-date. You imagine you should surround yourself with the modern only. It is an error. The truly contemporary creative force is something that is built out of the past, but with a difference.

Most of what calls itself contemporary is built, whether it knows it or not, out of a desire to be liked. It is created in imitation of what already exists and is already admired. There is, in other words, nothing new about it. To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain. Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a new idea into the air. (pp. 11-12)

We imitate and it drains us of something; we imitate and we are filled. Is there something in the time delay of imitation where we imitate something from another period, another context, even another language -- something in its apparent dead-aliveness, its mountain strata -- that sends us upwards, as Oliver has it?

What is it to you how Ruskin feels: feel for yourself

In his Preface to La Bible d'Amiens, Proust writes:

When we work in order to please others, we may fail to succeed, but the things we have done to satisfy ourselves always have a chance of interesting someone else.

Here Proust is referring to his attraction to Ruskin's writings as a whole; he might also have been writing about the effect of the long discipline of À la recherche du temps perdu (in fact at that time yet to be begun) on the readers of the future, which the narrator Marcel anticipates near the end of the last volume when he declares that the work of a writer is 'a sort of optical instrument which he offers to the reader so that he may discern in the book what he would probably not have seen in himself': the work as a physical conduit of thoughts:

...because what emerged from one man's thought can alone one day capture another thought, which in turn has fascinated ours.

In both this Preface to La Bible d'Amiens and his Preface to Sésame et les Lys, Proust struggles to understand what reading is, and more specifically, what was for him a significant but very nearly overwhelming experience: the writings of Ruskin. To the reader of Proust, who, even as she might discount these observations about a writer now thoroughly out of fashion, worries about the effect on her own writing of the rolling clauses of À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust's analysis and dismissal of this anxiety of influence near the end of the earlier Preface is peculiarly comforting:

Admiration for a thought... gives rise to beauty at each step because at each moment it rouses in us the desire for it. Mediocre people generally believe that to let oneself be guided by books one admires takes away some of one's independence of judgment. "What is it to you how Ruskin feels: feel for yourself." Such an opinion rests on a psychological error that will be treated as it deserves by all those who, having thus adopted an intellectual discipline, feel that their power to understand and feel is infinitely increased and their critical sense never paralyzed. We are then simply in a state of grace in which all our faculties, our critical sense as much as our other senses, are strengthened. Therefore, this voluntary servitude is the beginning of freedom. There is no better way of becoming aware of one's feelings than to try to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our thought, together with his, that we bring to light. We are free in life, but subject to purpose: the sophism of freedom of indifference was picked apart long ago. The writer who constantly creates a void in his mind, thinking to free it from any external influence in order to be sure of remaining individual, yields unwittingly to a sophism just as naive. Actually the only times when we truly have all our powers of mind are those when we do not believe ourselves to be acting with independence, when we do not arbitrarily choose the goal of our efforts. The subject of the novelist, the vision of the poet, the truth of the philosopher are imposed on them in a manner almost inevitable, exterior, so to speak, to their thought. And it is by subjecting his mind to the expression of this vision and to the approach of this truth that the artist becomes truly himself.

Thus we have the happy paradox of becoming ourselves only as we become obsessed with the work of another (and perhaps even start to imitate this other, as Orhan Pamuk might add: there is much of Proust in Pamuk), and as a result of which 'our critical sense' is not engulfed but 'strengthened' -- an unexpected bonus. Certainly, Proust is serious in his cool analysis of what he calls 'idolatry' in the work of his beloved Ruskin. In the Preface to La Bible d'Amiens, Proust presses him hard: this Ruskin who, he finds, is too guilty of idolising the objects he describes to be entirely perfect; who occasionally writes sentences thinking more about the cadence of the words in their series than any precision of meaning. It is an issue that Proust continues to pursue in his Preface to Sésame et les Lys, where he analyses the temptation of the 'literary man' who, instead of realising that reading 'is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it':

...reads for reading's sake, to retain what he has read. For him, the book is not the angel that flies away as soon as he has opened the doors of the celestial garden, but a motionless idol, which he adores for itself, which, instead of receiving a true dignity from the thoughts it awakens, communicates an artificial dignity to everything that surrounds it.

He describes the general temptation to make a fetish of the subject matter of a much loved piece of artwork or book:

"Take us," we would like to be able to say to Maeterlinck, to Madame de Noailles, "to the garden of Zealand where the 'out-of-fashion flowers grow,' on the road perfumed 'with clover and Saint John's Wort'..."

These objects might seem to project an almost holy literary significance in themselves when, 'in reality', as Proust goes on to argue, 'it is mere chance acquaintance or family ties, which, giving them the opportunity to travel or reside near them, have made Madame de Noailles, Maeterlinck, Millet, Claude Monet choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that river bend, rather than others.' There is, however, a great irony in all this: Proust himself seems only to have ever travelled in his life so as to be able to see the world through the eyes of Ruskin, unless it was in pursuit of another idol: a lover; Proust perhaps the greatest idoliser of all. And yet it is clear from the body of his writings that, should he now happen to catch sight of tourists sampling the crumbs of a madeleine dunked in tea with bewildered concentration in Illiers-Combray -- this town-sized fetish, far bigger and more established than any road or field according to Madame de Noailles, and long outlasting any residue of Ruskinian interest in the Cathedral of Amiens -- this part of him would groan aloud.

Proust's many years of work on Ruskin's writings, both as translator and commentator, is often described in terms of one long procrastination, with his mother's far too forceful encouragement, at the expense of the 'real' work of À la recherche du temps perdu -- a distraction from which only his mother's death could save him -- but it is in fact impossible to envisage his ever being able to write such a work without this impassioned engagement with the other's writings, and the inevitable disillusionment as his 'critical sense' came alive. The struggle with the temptations of idolatry -- which he notices in his own relationship to reading Ruskin as well as in the work itself -- provides the structural frame of La Recherche: the temptations and weaknesses and partial realisations of Swann and the temptations, weaknesses and more clearly realised conclusions of Marcel, which will lead, it is implied, to the production of the actual book we are reading -- a literary Mobius band: a 'sort of optical instrument' with which we, impassioned readers as well, might see not only what he means but what in fact we mean ourselves.

The poet, he said, is either nature, or he will seek it

What I hadn't quite grasped from Pamuk's lectures, is that Schiller saw the sentimental poet as being engaged in a quest for the ideal in nature:

The poet, I said, is either nature, or he will seek it. The former produces the naive, the latter the sentimental poet.

and:

Should one now apply the concept of poetry, which is nothing other than to give humanity its most complete expression possible, to both of these states, so it ensues, that there in the state of natural simplicity, where man still acts with all his powers at one time, as an harmonious unity, where therefore all his nature expresses itself completely in reality, the poet must imitate the real as completely as possible—that, on the contrary, here in the state of culture, where that harmonious cooperation of its entire nature is merely an idea, the poet must elevate reality to the ideal or, what amounts to the same, represent the ideal.

Perhaps, in this respect at least, not too far from what we thought he might have meant by the word 'sentimental'.

Mr. Pamuk, are you a naive novelist or a sentimental one?

The title of Orhan Pamuk's 2009 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, comes, as he explains in his first lecture, from Friedrich Schiller's essay, "Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung" (On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, 1795-1796). The word 'sentimental' here is a false friend, as Pamuk explains. In Schiller's essay it is intended 'to describe the state of mind which has strayed from nature's simplicity and power and has become too caught up in its own emotions and thoughts.' Pamuk writes about how Schiller had envied what he saw as Goethe's effortless brilliance -- his naivety -- which he saw in contrast to his own more complex tendency to think too much. Pamuk then goes on to reflect:

While reading "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry" thirty years ago, I too -- just like Schiller raging at Goethe  -- complained of the naive, childlike nature of Turkish novelists of the previous generation. They wrote their novels so easily, and never worried about problems of style and technique. And I applied the word "naive" (which I increasingly used in a negative sense) not only to them but to writers all over the world who regarded the nineteenth-century Balzacian novel as a natural entity and accepted it without question. (p.18)

Surprisingly, then, in his Epilogue to the lectures, Pamuk writes:

When I was in my twenties and first read the essay by Schiller that informs this book, I wanted to become a naive writer. Back then, in the 1970s, the most popular and influential Turkish novelists wrote semi-political, semi-poetic novels that took place in rural settings and small villages. In those days, becoming a naive writer whose stories were set in the city, in Istanbul, seemed a difficult goal to achieve. Since I delivered these lectures at Harvard, I have been repeatedly asked, "Mr. Pamuk, are you a naive novelist or a sentimental one?" I would like to emphasize that, for me, the ideal state is one in which the novelist is naive and sentimental at the same time. (p. 189)

Which Pamuk do we believe, the one who speaks first or the one that writes afterwards? Or perhaps there is only the classic Pamuk predicament: that while he thought he despised these naive, childlike writers, all along he just wanted to become one of them -- that he wanted to become somebody else.

As I prepare to transform my thoughts into words

It is interesting that, according to his lectures published in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, the visual is so important to Orhan Pamuk, not only in the writing of his own novels but of the form, as he sees it, in general:

Here is one of my strongest opinions: novels are essentially visual literary fictions. A novel exerts its influence on us mostly by addressing our visual intelligence -- our ability to see things in our mind's eye and to turn words into mental pictures. (p. 92) 

Certainly his own process of composition, as he describes it, would seem to bear this out:

When I write a chapter, a scene, or a small tableau (you see that the vocabulary of painting comes naturally to me!), I first see it in detail in my mind's eye. For me, writing is the process of visualizing that particular scene, that picture. I gaze out of the window as much as I look down at the page I am writing on with a fountain pen. As I prepare to transform my thoughts into words, I strive to visualize each scene like a film sequence, and each sentence like a painting. ( p. 93 - 94) 

Many of his novels -- at least those that have been translated into English -- do have a strong visual character. Here I am thinking of My Name is Red and The White Castle -- especially of its final, elliptical scene -- moments in Snow and, similarly, moments in The New Life -- where certain very visual images (particularly of objects) resonate throughout the writing -- as is also the case in his most recent novel, The Museum of Innocence, which might have been constructed, or at least yearned to have been constructed, out of the objects or images of these objects alone.

What is most fascinating about his stated opinion in these lectures is that Orhan Pamuk sees the visual primarily in terms of landscape painting. 'Most novelists,' he declares in his first lecture, 'sense that reading the opening  pages of a novel is akin to entering a landscape painting.' And, in the fourth: 'looking at a landscape painting is much like reading a novel.' From both these lectures and his memoir, Istanbul: Memories of a City, we learn that, in his youth, before turning to writing, Pamuk had wanted to be an artist: in fact, a landscape artist. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that he should see what he is doing in these terms. Snow, which he has described elsewhere as his first and only political novel, begins with a visual description of the landscape passed in a journey through a blizzard between Erzurum and Kars. After all, as Pamuk writes on the opening page, 'our traveller [had] glued his eyes to the window next to him.'

In all his novels, however, the voice of the narrator and/or the protagonist soon presses further forwards of any suggested landscape: the narrative moving quickly into the nebulous no-place and often distorting obsessions of the mind. The narrator interrupts Ka's journey in Snow with his reflections as soon as the eyes at the window have fallen asleep. On the first page of The Black Book, after a brief evocation of the streets of Istanbul, the narrator writes that Galip 'wanted to explore in full sunlight the willows, the acacias, the climbing rose in the enclosed garden of Rüya's tranquil sleep' and thus begins a labyrinthine journey through the obsessions of Galip and everyone he meets during his search for his wife in the landscape of Istanbul which he both sees and fails to see for itself. Even in My Name is Red -- which is the novel significant, as Pamuk claims in his Epilogue, for being the one during which he 'developed [his] ideas on the visual aspects of narration', the opening chapter 'I am a corpse' enlarges more upon the obsessions whirling around and through the rotting head of the corpse than the well or the landscape around it where, we have been told, the corpse has been thrown.

Significantly, the one novel of his, at least in English, that Pamuk doesn't get round to mentioning in the course of these lectures is the novel which promoted him to bestseller status in Turkey, although not yet in the West: The New Life: a novel whose intense, forward moving narrative blurs the division between scenes and suggests less a sequence of tableaux -- and much less a film in any conventional sense -- than the somnambulant obsessions and gothic distortions of dreams. 

For the record, it is also interesting to remember that this book, as we learn in Pamuk's Other Colours: Essays and a Story, was conceived and written, as if to provide some respite, during the two year hiatus it created in the writing of his more consciously visual novel -- at least in its intentions: My Name is Red.

The vivid illusion that the world has a center and a meaning

In the recent publication of Orhan Pamuk's 2009 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, he writes that when he was starting out as a novelist in his twenties, he was somewhat intimidated by the importance and role given to the notion of 'character' in E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, where the character of the protagonist with all his or her peculiar and artificial quirks is supposed to determine every other aspect of the novel, including the plot:

I sensed that human character was not nearly as important in real life as Forster said it was in literature. But I would then go on to think: If it's important in novels, it must be important in life too -- after all, I don't know much about life. [Pamuk's italics, p. 64]

It was only as he experienced more of life, and as he wrote his novels, that he found that despite aspiring to create great memorable characters such as Anna Karenina, it wasn't the peculiarities of character which interested him. Character, he discovered, was greatly over-rated. Pamuk explains that this view of character -- a view which is based on a highly artificial construction, and yet has, as he writes, 'aspects bordering on the mystical'  -- has come to dominate creative writing courses, where students are often taught lists of rules and dumped with assumptions that no one has thought to question. In the Epilogue to this collection of lectures he returns to these courses that seem to run on the edge of things, making do with the leavings of others: describing how Forster's book 'has been dropped from the syllabus in university English departments and exiled to creative-writing programs, where writing is treated as a craft and not as a spiritual and philosophical act' -- whether 'real or imagined,' he might have added, as he later describes the 'center' which, for Pamuk, turns out to constitute the generative heart of the literary novel.

One of the most carefully developed ideas in this series of his lectures is this one that literary novels, as distinct from genre novels -- whose purpose, it seems, is to make us feel at home -- are written to both suggest and conceal that they have a secret centre from which viewpoint the entire novel can be understood. Returning to Aspects of the Novel towards the end of the series, he uses Forster's idea of a guiding principle to investigate this aspect of literary fiction that he feels has been neglected by both literary critics and historians:

I have taken issue with E. M. Forster's idea -- the popular notion that, as the novel is written, the major characters take over and dictate its course. But if we must believe in a mysterious element in the writing process, it would be more appropriate to believe it is the center that takes over the novel. Just as the sentimental-reflective reader goes through the novel trying to guess exactly where the center is, the experienced novelist goes along knowing that the center will gradually emerge as he writes, and that the most challenging and rewarding aspect of his work will be finding this center and bringing it into focus. (p.157)

There is, he writes, no single centre to a novel; he even writes that this centre can be a masterful illusion:

The greatest literary novels -- such as Anna Karenina, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain, and The Waves -- are indispensable to us because they create the hope and the vivid illusion that the world has a center and a meaning, and because they give us joy by sustaining this impression as we turn their pages. (p.173)