Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature 0231183267, 9780231183260

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ORHAN PAMUK AND THE GOOD OF WORLD LITERATURE GLORIA FISK

O R H A N PA M U K A N D T H E GOOD OF WORLD LITERATURE

LITERATURE NOW

L I T E R AT U R E N OW Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Series Editors Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures. Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision Sarah Phillips Casteel, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination Jeremy Rosen, Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace Jesse Matz, Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture Ashley T. Shelden, Unmaking Love: The Contemporary Novel and the Impossibility of Union Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present Zara Dinnen, The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture

ORHAN PAMUK and the GOOD of WORLD LITERATURE Gloria Fisk

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fisk, Gloria author. Title: Orhan Pamuk and the good of world literature / Gloria Fisk. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2017. | Series: Literature now | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017023194 (print) | LCCN 2017031073 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231544825 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231183260 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Pamuk, Orhan, 1952—Criticism and interpretation. | Literature—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PL248.P34 (ebook) | LCC PL248.P34 Z69 2017 (print) | DDC 894/.3533—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023194

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Figure credits: 2.1 and 2.2: Images from Orhan Pamuk and Ekin Oklap, The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence. Istanbul, New York: Abrams, 2012. All rights belong to the Innocence Foundation. 7.1 Map data ©2016 GeoBasis-DE/BKG (©2009), Google, Mapa GISrael, ORION-ME Cover Image: INNOCENCE OF OBJECTS by Orhan Pamuk. All rights belong to the Innocence Foundation.

For Dale and Elaine Fisk

There is no reason to doubt that all cultures . . . tend to be successful in reproducing their hegemony. They do this in different ways, obviously. —EDWARD SAID, THE WORLD, THE TEXT, AND THE CRITIC

“If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.” “But no one believes everything they read in a novel,” I said. —ORHAN PAMUK, SNOW

CONTENTS

Ack now l e d gm e n t s

xi

Introduction: Slippery Words: Orhan Pamuk, Good, and World Literature

1

WHAT GOOD CAN A NOVEL DO?

Chapter One A Novel Can Teach You About Other People

32

Chapter Two A Novel Can Teach You About Other People’s History 65 WHAT GOOD CAN A NOVELIST DO?

Chapter Three Orhan Pamuk as Political Gadfly: “The Armenian Issue”

93

Chapter Four Orhan Pamuk as Exile: Pamuk and Auerbach in Istanbul

113

x CONTENTS

Chapter Five Orhan Pamuk Wins the Nobel Prize: The Cases of Orhan Pamuk and Mo Yan 128 WHAT GOOD CAN WORLD LITERATURE DO?

Chapter Six World Literature as an Artifact of the University in the United States: The Part About the Critics 165 Coda: Now, What?

189

No t e s 203 Bi bl io gr a ph y 237 I n de x 251

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Nobody prefaces a book with a reflection on how easy it was to write, I know. But my mind still reels when I think of the difficulty I had writing this one, so I bow down with gratitude when I think of the ways I did not go through that process alone. I wrote this book at three universities, on two continents, and I amassed significant debts everywhere. At Koç, I found a co-conspirator in Erik Mortenson and a friend forever in Aslı Niyazioğlu, who has been stalwart at my side at a police station, a veterinary office, a shrine to the Sufi sheikhs, and the terrace at the Buyuk Londra. At the Refugee Legal Aid Project (RLAP), my friends—especially Hamid Askari, Mahad Cumar, Suzy Hansen, and the indomitable Rachel Levitan—taught me with their example how to do my work even when it seems trivial in proportion to the needs of the world. At Princeton University, Kerry Walk reconfigured my brain to perceive the contours of the academic culture I describe in this book. And I would never have made my way into it without the friendship of Kristin Dombek, Margie Duncan, Elena Glasberg, Ann Jurecic, Alfie Guy, Soo La Kim, Andrea Scott, Keith Shaw, Judy Snow, and Amanda Irwin Wilkins, among many others. At Queens College, I have found an institutional home. Glenn Burger and Steve Kruger have done so much for me that I don’t know where to start; if I started, I might never finish. With their leadership, I find meaning and

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delight in the work I do alongside Annmarie Drury, Kevin Ferguson, Caroline Hong, Jason Tougaw, Amy Wan; also and crucially Joel Allen, Seo-Young Chu, Carrie Hintz, Rich McCoy, Maaza Mengiste, Bill Orchard, Karen Weingarten, Chris Williams, and, really, everybody. I want to have my office near all yours until I take my Travia leave. My dean, Bill McClure, has supported this project in ways that include but also exceed the obvious. My students at Queens remind me daily why I got into this line of work in the first place, and they make me marvel at the fact that I get paid for it. I’m also grateful to the PSC-CUNY, not only for the fellowships I’ve received but also for the variety of benefit I get as an employee in a union. As I’ve celebrated my homecoming to the City University of New York, I’ve found my people, too, at the Association of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). The intellectual kinship I find there—in Jonathan Eburne, Amy Elias, Mark Goble, Joe Jeon, Yogita Goyal, Sarah Evans, Angela Naimou, and so many others—has made this book possible by making my life as its writer fun. My readerly friends at the ASAP and elsewhere have pulled me out of countless writerly thickets, often under duress. Kristin Dombek read the whole messy manuscript with equal measures of generosity and genius. E. Efe Çakmak, Sarah Chihaya, Annmarie Drury, Shelly Eversley, Rachel Greenwald-Smith, Suzy Hansen, Matt Hart, Aslı Niyazioğlu, Sean O’Toole, Meline Toumani, Jason Tougaw, and Sevinç Türkkan all read portions of my drafty text, too, to help me find patterns in it that I had unwittingly hidden. David Damrosch, Amy Elias, Janice Ho, Louis Menand, and Benj Widiss lent support that I would have never had the audacity to request; so did Jennifer Dalton, David Driver, Mark Mooradian, Tom Strickler, and Heidi Wendorff. The central question of this book took shape over a conversation I had on a Beyoğlu rooftop with Jed Boyar, Borzou Daragahi, Delphine Minoui, Gökçe Saraçoğlu, and Ivan Watson. Every person I’ve named here has helped me through at least one difficult moment that I will always remember, and I look forward to trying to return those favors. Orhan Pamuk has been incredibly gracious to me. My conversations with him have changed the way I think about contemporary authorship, and the kindness he showed—not only to me but also to my students at Queens—attests to his goodness by a definition that needs no literary theory to explain it. The photos from his Museum of Innocence in Istanbul

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appear here thanks to The Innocence Foundation and with the help of the Wylie Agency, particularly Katie Cacouris, Jacqueline Ko, and Anna Wood. My editors at Columbia University Press have ushered this project through a thousand travails that were never of their making. Philip Leventhal gave me hope for this book ages ago, and he has supported it unfailingly since then. Azade Seyhan and my anonymous readers gave my manuscript the close and thoughtful attention every writer hopes to have. My greatest editorial debt is owed to the people of Literature Now—David James, Rebecca Walkowitz, and, especially, Matthew Hart—who helped me turn my manuscript into the book I intended to write in the first place. Miriam Grossman brought the book together with verve; Anita O’Brien edited the copy with patience and care, and Paula Durbin-Westby prepared the index. Portions of this book grow out of conversations I had on panels organized by Chris Bush, Paulo Horta, and Sevinç Türkkan. The argument I make in chapter 6 began at the invitation of the Postcolonial Studies Group at the Graduate Center, CUNY, with thanks particularly to Ashna Ali and Christopher Ian Foster. Scattered ideas from that chapter and the next also appear in articles I published in the American Reader, n + 1, and MLA Approaches to Orhan Pamuk. This book is better for the editorial work of Keith Gessen and Alyssa Loh, and I’m also very grateful to the New York Public Library for giving me access to the Allen Room, the Wertheim Room, and Elmer Bobst Library of New York University. The debt that underlies them all is to my parents, who taught me first to think carefully about the ways I live in the world, knowing that whatever I think, I’m probably largely wrong. Taking that wrongness as a feature of being alive, they gave their full support to this project long before and after its inception, even when its feasibility was not at all apparent. Gary Fisk, Michelle Fisk, and Brett Boyar have been here for the duration and then some. And I can’t imagine how anybody writes a book without Jed Boyar. The world where I live with him equals the world, as far as I can see, so his thinking is entwined with mine in every word I write.

INTRODUCTION Slippery Words: Orhan Pamuk, Good, and World Literature

The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk engages a public that is as rich in cultural capital as it is far-flung. His most notable novels—The Black Book (1994; Kara Kitap, 1990), for example, and Snow (2004; Kar, 2002)—circulate widely around the world, traveling through the small fractions of people who buy the equally small fractions of books that are marketed and sold as literature. This transnational reading class1 coheres through the same technologies as the business culture that subtends it, with global English as its lingua franca and global capital as the engine that makes it go.2 Orhan Pamuk is a producer as well as a product of this literary globality, where he reaches a foreign audience that dwarfs its Turkish corollary by orders of magnitude. He has acknowledged that disproportion as a fact of literary life in “the age of global media,” when novelists like Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, and Gabriel García Márquez write “less for their own national majorities (who do not read them) than for the small minority of literary readers in the world who do.”3 Locating himself in that company, too, Pamuk says that he writes by necessity for the people who want to read the kinds of novels he writes, so he writes for readers who live thinly spread all over the world.4 Orhan Pamuk circulates broadly and to great acclaim through that transnational literary sphere, which makes him legible to me as a functional answer to the question: what does a non-Western writer have to do

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to be read as an author of world literature at the turn of the twenty-first century? It is tautological to say that he or she has to meet the standard for literary value that prevails at this time and place, but it is also true, so I read Pamuk as a case study in the uneven processes of translation, circulation, and judgment that carry a non-Western writer to his publics in the West. Orhan Pamuk wins the highest honors “the world republic of letters” has to give in this historical moment, when the cultural and educative institutions that have housed literary culture in the metropolitan centers of the United States and Europe advance the good intentions they state to expand their reading in the traditions to their south and east.5 He becomes widely available to this transnational literary establishment that convenes through the same technologies that globalize the economies that subtend it, fostering conversation among literary critics about the best ways to resist the neoliberalism that suffuses the air we breathe.6 The critical discourses surrounding world literature are inscribed with that paradoxical relation to hegemonic power, locally and globally, and the rhetoric of Pamuk’s canonization reads like a Rorschach test in that context, revealing the great expectations Western readers bring to the writers who travel to them from farthest away. Orhan Pamuk’s canonization rests on his ability to render Turkish people and places eminently legible to readers who lack the facility to read his words without a translator or to locate his characters and settings with ease on a map. He excels under those conditions for canonization as world literature by transmitting the granular details that have historically been the novel’s stock in trade to readers who come poorly equipped to receive them. Demonstrating literary talents that are well suited to the demands of his moment, he is praised for recuperating the genre that Franco Moretti called “the symbolic form of the modern nation-state” to make it work on a global scale.7 And he gains currency from the strategic value of his geographic location, which prompts his readers to gesture toward their anxieties about Islamic terrorism and the wars against it when they describe the greatness of Orhan Pamuk in terms of his goodness as a citizen of the world. Pamuk is praised warmly for the infrastructural work he performs between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic East, providing a bridge where one is needed, a diplomat between warring parties, and a window from one side of the world to another. The Swedish Academy invoked all those metaphors by turns in 2006 when they announced that Pamuk had

3 INTRODUCTION: SLIPPERY WORDS

won his nation’s first Nobel Prize for peering “into the melancholic soul of his native city” to discover “new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”8 Loose echoes of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” resonate here, as they do throughout Pamuk’s reception in the West. When John Updike reviewed the English translation of Snow in the New Yorker, he prescribed it as a “tonic in its scope, candor, and humor,” for nurturing the “empathy [that] knits a society together.”9 Duly grateful for that medicine and protesting a bit too much against its necessity, the British critic Tom Holland contended that “we in the West can only feel gratitude that such a novelist as Pamuk exists to act as a bridge between our culture and that of a heritage quite as rich as our own.”10 His capacity to represent human experience that is otherwise hard to see makes him legible as an author of world literature and, not incidentally, a more global peace. That criterion for literary merit fuses the aesthetic with the political in ways that are historically specific to Western institutions that increasingly speak English with an American accent. David Damrosch narrates how world literature emerged as an artifact of this moment in the most succinct answer he gives to his titular question: what is world literature? Historicizing the term that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe coined, Damrosch begins with the moment when “world literature” referred to nothing other than Greco-Roman classics, and everything less foundational than Aeschylus was deemed parochial. That ended in nineteenth-century Europe, when the “masterpiece” arose as a category to describe modern works of aesthetic sophistication that engaged with the classical traditions that preceded them. It was only in the twentieth century that “world literature” became synonymous with a canon of texts that provide what Damrosch calls “windows into foreign worlds” without necessarily demonstrating the craft and grace of a masterpiece—I, Rigoberta Menchú, for example.11 This aesthetic value that is contingent on political utility indexes the varieties of multiculturalism that ascended in the United States in the wake of the canon wars of the 1980s, and they are globalized in the reception of writers like Orhan Pamuk. Representing a species of diversity that cuts across the categories of citizenship and national belonging, Pamuk demonstrates to his Western publics the good world literature can do at the turn of the twenty-first century, when a novel gains its value from the view it gives its readers on worlds they would find hard to see without a local and literary guide. The novelist’s greatness becomes evident in this cultural and

4 INTRODUCTION: SLIPPERY WORDS

political good he provides with the information he conveys, rendering his literary quality inseparable from—if not wholly dependent on—the kinds and degrees of solidarity he creates among strangers. Literature has not always been read so instrumentally, nor is that lens applied to all writers equally. Neither Karl Ove Knausgaard nor Jonathan Franzen is tasked with this job of using his literary craft for political good, as that good is understood by a very contemporary and Western definition. The American pragmatist Richard Rorty articulated it clearly when he explained why he left philosophy for literary theory in the 1990s, under the twinned assumptions that “solidarity” is the key to every functional society, and literature is uniquely qualified to create it. “This process of coming to see other human beings as ‘one of us’ rather than ‘them’ is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and a redescription of what we ourselves are like,” he observes, a feat of “imagination” rather than “inquiry.” Consequently, “this is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel.”12 And if it is unsurprising that literature becomes valuable to a pragmatist philosopher chiefly to the degree that it advances pragmatic thought, Rorty’s argument is recapitulated whenever Western critics praise Orhan Pamuk as a bridge between East and West, which is to say, quite often. “WHO DO YOU WRITE FOR?”

The sheer facticity of his global reach seems apparent to Orhan Pamuk, so it is with some chagrin that he has reflected on the frequency with which he is expected to deny it. In an essay titled “Who Do You Write For?,” Pamuk attributes high stakes to this question he is asked more often than any other: “You write in Turkish, so do you write just for Turks or do you now have in mind the wider audience you reach through your translations?” The question is leading, and its answer is a statement of fact: Orhan Pamuk sells many more of his novels in translation than in his native Turkish, thanks to the multinational publishing corporations that market his work as globally as any other consumer good.13 But that is not the answer Pamuk’s interlocutors want to hear, as he understands it, because the question is always posed with “that same suspicious, supercilious smile,” which indicates to him “that if I wish my works to be accepted as true and authen-

5 INTRODUCTION: SLIPPERY WORDS

tic, I must answer, ‘I write only for Turks.’ ”14 This expectation has broad implications that trouble Pamuk, and they trouble me, too. Pamuk contends that his domestic and foreign readers collude in the fantasy of his blindness to the reality of his place in the world, but their investments in it are quite different. On one hand, as Pamuk argues, “the opinion makers and cultural institutions of nonwestern nations” protect that fiction from the facts that would dispel it because they want to “avoid discussing current national crises or the black marks in their history in international arenas.” The most culturally endowed of his compatriots shrink at the thought of his access to microphones that work beyond the limits of his state’s control, because they are invested in the status quo that gives them the time, education, and money required to read literature like his. And Pamuk sees a corollary logic at work on the opposite side of the Bosphorus, where his Western readers also put their hegemonic status at stake in their fantasies about his authorship. As Pamuk understand them, his Western readers come to him with the desire “to open a book and enter a foreign country that is cut off from the world,” so they can “watch that country’s internal wrangling, much as one might witness a family argument next door. If a writer is addressing an audience that includes readers in other cultures speaking other languages, then this fantasy dies too.”15 This is the fantasy that the cultural knowledge Pamuk imparts to his Western readers is an exclusive property, accessible only to the most intrepid explorer of textual worlds that are meant for other people entirely. By reading Pamuk’s novels with this fantasy in mind, literary readers fashion themselves as globalists in a neighborhood of nationalists who know less. Orhan Pamuk alternately fuels and resists these fantasies. He describes himself as a “global novelist” to historicize the term, contrasting his transnational readership with the more boundaried publics that embraced Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy, when “the art of the novel was in every sense a national art.” The meaningful coincidence that binds the novel and the nation-state witnesses the rise of a middle class of readers who could recognize “every city, street, house, room, and chair” that their “national authors” represented. And the first novelists invented literary devices that anticipated and used that recognition semiotically, representing the granular details of everyday life as indices of meaning beyond themselves so they could intervene in “a national discussion on matters of national importance” without ever leaving the realm of fiction.

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They invented realism, in other words, to render ordinary objects and incidents meaningful as referents in a discourse that became the lingua franca of their nation.16 But Pamuk sells most of his books far away from the places and people he depicts, and he knows it. That knowledge prompts his reasonable inference that his readers buy his novels without hoping to discover mimetic representations of the world they see around them; instead, they hope to feel more intimate with parts of the world that would otherwise seem to them excessively remote. His wry tone suggests some skepticism about the possibility of using literature for such cross-cultural enlightenment, but he does not dismiss the effort entirely—and how could he? His non-Turkish readers buy his novels to glean nonfictional information that is geopolitically specific, and all of us who make our livings in world literature—including Orhan Pamuk—would be lost without them.17 He gestures toward that dependence with an argument that is only gently skeptical and ultimately more descriptive than prescriptive. As he contends, the fictional representation of historical fact has become the stock in trade of the novels and novelists that he calls “global.” That adjective demands further modification, though, to distinguish the category of novelists that Pamuk names from others who might be deemed “global” in a different context. Pamuk does not include in this category the novelists who gain sizable audiences in their national cultures but lack broad circulation globally, nor does he refer to novelists who circulate broadly but without the critical acclaim that attends works of “world literature”: Maeve Binchy, for example, Stieg Larsson, George R. Martin, or J. K. Rowling. By definition, the novelists he calls “global” have admirers who are as prestigious as they are broadly dispersed. These novelists “no longer speak first and only to the middle classes of their own countries”; they “speak, and speak immediately, to readers of ‘literary novels’ all over the world.”18 The audiences for these novels that are too demanding to routinely become bestsellers comprise a minority in every nation, but they aggregate in a transnational audience of significant size and cultural heft, and that heftiness prompts Pamuk to his most salient point. “So there we have it,” he declares. “The needling questions, and the suspicions about these writers’ true intentions, reflect an uneasiness about this new cultural order that has come into being over the past thirty years.”19 Pamuk leaves the subject at that, but there is much more to say. As he de-

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scribes it, this scene of imagined rapport between the author and reader of world literature is coerced by the rhetoric in which it is written, which consolidates power and privilege where it currently resides by obscuring the violent stratifications that hold the contemporary world together and apart. It is my argument here that Pamuk is right to observe the high stakes that attend this encounter between “the global novelist” and his publics, and he is right, too, to suspect that his readers come to him with the desire that he will soothe the “unease” they feel about “this new cultural order” that works as globally as the economy that subtends it. In fact, this suspicion obtains further than he applies it. Orhan Pamuk is the apotheosis of a literary globality that vents anxieties historically particular to the authors of his canonization in global English: literary critics who write with a broad consensus against neoliberalism and global capitalism in research that secures their employment in cultural and educative institutions that operate by precisely those logics. Written from this compromised position, the critical discourses that work explicitly against the inequities that have structured the literary world also enable their authors’ very local interests, and that secondary purpose works in tension if not diametric opposition to the first. Orhan Pamuk’s case is illustrative, and it indexes a problem that extends far beyond him. The Chinese American novelist Ha Jin points toward that problem, too, when he raises a corollary of Pamuk’s titular question, asking: “For whom does the writer speak?” Jin contends that “there is no argument that the writer must take a moral stand and speak against oppression, prejudice, and injustice, but such a gesture must be secondary, and he must be aware of the limits of his art as social struggle. His real battlefield is nowhere but on the page. His work will be of little value if not realized as art.”20 This passage is rife with the paradoxes that drive Pamuk’s story as well, but Jin resolves them with a clearer hierarchy of concerns. The writer “must take a moral stand” on behalf of a community that exceeds himself, but he must also put his highest priority “on the page.” He must act in the real world while he also declares his primary allegiance to fiction. In this well-defined order of aesthetics over politics in his work, harmony is assumed. But it is exactly that harmony that eludes Pamuk and so many other writers from the outer edges of a “world republics of letters” housed in the West. They find it hard to write about political realities in strictly literary terms because they become legible to their Western publics primarily, if not

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exclusively, by the journalistic content they convey beyond the limits of their national cultures, which incline to hold them accountable in ways that Western democracies do not. Pascale Casanova describes their straitened condition by quoting the Brazilian critic Antonio Candido, who identifies the structural inevitability of this inequity that conforms to the shapes of global capital: nations with high illiteracy rates have inversely small “publics disposed to literature,” and that creates “the impossibility, for writers, of specializing in their literary jobs.”21 Writers in less culturally endowed nations become obligated to do extra-literary work for their states and their people, underlining the historical contingency of that definition: what is the writer’s “literary job,” exactly, and to whom does he or she report? As that question is inflected by the relative power of nations and states, it is inflected also by the differences among languages. Pamuk enters Western canons at a historical moment when any writer who harbors the ambition to reach a global public becomes functionally obligated to travel through the English language to get there, employing the help of a translator if necessary,22 because the sheer size of Anglophone markets combines with the ascendance of global English to make literary canonization increasingly synonymous with publication in English.23 To show how Pamuk travels through a literary world that speaks the dominant language of global capital, I read his work and his public personae in their English translations, focusing particularly on the period after the terrorist attacks of 2001 drew Western readers’ attention to the literary traditions of the Islamic East.24 Like Aamir Mufti, I work from the premise that, “the ‘rise’ of English to worldwide pre-eminence is one of the most pronounced cultural and social developments in the modern era, with profound implications for, among other things, languages and cultures of writing on a world scale.”25 I study the conditions for Pamuk’s arrival in this increasingly Anglophonic literary sphere to read world literature as a rhetorical arena where U.S.-based critics negotiate our complicated relationship to hegemonic power, locally and globally. Enjoying the relative degrees of privilege that accrue to people in the professional strata of the U.S. economy, humanists evaluate world literature by its utility against the corporate logics we dislike for good ethical and political reasons, including but not limited to their devaluation of humanistic work. The critical discourses that greet Orhan Pamuk on his translation into global English vent the anxieties that spring from literary critics’ marginalized position in a capitalist’s world, and our

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structurally complicit relation to processes we broadly oppose. Those anxieties find expression in two assumptions that are as widely held as they are prescriptive: literature should work oppositionally to neoliberalism and global capital, and the interpretive challenges of translation should be recognized far beyond the level of the word or the sentence. Pamuk’s novels give their critics a good opportunity to put those prescriptions into practice. They represent a contribution to “the literature of the future,” as Rebecca Walkowitz describes it when she imagines a corpus “written for translation, calculating its presence in many languages, and from translation, incorporating the trace, the influence, and the needs of other readers[;] future reading may have to be different reading, both technically and philosophically.”26 That future is Orhan Pamuk’s present, and his work lends itself readily to the critical discourses that are honed for this task. I study them to trace their limiting effects, teasing out the narrative of enlightenment that Western cultures tell about their engagements with world literature by some definition. To show how those definitions are culturally and politically freighted, I historicize a scholarly conversation that unfolds in universities in the United States, among critics who theorize how and why Western readers expect the literature we read to suture opposites, cross distances, and bridge gaps. Timothy Aubry refers to the “therapeutic paradigm”;27 Rachel Greenwald Smith uses the “affective hypothesis” to explain how “compromise aesthetics” serve a neoliberal agenda;28 Jodi Melamed describes how “neoliberal-multicultural discourse” advances U.S. hegemony around the world;29 Sianne Ngai and Patrick Jagoda write separately about “network aesthetics”;30 and Rachel Walkowitz theorizes a more global literature that seems as if it is “born translated” into English.31 Taken together, these theoretical vocabularies aggregate as an argument for valuing literary texts for their representation of the world as a loose connection of institutions and structures operating transnationally, from powerful states to the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund.32 Literary readers seek authors who can help them orient themselves in this global reality by functioning as “network-extenders,” to borrow the vocabulary of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello. “The new spirit of capitalism,” as Boltanski and Chiapello describe it, demands a bridge at any location that is “bereft of links” because “the attainment of better conditions” matters only when it works for “the whole

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city, and [is] thus a common good.”33 Political progress hinges on the totality of its reach in the historical moment Boltanski and Chiapello describe, which is, uncoincidentally, the moment of Orhan Pamuk’s canonization as world literature. He is honored in the metropolitan centers of the United States and the European Union for the benefits he brings to a city that expands to include the whole world, diminishing not only the distance his readers imagine between themselves and his fictional characters but the distance they imagine between themselves and those characters’ referents— that is, Turkish people. He fosters sensations of proximity that ease geopolitical concerns, and he also guarantees the seamless relation of the novel to the world. Erasing temporarily the mimetic gap that has troubled literature’s relation to the political since Plato ejected the poets from the polis, Pamuk gives his readers a transparent “window” onto people and places that have strategic value but are hard to see, even with Google. He advances the species of enlightenment that literary readers deem requisite for a more global peace, testifying to the value of the literary in an economy where its value is not self-evident. The parties who have a vested interest in that value include literary critics like me, who live on what we get paid by universities in the United States. Discourses of globality serve us well in that institutional setting, where they assert the value of the humanities as a source of information about the nonfictional world.34 That assertion proves useful in the increasingly stratified landscape of the neoliberal university,35 which assesses the quality and quantity of labor in terms that lend themselves poorly to work in the humanities. Those of us who make our way into the dwindling number of positions on the tenure track struggle to list the deliverables and outcomes that ensure our continued access to the kinds and degrees of privilege that are categorically denied to the swelling ranks of contingent laborers who populate our departments, bearing instructional workloads that all but preclude active participation in our critical debates. The existence of that contingent workforce shapes the conditions in which scholarly debates get written by tenure-track faculty, who are distanced from the adjunct’s precarity by the promise of a paycheck that arrives regularly in perpetuity, with levels of job security that are surely in the top 1 percent. As literary critics become structurally bound in a dependent if not complicit relation to the institutional logics of neoliberalism, the theoretical discourses associated with neoliberalism gain new utility as a rhetorical

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straw man. The media theorist Terry Flew has made a related point with empirical evidence that documents the ascendance of “neoliberalism” in humanists’ research from the early 1990s to 2014.36 Charting a period that coincides roughly with the ascendance of “world literature” among literary critics, too, Flew’s analysis obtains in both cases. He argues that “neoliberalism” is as “oft invoked” in the humanities of this era as it is “ill defined,” with referents that differ so widely that they are sometimes mutually exclusive. Using digital technologies to cull a huge amount of research across the humanities, Flew shows how neoliberalism functions as a “rhetorical trope” to suggest: “(1) an all-purpose denunciatory category; (2) ‘the way things are’; (3) an institutional framework characterizing particular forms of national capitalism, most notably the Anglo-American ones; (4) a dominant ideology of global capitalism; (5) a form of governmentality and hegemony; and (6) a variant within the broad framework of liberalism as both theory and policy discourse.” It is precisely because of this semantic looseness that “neoliberalism”—and, I argue, “world literature”—proves so useful to contemporary humanists.37 With these abstract nouns as bogeymen, literary critics create a rhetorical place to stand outside of the institutional logics by which grants are funded, promotions are approved, time for research is allowed, and paychecks are sent. Orhan Pamuk helps literary critics rationalize our compliance with the corporate logics that structure intellectual life in the U.S.-based university. Those rationalizations suffuse the debate over world literature, which is legible as a debate over the best way to negotiate the institutional worth of literary critics in an era that witnesses a marked contraction in funding for the humanities on many levels. As critics like David Damrosch and Gayatri Spivak hone the tools we have at our disposal to read Orhan Pamuk, they also test the arguments that could work against the adversary we share in the corporatization of higher education, known to its theorists as “academic capitalism.”38 The terms of Orhan Pamuk’s canonization cohere as an implicit argument for institutional spending on the humanities, which are framed as the means to the wide array of good ends that follow from cross-cultural understanding: progress toward a more global peace, most notably, and success in a creative economy.39 That argument for the instrumentality of literary education is written in tones that incline toward the defensive, assuming an implied reader who looks skeptically at a field of study that promises to be less lucrative than

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business, perhaps, economics, or neuroscience. Against that presumed skepticism, the marketability of literary study is emphasized on the website for the School of Arts and Humanities at Harvard University, where the Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature James Engell lists “practical” reasons to study literature “in today’s fast evolving world”: “Leaders across the spectrum of vocations and professions need a broad imaginative and critical capacity, not a prematurely narrow point of view. In terms of the actual world, a solid liberal arts and sciences education will generally prove the most practical preparation for many demanding, high-level careers, or for the several careers that an increasing number of adults will eventually pursue.” 40 A degree in English is posited as a good credential for gainful employment by a logic that recurs throughout Orhan Pamuk’s canonization: literature is valuable to the degree that it enables the “broad imaginative and critical capacity” a creative economy demands. It prepares a worker to be as flexible as she must be to market herself successfully in a world that needs better bridges, translators, and network extenders. U.S.-based critics use this market-driven rhetoric because it works well when we need to speak beyond the internecine conversations scholarly humanists have among ourselves, with a generally oppositional relation to the cultural logics that bolster neoliberalism, global capital, the creative economy, and the gross domestic product of the United States. This is a contradiction that literary critics can hardly avoid, but we could acknowledge it and use our work on literature to confront it rather than deny it: the employees of U.S.-based universities work in systemic complicity with these moneymaking imperatives whether we like them or not, so any critique we mount against neoliberalism and global capitalism is necessarily a critique from within. The critical rhetoric surrounding world literature suggests implicitly that the person who takes the right stance in this debate becomes more able than her opponents or, indeed, than workers in other sectors of the global economy to extricate herself from the compromises that global capital demands.41 Literary critics cultivate that pleasing fantasy only through a sustained use of “the empathic fallacy’ that the critical race theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic posit as a constitutive feature of contemporary debates over free speech on college campuses. Coining a term that builds on John

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Ruskin’s account of the way poets attribute human emotions to nature, Delgado and Stefancic note that “the poet, feeling sad, implores the world to weep with him or her.” In this “correlate” to the pathetic fallacy, the advocates of untrammeled free speech believe erroneously “that we can enlarge our sympathies through linguistic means alone. By exposing ourselves to ennobling narratives, we broaden our experience, deepen our empathy, and achieve new levels of sensitivity and fellow-feeling. We can, in short, think, talk, read, and write our way out of bigotry and narrow-mindedness, out of our limitations of experience and perspective.” 42 Using the same bad logic toward a different purpose, literary critics manage the discomfort that follows from that necessary contradiction between our theory and our praxis: our ethical and political opposition to the tenets of neoliberalism and our structural compliance with them. The ill feelings that attend that compromised condition of humanistic work in the contemporary United States are sublimated through the reception of writers like Orhan Pamuk. Testifying to the openness of Anglophone canons to the writers they have historically excluded, they obscure with their presence the controlling interest that Americans gain in global literary markets. It is not incidental that so many of the foundational texts in the critical debates over world literature were written at Harvard, Columbia, and other universities built on the American model.43 A product and a producer of the institutional culture of higher education in the United States, this archive is structured by an abiding Americanness that is duly noted but not fully addressed. Spivak identifies that quality when she inveighs against the Americentrism that is built into Damrosch’s translation of weltliteratur,44 and Damrosch concedes the point, acknowledging that the world literature he describes is not the only world literature there is; one among many, it should be understood as an artifact of its historical location rather than a vision of the literary world in its entirety. As he observes, “The relative invisibility of our American standpoint is itself a characteristically American trait,” which is reproduced in the scholarly culture of the United States, where Spivak received most of her training, and where she has done her seminal work in postcolonial theory over the course of decades. Including her work, too, in the object of her critique, Damrosch traces the Americentrism she describes to the institutional culture they share45 and suggests the need to make its cultural logics visible.

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That is part of my project in this book, where I take up the challenge that Damrosch describes when he contends that “American-based comparatists . . . have become increasingly attuned to the limitations of the traditional Eurocentrism of Comparative Literature, [but we] have yet to think through the impact of our cultural and institutional location, both as a limiting factor and as an arena of possibility.” 46 Taking those limits and possibilities as my subject here, I show how they are inscribed throughout the critical discourse of Pamuk’s reception, which uses the arrival of the Turkish novelist as an occasion to air the hopes and fears that are most pervasive at the institutional location U.S.-based humanists inhabit, domestically and globally. Suggesting in his work and his person an Islamic East with which the West can live in peace, he is received as a harbinger of greater reconciliation of the global North and South; secularity and religion; wealth and poverty; hegemony and its opposites. He shows his U.S. readers that Islamic populations have their blue states, too, and he soothes the anxieties of Western humanists about the compromised position we inhabit in our universities and in our national cultures at large. He is prescribed as the living solution to all manner of problems that are more North American than global and only marginally related to the literary at all. “WE’RE NOT STUPID! WE’RE JUST POOR!”

Pamuk acknowledges the complexity of his relationship to his various readerships in an allegory that he buries deep in the middle of his novel Snow (2004; Kar, 2002). The protagonist is a Westernized Turk who extends his stay in the snowbound city of Kars, in Turkey’s remote Southeast. Claiming to be a journalist, the cosmopolitan expat returns to his native country, using that pose as a pretext to inquire further than politeness would dictate about all manner of local conflicts. He exploits that opportunity when he invites the townspeople to formulate a collective statement for an editor at a German newspaper who possesses a “deep-seated interest in Turkey’s problems,” so he wants to publish an account of the world as it appears through Turkish eyes that have never seen European streets. The townspeople stand in figuratively in this scene for their author, who is also read as a reliable spokesperson for his nation; he is praised for his ability to synthesize Turkish views of the world into a text that translates well. The fictional meeting at the Hotel Asia narrates what gets lost in that trans-

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lation, which reduces divergent views into a consensus that is fictional. The characters disagree profoundly about what message to send to the fictional Hans Hansen for publication in Frankfurt, and some bristle at the thought of the European audience that condescends to attend to them so briefly, so they protest the purpose of the meeting altogether. Seeing their hesitation, a Kurdish youth accuses them of disingenuousness, insisting that his desire for a distant audience is as broadly felt as it is urgent to him: “I’ve always dreamed of the day when I’d have a chance to share my ideas with the world,” he says, “and so has everybody else in this room. . . . What I would say is very simple. ‘We’re not stupid! We’re just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction.” Questions arise about the veracity and appropriateness of the Kurdish youth’s statement, but also about the limits of his constituency. “What do you mean, my son, when you say ‘we’? Do you mean the Turks? The Kurds? The Circassians? The people of Kars? To whom are you referring?” The youth proceeds without answering, contending that “people might feel sorry for a man who has fallen on hard times, but when an entire nation is poor, the rest of the world assumes at once that all the people of that nation must be brainless, lazy, dirty, clumsy fools. Instead of pity, the people provoke laughter. It’s all a joke—their culture, their customs, their practices.” 47 In his imagination, “the rest of the world” takes the shape of a reader who is too thoroughly cossetted in the wealth that global capital distributes unevenly to find the inclination or ability to learn about the cultures that grow in national economies that are more developing than developed. But the critique that this dialogue directs toward the Western reader it represents is not directed toward Pamuk’s readers, exactly. The fictional townspeople of Kars anticipate German readers who are too blinkered by Eurocentricism and complacency to read a 450-page novel by a Turkish writer like Orhan Pamuk.48 By virtue of her arrival at chapter 31 in this novel that is dense with granular details about its Turkish characters and settings, any reader of this passage has differentiated herself from the Western readers it describes, and she has demonstrated her will to expand the literary canons she inherits. So, as the Kurdish youth’s complaints dovetail with more widespread laments from his fellow citizens, they suggest implicitly that, while Western cultures are bad to the degree that they ignore Turkey and its literary traditions, Orhan Pamuk’s readers, by contrast, are relatively good.

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But this moment of congratulations is short-lived by design. With the same deftness that Pamuk constructs it, he limits its duration sharply. The unnamed teenager proceeds farther into his imagination of Hans Hansen’s audiences by speculating about the ways these German readers rationalize the exploitation of the poor to enrich themselves, deeming it inevitable that “some of the rest of the world begins to feel ashamed for having thought this way”—that is, for assuming the superiority of European culture over its others. And he predicts, moreover, that this shame will prompt their fear, which will enhance their desire to learn a bit more about the cultures from which their janitors and housecleaners come: “When they look around and see immigrants from that poor country mopping their floors and doing all the other low-paying jobs, naturally they worry about what might happen if these workers one day rose up against them. So, to keep things sweet, they start taking an interest in the immigrants’ culture, and sometimes even pretend to think of them as equals.” 49 By this description, the canonization of writers like Pamuk yields a paltry compensation for the sufferings that are structurally induced for people who lack the relative privilege—that is, the time and the education—that girds the readership for books like his. Snow thematizes the economic processes that enable its Western readers to benefit from the labor of low-wage workers in places like Kars—and, drawing the analogy, it thematizes the cultural processes that circulate literature globally, too. Through the Kurdish youth, Pamuk reminds his reader that the processes of globalization that enable his circulation in the West also deepen the divisions that separate people who spend their days reading and writing novels from their people who spend their days mopping floors.50 He maps those divisions within and across national lines by acknowledging that nobody who has the time and education to read a novel written by Orhan Pamuk—much less to write one, or to write a book about it—can claim an easy exemption from the accusation that the Kurdish youth makes. Like Hans Hansen’s diegetic readers, Pamuk’s Western readers benefit materially from the hegemonic status our nations enjoy in the world. And we cultivate that status partly if inadvertently through the interest we take in the literatures we receive from “immigrant cultures” like Turkey’s. That phrase—“immigrant cultures”—works shrewdly in this context, capturing the ways that the townspeople of Kars are bound to their German readers in an economic system that depends on their inequality. By

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placing Hans Hansen in Germany, Pamuk invokes the gästarbeiter legislation that stabilizes the Turkish workforce for jobs concentrated in low-wage sectors of the German economy.51 And by making Hans Hansen an editor, he renders that stratification that global capital demands available as a metaphor for the stratifications that are built into a literary globality, too. The attention that Hans Hansen pays to Turkish cultures becomes possible only in the context of the globalization of media along with every other sector of the economy, and that is the context, too, for Pamuk’s relation to the implied reader he addresses. As Western publics take growing interest in the cultures that produce the low-wage labor that makes globalization go, they develop a taste for literature that conveys valuable information about the non-Western world. In Snow and throughout his oeuvre, Pamuk enables that narrative of cross-cultural enlightenment while he also pushes back against it, noting that learning about other cultures is not necessarily the opposite of bringing them under employ. Pascale Casanova makes a similarly nuanced point when she demonstrates how Western institutions maintain their centrality in a “world republic of letters” that extends its authority on a global scale. Taking the Swedish Academy as an illustrative case, Casanova maintains that Western cultures demonstrate on the one hand” a real commitment to “the progressive enlargement of literary space that accompanies the spread of national independence in the various parts of the world.” On the other hand, it also uses that “enlargement” in the postcolonial world to achieve colonization by another name. By anointing more writers like Orhan Pamuk, the Swedish Academy expands its jurisdiction over nations that lack significant “cultural endowment,” and it robs those writers who are plucked from relative obscurity of their “autonomy, which is to say literary emancipation in the face of political (and national) claims to authority. The original dependence of literature on the nation is at the heart of the inequality that structures the literary world.”52 Thus a writer like Orhan Pamuk works as a spokesperson for his nation on a global stage, whether he seeks that duty or not, and his Western readers come to him to learn the truth about distant people and places, notwithstanding the obvious fact that he traffics in fiction. And as Western literary cultures hold non-Western writers responsible for representing their fellow citizens to the rest of the world, they also hold those writers responsible for the corollary and roughly opposite duty to

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subvert the grand narratives and rhetorical taboos that define their national citizenship as such. The Turkish novelist’s canonization as an author of world literature becomes contingent on his ability and willingness to speak in ways that are foreign, if not offensive, to his domestic public, demonstrating a species of literary greatness that is tethered to good citizenship by the definition that obtains in a participatory democracy,53 which is to say, in the West. That standard for entry to world literature undercuts the globality it explicitly announces, taking for granted a model of authorship that is neither universally accepted nor legally protected all over the planet. Western hegemony is consolidated on a planetary scale by the novelist who serves as an outpost of secular humanism where it is unwelcome and a peacemaker between the hemispheres where they need one. His successful performance in those extraliterary jobs reassures his Western public of the universality of Western values, which enables much a bigger reassurance: it suggests the utility of the novel to the contemporary world and the good of the literary as such. “THE ARMENIAN ISSUE”

Orhan Pamuk’s polarizing effects in his national culture have a logic and lasting importance that are hard to see from afar and are impossible to explain without reference to one sentence that he uttered to a Swiss journal in 2005: “Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me wants to talk about it.”54 That sentence has been parsed more carefully in Turkey than all of Pamuk’s novels combined, and the animosities it elicits are as complex as they are deeply felt. They hinge on the meaning of Pamuk’s defiance of the historical narrative that every Turkish student learns in school, where the massacre of ethnic minorities in the formative years of the Turkish Republic is described as an effect of civil war, and people who say otherwise are reviled in the strongest terms.55 With this sentence, Pamuk remade himself as a public figure, inhabiting very different but equally recognizable roles at home and abroad. His Western readers needed neither any acquaintance with his work nor any knowledge of the history he cited to receive him as a gadfly writer who shakes his fist at the repressive machinery of his state. And his national media portrayed him as a traitor to the Turkish Republic and its people,

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motivated by some combination of opportunism and bad politics to ally himself with the West. The Turkish government criminalized his statement after he made it, entering article 301 into the Turkish penal code to codify the arguments against him and render the nationalist narrative legally binding. Any gesture of speech or action that constitutes an “insult to Turkishness” became a legal offense, so any Turkish person who maligns the Turkish Republic became a criminal under its law. Pamuk was charged retroactively because his acknowledgment of the broad outlines of the Armenian genocide—although he never used that word—was understood as an insult to foundations of the secular state.56 His trial became a national spectacle, and his name circulated in the public sphere with allegations of his traitorousness, although his acquittal was widely predicted. Even his prosecutors conceded after the fact that the case against him was weak because the key terms of the charge that was filed against him—“insult” and “Turkishness”—prove unwieldy in court.57 Article 301 functions more effectively as a pillory than as a legal instrument,58 and it generates more chilling effects than prison sentences. It formalized the narrative of Turkish nationalism that cast Orhan Pamuk as a traitorous Turk, and it circulated that charge widely among his fellow citizens, even among those who will never read a line that he writes. Editorialists likened him to the dragomans who twisted the reports that they translated between the Ottoman sultans and their European counterparts,59 and many Turks across the political spectrum—including some who would acknowledge the slaughter of Armenians, too—saw disingenuousness among Pamuk’s motivations. The quickness with which his Nobel Prize followed his statement on “the Armenian issue” confirmed to many Turkish people the solipsism with which the West rewards its own, wherever they claim their citizenship, and the depth of Western desires for the recuperation of old prejudices against the Terrible Turk.60 To cynics, it all seemed too well timed. Just months after Pamuk was tried and acquitted for breaking a national taboo, he won the Nobel Prize; his prize was announced simultaneously with a French law that criminalizes any denial of the Armenian genocide.61 During the same interval, Turkey’s negotiations for accession to the European Union crumbled and fell apart, which meant that the gates of Europe swung open for him and closed swiftly behind him. His entry to the highest pantheon of a culture that belongs at once to the West and to the world coincided with the exclusion of

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his fellow citizens from Europe, and he gained a reputation for portraying himself as a truth-teller from a nation of liars. Threats were made on his life, and they seemed particularly credible in the wake of the assassination of the Armenian Turkish journalist Hrant Dink. A hero for progressive Turks, Dink was a writer and a publisher of the Armenian Turkish newspaper Agos, and he was also a friend and colleague of Pamuk’s. Dink was charged with violating article 301 by reflecting critically on the oath of national identity with which Turkish students begin their school days: “I am a Turk, I am honest, I am hard-working.” As a child, Dink remembered, he embraced part of that sentence wholeheartedly, but his sincerity plummeted when he had to speak it in its entirety. “I said that I was a Turkish citizen, but an Armenian, and that even though I was honest and hard-working, I was not a Turk, I was an Armenian.”62 That resistance to the racialized discourse of Turkish nationalism prompted Dink’s prosecutors to action: if he was not trying to identify some deficiency inherent in Turkishness, the prosecutors contended, why would he need to qualify his identity as a Turk? That argument did not withstand legal scrutiny, but it was widely publicized, and it lingered and metastasized outside of the law. A young nationalist shot Dink on a busy Istanbul street, and a conspiracy was discovered. One of the men who was arrested in connection with his murder used his perp walk as a podium from which to terrorize the Nobel Laureate in absentia, yelling, “Orhan Pamuk, be smart! Be smart!” Few Turks took these as idle or isolated threats, particularly after the police chief of Istanbul was arrested on charges related to Dink’s case. Even the minister of justice expressed his doubts that the assassins worked alone,63 and mainstream newspapers reported the involvement of the “deep state” (derin devlet)—a shadowy configuration of military, business, and political elites plus elements of the mafia who are believed to control most of what happens in Turkey.64 Pamuk was deemed an open target for both the criminals and the police. He secured a bodyguard for travel in his native city, and he left the country soon after Dink’s murder. Like so many other exiles, he made a new if perhaps temporary home in New York City, but unlike most of them, he came bearing a Nobel Prize. He accepted a fellowship at Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought, solidifying his identity as an expat if not an exile just as he lost the ability to live safely at home. A citizen of the

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world by necessity as much as by choice, he lived out a narrative of cosmopolitanism that many of us experience much more metaphorically: “Becoming a global citizen,” as Martha Nussbaum observes, “is often a lonely business.” 65 That loneliness operates in Nussbaum’s argument as the name for a price that a good critic will willingly pay for the insights that come with it.66 But if the construction of a global literary canon brings benefits that are worth the cost to Western critics, it demands more from the non-Western writers who enter it only by sacrificing their return trip home. The quick succession of Pamuk’s enshrinement in English after his Turkish tribulations suggests some causal relation between them, and that narrative is more representative than unique in contemporary literary history. Other non-Western Nobel Laureates have similarly met their warm reception abroad just as animosities built against them closer to home: J. M. Coetzee, Imre Kertesz, Gao Xingjian, and before them, Naguib Mafouz. Sometimes hunted, they have gone into exile because their states and fellow citizens have threatened them with varieties of violence that range from the symbolic to the very real. The farther these authors of world literature travel from their origins in Africa, China, and the Middle East, the more difficulties they encounter—and it is notable that those difficulties are not exclusively governmental. By thinking historically about the Turkish people’s reluctance to celebrate their nation’s first Nobel Prize, Western critics can also think about the variety of ways world literature is expected to yield cultural and political good, noting that Pamuk is read as a representative of people who would not likely elect him to that post. Discounting the reasons for his fellow citizens’ ambivalence toward him to lionize him for his defiance of his state, the critical discourse of Pamuk’s reception in English shifts the costs of constructing a more global literary community in the West onto its newest entrants—that is, onto Orhan Pamuk, and other writers who follow his path to reach their publics throughout the United States and the European Union. Their canonization is linked discursively to the problems of intellectuals with full-time employment in the cultural and educative institutions of nations that are well endowed in “the world republic of letters,” not to mention rich by more literal measures: we secure our status at their expense. This is consistent with Edward Said’s observation that the tendency to reproduce hegemony is universal, but the manner of its reproduction is endlessly diverse; he did not exempt academics.67 The debate over world literature that is centered

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in U.S.-based universities becomes legible in this context as a debate about the way to reproduce the specific kinds of hegemony that enable scholarly work in a national culture that guarantees freedom of speech but is not overly willing to spend money on the humanities. The rhetoric of Orhan Pamuk’s reception enables the displacement of anxieties that are historically specific to humanists in North American institutions: about the status of the intellectual work that we do, and the degrees of marginalization, security, and privilege that this work affords in a national culture driven by the logic of a neoliberal economy. This displacement is as unfair to the writers who are canonized as world literature as it is unhealthy for the more global literary culture that becomes imaginable through them, and it is also unlikely to succeed—to the degree that success is synonymous with a literary culture that is more engaged with political realities, or more able to protect the humanities from the threats that the critical discourse of world literature confronts. WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THIS BOOK

Not a monograph on a single author, this book takes Orhan Pamuk as a case study in the conditions by which Western literary cultures expand to their east. It is divided into three sections. First it traces the varieties of good that are attributed to the global novel, and it proceeds to consider that genre’s author; then it moves to the cultural and educational institutions where world literature is constructed. In the first section, I refer to Maureen Freely’s English translations of The Black Book, The Museum of Innocence, and Snow, showing how Pamuk constructs his authority to convey nonfictional truth about Turkish people and their history to the West. In the second section, I study Orhan Pamuk’s public personae in a comparative frame, working from the premise that a non-Western novelist’s canonization hinges on the terms of his literary celebrity and his political profile, which renders him recognizable in markets that have historically been resistant to works in translation.68 In the final section, I study the theoretical framework and institutional practice of world literature as it is taught at universities in the United States and in Turkey. Throughout, I show how Orhan Pamuk negotiates the narrow path he travels from his domestic publics to a global audience and back home again.

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There are many books yet to be written about Orhan Pamuk, and this one does not to exhaust its subject. To read Pamuk as a case study that is relevant to other writers who also write world literature from the global South and East, I read his works as they translate and circulate in a transnational literary market, with the imprimatur of Western universities and cultural institutions. That is to say, I read him as he circulates in English rather than Turkish, focusing on the parts of his oeuvre that secure his canonization as an author of world literature. I do not trace his lineage in Turkish literature, nor do I narrate his rise to prominence in his native country. I do, however, think about the ways that his Turkish reception interacts with his international reception, particularly in chapter 3, where I write about the representation of his statements on “the Armenian Issue.” In that chapter and throughout this book, I mark my indebtedness to the scholars who study Pamuk in his native language and national culture— like Ayșe Gül Altınay, Sibel Erol, Kaya Genç, Sibel Irzık—and I refer to them as colleagues in that field that is related but distinct. My debt is owed even more directly to the critics who work comparatively in Turkish and world literature, particularly, Erdaĝ Göknar, Jale Parla, Azade Seyhan, and Sevinç Türkkan. I cite all of them and rely on them heavily, using their analyses of Pamuk’s Turkish texts in the context of Turkish literary traditions to read his English translations as contributions to a world literary system. I undertake that project that departs from the work of the “prominent critics and reviewers” to which Göknar alludes, “who reinforce the assumption that it is unnecessary to know the Turkish literary context to comprehend Pamuk’s work and that comparison with writers of world literature is sufficient.” I work alongside Göknar from the premise that “this assumption gives rise to persistent misreadings of the author’s work,”69 so I trace those misreadings at their sources in the cultural and educative institutions in the West. In that sense, I see my project as a complement to writing that places Pamuk in Turkish traditions, recognizing that contemporary readers who strive to imagine a literary globality do so necessarily beyond the limits of the languages and literatures we know well. To do that responsibly, we need methodologies that are appropriate to the task, and we do not yet have them. Taking that as my goal, I draw also on translation theorists from Walter Benjamin to Lawrence Venuti, and theorists of global English’s role in the literary marketplace,

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particularly Sarah Brouillette, Pascale Casanova, Aamir Mufti, and the Warwick Research Collective (WRC). In the final chapters, I frame these analyses of Western institutions comparatively, next to my experience of teaching Pamuk’s novels in the United States and as a founding member of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Koç University in Istanbul. I focus on the novels Pamuk published in English after 2001, when Western publics turned their attention to the cultural and political conflicts that he thematizes in Snow. The last novel that he published before he won the Nobel Prize, Snow was written before 2001 but published in English afterward,70 and it is his most overtly political novel to date; it is also the only novel that Pamuk has set in his contemporary moment. Narrating its protagonist’s progress eastward from Germany to Istanbul to Kars in the remote Southeast, Snow chronicles his characters’ competing commitments to secularism, the Turkish state, and religious fundamentalism. The characters weigh the possibility of an integral relation between Islam and terrorism and the malleability of gender rights across religious and cultural differences, posing with some persistence the same question that the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod raises in the title of her widely circulated article “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?”71 Snow puts a microphone in the hands of its Turkish characters to represent a range of answers to that question and others, as Nergis Ertürk observes convincingly, and foregrounds the mediation that filters their speech to the rest of the world.72 Those processes of mediation are my primary subject, and I focus particularly on the ways they operate in the United States, through cultural and educative institutions where world literature is constructed in English. In chapter 1 I analyze the literary identifications that Snow constructs between its Turkish characters and its Anglophone readers—implied and actual. To analyze the formal innovations Pamuk devises to create a readerly experience of proximity across distance, I draw on contemporary theories of character and identification, most notably by Suzanne Keen but also by Elaine Scarry and Blakey Vermeule. I reframe the question of identification more historically in chapter 2, where I study the strange use that Pamuk makes of an episode in recent Turkish history in Snow. It thematizes a nonfictional epidemic of suicides among young women in the Turkish city of Batman, but it alters the story in ways that change its political import, too. That difference between fiction and fact is lost on most of

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Pamuk’s non-Turkish readers, since the rash of suicides in Batman failed to register as international news. I show how that inaccurate representation of recent Turkish history undercuts the novel’s mimetic potential and suggests the complexity of Pamuk’s relation to his readers’ desire for a novelist to convey the realities of a faraway world. To support this thesis, I read Snow in the context of The Black Book, and as the precursor to The Museum of Innocence and the nonfictional museum in Istanbul with the same name, contending that they demonstrate how consciously—also how ingeniously—Pamuk toys with his readers’ expectations for mimetic representation of Turkish history in his work. From this literary analysis of Pamuk’s fiction, I study Orhan Pamuk as a celebrity and political actor on a transnational stage. My aim in the second section is to show how world literature and its writers suffer as a consequence of the great expectations Pamuk’s domestic and foreign publics bring to him. In chapter 3 I argue that the complexity of his domestic position has been poorly appreciated in the West, and I make this case by tracing the controversies that surround his statement on the “Armenian issue.” Presenting textual evidence from Turkish and foreign media, I show how he becomes functionally obligated to represent freedom of speech as unfailingly as if he had it already, and to speak on behalf of cosmopolitanism in a discursive location that binds him to speak like a nationalist. I show that Pamuk has taken positions on human rights in Turkey that are more equivocal than his reputation in the West would suggest. At the same time, I argue against the cultural logics that would read those equivocations as evidence of Pamuk’s failure to deliver the good of world literature. My thesis is that this definition of world literature is flawed from the start because it cultivates Western hegemony in the globality it constructs, and it limits the ethical and political potential of the literary as such. Asserting the universality of modes of thought and action that are peculiarly Western, this “world republic of letters” that Pamuk enters has historically worked from the assumption that the writer who stands up to his state is always more pure than the one who complies, which is simply untrue. Some writers live under states that suppress their opposition by putting them in jail, and all writers live under states that suppress their opposition in one way or another. By ignoring that variation, contemporary literary critics manage their complicity with their states and the global markets that subtend them, and they task non-Western writers with cultural and po-

26 INTRODUCTION: SLIPPERY WORDS

litical work that few Western writers undertake. They predicate world literature on the sacrifice of its writers’ relationships to their native countries. I further this argument with respect to Pamuk’s authorial personae in chapter 4, where I show how he is read in the tradition of “exilic” writing that became central to comparative literary studies over the course of the twentieth century. By reading Pamuk’s story in comparison to Erich Auerbach’s, I contend that U.S.-based critics limit our ways of thinking about the literary world by judging the value of non-Western literatures through an aesthetic model of “homelessness” that is captured metonymically in the founding father of comparative literature. As I consider how Pamuk’s flight from Turkey shapes his reception in Western institutions, I also show how he is circumscribed by a narrative of Western enlightenment that predicates non-Western writers’ canonicity on their sacrifice of their relation to their domestic culture. I engage throughout the chapter with the recent work of Kader Konuk, and I contest the narration of Auerbach’s history that is most critically accepted in the wake of a seminal essay by Emily Apter. I continue that analysis of the ways literary celebrity works transnationally in the next chapter, where I show how the Nobel Prize functions as an institutional lever to expand Western canons eastward, and I critique the logic by which that expansion works. To make this case, I draw on recent scholarship about literary prizes73 to compare the controversies surrounding Pamuk’s Nobel Prize in 2006 and Mo Yan’s in 2012. In both cases but in different ways, I argue, the canonization of these two writers gives form to Western desires for a new rapport with the East via writers who speak freely even when that freedom is not granted by the state. I show how Pamuk meets these expectations while he also suggests—implicitly and explicitly, in his interviews and in his work—that world literature asks too much of writers like him. I also frame this as a problem of cultural translation, foreshadowing the argument I make in the next chapter. In the concluding section, I historicize world literature as a field of study at universities in the contemporary United States and Turkey. Chapter 6 is a critical study of the scholarly discourses that pit world literature against postcolonial studies in the United States, and its thesis is this: contemporary debates over world literature vent domestic concerns about the relevance

27 INTRODUCTION: SLIPPERY WORDS

of the humanities by testing competing claims for the value of literary work in a global economy that makes it both marginal and privileged. The debates over world literature become legible then as debates about the good that literary critics might do with our work—by launching a defense of the humanities, perhaps, or protesting against the inequities that global capital creates. I use Orhan Pamuk as a case in point to show how this instrumental use of world literature limits the range of its writers and the canons they create. My focus in this chapter is the scholarly strain of that debate, as represented most visibly by Emily Apter, David Damrosch, and Gayatri Spivak; I refer also to recent work by Peter Hitchcock, Gerard Holden, Mariano Suskind, and the editors of the literary magazine n+1. Finally comes the coda: “Now, What?” I use this space at the end of the book to write polemically about the philosophical implications of the argument I’ve made, gesturing toward the pedagogical, too, to take up the question: how should we read world literature, then, and how should we teach it? In answer, I refer to Alexis Shotwell’s philosophical argument “against purity,” and I argue for its utility in the literary sphere. If literary critics could work from the premise that we are wholly imbricated in the exploitative structures we write against—chiefly, neoliberalism and global capitalism—we might stop performing the rhetorical gestures we’ve honed to critique the purity of one way of reading against another; in their place, we might devise the tools we need to have a more meaningful conversation about the ways world literature is shaped to fit the institutions that house it at universities in the United States. Letting go of the fantasy that becoming a better reader of world literature works necessarily to equalize anybody’s relation to anybody else, we might learn to read and to live more responsibly with the complicity we bear uneasily. In the coda and throughout the book, I have in mind the way Edward Said begins his magisterial study of Orientalism, by conceding what it does not do: Perhaps the most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalism, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective. But then one would have to rethink the whole complex problem of knowledge and power. Those are all tasks left embarrassingly incomplete in this study.74

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That “whole complex problem” is my subject here, and I come to it, following Said, as an epistemological problem that is deeply entrenched in material realities. It is only by a feat of magical thinking that North American critics elevate the stakes of literary work to entrust it with easing physical violence between East and West, or shrinking the more structural violence that grows with the globalization of capital. And this logical error has material consequence, too, for Orhan Pamuk, and for the next generation of writers who will follow his path to reach their readers in the West. Literary critics can neither make peace among warring states nor extricate ourselves from global capital. As we strive to become better readers of the literature that pushes the limits of what we know, we can be more honest about how and why that project is worth the trouble—and the money. My years as a student and teacher of world literature in “the neoliberal university” shape all the arguments I make in this book, with relevance beyond the obvious. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney establish the order of things correctly when they observe that “before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals, there is the experience of being taught and of teaching.”75 Likewise, before there is Orhan Pamuk, and before there is world literature, there is my experience of learning in school what kind of literature matters most, in what ways, and of teaching. I taught at three different universities during the years I was writing this book—first at Koç University in Istanbul, then at Princeton University, and now at Queens College of the City University of New York. And as my students have varied within and among those institutions, so have the cultures that taught them how and what to read. I take that variation as a pedagogical challenge and opportunity in the coda, where I show how the literary analyses I develop throughout the book correlate to a classroom practice for undergraduate students of world literature. At Queens, I teach my multilingual students learn how to read it as a translation, even though they lack the linguistic facility to read it in Turkish. In Istanbul, I taught my Turkish students to read Snow in its English translation, following the university policy to teach every text and every class in the language of global capital.76 That experience of teaching at a Turkish university that had not had a department for literary study for long shapes the ways I understand Pamuk’s relationship to his various publics; it also shapes my relationship to the institutional culture where I work in the United States. I argue throughout this book that the work that U.S.-based literary scholars do in

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every field to think more comparatively across languages, media, and literary traditions would benefit from a corollary effort to think more comparatively about our institutions, too. And this point is underscored for me as I finish this book, when I witness a rapid ascendance of authoritarian leadership in the United States as well as in Turkey. This is the kind of leadership that makes a novelist’s observations describable—and therefore legally actionable—as a threat to the state, and Western cultures have relatively little experience with it. The power that our states exert globally works in very different ways, and the literary world subtends the grand narratives that write that difference as evidence of the superiority of the cultures that grow out of the European Enlightenment. It is one of my primary aims in this book to work against that inscription that runs deeply throughout the Anglophone literary world. . I began this book in the waning days of George W. Bush’s war on terror, and I am finishing it in the months after the election of Donald Trump, who has asserted his desire to create a registry of Muslim citizens, wage war against the press, and lock his political opponents in jail. The limits of his willingness and ability to erode the human and civil rights of U.S. citizens remain to be seen, but the Turkish state has provided a model to show how the expansion of authoritarianism could work. Since the coup d’état of 2016, the state has “carried out mass arrests of journalists,” according to Human Rights Watch, “closed multiple media outlets, and jailed elected opposition politicians. It dismissed or detained without due process over 100,000 civil servants including teachers, judges and prosecutors, suspended hundreds of nongovernmental groups, and consolidated government control over the courts.”77 Academics who signed petitions against state violence in the Southeast were identified as a threat to national security, and 4,811 lost faculty jobs without the possibility of future public service.78 A national extremist announced his desire to “shower in their blood”; and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan denounced them as puppets of “colonizers” who had created a “fifth column” to undermine the Turkish Republic.79 Those pressures put Turkish academics in 2017 in a position akin to Orhan Pamuk’s in 2006. Like him, they inflame the animosities of Turkish nationalists by defying the state narrative of a unified Turkey, which renders any declaration of allegiance to a minority identity an existential threat. And as these academics are persecuted by the state, they are persecuted, too, by the segment of their fellow citizens who voice a vigilante’s

30 INTRODUCTION: SLIPPERY WORDS

willingness to take the protection of the Republic into their hands. To that degree, academics find their ability to do their jobs imperiled, even when their security is not. As Western observers rightly denounce such authoritarianism, we should also recognize the context in which such denunciations will be heard: as the praise of the colonizer for the puppets who do our bidding, and as unsolicited advice from citizens in a state that is ill qualified to give it. In a world where the United States wields hegemonic power and is led by a president whose Islamophobia is overtly expressed, Turkish phobias about Western designs on the East find ready support in the daily news.  And the MLA’s statement of solidarity with Turkish academics is easy to read from afar as a press release from the White House expressing thanks for destabilizing a rival.80 Literary critics have no more autonomy from that geopolitical morass than from the mechanisms of global capital; we are of this world, too. And, being of it, we reiterate in our darkest moments the question that our worst enemies put to us: what good can literature do? That question was put to me in nonrhetorical ways when I taught in Turkey because I was hired with one other junior faculty member to create a new department of English and comparative literature at an institution that had never had hired anybody for literary study of any sort. Prestigious and privately funded, Koç University was founded in the name of one of Turkey’s wealthiest families to launch Turkish youth toward success in a global economy.81 That mission dictated a curriculum that was strong in business and the STEM fields, and also in the specific areas of the humanities and social sciences—archeology, art history, and Ottoman history— that enable the appreciation and monetization of Turkey’s cultural heritage. It also dictated that the language of instruction should be English, since that is the lingua franca for commerce in goods of all kinds across national lines. Little investment was made in disciplines with less apparent profit-making potential for Turkish people. When I came to give a job talk, I was told that a handful of literature courses were offered at Koç offered every semester under the auspices of the English Language Center (ELC), which prepares the Turkish student body to do all their coursework in the language of global business. My students had previously had neither the opportunity nor the requirement to study literature; their education had taught them to memorize the names of their nation’s most prominent authors and liter-

31 INTRODUCTION: SLIPPERY WORDS

ary movements but not to read them, and not to look beyond the national literature at all.82 Only those who had the same exceptional interest in literary study that motivates students in the United States to major in English or comparative literature had ever read a novel on their own time. The rest wanted real answers when they asked: “Why do we have to read these books about people and problems that don’t even exist? What good does it do?” So Orhan Pamuk was just one of many writers they had not read. But most of them had strong opinions about their nation’s most notable novelist because they knew him as a public figure, and they expressed those opinions with a vehemence that surprised me at first.83 This was in contrast to their general inclination toward a geniality so great that it verged on apathy; they were the children of the secular elite, destined for good jobs in a burgeoning economy; they were charmed, sheltered, and young, like the students I had taught at Princeton. But they had been taught to understand literature solely as an instrument, and they could see from their daily news how Orhan Pamuk used it. I watched them fly into genuine rages at the Nobel Laureate who was not in the room—rages replete with fist-clenching, table-pounding, and explosive exits with doors that slam. These are things I’ve never witnessed in any classroom in the United States. Certainly not on the subject of a novelist. In a small measure, it was exciting to see: in Turkey, literature matters. And yet to a larger degree it was terrifying to see, and literature didn’t seem to matter at all.

Chapter One

A NOVEL CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE

It does not seem possible to say of the imagination that it has a certain single characteristic which of itself gives it a certain single value as, for example, good or evil. —WALL ACE STEVENS, THE NECESSARY ANGEL: ESSAYS ON REALITY AND THE IMAGINATION

In his Norton Lectures in 2010, Orhan Pamuk makes big claims for the political good that the novel can do. Echoing the logic his readers use to read him as a “bridge between East and West,” he credits his genre with the ability to build cross-cultural understanding among strangers, and, in turn, to foster progress toward world peace where there could be war. This case for the geopolitical utility of the novel relies on assumptions about literature’s purchase on realities that are historically specific to the contemporary moment, and they often go unstated, but Pamuk lays them out plainly: “If we are to understand someone,” he writes, “we must comprehend how the world appears from that person’s vantage point. And for this, we need both information and imagination”—which is to say, we need the novel. Fusing data about human lives with conjecture about the wide variety of ways that we live them, “the art of the novel” as Pamuk describes it “becomes political not when the author expresses political views, but when we make an effort to understand someone who is different from us in terms of culture, class, and gender. That means feeling compassion before passing ethical, cultural, or political judgment.”1 By this description, the novel’s politics reside less in the text itself than in the conditions by which it is read, and, more precisely, in the differences among the people who write, read, and populate it diegetically. This is a remarkable claim for the effects of any slippage that happens across the boundaries between fictional and

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nonfictional worlds, but it was received as a truth that is self-evident, perhaps because its most remarkable qualities are normalized by the literary culture that convened in Pamuk’s audience at Harvard.2 Pamuk indicates his awareness of that audience with the uncharacteristic imprecision of his prose in this passage, where abstract nouns pile up around pronouns, inviting a careful reader to ask: who does what here, exactly, and how, to what effect? The novelist who may or may not “express political views” collapses into a hazy “we” who “make an effort”—presumably, through the novels that we read and write?—“to understand someone who is different from us.” That “someone” must be a fictional character located in a setting far away from “us,” across a distance measurable also in a nonfictional geography. As fictional and nonfictional worlds blur together, so do all these writers, readers, and characters collapse grammatically; the shared activities that unite them become indistinguishable from one another, too. The act of reading across some difference “in terms of culture, class, and gender” becomes synonymous with the feat of cross-cultural understanding that is trusted to be its result. And that degree of enlightenment becomes synonymous in turn with political action, as the transitive property of logic enables magical thinking: a reader of fiction constructs herself as a political activist without lifting a finger except to turn the page. Pamuk locates the political benefits of world literature in the murky stew of identifications he describes among the people he sees in and around his work: the novelist, his implied readers, his actual readers, his characters, and those characters’ referents in the nonfictional world. By blurring the distinctions among them, he corroborates his readers’ claims for the political good a novelist can do by traversing a border that is contested in the nonfictional world. As his North American and European readers lace their praise for his novels with testimonies to world literature’s potential to convey extraliterary information across the border between East and West, he makes those testimonies, too. Contending that his genre teaches its readers to feel “compassion before passing ethical, cultural, or political judgment,” he expands the claim that his readers make for him and applies it to every novelist worthy of the name. His ability to teach his readers what is really happening in the minds of people whose faces are visible only from afar becomes an essential quality of the genre in which he works and suggests the political utility of world literature writ large.

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That reasoning propels Pamuk’s novels through Western literary markets. When the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, for example, recommended Snow to readers of the New York Times, she conceded that it might overwhelm some with its length and level of detail, but she also emphasized its rewards for those with the time and inclination to take an “in-depth tour of the divided, hopeful, desolate, mystifying Turkish soul.” This armchair trip gains its vivacity for Atwood from the protagonist’s “pose as a journalist,” which gives Pamuk the focalizing gaze he needs “to display a wide variety of opinions,” many of which would otherwise cleave poorly to the Western imagination. “Those not living in the shrunken remains of former empires may find it hard to imagine the mix” of historically induced sufferings that Pamuk’s characters endure, she writes, marveling at how he reveals them: the “resentful entitlement (We ought to be powerful!), shame (What did we do wrong?), blame (Whose fault is it?) and anxiety about identity (Who are we really?) that takes up a great deal of headroom in such places, and thus in Snow.”3 Atwood’s testimony represents the dominant strain of Pamuk’s Western reception, locating Snow’s literary greatness in its potential to bring a reader like her from North America into its Turkish characters’ thoughts and feelings and, more precisely, into their perspective on a world that is politically structured. And she counts that transporting experience as a source of reliable information about the thoughts and feelings that fill the minds of nonfictional Turkish people. The novel’s literary quality hinges on its ability to help its reader overlook its characters’ status as fiction, so they can serve alongside their author as unelected representatives of their nation on a global stage. The novel becomes an instrument for geopolitical peace by convincing its readers of its ability to close the mimetic gap and reveal the nonfictional world as it appears through Turkish eyes. That assurance satisfies some desires that predate Orhan Pamuk in Western literary cultures by decades if not centuries.4 Blakey Vermeule underscores their ahistoricity when she observes that “the tendency to think of literary characters as if they were real people is a habit lodged deep in the human psyche, and no amount of literary-critical sophistication is likely to cure people of it.”5 But if this tendency to erase the difference between real and fictional people has some constancy over time and space, it works particularly powerfully in the Western reception of Pamuk. His early novels appeared in English in the wake of the canon wars of the 1980s,

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which taught increasingly multicultural readerships to interpret literature as a source of knowledge about the private worlds of the people who populate our news of the world.6 In that context, Christopher Hitchens observes, it was “well before 2001” that a search was in progress on the part of Western readers and critics, for a novelist in the Muslim world who could act the part of the dragoman, an interpretive guide to the East. In part this was and remains a quest for reassurance. The hope was (and is) that an apparently ‘answering’ voice, attuned to irony and rationality and to the quotidian rather than the supernatural, would pick up the signals sent by self-critical Americans and Europeans and remit them in intelligible form. . . . Orhan Pamuk has for some time been in contention for the post of mutual or reciprocal interpreter.7

That job demands a person who is uniquely qualified to represent characters in the hazily defined territories of “the Muslim world” through aesthetics that translate readily for his Western publics to read, and, as Hitchens suggests, Orhan Pamuk is well suited to those tasks. His particular talents for the novel as a genre combine with the accident of his birth at his place and time to make him ready for canonization as an author of world literature from a region that had produced few of those. And if a spokesperson from that region was wanted in the West before the terrorist attacks of 2001, the need became more pressing afterwards, when novels and memoirs that trafficked in information about “the Islamic world” found new levels of success in Anglophone markets. Particularly notable were Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2004), which affirmed—explicitly in the Nafisi’s case and implicitly in Hosseini’s—the power of Western literary forms to domesticate, civilize, and liberate suffering others.8 The emphasis on the novel as a genre is not without relevance here: Nafisi’s polarizing work, subtitled “a memoir in books,” narrates how Iranians were empowered by their engagement with Western novels; the Afghani American novelist Khaled Hosseini relies heavily on the generic conventions of the realist novel to narrate a childhood in Afghanistan. In form as well as content, these works testified to the emancipatory power of the novel, and also to its viability for exportation to non-Western cultures. For, as Aamir Mufti observes, “it is one of the most widely shared assumptions in literary studies

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that the transition to a properly speaking bourgeois literature in any language, and thus entry into the space of world literature, is announced by the rise of the novel form.”9 And so it is that non-Western writers who embrace the realist novel bring their nations into visibility for Western readers, who use literature to see the limits of the legible world. Nafisi and Hosseini brought Iran and Afghanistan into Western literary space by enabling Western readers to identify with characters in those nations as characters of realist novels. And as Nafisi and Hosseini foster that vision of a more unified world for readers of popular forms, Pamuk fosters it, too, in a higher stratum of the literary market.10 His oeuvre was sold as an archive of intelligence sent across a border fenced with high security, and it was marketed for its legibility to readers schooled in Western literature. That marketing served Pamuk as poorly in his native country as it served him well abroad, making him a recognizable figure in Turkish nationalist discourse: the purveyor of the Orientalist propaganda that the West always needs from its colonial elites.11 But those symmetrical claims for and against Pamuk rest on equally shaky grounds. When the culture brokers of Western literary institutions—Margaret Atwood, John Updike, and the members of the Swedish Academy—praise Pamuk for his representation of Turkish people with mimetic accuracy, they do so only by ignoring vast archives of evidence to suggest that his fellow citizens do not see themselves in his work. And the Turkish readers who find in Pamuk’s novels a betrayal of their national identity embrace the mimetic fallacy, too, entrusting the novelist to do journalistic and diplomatic work that is hardly his job. So it is that, on both sides of the divide between East and West, Pamuk’s readers come to him with great expectations that he will reveal what actual Turkish people think, so they want to control his revelations, or to use those documents for purposes that have little to do with literature as such. He enables those contrary responses at times by asserting his authority over the reality of Turkish life and culture, and also by asserting for the good that the novel can do, while he also asks for more: to be read as a novelist and valued for the work he does to advance the novel as a genre. He protests its instrumentality by insisting that he is a writer of fiction, not a purveyor of facts. With that self-identification, he locates himself in a literary tradition that he traces to Italo Calvino, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ahmet Hamdi Tapınar, who generate the semblance of verisimilitude that

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Western readers detect in Snow while they also insist on their status as authors of literature.12 As Pamuk benefits from his Western readers’ expectations that he will heal the rift between East and West, he also claims the value of a literary world that is embedded in the political but not in service to it. Literature by this account illuminates reality, but not reliably. This formulation works at the boundary between truth and its opposite, posing a challenge to Western ways of reading world literature that U.S.-based critics poorly understand. We are schooled to read the novel through normative logics of multiculturalism that are historically particular to our national history, and we find those logics distorted when they are extended on a global scale, where they make the non-Western novelist do cultural work that has little to do with him. Pamuk represents that act of transferal in Snow, where he uses the formal devices at his disposal to toy with his Western readers’ expectations that a novel about Turkey will always be more—and less—than a work of fiction. HOW VOICE AND CHARACTER WORK IN SNOW

The narrator of Snow has the same name as his author, following the postmodern formula by which a metatextual reference suggests the complicated relation between the text and the world that contains it. A diegetic Orhan narrates the story of the protagonist, Ka, who focalizes the novel powerfully but lacks the warm relations to the world around him that would make him a stable locus for his readers’ identification.13 Evidence of that instability opens the novel, which begins with Ka’s journey eastward from Frankfurt, first to Istanbul and then to Kars, as Orhan reports: “Our traveler had spent his years of happiness and childhood in Istanbul” and “returned a week ago, for the first time in twelve years, to attend his mother’s funeral. Having stayed four days, he had decided to take this trip to Kars” (3). No further mention is made of the funeral, and little more is said about Ka’s mother, whose death weighs lightly on the rest of the novel. That lightness is characteristic of Ka’s impoverishment as a character, which is a subject of interest to him as well as to his narrator. His engagements with other characters are strangely cold except when they are inordinately warm, as in the case of his infatuation with the beautiful İpek. The novel draws on the literary conventions that have made love and marriage central to the genre in the West, but it also suggests that any

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love Ka feels for the object of his affections is superficial to a degree that is disturbing, even to him. As İpek begins to soften toward Ka, she shares with him her concerns, including her worry about the ways her fellow citizens suffer politically. Whispering in the kitchen while her family watches television in the next room, İpek recounts how violently Turkish soldiers enforced the limits of the secular state as they “loaded the dead boys from the religious high school into army trucks and sent them out to the Kurdish villages for their relatives to identify them.” But if love is for İpek a refuge from the horrors of state-induced violence, Ka is interested only in the aspects of her experience that pertain directly to him. “As she told him all this, Ka looked at her arms, looked into her eyes, admired the fine colour of her long neck, admired the way her brown hair brushed against her nape. Could he love her?” Such rhapsodies over napes, arms, and eyes are rife in Western lyric traditions but not in contemporary novels, where a lover is expected to listen to his beloved when she speaks. And if the novel gives its readers evidence to suggest that İpek would do well to look elsewhere for true love, that effect is increased as Ka continues, wondering whether he could be happy in Frankfurt with “this woman,” who “had cut the bread into thick slices just as they did in the poorest houses, and even worse, [had] arranged these slick slices in a pyramid, in the manner of fisherman’s soup kitchens” (179). He sees İpek through the stratifications of gender and class, and that vision dramatically diminishes his ability to hear her. But his deafness to the speech of other people is balanced by his extraordinary ability to peer into their minds, and to describe what happens there. That ability depends on his close relation to the narrator, whose view borders on omniscient, even though he reports what he sees of Ka from the vantage of an old friend. In turn, Ka knows more than he could possibly know—that is, he knows, sometimes, what only a near-omniscient narrator could know about other minds and lives. Ka’s surplus of insight is a subtle but crucial aspect of this novel’s form, which constructs a kind of knowingness that is logically impossible to bring the implied reader into the intimacy that the fictional Orhan and Ka share. By refracting the narrator’s voice through the novel’s protagonist, in this way, Pamuk forges new territory in the tradition of the realist novel.14 The narrating Orhan locates himself explicitly in that literary history by calling attention to his diegetic status with antiquated phrases that construct a cozy relation between the implied reader, the narrator, and the protago-

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nist. “Let us take advantage of this lull,” the narrator suggests during Ka’s travel to Kars, “to whisper a few biographical details.” These details begin inside the scene, in the bus that Ka takes from Istanbul to the remote southeastern city of Kars, but they quickly exceed it.15 “Although it might be hard to tell with him curled up in his seat,” Orhan reveals that Ka “was tall for a Turk, and he had brown hair and a pallid complexion that had become even paler during the journey.” Going beyond what is visible to relay what is not, the narrator also sets limits on what he will tell as he identifies himself. Turning to the reader, he says, “I don’t wish to deceive you. I’m an old friend of Ka’s and I begin this story knowing everything that will happen to him during his time in Kars” (4–5). That foreknowledge is extended to the reader, too, as the narrator reveals that the protagonist will die, so all that is left to learn is how the death will happen, and what it will mean. That meaning depends on the interpretation of Ka’s journey, which is rich with the symbolism of a passage from West to East—from Berlin to Istanbul, and, still farther, to Kars. The novel begins near the end of that 900-mile trip: “After leaving Horasan, the bus turned north, heading directly for Kars. As it climbed a winding road, the driver had to slam on the brakes to avoid a horse and carriage that had sprung out of nowhere on one of the hairpin bends, and Ka woke up. Fear had already fostered a strong fellow feeling among the passengers, and before long, Ka also felt at one with them” (5). The sense of a shared mortality exceeds more superficial divisions between the urbane traveler, Ka, and the rural locals who surround him, binding them in a moment of communion that is a pleasure for Ka. But it dissolves when one of his neighbors asks him about the purpose of his trip. “It was easy to see that Ka was not a local,” the narrator observes, establishing the theme of Ka’s visible difference from the townspeople. “ ‘I’m a journalist,’ Ka whispered in reply. This was a lie. ‘I’m interested in the municipal elections, and also in the women who’ve been committing suicide.’ This is true” (5–6). The narrating Orhan can recognize Ka’s lies as such not because he is omniscient but because he knows Ka, from the “real life” they share in the diegetic fiction. And from that shared history, he offers the confession that Ka does not. He makes the moral problem of the lie available to the reader in the same acknowledgment that it is its excuse. With that ambivalent gesture that is at once a confession and a disavowal, Orhan dwells on the difference between what Ka thinks and what

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he says, juxtaposing the protagonist’s internal experience with his social presentation. The narrative springs from the interplay between the fictional and the real and equally the foreign and the domestic, as Ka’s decades of living in Europe place him at a distance from some elements that will also be foreign to Western readers, like the horse and carriage, and the bus full of local people headed to Kars. Ka’s alienation from his less cosmopolitan compatriots is rendered literally in the Germanness of his coat, as Orhan observes for the reader on the novel’s first page: “We should note straight away that this soft, downy beauty of a coat would cause him shame and disquiet during the days that he was to spend in Kars, while also furnishing a sense of security” (3). Duly ashamed of the enjoyment he takes in his privilege relative to the people of Kars, Ka gives his narrator an opportunity to represent the hierarchies that structure a Western reader’s relation to the fictional world of Snow. Those metafictional features function for Pamuk’s reader like the German coat functions for Ka: as a marker of their bearer’s elite status, evidenced in their familiarity with the conventions of world literature as it is read in the West. And the mediated identification that Snow constructs between the implied reader and the protagonist— whose fictionality Pamuk does not let us forget, thanks to this commentary by Orhan, the narrator—creates a semblance of proximity that attains its truth value from its admission of its incompletion. That admission is reiterated every time Ka struggles to understand the townspeople in light of his knowledge that they are more Eastern and less privileged than he is. Unable to fathom the religiosity of the suicide girls who took their own lives—perhaps in a collective act of devotion, perhaps not, as I contend in chapter 2—he wishes he could have more mystical epiphanies as a poet and as a lover, to commune with the land and its people in ways that a rational Westerner could not. Pamuk narrates Ka’s ambivalence about the axioms of Western rationality, and he makes that ambivalence visible in a metafictional frame, as when Ka is taken with Muhtar—the Islamist ex-husband of Ka’s love interest, İpek—to a local police station. The passage begins with something akin to free indirect discourse, as each of the first two sentences begin with the narrator’s observation of the scene, and they conclude with a thought of Ka’s that “the snowflakes now seemed as large as the snowstorms Ka had played with as a child. As a police car trundled through the snow he imagined himself inside a plastic dome” (66). The diegetic narrator moves swiftly between the outside and

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the inside of Ka’s head, dramatizing his intimacy with Ka by describing features of his interior landscape that only somebody who is very close would know. Then Pamuk demonstrates his authority as a novelist over the Orhan who is the narrator by reminding his reader that diegetic characters can never have complete access to each other’s thoughts. Orhan’s functional omniscience as a narrator is mimicked by Ka, who peers impossibly far into Muhtar’s mind to see his thoughts, which are implausibly visible on Muhtar’s face. Ka “could tell” from Muhtar’s look of miserable resignation that when they reached the police headquarters, Muhtar knew he would get a beating, while Ka himself would be spared. He read something else into the look Muhtar gave him, and it would stay with him for many years: Muhtar thought he deserved to be beaten. He seemed to be thinking: I deserve this beating not just for insisting on settling in this godforsaken city, but for succumbing once again to the desire for power. I won’t let them break my spirit, but I hate myself for knowing all this, and so I feel inferior to you. So, please, when you look me straight in the eye, don’t throw my shame back at me. (66)

The immediacy of this first-person narration seduces its reader into forgetting—momentarily but repeatedly—that it is twice removed from the speaker. Focalized through Ka, Muhtar’s experience is relayed to us only by the narrating Orhan, who is linked coyly through his name to the authorial Pamuk. That diegetic telephone game enables Pamuk to ally himself with the narrator who imagines so much but still can’t know everything, and also with the protagonist, whose knowledge is even less total. Ka travels across a vast expanse of cultural territory to visit Kars, and his narrator relays what he finds there to a reader who is more foreign still. When Ka takes the bus from Istanbul to Kars, he travels from a region of the world that appears as an exotic location in Western media to a region that is scarcely covered and touristed rarely, if at all.16 Ka’s location at that uneasy midpoint between his Western reader and the fictional characters who surround him is highlighted at regular intervals with reflections that are easy to read as a welcoming gesture that works domestically as well as internationally. If Pamuk’s foreign readers followed their media’s recommendations to visit Istanbul on a cruise ship or a honeymoon, they might

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meet educated Turks like Ka who constitute the dominant audience for world literature in Turkey. Concentrated in the wealthier coastal region from Izmir to Istanbul, Turkey’s cultural centers are separated by vast swaths of land from Kars, which appears in their national news for two primary reasons: it is the historic home of Kurdish and Armenian minorities, so it is a site of past and ongoing state violence, and it has an extremely harsh climate that yields a lot of snow. Reports of roadblocks around Kars were regular staples of the national media in the twenty-first century even before the civil war in Syria and the end of a nominal truce with the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) in 2015. Travel to the East was interrupted with regularity by snowstorms across the mountains and intermittent clashes between the nation’s military and its Kurdish minority. Remote by every measure from the most Westernized swaths of Turkey, Kars is home to few people with whom Pamuk’s readers—including those who are Turkish—will identify readily. But Pamuk gives readers who live everywhere west of Ankara an easy point of entry to this unfamiliar landscape: through a protagonist who was born midway between Kars and Europe, and who shuttles between those two locations, knowing both and neither. In that sense, Margaret Atwood was right to note that Ka performs a journalistic function within the novel, as he gives his Anglophone readers eyes and ears that work well where ours fail. At the same time, he describes what our gaze feels like from the other side. Ka remembers walking the streets of Frankfurt and singling out a lone German—the figure of a foreigner against the background of foreignness. “There was always one who stood out from the crowd as an object of fascination,” he recalls: The important thing was not what I thought of him, but I thought he might be thinking about me. I’d try to see through his eyes and imagine what he might be thinking about my appearance, my clothes, the way I moved, my history, where I had been and where I was going, who I was. It made me feel terrible but it became a habit. I grew used to feeling degraded and I came to understand how my brothers felt. Most of the time it’s not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. (75)

With this complex maneuver—inhabiting his own mind, inhabiting others’—Ka reassures his Western readers that they have primacy of place in

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the fictional world, too, where the foreigners among us value our thoughts as much as we value them ourselves. But Pamuk uses this narrative device to satisfy the narcissistic desire of Western observers to see their self-reflection, providing the kind of revelatory moment that is cited frequently in Western praise for Pamuk’s oeuvre. As he provides the semblance of a window into Turkish subjectivity, he also holds up a mirror that reflects Western cultures in ways only an outsider can see. Putting this de Tocquevillean content to new purpose in novelistic form, he tells his Western audiences what it feels like to live as a foreigner among us and performs a role that is akin to a native informant, but not quite. It is the role of the domestic informant, perhaps, who tells hegemonic powers what it feels like to live inside them, unseen. This is a critique of the blinding effects of hegemonic power on the people who enjoy it, but it is equally a reassurance to the individual reader of Pamuk’s novel, who sees the Turkish person that his culture ignores by virtue of reading Snow. It also stakes a claim about the novel’s potential as a genre of world literature in the twenty-first century. These convoluted identifications that Ka performs in Germany both confirm and refute the argument that Western humanists have historically made for the novel’s empathy-building effects. Those arguments for the humanizing power of the literary as such are restaged throughout contemporary debates over world literature, which also air institutional concerns that are less worldly than local to the U.S.-based university, as I maintain in chapter 6. On one side, Martha Nussbaum leads the charge that the literary imagination enables “emotion” and “reason” to work together for the political good, while, on the other, Marcus Wood contends that “the dirtiest thing the Western imagination ever did, and it does it compulsively still, is to believe in the aesthetically healing powers of empathetic fiction.”17 But to read Pamuk well is to understand what the poetic collective at the Lana Turner Journal meant when they suggested that the binary is falsely constructed because “there are a number of reasons to be hesitant around claims that literature or culture possess an intrinsic politics in the US right now. This is hardly to dismiss literature but to try to understand its precarious position and its difficult relation to precarious lives.”18 That effort to understand is my project here, and I think it is Pamuk’s project, too. He undertakes it in Snow whenever the novel calls attention to the quantity and quality of effort it takes for Western readers to begin to understand

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what life is like for nonfictional Turks. On its face and very explicitly, Snow gives Western readers insight about the contemporary world as it appears to non-Western people, and it achieves that effect by shuttling information about the interior experience of the fictional people of Kars through Ka to Orhan, who transmits it to the implied reader of the text. With those layers of omniscience and connectedness that could exist only in fiction, Snow focalizes an experience that Western readers are constitutively unable to have. But if Ka’s narration of his interaction with his German counterpart illuminates the blindness of the hegemon, it suggests uncritically the preoccupation of Turkish minds with Europeans’. In that sense, it satisfies a generalized Western narcissism just as it satisfies its narrator’s, reassuring its Western readers performatively that the minds of Turkish people lie within the reach of our collective imagination—that we can enter them if we try, with the novel’s help. It also exposes the less seemly pleasures that we discover in that effort. When Ka makes the brief acquaintance of a local man, the man confides in him the difficulties of living in a place that has neither good hospitals nor good prospects for the future, and he expresses his gratitude to Ka for bothering to visit. The diegetic narrator reports this dialogue indirectly, recalling that this man was “happy to see a well-read, educated gentleman like Ka had taken the trouble to travel all the way from Istanbul to find out more about Kars’ problems” (6). Without comment, the narrator shifts his gaze from the conversation between the two men to the thoughts that exist only in Ka’s head: “There was something noble in the simplicity of his speech and the pride of his bearing, and Ka respected him for it.” Like his reader, Ka takes the time to investigate the interior lives of his neighbors to the east, and he is congratulated on the generosity of that gesture. He witnesses the nobility of the less refined among his fellow citizens, and he pays his respects. But as Pamuk affirms the warmth of this encounter that his reader simultaneously observes and performs, he also undercuts it as the passage continues. The man’s “very presence was calming to Ka,” the narrator observes. “Not once during his twelve years in Germany had Ka known such inner peace: it had been a long time since he had enjoyed the fleeting pleasure of empathizing with somebody weaker than himself” (6). As Pamuk elicits his Western readers’ empathy with his Turkish characters, he also underscores the condescension with which it is given by staging the com-

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plexity of Ka’s relationship to the community where he travels. Neither a foreigner nor an intimate, Ka is crucially estranged from Kars’s inhabitants, but he is also empathetic with them to an absurd degree, discerning with an impossible omniscience their thoughts and feelings via the expressions on their faces—as, for example, when he intuits Muhtar’s assessments of the beating at the police station. In this moment and others like it, when Ka knows impossibly much about what happens in other people’s heads, he becomes intensely “Machiavellian,” by Blakey Vermeule’s definition, which is to say that he demonstrates a superhuman capacity for “mind-reading.” Vermeule contends that characters of this type have greater “power to circulate” than others because they have an inordinate ability “to give people shared stories, and to sponsor discussions about shared values.”19 And Vermeule develops a theory to explain why some characters are “stickier” in this way than others, drawing on scientific studies that show the utility of mind-reading to humans. She cites a seminal experiment that suggests that the “reasoning capacities” people share across other cultural differences are those that are most “suited to social exchange problems—that is, to problems that arise with individual names, personalities, and characters attached.” Contrasting those interpersonal dilemmas to “general-purpose questions of logic,” Vermeule concludes that the characters who become known even to people who don’t read the literary texts in which they first appear—Charles Dickens’s Scrooge, Herman Melville’s Ahab, Bram Stoker’s Dracula—are those who convey the most information about our relations with other people in the real world: “Literary characters circulate,” she argues, “levitate, and generally become famous because they help us reason about the social contract under conditions of imperfect access to relevant information.”20 This is a succinct description of the task that Western readers give Orhan Pamuk, who is credited as a source of “reason about the social contract under conditions of imperfect access to relevant information.” And as he expands the logics of belonging to a multicultural polity on a global scale, he also thematizes that expansion throughout his novels, particularly in Snow, as in the meeting in the hotel room that is narrated in “We’re not Stupid! We’re Just Poor!”21 The purpose of the meeting is to bring the townspeople to a consensus about what they should relay through Ka to the readers of his German newspaper. The conversation unfolds as an exaggerated and fully explicated negotiation of the differences that make up Turkish

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political culture, as the characters stand in for representative types who rarely assemble in one room. The full range of ideological factions that appear in the novel are represented here: the Islamist with terrorist tendencies, Blue; the aging leftist, Turgut Bey; the bright-eyed young Islamists and Fazıl; Fazıl’s strong-willed beloved, Kadife, who wrestles with her decision to cover her head with a scarf; and a collection of unnamed teenagers representing the Kurdish minority. In this meeting, Pamuk narrates the work of reasoning about the social contract, and he also thematizes the work that world literature is supposed to do: it enables Turkish characters to speak to their Western readers and show them realities they would otherwise fail to see. In this fictional meeting, Pamuk also intervenes in the work of his translators by converting the “heteroglossia” that Mikhail Bakhtin identified as a characteristic of novelistic form into novelistic content, generating dialogism that is uniquely translatable.22 When Bakhtin writes about heteroglossia, he refers to linguistic differences that are extraordinarily difficult to translate from one language to another.23 Emphasizing the ways that a nation’s cultural life becomes audible in the “diversity of social speech types” it contains, Bakhtin argues that the novel works by putting these types in conversation with one another. Pamuk renders that formal diversity as the actual content of the conversation in the hotel and elsewhere, guaranteeing its legibility to the non-Turkish reader. As the characters debate what they would say to their readers in the West, they make the differences among them plain in ways that translate readily, so Pamuk can exploit their narrative possibilities for readers all over the world. This is a hallmark of the category of world literature that Rebecca Walkowitz calls “comparison literature,” a subcategory of the literature that circulates widely enough to reach audiences beyond its national and linguistic borders. Each text that Walkowitz places in this category invokes the notion of comparison in many registers: “formally, the text experiments with comparative structures such as lists and catalogues; typographically, it invokes historical practices of translation that emphasize comparison between source and target; and thematically, it reflects on gestures of ethical, national, and generic comparison.”24 Snow chronicles the ways the townspeople of Kars compare their ideological and political positions, locating themselves on a cultural map that would be illegible to most of Pamuk’s readers. And it tests the political utility of the literary project it undertakes

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with dialogue that reaches implicitly across the entire landscape of Turkey’s national culture while it also suggests that any hope for such an inclusive community is futile. The protagonists debate what to say in this document that they intend to write by consensus, but no consensus emerges, and no document gets written. Its absence is not framed as a significant lacuna in the text because the reader knows that there is no German editor to publish it anyway. He is a fictional character, existing only in Ka’s head. PAMUK ASKS TO BE READ AS A WRITER OF FICTION, NOT AS A BRIDGE OR A WINDOW

Pamuk’s characters look askance at fiction’s ability to do nonfictional good, drawing the same bright line that Pamuk draws sometimes, too, when he distances himself from political realities in his public appearances. Some irritation crept into his voice in 2011, for example, when Charlie Rose pressed him for commentary on Turkey’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Israel, and Pamuk demurred with a stiff reminder that he is a novelist, after all, so he would prefer to talk about literature, please.25 More playfully in 2013, Pamuk told Pankaj Mishra that his mailbox was full of requests for his opinion on the Taksim Square protests, but he denied them all, reflecting that “I used to do this fifteen years ago, but I don’t want to be a journalist. Maybe I’m old. I will try to write something poetic, more personal, than There is this party, and that party, and social democracy. The younger generation should do it. I don’t want to explain Turkey in a journalistic way to anyone. Except you, Pankaj. [Laughter.]”26 But if Pamuk declines those requests for his journalistic analysis, there is a good reason why he receives so many of them, and it is not only because he has ventured into that terrain before. He is right to note that his most overtly political engagements came early in his career, when his failure to deny the reality of the Armenian genocide led to his trial on charges for “insulting Turkishness.”27 Since then, Pamuk has negotiated a fragile peace with his government in his interviews and commentary, and he generally demurs when Western journalists ask him to speak about Turkish politics. When those questions are framed in the terms that he sets in his novels, which are rich in journalistic detail, he insists on their status as fiction. And if those gestures—toward and against the political as such—are not necessarily contradictory, they are not necessarily coherent, either. The

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uncertain fit between them creates interpretive problems for Western readers of Snow, who lack sufficient familiarity with the people and places he depicts to know how and whether he represents them mimetically. That contextual insufficiency leads to readings that are bound to be bad, in the sense that they say more about the readers than about the text. Nergis Ertürk observes this effect, too, and she accounts for it with this convincing argument: the primary subject of Snow is not Ka’s travel through Kars but rather the novel’s complicated relationship to its readers all over the world. Pamuk makes that relationship integral to the text as Ertürk reads it by foregrounding the nonfictional quality of the truths it tells and at the same time undercutting those truths perpetually. He enables his international public to misinterpret or overlook the complexity of his relationship to his Turkish characters, as Ertürk observes, to make explicit his recognition of his canonical status in what Pascale Casanova calls “the world republic of letters.” From that privileged location, he gains the authority to convey new information about Turkey to Western readers who have not historically wanted to hear it, and, equally, the authority to underline that ancestral inattention: “If Snow speaks to this (nonlistening) public sphere as world literature,” Ertürk writes, it does not do so via characters who can “speak for the peoples of Kars as proxies.” In fact, it thematizes their inability to speak in that capacity by giving them access to a notional German paper that would publish what they say if only it existed. And as the novel asserts the limited ability of international media to provide a source of cross-cultural enlightenment, nor, on the other hand, is the novel a neutral medium for the portrayal of the sufferings of the oppressed. Denying its own referentiality, “Snow rather affirms precisely that which lies outside its own representations: the proximate distance of the other evading its political and literary abstractions.”28 Ertürk’s reading of Snow is exactly right. Throughout the novel, Pamuk testifies to the remainder that his fictional representations leave behind, the truths about Turkey that they can’t tell. The result is paradoxical but symmetrical and somewhat elegant: it is precisely in those testimonies to its mimetic limitations that Snow convinces its readers of its purchase on documentary evidence. This interpretation of Snow should be more obvious than it is because Pamuk makes it fairly plain in the final scene. Addressing his Western reader with a directness that is unparalleled in the rest of his work, Orhan declares his intention to write the novel that his readers hold in their hands.

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He asks an Islamist boy to frame the fictional story Snow tells to its nonfictional readers. Echoing the prompt that was given to the townspeople at the hotel, the narrator asks Necip what he would say at the end of a novel “about the events that just transpired, and you could say whatever you want to readers all over the world?” “Nothing,’” Necip replies, and “his voice was determined.” The narrator expresses his disappointment and prods Necip, who relents: “If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.” “But no one believes everything they read in a novel,” I said. “Oh, yes, they do believe it. If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I’d just said, at least your reader will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.” (435)

What kind of reading is Orhan Pamuk requesting here, exactly? From within the novel as from without, he injects layers of doubt around everything that Western readers have learned from his long, detailed, and deeply political novel. And most will have learned quite a lot—about the dynamics between Islamists and secularists, and about the ways that the Western world appears to people who live outside of it. By reminding his readers that none of this exists outside of a fictional frame, Pamuk paradoxically makes the novel’s purchase on enlightenment seem true. That paradox complicates the assumptions about mimesis that structure Pamuk’s Western reception, where the limitations on a novelist’s ability to capture nonfictional realities are confronted only rarely, obliquely, and at times illogically. Pamuk’s “modesty as a writer,” writes Julian Evans in the British New Statesman, “his refusal to write as if he knows what is happening, is one of his finest qualities.” This admiration is hard to reconcile with Evans’s wish to learn from Pamuk what is really happening in Turkey. “There are episodes” in Snow, he writes, “that illuminate the confrontation between secular and extremist Islamic worlds better than any work of non-fiction I can think of.”29 Pamuk’s authority rests on his refusal of it only by an argument that Evans does not make, trusting the reader to understand

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implicitly how this claim to credibility works. That trust also guides the Independent’s Steven O’Shea to adopt a conciliatory tone, as he concedes to the objection of his implied reader: “True, Pamuk trades on stereotypes. But the strength of Snow lies in its failings. The less believable the characters, the more true-to-life they appear.”30 This paradox stands unreconciled here, as it does in much of Pamuk’s reception, which asserts without argument the verisimilitude that attends his admittedly unrealistic characters. The readers of the Independent and the Guardian are presumed able to supply some logic that would put those contradictory terms in meaningful relationship to each other, and that vagueness yields another as O’Shea continues: “It is to Pamuk’s credit that he saw this sad farce coming before the rest of us.”31 Which “sad farce” is that, exactly? O’Shea leaves it unspecified, slinging a chummy arm around his implied reader, who is presumed to share O’Shea’s ironized if not directly activist relation to the political world. And with that rhetorical gesture, the audience is also aligned with O’Shea’s assumption that Pamuk’s characters have the ability to capture the essential truth of their nonfictional referents, namely, Turkish people in the real world. Fictional and nonfictional people collapse willy-nilly, corroborating the claim that Orhan Pamuk made in his Norton Lectures: when literature brings readers, characters, and authors together across great distances, it can only do political good. How do Western critics justify the trust they place in the Turkish novelist’s ability to soothe geopolitical strife? It is on its face at odds with many of the theoretical precepts that literary critics in the United States and Europe have assumed since the middle of the last century, if not before. Among others, Theodor Adorno, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Paul DeMan, Stephen Greenblatt, Georg Lukács, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak have developed a wide array of arguments against this thesis that Atwood trusts implicitly. Those of us who are educated in these critics’ wake internalize the claims that they make; we work from the premise that language makes only imperfect reference to lived experience, and those imperfections become evident only in the political contexts in which a text gets read and written. Rey Chow describes succinctly how these two contradictory impulses meet in the study of world literature, where “the uncritical attempt to see popular literature as more or less transparent documents of sociological knowledge inevitably runs up against the problems of literature’s

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opacity or constructedness.”32 A great novelist is expected to tell the truth about the people she depicts while she also looks skeptically at the whole endeavor of depicting truth in fiction. Orhan Pamuk is among the contemporary novelists who are canonized in those terms. He helps his readers navigate a path through the contradiction that Chow describes by exaggerating both sides of the paradox: His novels underline their status as fiction while they also invite their reader to value them for the truths they tell about the nonfictional world. Pamuk names fictional characters after himself and inserts faux journalism in his novels, documenting events that didn’t happen to people who never existed. And yet he tempts his readers to believe that his fictions can reveal nonfictional truths, as when the protagonist Ka sees an article in a newspaper that announces that “KA [sic], the celebrated poet whose fame now spreads throughout Turkey, has come to pay a visit to our border city.” The novel quotes the newspaper, and Ka laments the erroneous use of capitals. “My name is printed wrong,” he observes, speaking to the editor of the paper. “The ‘A’ should be lower case.” But “he instantly regretted saying this” and retracted his words. “ ‘It looks good,’ he now added, as if to make up for his bad manners” (28). Here, the novelist who is disparaged in his native country for caring more about his image than his people33 narrates how a fictional author dithers over his vanities—and he reflects on what the dithering means in a specifically Turkish context. This passage places its Western reader in an oblique relationship to the reality of its Turkish setting. A reader who lacks familiarity with Turks and Turkey will be tempted to take Orhan’s narration as fact, and the novel nurtures that temptation by piling up evidence in documentary forms—quoting from a fictional newspaper that is represented as a clipping on the page, for example—but it also compiles volumes of realistic details over more than four hundred pages. Pamuk has a qualified engagement with the forms that dominate the modern Turkish novel, and the shell games that he plays with his narrator and his protagonist remind the Western reader at regular intervals of his familiarity with the metafictional strategies of AngloEuropean postmodernism.34 Belonging to the era when, as Suzanne Keen asserts, “the very nature of fictionality” seems complicated, and that complication “renders social contracts between people and personlike characters null and void,”35 Pamuk derives narrative tension from the balance between those contradictory impulses: toward a mimesis that is limited by

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its historical particularity and, equally, its awareness of its relative value as fiction. Pamuk works toward that project throughout Snow, even with its protagonist’s first name. An abbreviation of Kerim Alakuşoğlu, “Ka” is also the German pronunciation for the letter “K,” and that homonym enables a linguistic joke that alludes to Franz Kafka as it travels readily across Snow’s many translations. Indeed, Snow exhibits many of the traits that Western readers associate with Kafka—chiefly, its plunge into institutional labyrinths that are both referential and not—but it makes itself legible too as absurdist farce with neorealist proportions, a Samuel Beckett play performed on a stage that is stuffed with documentary detail. That landscape is focalized through Ka, who navigates a path through this world that is less foreign to him than it is to his Western readers. He understands it with the intimacy of a neighbor while he also dissects it with the objectivity that a local would lack. This intermediate distance is carefully measured by Orhan, the narrator, who constructs Ka with conventions that are familiar to readers of his genre—from The Great Gatsby, or Portrait of a Lady, or Sentimental Education, among many others. That mediated narration determines which version of Turkey’s local culture is available to Pamuk’s Western readers, who project their imaginations across time and space to attend to the problems of people who are unreal— that is, to read novels. Pamuk uses the identification he generates between the reader and Ka to assert the complicated ethics of identification, more generally. On one hand, Ka offers a focalizing lens on a landscape of non-Western others who are by definition less privileged than their readers; they are also less privileged than Ka, and they speak directly to the Western audiences for whom he purports to write when they say, “We’re not stupid! We’re just poor!” (272). At the same time, they look skeptically at the self-absorption of Western readers who think that they have done something to diminish the deprivation that is the flipside of their privilege when they read a novel that gives them a semblance of engagement with the non-Western world. THE GOOD OF SOLIDITY

Pamuk authorizes both those contradictory arguments by turns, alternately accepting and rejecting contemporary Western ways of thinking

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about the good of world literature. His contention that the form of the novel is politically inscribed—working through generic conventions to expose the “black spots” in every nation’s history—becomes legible in this context as the statement of a novelist in transition, moving from the exclusively domestic audience for his earlier work to the more transnational audience of the “world republic of letters.” As his translation and circulation gave him access to readers who lack familiarity with his characters’ referents and local contexts, he framed their politics in terms that require no specific expertise, and he extricated himself from his nation’s most polarizing cultural and political debates.36 So it is that in his work as well as in his public appearances, he positioned himself as a cosmopolitan vis-à-vis the nationalists in his public sphere, allying himself with the liberal politics that Western readers associate with the realist novel as a genre. Pericles Lewis makes those associations explicit with his contention that “canonical realist novels, such as those of Balzac,” represent the relationship between an individual and her society in ways that subtend “early nineteenth-century liberalism in several respects,” all of which are ironized in Snow: “autonomous individuals pursue their own interests, motivated by the desire for material gain and for social esteem; they share a common human nature, although the circumstances of their birth and upbringing shape their characters in diverse ways; the shared social reality in which they interact is governed by immanent laws of its own that are not in themselves evident to the individuals who make up society.” Snow thematizes these conventions taken for granted in the tradition Lewis describes by constructing a protagonist who stands in an impossible relationship to the society around him. As Ka grapples to find some sense of belonging in the locality he inhabits, he sees into other minds with a vision that real people lack. If the nineteenth century novel represented an individual’s complicated relationship to a “society” that was understood in national terms, Pamuk adapts the form he inherits to represent an individual’s complicated relationship to the transnational society that binds the townspeople of Kars to their potential readers in Frankfurt and elsewhere. And, as Lewis contends that the realist novel relies on “formal techniques” to advance the liberal “conception of society” that was contemporaneous with it, so does Pamuk devise new techniques for this task on a global scale.37 Pamuk makes this point ahistorically in his Norton Lectures, and it is reiterated in more formal terms by the literary critic Elaine Scarry, who ar-

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gues that novelists use the conventions at their disposal to help their readers imagine fictional worlds by drawing unusually sharp contrasts between objects that are abstract—like light and fog—and those that are concrete— like walls and cars. This contrast parallels that between the narrator, Orhan, and the character Ka: One is “real,” the other is not, and the interplay between the two provides a grammar for the emergent imagination of a society that extends beyond the borders of the nation. Scarry coins the term “solidity” to describe the ways that readers make the objects we encounter in fiction tangible in our minds, so that they feel real enough to care about, even though they don’t exist. We accomplish this feat more easily than you’d think, she argues, because our powers of imagination work better for reading images than they do for remembering them. As evidence, Scarry cites the difficulty that people have envisioning the faces of absent friends. “It is a remarkable fact,” she observes, “that this ordinary enfeeblement of images has a striking exception in the verbal arts, where images somehow do acquire the vivacity of perceptual objects.” 38 In other words, we can follow Marcel Proust’s instructions to picture the madeleine that he remembers for us more easily than we can reach into our memories and see pictures of the breakfasts that we ate, ourselves, years ago, or possibly even this morning. Likewise, Western readers might picture the interiority of the Turkish people we encounter in fiction more readily than we will subvert our cultures’ historical tendencies to think reductively about real people on the other side of the world. This is a peculiarity of language and the way we use it, Scarry argues. “Devoid of actual sensory content,” verbal texts do not rely on perception to carry us from the imagined to the real—in contrast to painting, for example, or music. Rather, literature creates the effects of solidity by giving us written instructions: every description is a step-by-step recipe for imagining the object or person it describes. So in Snow, Pamuk tells his readers how to imagine the principal events and characters, who may prove unfamiliar to Western readers. And he achieves this effect with a technique that Scarry describes, too: first, he instructs his readers to imagine one thing that is solid, and then he shows how to imagine another thing that is not. To illustrate how that works, Scarry recalls that when Proust wants his readers to picture a wall, he begins by instructing us to picture the light of

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the lantern that flickers, transparently, across it. That works, Scarry argues, because we understand that our mental images of transparent things like light and fog closely resemble those things as they exist in the world; we know that our imaginings are hazy, but that the things we imagine are hazy, too. With that knowledge—that our image of fog is hardly less dense than fog—we gain the confidence that we need for greater feats of the imagination. “The imagined object” that opens Proust’s description of the wall at Combray is not accidentally two-dimensional, Scarry maintains. On the contrary, the intangibility of fog is requisite for overcoming a reader’s reluctance to imagine anything. And once we clear that hurdle to follow Proust’s instructions for a picture of fog, we become more capable of imagining an object that is solid—for example, a wall. We work our way up, chipping away at our fear of imagining a world that is both like and unlike the one that we see. Scarry explains this process with reference to a mental exercise that Jean-Paul Sartre created. First, picture a person you know. Then try to move the picture in space. You will find that difficult. “But,” Scarry adds, “if we now put a sheet of ice under the image of the person we are trying to imagine, it becomes much easier to move the person around: even if  the figure is seated in a chair, he can be moved about with startling ease.” 39 That, she says, is how we can picture the wall in Proust. We bring solidity to the wall by contrasting it to the transparency of the light. “The idea of the solid wall” reassures us, Scarry writes, that this entrance into the imagination won’t be infinite; it provides “a vertical floor for all subsequent imaginings” and “lets us perform the projective act without vertigo or alarm.” It “lifts the inhibitions on mental vivacity that ordinarily protect us.” 40 Presumably, then, the effort that readers put into imagining objects prepares us for the real challenge of imagining people. Scarry’s argument suggests that literary readers strengthen the cognitive muscles we need to take other people’s experiences seriously when we imagine a wall and the light that passes over it; then we proceed to imagine the fictional person— Marcel—who is imagining them, too. The walls and lights lure us into that imaginative project that inheres in the novel as a genre by scaring us less than people do, promising they will not assume too much of our mental space because they lack the consciousness that other people have. And we

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trust that promise implicitly, so we use objects as placeholders for the fictional people who would populate our imaginations. That relatively small feat of imagination provides the encouragement we need to imagine other people who are just as real as we are. A fictional person has the same transparency relative to a real one that a flickering light has relative to a wall. Every novel assures its readers that, after we contemplate these characters’ existence, we can go back to our own, unscathed. Scarry’s account of solidity provides a useful description of the formal devices Pamuk puts to more political effect in Snow. He does not obligate Western readers to identify with the headscarf girls, or with the secularist villagers who want them to uncover—that would be too hard. By focalizing the novel through Ka, whose cosmopolitan worldview would not be out of place at Harvard University or the Swedish Academy, he gives readers at those locations an accessible point of entry to the fictional world he depicts in Snow. And, to use Scarry’s language, the relative opacity of that world to its Western readers only serves to reinforce Ka’s solidity. The characters of Kadife, Blue, İpek, and the Kurdish youth are sufficiently intangible to function like the lantern flickering across the wall in Proust. Their unreality—constructed in terms of their foreignness—makes Ka seem real and familiar by contrast. THE SCARINESS OF OTHER PEOPLE IS HISTORICALLY CONTINGENT

Elaine Scarry’s analysis of solidity depends on the assumption that the act of imagining a fictional world is inherently frightening—that readers resist difference categorically, so we need to be coaxed into its recognition. This is hardly self-evident, but it is certainly plausible, and it becomes more so when Scarry’s theory of the imagination of fictional worlds is translated to the imagination of foreign worlds. The representation of a worldview that is culturally and politically different from the reader’s threatens by degrees any privilege and comfort the reader enjoys in the world as it is or seems to be. And that threat underlies one of the principal subjects of debate for contemporary intellectuals across the disciplines: does the critique of universalism imply a relativism without limits? This question has historically been phrased in the discourses of multiculturalism that exert a dominant

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authority in literary and educative institutions in the United States, where they inscribe the respect for difference that is imperfectly practiced but officially endorsed. They inscribe respect for the literary, too, which is institutionalized as a vehicle for the progress toward a more transnational and multicultural world. But if this argument proves useful to U.S.-based critics for asserting the value and utility of the literary, it maps poorly on a global scale, because it obscures the inequality among nations and cultures that conditions Orhan Pamuk’s arrival in the West. I want to suggest here that Snow demonstrates how ineptly U.S.-based readers extend normative discourses of diversity to read more globally, and, moreover, that our ineptitude is as significant as it is predictable. It creates interpretive problems that are distributed with unevenness that is predictable, too: the bad logic by which Western critics use non-Western writers to justify the value of our humanistic work weighs less heavily on us than on the writers and texts we cite to make our case. Pamuk dramatizes the problem by showing the Western reader how much we will fail to see, partly because we are far away but also because we don’t want to see it. Here and throughout his work, Pamuk softens his critique of the ways literary empathy works to consolidate Western hegemony by positing empathy also as hegemony’s undoing. This critical analysis is hard to parse because Pamuk frames it subtly and gently, for good reason: he arrives in Western literary institutions by precisely the logics he views skeptically here. Jodi Melamed explicates those logics in her analysis of “racial liberalism.” Melamed shows how the “racial liberalism” that took hold in the United States at midcentury grows into “neoliberal multiculturalism” in the twenty-first century, when it subtends the ascendancy of the United States in the world: “At racial liberalism’s core was a geopolitical race narrative,” Melamed argues: “African American integration within U.S. society and advancement toward inequality, defined through a liberal framework of legal rights and racially inclusive nationalism, would establish the moral legitimacy of U.S. global leadership.” Racial progress becomes tantamount to world domination, and the cultural logics of multiculturalism work—surely against the intentions of U.S.-based critics—to authorize U.S. soft power around the world. And literature is integral to this project because it is cited as a repository of human experience in all its diversity,

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and a tool for the expansion of liberal thought on a global scale. It is toward that expansion that Orhan Pamuk is welcomed as a “bridge between East and West,” assuring Western readers that the Islamic world is neither as far away nor as angry as they might fear. As Pamuk embraces this argument for the humanizing power of literature, he also pushes at the terms in which it is made. By constructing the protagonist of Snow as a chilly character, he makes his novel unavailable to description with the popular discourses of “relatability” that are symptomatic of the varieties of liberalism that Melamed describes. But instead of rejecting the cultural logic of racial liberalism entirely, he makes it work in a register that is higher than mass-produced sentiment. Ka is not “relatable,” but he is “interesting,” in the sense that he represents a recognizable innovation in the history of the realist novel in the West. Instead of demonstrating in a realistic way the kind of mindreading that Blakey Vermeule describes as a characteristic of Machiavellian literary characters, he reflects the limits of that concept prismatically, seeing into other minds in a superhuman way. With that intrusion of unreality in a novel that is otherwise realistic, Pamuk foregrounds mindreading as a literary problem with formal and political significance, and he also corroborates the skepticism that Melamed expresses about neoliberal multiculturalism on a global scale. Both those claims are dramatized when the young Islamist Necip confides in Ka that he lives in perpetual fear of losing his religion, and he says that disbelieving would be worse than death: “I understand,” says Ka. “I looked it up in an encyclopedia once,” Necip replies, “and it said that the word ‘atheist’ comes from the Greek word athos. But that word doesn’t refer to people who don’t believe in God: it refers to the lonely ones, the people whom the gods have abandoned. And so this proves that people can’t ever really be atheists. Because even if we wanted Him to, God would never abandon us here. To become an atheist then, you must first become a Westerner” (145). This reasoning has few reference points in the culture of Western humanists, and its newness compels the reader to identify with Ka, who functions like the Proustian wall that the lantern-light flickers across in Combray. The relative strangeness of Necip makes Ka seem familiar by contrast, and, conversely, that familiarity brings Pamuk’s reader and his protagonist just a little closer together. It eases anxiety about cultural difference by infusing them with anxieties about the difference between fact

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and fiction, and by using the tools of the novel to generate sensations of proximity that Western readers have come to expect from the novel generically. PROXIMITY, DISTANCE, METAFICTION, THERAPY

The metafictionality I have been describing in this chapter has a slippery politics and a complicated form. Pamuk refracts his voice through the narration of the diegetic Orhan, and then again through the protagonist, Ka, using the formal devices that are available to him as a novelist to contrast the relative foreignness of some of his characters against the familiarity of others. Using that juxtaposition to foreground the difficulty with which the realist novel reaches a global public, Snow asserts its inability to transmit journalistic information, but it also includes newspaper clippings that would suggest precisely the opposite. The effect is a novel about proximity and distance, tempting the Western reader to feel close to the Turkish characters who stand in for Turkish people in a way that is demonstrably fictional. This effect lends support to Elaine Scarry’s implicit argument that empathy is inherently frightening, as is the act of imagination. Alternately chastening and satisfying that impulse to imagine other people’s reality, Snow purges its readers’ fear of imagination and cultural difference, offering pleasures of the sort that Timothy Aubry calls “therapeutic.” Aubry focuses his argument about “reading as therapy” on novels that are “middlebrow,” which is to say that they express “an urge to offer a cultural education to middle-class consumers and a capacity to muddy the boundaries of high and low.”41 In that category, which works across the boundary between the literary and popular, a work like Pamuk’s coexists with works like Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner, which was marketed as a source of timely insight about the culture of a nation with which the United States was at war. A more sentimental and less literary work than Pamuk’s, The Kite Runner conforms to its genre and sells itself; it was a best seller, but its author has not appeared on a shortlist for a Nobel Prize. Those differences notwithstanding, The Kite Runner shares this in common with Snow: it frames the contemporary Middle East with a self-conscious fictionality that enables Western readers to empathize with fictional characters whom they encounter as representatives of another

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culture at the same time as they become aware of how they travel imaginatively through landscapes that we know from the daily news. Aubry argues that the self-consciousness that The Kite Runner fosters is crucial to the confrontation it stages between Americans’ anxieties about their nation’s place in the world and a wide array of misgivings we feel about the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Narrating an Afghani man’s recollection of his childhood friendship with a much less privileged boy, the novel focuses tightly on the remorse that he feels about his betrayal of the son of his father’s servant. Aubry argues that this affect of remorse is crucial to Americans’ reading of the novel. Citing reviews posted on Amazon .com to describe the novel’s reception among nonprofessional critics, Aubry contends that The Kite Runner provided a historically specific context for “a family of affective responses . . . including sympathy, compassion, empathy, and identification, all of which seem to function as demonstrative proofs of humanity.” 42 This argument bears on Pamuk, too, with its suggestion that literary readers in the United States referred obliquely but clearly to their very divergent political positions on their president’s foreign policy in their interpretations of the novel, and they expressed a surprisingly unanimous gratitude for these “proofs” of an identity that supersedes national belonging. Remarkably, Aubry observes, the readers who reviewed The Kite Runner online cited it as evidence for political arguments that are diametrically opposed: it appeals “to readers who understand it as categorically supporting a neoconservative interventionist philosophy and to those who understand it as categorically opposing this position, while also earning praise among many for apparently avoiding a determinate political position altogether.”43 This heterogeneous audience is united, Aubry argues, by its members’ shared hope that The Kite Runner might “change . . . [the] unsympathetic, dehumanizing attitudes” that their fellow citizens maintain toward “Muslims in the Middle East and central Asia.”44 Like Pamuk and Atwood, these readers trust implicitly that their experience of identifying with fictional characters on the other side of the world deepens their imagination of real people who are equally distant. Moreover, they trust that literary identification works necessarily toward ethical and political good. Aubry locates the source of this trust that Hosseini elicits in an analysis that pertains to my argument about Pamuk, too. The truly remarkable

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agreement that The Kite Runner inspires among American readers hinges for Aubry on the guilt that structures his protagonist’s character: “Hosseini offers a recuperative narrative that identifies humanity, through Amir [the protagonist], precisely with sin and guilt, thus allowing readers to feel human as a consequence of their struggle to cope with the worry that they, as American citizens, are among the victimizers.” 45 Snow works in a similar way to enable its readers “to feel human”—and it is striking, too, if literary readers trust novels generically to provide that feeling—precisely by foreclosing the possibility of cross-cultural identification that is unbounded. That is, Snow brings its implied reader closer to the townspeople of Kars by acknowledging the significant degree to which their intimacy is limited. And by registering the certainty of some distance between East and West, he creates a reading experience that his Western reviewers describe as redemptive. Aubrey’s analysis of The Kite Runner is illuminating to me as a point of contrast because Snow is a very different kind of book. Making explicit its demand to be read as world literature, Snow is marketed to readers who demand more nuanced forms of narrative therapy: it speaks to cosmopolitan readers who are culturally invested in the rhetoric of globalism, and it speaks to us, paradoxically, by telling us that this novel will not give us the easy pleasures of enlightenment we seek. While Hosseini underlines the universalism that binds his characters to his readers in a human sameness, Pamuk reiterates perpetually the differences of class and culture that separate the characters from each other as well as their reader. Emphasizing those gaps that will not be bridged, Snow generates a variety of limited intimacy that functions like a consolation prize for the enlightenment that is not on offer. Innovating the traditions of the realist novel to become legible as world literature, Snow accomplishes for the reading classes what The Kite Runner did for a more “middlebrow” audience: eschewing a happy ending, it underscores for its non-Turkish readers “their own compassionate reaction” to the plot and the characters, which yields “a self-validating basis for hope—one that posits their participation in a purportedly universality and unifying affective response as a nonpolitical solution to the ethnic hierarchies and antagonisms that the novel, in order to elicit this response, presents as intractable.”46 By recognizing the intractable divisions that separate the characters within the novel, and, by extension, their nonfictional

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referents and readers, Pamuk works at the level of novelistic form to generate “the compassionate response” that his Western readers seek to find in him. THE CONTEMPORANEITY OF IDENTIFICATION

Identification ascends as a criterion for literary value in the same period that witnesses the rise of the cultural logics of neoliberalism and multiculturalism, and it isn’t hard to see why. At the turn of the twenty-first century, these general principles became increasingly axiomatic for literary readers in Western cultures: literary canons should represent the full scope of human diversity while they also underline the universality of our experience; schools should teach readers to interpret literature locally and globally at once, respecting the particularity of their authors’ identities in tandem with the humanity that belongs to us all; we should study the ways that every character is constructed uniquely at the intersection of her personal and cultural history, and we should balance that respect for difference against a countervailing respect for what is valuable about all of us universally. In this grand narrative of the postenlightenment period, fictional narratives play a starring role, and identification is crucial to the cultural work they are expected to do.47 The novels that are marketed as world literature ask their readers to imagine distant and fictional people who are neither ideal nor horrible; they put training wheels on the everyday project of imagining the reality of similarly middling people who exist as fully as we do. In this formulation, the value of an author of world literature resides in his or her ability to knit the universal and the particular together, and, in the process, to teach his or her readers how to be better citizens of the world. Orhan Pamuk assumes his literary value in the West in this context, and the institutions that embrace him work from the twin principles of cosmopolitanism as Kwame Anthony Appiah describes them. The first, Appiah argues, is the imperative to uphold “obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences.” Cosmopolitans are globalists who take care to make ethical

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distribution of the time, energy, and money that they devote to other people, even to those strangers who would be easiest to ignore. Philosophically, for Appiah, they become adept at balancing the particular with the universal, because they believe in human dignity across the nations, and they have their creed. They share these ideas with people in many countries, speaking many languages. As thoroughgoing globalists, they make full use of the World Wide Web. This band of brothers and sisters resists the crass consumerism of modern Western society and its growing influence in the rest of the world. But these people also resist the temptations of the narrow nationalisms of the countries where they were born.48

Who are these people? They bear some resemblance to the swaths of voters who opposed the populist-nationalist tides of Brexit in the UK and Donald Trump in the United States, and they sound much like the consumers who buy Orhan Pamuk’s novels.49 But can we say categorically that either of those demographics “[resists] the crass consumerism of modern Western society”? I see no evidence to that effect. The cosmopolitans who deploy less “crass” styles than their nationalist neighbors also have comparatively great wealth to spend on consumer goods, and they wield significant power on global markets for literature. Speaking global English fluently, they set the tastes that prevail in a literary sphere that is increasingly dominated by English. They are we: the readers Orhan Pamuk writes for. Our taste underwrites a new criterion for literary value in this era when the greatest writers are read as translators because they render meaningful those features of life that a foreign reader would otherwise find hard to parse. Orhan Pamuk is in this sense a writer whose talents are inarguably well suited to his age. What is arguable—and, indeed, argued vociferously—is the effect to which he uses those talents: to consolidate wealth and power where it currently resides, or to redistribute those assets more fairly. His domestic adversaries prove quick to suspect that his canonization in the West testifies to his instrumentality for Western interests. They note that he is not the first of their fellow citizens to use the conventions of his genre—description, voice, focalization, plot—to narrate a character’s progress through a Turkish place that is vividly imagined, nor would he be the first non-Westerner to make himself a favorite of Western elites

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at his nation’s expense. In this chapter and the next, I consider how Pamuk uses his command of the novel as a form to negotiate a path between his national public and the Western institutions that enshrine him as an author of world literature. As his fellow citizens wonder why his representations of Turks and Turkey bloom so readily in the imaginations of foreign readers—which seems even more startling given the demonstrable difficulty of that task—they also lament the obliviousness of foreign audiences to everything that they love most about their culture, so they ask: why does Pamuk travel so easily among Westerners—and why is he so “relatable”— when that is so hard for the rest of us?

Chapter Two

A NOVEL CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE’S HISTORY

Pamuk has never fitted into the role which Turkish society demands of its novelists. Dedicating all his life to literature, he has always been more absorbed in his own fictional world than the “real” world outside. —ELIF SHAFAK , “PAMUK’S NOBEL IS A FAMILY AFFAIR”

Borges and Calvino liberated me. —ORHAN PAMUK , “THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW”

This chapter builds on the previous one, which began to describe how Orhan Pamuk adapts the form of the realist novel to illuminate, satisfy, and quite subtly protest the great expectations Western readers bring to world literature—which is also to say, to him. As the preceding chapter showed how and why Pamuk toys with the generic conventions that foster readers’ identification with fictional protagonists, this chapter traces the ways Pamuk speaks to contemporary readers who place the literature that travels from farthest away in a paradoxical relation to historical truth. Throughout his oeuvre, Pamuk convinces his Anglophone readers of his authority over historical facts that few of us learn in school while he also plays literarily with facticity per se. Inventing new ways to deploy the stylistic gestures of social realism and postmodernism in tandem, Pamuk becomes able to stand in two very different places at once: he earns his readers’ trust as a conveyer of reliable information about the rest of the world—alongside Christiane Amanpour, perhaps, Fawaz Georges, and Fareed Zakaria—while he is also canonized as a fabulist among the very best: Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Vladimir Nabokov. A winner in both of these categories that are quite nearly opposite, Pamuk inhabits an authorial figure who wears a magician’s cape but carries a reporter’s notebook, and each of his seemingly incongruous identities somehow authenticates the other.

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His ability to play those two different authorial functions at once is partly an accident of history, which places Pamuk in Western cultural and educative institutions at this moment when they internalize the cultural logics of postmodernism while they also turn increasingly to literature as a source of cross-cultural understanding. But as Pamuk writes accessibly for readers who come to world literature from this vantage, he also calls attention to some bad logic that inheres in it by staging highly stylized confrontations with history with a capital H. His novels yield a catalog of characters who foster their readers’ imaginations of lives as they are actually lived, not only in other places but in other times: by Ottoman miniaturists (My Name Is Red), for example, and secular elites in midcentury Istanbul (Museum of Innocence). Casting the contemporary reader into distant pasts through the literary pyrotechnics that he employs—the doppelgängers, reversals, and tricky metafictional games—Pamuk identifies himself primarily as a purveyor of artifice. He cautions his readers against his reliability as a narrator of the nonfictional world as he also becomes known for precisely that quality. That is because his paradoxical relation to historical truth coheres by a habit of thought that is an artifact of Western cultural and educative institutions at the turn of the twenty-first century: the novelist who underscores his trickster’s relationship to fact establishes his readers’ trust in his representations of people and places as they really are, and also as they have been. He builds his authority over Turkish history and politics in the way he denies it, and he creates a space where he can move among the contrary demands of his foreign and domestic publics to become legible as an author of contemporary world literature. Pamuk allegorizes this particular species of mimesis along with the interpretive challenges that attend it in The Black Book, among other places. As the protagonist, Galip, wanders the streets of Istanbul, looking for his missing wife, the novel alternately follows and subverts the generic conventions of mystery. His search for his wife yields instead the discovery of a trove of representations of Turkish people under the streets of Istanbul in an underground museum called the Mars Mannequin Atelier. They are the product of a proud mannequin-maker who wanted to document the variety of Turkish “malcontents, our history, the things that make us who we are,” as his grandson recalls.1 With that intention, each mannequin is crafted in the image of a recognizable Turkish person—a celebrity, histor-

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ical figure, or common feature of the sociocultural landscape: “lotto men with their sacks,” for example, “unemployed men with their heads sunk to their shoulders, and the lucky ones who could, when they played backgammon or checkers, forget what century they lived in and who they were” (187–88). But if the mannequins refer to Turkish people who wish they could lose their historical specificity, their maker works toward a contrary purpose, and his project fits neatly with Pamuk’s. The proud mannequin-maker aims to preserve a semblance of Turkishness whose extinction seems imminent, so he tethers each of his mannequins to a specific time and place that endows them with meaning en masse that they have in isolation. But as he works to fill his atelier with inanimate representations of the Turkish people in encyclopedic detail, his grandson looks retrospectively on his failed ambition to obstruct the encroachments of Western style by ensuring “that the mannequins in the shop windows were based on our own people.” And that failure is not the mannequin-maker’s fault. A shadowy conspiracy of transnational agents wreaks homogenizing effects on street commerce in Istanbul by relegating the mannequins who represent Turkish types to locations under the ground. Cultural specificity is designed to lose to global hegemony as Turkishness is buried below the city surface. That burial precedes the novel’s diegetic present tense, when the store windows of Istanbul are filled with mannequins who have no nationality, history, or memory. Only in the passageways underground is there a place for the mannequin-maker’s facsimiles of Turkish “citizens who carried their histories, their meanings, on their faces” (91). Like his author, the mannequin-maker uses his craft to capture the specific realities of Turks and Turkishness and make them available where they are absent. Pamuk’s translators help him achieve that effect but sometimes in contrary ways. Maureen Freely’s English translation of The Black Book is rightly celebrated for its legibility to an Anglophone audience and also for its preservation of the rhythms of Pamuk’s Turkish, which she describes admiringly in the afterword to the book. Reflecting on her intention to convey the effects of Pamuk’s Turkish to readers who are unable to read it, Freely also underscores her ambition to convey the city of Istanbul—not as it is, but as it was when she grew up there in the 1960s. She lists the names of the shops, streets, and brands that she leaves untranslated, and she explains why: “We all used Omo detergent, İpana toothpaste, Job shaving

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cream, and Sana margarine. I remember a man on a donkey delivering milk straight from the farm. Another man with a horse-drawn cart delivered water. We bought glassware from Paşabahçe, Turkey’s only glassmaker. Our shoes came from the dozen or so shops lining İstiklal Caddesi, and our silk scarves from Vakko, Turkey’s only department store” (465). By letting these names of Turkish brands and places stand as they are, Freely articulates the same nostalgia about proper names that suffuses Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, where Turkish visitors can muse over objects from their national past, now gone. But Freely also claims her ownership over the text and the culture that produces it by making visible the instant when her translating hand lifts momentarily. Readers who lack her intimate relation to Turkish cultural history are invited to witness a nostalgia from which they are excluded, and, by extension, to perceive the untranslated text that precedes the English they can read. The presence of Turkish names make visible, by contrast, the work that the translator does to make English words fill the rest of the page. Because these words—Omo, İpana, Job, Sana, Paşabahçe, and so on— appear in the English text without translation or further elaboration, they come bathed with a warm nostalgia that is structurally unavailable as such to the Anglophone reader, who is left to speculate what İpana toothpaste looks like, for example, and what it might signify to a person who saw it or used it long ago. These are moments when the text calls attention to itself as a translation, and, equally, to its traffic in the kinds of words that Emily Apter calls “Untranslatables,” which is to say, words that have an extraordinary “quality of militant semiotic intransigence,” because they are deeply embedded in local specificities.2 But Apter sees the Untranslatable as anathema to world literature, while Freely posits it as world literature’s precondition. Underscoring her reader’s estrangement from the system of associations that makes these brands and places so meaningful to the Turkish novelist and his translator, Freely forces her Anglophone reader to perceive that relative distance. The politics that attend that perception are not necessarily good. The translation theorist Sevinç Türkkan inadvertently points toward this political problem as she explains how Freely blocks her Anglophone reader’s entry to the setting of The Black Book with untranslated Turkish words that “[perform] distancing and defamiliarization. For those of us who have been to Istanbul, ‘İstiklal Caddesi’ is a familiar icon and almost stands for the

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city. For a reader who has never been to Istanbul, this name and location is a wonder.”3 But that wonderment has a political valence that Freely is unable to control. It hints at the pleasures unreconstructed Orientalists found in cultural artifacts that appeared to them as exotic, mysterious, and strange, while it also satisfies the multiculturalist’s identification with the feeling of missing a brand of toothpaste that is an object of nostalgia elsewhere, not here. To engage both sets of readers equally, Freely dots her translation with Turkish words too obdurate to pass into English, producing a work of world literature that conveys its awareness that its translatability is only partial. Marking the lacunae that translation leaves behind, those Turkish words function in The Black Book like the gestures preserved in the lifeless bodies of the Mars Mannequin Atelier: as a rich archive of cultural information for an audience who can’t read it. To that degree, the story of the mannequin-maker refers to the difficulty of reading on a global scale as it also allegorizes the interpretive challenges of reading across time. When the protagonist Galip enters the atelier, he learns from his guide that its two-story construction is not at all unique in the history of Istanbul, which has always been layered like a palimpsest: “Each incarnation of this city—Byzantium, Vizant, Nova Roma, Anthusa, Tsargrad, Miklagrad, Constantinople, Cospoli, Istin-Polin—had beneath it the underground passages in which the previous civilization had taken refuge.” The past persists in the present just as the fictional Istanbullus underground persist in the city in fact, invisible but existent in “an extraordinary sort of double city, with the underground city ultimately wreaking revenge on the overground city that supplanted it.” The mannequin-maker knows that fiction will ultimately “wreak revenge” on the city of Istanbul, whose representations inevitably assume more authority than their referents. So he builds his forest of mannequins, knowing that “history could only survive underground” (191). This story is easy to read as an antiglobalization fairy tale, pitting the mannequin-maker’s nostalgia for a more purely Turkish culture against the international style that global capital demands and subtends, but it is also an allegory of the role of the literary in the contemporary moment. The prelapsarian past stands in contrast to the fallen present, when Turkish consumers have become accustomed to seeing their clothes on mannequins that are scarcely distinguishable from their counterparts in the major metropolises of the United States and Europe. The cultural specificity

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of the mannequins’ representative types makes an explicit appeal to Turkish readers who are implied as familiars of these characters, but it also engages readers who lack the context to read “the lotto man” or know what is contained in the sack he carries. The lamentation of his likely extinction encircles the readers of world literature, who need not be able to read the mannequin-maker’s work with any precision to mourn the death of his occupation. In this encircling gesture, the story of the mannequin-maker performs part of the same duty that the novelist assigns himself: it produces a more global awareness of a cultural loss that could otherwise go unnoticed, and it marks the presence of the Turkish text even in the English translation. But that can’t be all. Crucial to the story of the Mars Mannequin Atelier is the temporary status of its location underground; as the mannequin-maker observes, “life underground was itself a sign of the imminent collapse above” (191). By the logic of the allegory, the vitality of the nation is itself a sign of the imminent collapse of the global. Such triumphant nationalism fits uneasily in an oeuvre as a cosmopolitan as Pamuk’s, which expresses an abiding commitment to the discovery of better ways of belonging to a global community, often by voicing ambivalence about globalization and globalism in their current forms. In that context, the allegory of the Mars Mannequin Atelier works better as an allegory of the novel in the age of global capital, which makes the mannequins legible as characters— fictional representations of Turkish people—under the streets where their referents walk. By an inversion of mimesis that is recognizable to Pamuk’s readers, these characters threaten to come to life to advance the authority of fiction over fact. Their maker shares a common project with the novelist who created them all: artists and documentarians in equal measure, they represent their fellow citizens in all their specificity, aggregating fiction in sufficient volume to generate a semblance of fact. TRANSLATING REALITY INTO FICTION

Pamuk pushes this aggregation to its limit in both iterations of his Museum of Innocence: the novel (2009; Masumiyet Müzesi, 2008) and the eponymous museum. Three years after Freely reflected on her nostalgia for the brands and places represented in The Black Book, Pamuk published this novel that prismatically performs and narrates the work of remembrance

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that she describes. Set in 1970s Istanbul, The Museum of Innocence has as its protagonist a man who obsessively collects the physical objects that evoke for him the memory of a brief love affair in his youth: a toy Ankara Express train his beloved once held; the butts of the cigarettes she smoked; and the Meltem soda bottle that figured prominently in an ad they saw together. He spends the rest of his life trying in vain to recapture the time when he was a young man in love, and he focuses that effort on the inanimate objects that bear the impression of the lover he lost. He whiles away his afternoons in the apartment where they had trysts, building a “museum of innocence” to house the inanimate objects that refer to his lover’s animate body, now absent from him. “I would usually spend my two hours in the apartment daydreaming in bed,” he recalls, having selected some object charmed with the illusion of radiating the memories of our happiness—for example, this nutcracker, or this watch with the ballerina, with Füsun’s scent on its strap, with which I would stroke my face, my forehead, my neck, to try to transfer the charm and soothe the ache—until two hours had passed, and the time had come when we would have been awakening from the velvet sleep our lovemaking induced, and, depleted, I would try to return to my everyday life.4

These objects do more than remind the protagonist of his absent lover; they exceed referentiality, expressing her qualities as a feature of their ontology, so he can spend time with them in bed as if it is time spent with her. This complicated relationship between mimesis and remembrance works powerfully throughout Pamuk’s oeuvre, and he develops it most fully in the nonfictional “Museum of Innocence” he builds alongside his protagonist’s. After Pamuk won the Nobel Prize, he added an undisclosed sum of his own to the million euros he received with his award to buy an apartment in Istanbul that refers mimetically to the one where his fictional protagonist lolls in bed. The result is a museum that displays the documents of two different pasts at once: the fictional love story of these characters, Kemal and Füsun, and the cultural history of Pamuk’s native city and country, circa 1971. A physical feature of the Çukurcuma neighborhood where the novel takes place, this Museum of Innocence creates a space where real and fictional worlds intermingle. It gives its visitors evidence for the claim that Pamuk makes with a loose use of the first-person pronoun: "Our daily lives

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are honorable, and their objects should be preserved. It's not all about the glories of the past, it's the people and their objects that count.”5 The pining protagonist Kemal is in this respect a likeness of his author, who shares his investment in the physical detritus of the past. That likeness is the central conceit of the museum, which greets visitors with a wall filled with tiny cigarette butts pinned to it like butterflies in a case, ringed with red lipstick traces, just like the butts left behind by the fictional Füsun. Smaller objects appear in boxes reminiscent of Joseph Cornell’s, and they evoke memories that work in two ways at once. Some are nonfictional artifacts of life in 1970s Istanbul that Pamuk found rummaging through the neighborhood’s antique stores and junk shops, so they speak as meaningfully to Turkish visitors as Omo detergent and İpana toothpaste speak to Maureen Freely. Alongside those totems of a lost culture are fabricated artifacts of the characters’ fictional lives, like the cigarettes that were smoked to be displayed as butts, or the empty bottle printed with a brand that existed only in the pages of The Museum of Innocence. By braiding together these fictional and historical pasts, Pamuk asserts and denies the novel’s historiographical utility, and he places a clear limit on his capacity for mimesis. He questions the high expectations that his readers bring to his work by evaluating it in terms of the quality and quantity of historical knowledge it conveys. And he accomplishes this effect through the allegory of the mannequin-maker, who shares a common occupation with his author: he is the creator of a new kind of museum that aims to preserve a history that works prismatically as fiction. Among other novelists of his time, Pamuk distinguishes himself with the construction of exceedingly intricate relations between his fictions and their referents, not least by inventing a museum and then writing a novel to narrate the fictional lives it exhibits. In the story of the Museum of Innocence as in the story of the mannequin-maker, fiction takes form in the material world—and the success that Pamuk achieves in the process enables his representations to claim precedence over their referents in the global imagination. There is a certain irony to this: by inviting his non-Turkish readers to join him in recalling a specifically Turkish past, he introduces new historical information to the global literary sphere and cultivates a false memory of experiences that are new. While Turkish visitors encounter in the Museum of Innocence the signifiers of a past they remember, Anglophone readers witness the evocation of memory from the outside to

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perceive an attenuated nostalgia for a past we haven’t had. Both sets of readers are brought together in a shared experience of remembering the novel, The Museum of Innocence, which is recalled by the referents of a past that happened only in fiction. The imagined and the real trade places with the familiar and the foreign, which are contrasted here as constitutive features of its reading experience. The novel and the museum work together to thematize the braided relation between translation and mimesis and mark the limited good of world literature, which specializes in the imperfect portage of meaning from one linguistic system to another, so it can play shell games between the imaginary and the real only as it also acknowledges the necessary difference between the two. THE SEMIOTICS OF THE HEADSCARF

These tangled relations between translation and mimesis also drive the plot of Snow, which is structured around the semiotics of the headscarf. It is as redolent of meanings as any of Emily Apter’s “Untranslatables,” meanings as culturally specific as the Turkish brand names that Maureen Freely leaves untouched.6 Every controversy over the headscarf in Pamuk’s native country is legible as a controversy over the legacy of Kemal Mustafa Atatürk, the symbolic father of the Turkish Republic and the founder of its secular state. Following the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk fashioned an identity to distinguish the Turkish people from their neighbors by transforming the habitus of Turkish citizenship. He told his people how they should appear to the world: in a guise that was modern, Western, and wholly extricable from the rest of the former Ottoman Empire. He advanced a definition of Turkishness that was ethnically based,7 and he Westernized his citizens’ dress8 as he also purged their language of its grammatical and lexical resemblances to Arabic and Persian.9 Turks of both genders were instructed to retire their fezzes and headscarves to better resemble the model citizen of the Republic, who was imagined with a head uncovered, unless covered in a Western-style hat. The headscarf became newly legible as a sign of its wearers’ backwardness10 and, more broadly, as a symbolic threat to national unity, sovereignty, and secularity.11 This antithesis that secular Turks have historically drawn between the headscarf and modernity resonates with Islamophobic discourses in the

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West, where the headscarf is also coded as backwards at best and threatening at worst. Snow was read as useful counterevidence by Anglophone readers like Margaret Atwood, who urged Guardian readers to turn to Pamuk for enlightenment about the world as it appears to nonfictional Muslims, “not only in Turkey but also in Britain, where the current Jack Straw headscarf [sic] controversy eerily mirrors the subject matter of [Pamuk’s] recently-translated 1996 novel, Snow.”12 In fact, the controversy to which Atwood refers was not about the headscarf (baş örtüsü, hijab, or turban) but about the veil (niqab), and the difference is greater than the size of the fabric in question. It is laden with the cultural politics that surround Islamic practices that are specifically gendered—in the West as in Turkey—and it suggests the difficulty with which Orhan Pamuk circulates in his translations. When Jack Straw was Britain’s foreign secretary, he published an opinion piece in the Lancashire Evening Standard that sparked a national discussion about the openness of Britain’s public sphere to Britons who wear traditional Islamic dress. Straw maintained with care the distinctions between veils and headscarves that Atwood elides, contending that he defends “absolutely the right of any woman to wear a headscarf. As for the full veil, wearing it breaks no laws.” With that distinction between legality and custom in place, he assured his readers that no woman should ever remove her veil except by her own choice, and he also recommended that women should make that choice at meetings with a civic purpose. Unlike the headscarf, he wrote, the veil diminishes “the value of a meeting as opposed to a letter or phone call” by limiting the ability “to see what the other person means and not just hear what they say.”13 It hides the visual corollaries to speech that are revealed on the speaker’s face, and to that degree, it effectively silences the woman who wears it. A row ensued in response among a predictable array of pundits and politicians, who aligned to contest the limits of multiculturalism and assimilation in postcolonial Britain. The headscarf became legible as a sign of difference—religious but also ethnic and political—from the dominant culture of the nation. The case is very different in Turkey, where birth certificates register babies as Muslims by default, and more than 98 percent of the population has that designation, so markers of Islam are not markers of any otherness. But the headscarf functions as a marker of a minority identity in Turkey, too, because of the way the semiotic systems of the Ottoman past obtain in a

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politicized present. With the growth of Islamic nationalism and the growing authoritarianism of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a covered woman polarizes Turkish culture along the fault lines that prove most worrying to Turks, who are relatively homogeneous in their religious beliefs but divided in their understanding of the maintenance and durability of Atatürk’s legacies.14 As the sociologists Ayşe Saktanber and Gül Çorbacioğlu suggest, “the Islamic headscarf has become almost a trope to denote problems intrinsic to the republic and the secular regime.”15 So, when Western readers interpret Turkish controversies surrounding the headscarf as a source of insight about the geopolitical tensions between East and West, they misread a text that derives its meaning from cultural and political divisions internal to Turkey. But those divisions are obscure to Anglophone readers, who come to Pamuk’s novels without the education we would need to question his representations of historical realities we don’t know. Inevitably, then, we rely on the novelist to provide information that exceeds the fictional, and that reliance has implications far beyond any particular reading of Snow. Pamuk points toward them with the magical-realist devices16 he uses to make the limitations of translation and mimesis readily visible—by making a Museum of Innocence to document a fictional history, for example, and enabling a corpse and a coin to speak during the reign of Sultan Murat III in My Name Is Red. That quick alternation between the real and its opposite is literalized in the structure of The Black Book, which separates the chapters that follow the fictional plot with diegetic newspaper accounts that impede it. And that juxtaposition is allegorized in Snow, which, as the critic Adam Shatz observes, is written “in a more restrained, almost journalistic mode; yet even here he can’t resist inserting his story into a bigger, historical frame, as if he were afraid that in a smaller one it wouldn’t be understood, or even noticed.”17 Writing in this journalistic mode, Pamuk toys with the desire his Anglophone readers state repeatedly: that we want to learn about a nonfictional Turkey from a novel. The critic John Freeman expresses that desire synechochally by reading Snow as a betrayal of Pamuk’s frequent claims that he is an aesthete and therefore not a political animal at all. Evidence to the contrary fills Snow, Freeman contends, as the novel “dramatizes many of the issues facing the Middle East today: the separation of church and state, poverty, moderniza-

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tion, and the influence of the West.”18 And Freeman is right in a manner of speaking; Snow reflects systematically and sometimes schematically on the “issues” he names, constructing unlikely dialogues about them among representative types of Turkey’s many subcultures: the religiously devout secularist who works as a civil servant; the young Islamist who shoots him for his enforcement of the headscarf ban; the girls who are uncertain about the conditions by which they wear the headscarves and the boys who are uncertain about that, too; the police chief; the playwright, and so on. But the implausibility of this cast of characters functions like the Mars Mannequin Atelier, to suggest the impossibility of providing a comprehensive view of Turkish culture, and also like the unreality of a Beckett play: it underlines the literary status the text as a whole. As the critic Nergis Ertürk observes, Snow is “less ‘about’ Turkey than about the representation of Turkey on both a literary and a political world stage—‘the microcosm of Turkey in a small town’ inverted and expanded within a global world-literary and world literary-critical aesthetic.”19 This is an excellent point, but Pamuk goes even further than Ertürk suggests. He embeds a message in Snow about the representation of Turkey in the world, hinging the plot on specific events in Turkish history but misrepresenting them in a crucial way. That misrepresentation is well hidden from non-Turkish eyes and raises an interpretive question that Anglophone readers have failed to see. THE NONFICTIONAL REFERENT FOR “THE HEADSCARF GIRLS”

It is a question about the ways in which mimesis is culturally specific. The plot of Snow is built around an event in recent Turkish history that international media noted only briefly. During the early 2000s the eastern Turkish city of Batman witnessed a rapid rise in the suicide rate among young women,20 who killed themselves at a ratio of nearly 10 per 100,000 in contrast to the nearly 2 per 100,000 for local men.21 That contrast was especially striking in a global context where the suicide rate for men surpasses women’s by a factor of at least two, so Turkish media took up the story. Journalists asked why so many young women in one place would take their own lives,22 and researchers in Turkey responded with two conclusions, both of which place blamed squarely on men.

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The sociologist Rüstem Erkan outlines scholars’ consensus that the dead women either were slain by family members for perceived breaches of sexual mores in “honor killings” that were made to look like suicide or were driven to self-harm by varieties of “extreme patriarchal oppression.”23 The social scientists Mazhar Bağli and Aysan Sev’er cite empirical evidence to trace the cause of the suicides in Batman to the “reduced control [that women have] over their personal lives . . . and their physical bodies” in a “developing country such as Turkey and especially in a very patriarchal region such as Batman.”24 These scholars explained the women’s suicides as symptoms of a culture of misogyny in Turkey that grows more prominent with travel eastward, culminating in fatal levels in Batman. International media plotted the suicides along a similar cartography, explaining the elevated rates of self-harm among women as an effect of Turkey’s location to the east of Europe. Writing in the New York Times, Dan Bilefsky draws an ambiguous causality among the suicides and a variety of social and political developments in Turkey, including stricter punishments for honor killings in response to demands from the European Union; escalating violence between the Turkish military and Kurdish separatists in the surrounding area; and the increased migration of girls to cities. The physical and political contours of Batman were also found generally wanting; as Bilefsky noted, it is “a grim and dusty city of 250,000 people, where religion is clashing with Turkey’s official secularism.”25 But if heightened tensions between religious and secular Turks correlated loosely to the rate of suicide among women, these observers were unable to explain why Turkish women of this region killed themselves in such high numbers. The mystery surrounding the suicides in domestic and international media translated readily into the discourses of Turkey’s culture wars.26 Secular Turks who worried about the rise of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) amid rapid urbanization understood the suicides in Batman as testimony to the repressive and misogynist tendencies of their more rural and religious fellow citizens; conservatives worried about the corrosive effects of globalization on family life. Both of those factions expressed degrees of anxiety over the representation of Turkey as a nation that might “become like Iran,” as the sociologist Esra Özyürek writes, or appear like Iran to the rest of the world.27 In this context, the global circulation of the story aroused similar domestic fears as Orhan Pamuk’s recognition of the

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Armenian genocide: it legitimated old Western prejudices about the backwardness of Islam in general and the terrible Turk in particular; and it reinvigorated the divisions that persist in the modern Republic, making the nation vulnerable to its enemies within and beyond its borders.28 THROUGH THE DIEGETIC NARRATOR, SNOW FLIRTS WITH ITS HISTORICITY

All those concerns are dramatically recast in the fictional narration of the story of the suicides in Snow. It is filtered through a protagonist who claims authority he does not have as a narrator of history: a poet pretending to be a journalist, Ka travels to Kars on false pretense, as we have seen. He also arrives in eastern Turkey amid worries that “the Westernised world he had known as a child might be coming to an end” because the rise of Islamist politics has diminished the cultural currency of secularists like him and his family. “If the country were taken over by a fundamentalist Islamist government, he now thought, his own sister would be unable to go outside without covering her head.”29 The specter of a rising religiosity looms over Ka throughout the novel, just as it did over Turkey during the period of its authorship. Snow was written during the period that witnessed the expanding power of the AKP, which gained hegemony nationally from its historic home in the east. Snow represents its protagonist’s journey from the city that had been the seat of cultural power to less enfranchised region of the country, where the power that secular Turks had exercised over their more religious fellow citizens could no longer be assumed. Kars is culturally and geographically remote from Ka, as it is remote also from the vast majority of Pamuk’s Turkish readers. Long hours of difficult travel separate it from the cities—Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir—that have historically been home to the largest portions of Pamuk’s domestic audiences in Turkey’s universities and among its elites. On the far eastern edge of the country, Kars functions symbolically for those Turkish publics much like Africa functions for Joseph Conrad’s Europe, minus the plunder; it is a place about which little is known and on which a miscellany of fears are routinely projected.30 It is a place, in other words, where Turks in the coastal regions of the country might expect to find a concentration of oppression against women, just as social scientists did when they studied the suicides in Batman.

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The pretext for Ka’s trip to Kars is a similarly eastern-looking story. A childhood friend, Taner, tells Ka “about the municipal elections coming up and how—just as in the city of Batman—an extraordinary number of girls in Kars had succumbed to a suicide epidemic.” Taner alludes sweepingly to Kars’s marginal place in the national imagination with his suggestion that the long-absent Ka should go to Kars to rediscover “what Turkey was really like” (8). Ka’s travel to eastern Anatolia is likened to his Western readers’ corollary travel eastward for literary enlightenment about people and places far away in the nonfictional world. That boundary between fact and fiction is traversed for dramatic effect throughout Snow, which represents political violence that oscillates between the real and the fictional until the difference becomes hard to see. This happens first early in the novel, in the story of how the director of the Education Institute is killed by an Islamist extremist for his role in banning headscarves. The narrator later acquires a transcript of a tape that the director made with a recorder strapped to his body at the time of his death; a facsimile of documentary evidence, the faux transcript is set in a different font to distinguish its pretense of facticity from the fiction of the novel. It sets in motion this play between the evidentiary and the fictitious as it stands in contrast to the narrative prose that surrounds it. That contrast works across the registers that Rebecca Walkowitz names as the terrain of “comparison fiction”: the “academic and popular; public and private; the geopolitical and the neighborhood; oral, written, analog, and digital; standard and vernacular.” And by setting those opposites next to each other, Snow raises the same central question that Walkowitz sees as pivotal to comparison literature, generally: each “text asks whether transnational enlargement in fact enhances—or ultimately thwarts—our capacity for social responsibility and political agency.”31 Snow invites its reader to trust the novel as a source of cross-cultural enlightenment, and, moreover, to trust that kind of enlightenment as a source of ethics, but then it revokes both of those invitations to insist on the autonomy of art. These invitations and their revocations are framed in the love story that provides the nominal structure of the novel, although any narrative desire it generates is tepid. The friend who proposes that Ka travel to Kars also mentions that their “old classmate, the beautiful İpek” is recently divorced and living there. “The prospect of falling in love” arises without further explanation at the mention of İpek’s name, and the narrator re-

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calls that it “filled Ka with an intense, almost instinctive dread.” The plot’s gears click into place and move as the diegetic narrator casts a scrim of doubt around the reasons Ka gives for his trip. Soon after his arrival in Kars, Ka’s heart revealed a thing or two that his mind refused to accept: first, that in returning to Istanbul from Frankfurt for the first time in twelve years, Ka’s purpose was not simply to attend his mother’s funeral but also to find a Turkish girl to make his wife; second, it was because he secretly hoped that this girl might be İpek that he had travelled all the way from Istanbul to Kars. (23)

Narrator and reader form a conspiracy in this knowledge that the protagonist lacks, and that he would deny. “If a close friend had suggested” the marital object as the telos of Ka’s trip, the narrator confides, “Ka would never have forgiven him; but the truth would cause Ka guilt and shame for the rest of his life.” Ka’s self-deceits around love and marriage—in general, and specifically with respect to İpek—become explicable to the narrator as an effect of his inability to admit that he ever does “anything for the sake of personal happiness. On top of that, he did not think it appropriate for an educated, Westernised man like himself to go in search of marriage to someone he hardly knew” (23). Struggling to behave like the person he thinks he is, he imitates the habits of Western thought that he has learned from the European novels he read as a young man in Istanbul. And he reflects on the ways his identity grows out of his education as a secular Turk who was born to a bourgeois family and exported to Europe as he reflects also on the ways one culturally constructed self is layered over another. In those reflections, he invites his reader to the interpretive challenge of discerning truth from lies in a world that also mixes fact with fiction. Those categories blur with high stakes when a local journalist connects the fictional suicides in Kars to the real ones in Batman. “The first stories of such suicides had come from a city called Batman,” the narrator recalls, providing orienting information for a non-Turkish reader, “a hundred miles from Kars” (14). That proximity between the journalistic and the novelistic is rendered diegetically in the rumors Ka hears as he travels east: the reporting on the suicides might be fake news, he is told, the dezinformatsiya of an authoritarian state. And as Snow represents its protagonist’s misrecognitions of fact and fiction, it generates that confused condition

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for its reader, too. It cautions against excessive trust in the historical truths that it conveys, but it makes healthy skepticism nearly impossible; it embeds a falsehood at the very root of the historical narrative it tells. And it demonstrates its awareness of its readers’ inability to keep the categories straight by addressing its Western reader explicitly and testifying to limited good of world literature as a purveyor of journalistic truth. With the acknowledgment that its readers will need prior knowledge of the history to which it refers, and also that few of them have it, Snow locates its Anglophone reader in the position of “the simple-minded fellow” that Plato’s Socrates imagines as a dupe for the poets. They are barred from his Republic because they have the power to manipulate a citizen who is ill qualified to distinguish between the images they create and their referents. Pamuk performs exactly that kind of manipulation on his Western readers, who lack sufficient knowledge about Turks and Turkey to check the mimetic quality of any cultural logic he constructs. And such a blindly trusting reader makes a faulty citizen of a cosmopolis as well as a polis because, as Socrates suggests, “he himself can’t distinguish between knowledge, ignorance, and imitation.” The problem of mimesis is conflated with the problems of translation, but also with the problems of citizenship—for Pamuk as for Plato, with effects that I have yet to fully describe. WHY DOES PAMUK INVERT THE TERMS OF THE HISTORICAL NARRATIVE HE TELLS?

Pamuk foregrounds the politics of mimesis by altering in one very important way the history to which he refers: he suggests implicitly but forcefully that the women who committed suicide in Kars did so because the secular state prevented them from wearing a headscarf freely. This suggestion might be described as counterfactual or, perhaps, fictional, as some readers have suggested.32 No evidence suggests that any tensions surrounding the headscarf contributed to the suicides in Batman, although the headscarf is a polarizing symbol in Turkish national culture, where women’s bodies are contested ground by many measures. In Pamuk’s novel, that contestation is represented through the mediating metaphor of the headscarf—so what does Pamuk accomplish by introducing this powerful symbol to the history he tells? He refracts the real history of Batman through the fictional story of “the headscarf girls” to

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thematize the limits of the mimetic representation in world literature, and to launch a trenchant critique of his secular state that is illegible to any reader who is ignorant about the suicides in Batman—which is to say, the vast majority of his readers outside of Turkey. For them, the story that Pamuk tells is as thoroughly draped with layers of fictionality as the city of Kars is draped in Snow; the suicides of the headscarf girls are linked to some referents in the nonfictional world, but only in their inexplicability. The girls commit violence against themselves for reasons that are known finally only to them, and they leave no note to explain, so they leave their friends and neighbors to guess. “What is certain,” the deputy governor tells Ka, “is that these girls were driven to suicide because they were extremely unhappy. We’re not in any doubt about that. But if unhappiness were a genuine reason for suicide, then half of the women in Turkey would be committing suicide” (15). As an observation of a quality or quantity of unhappiness that is disproportionately felt by women in Turkey, this is obliquely and briefly stated, with implicit evidence that undoes any feminist claim it makes. The women in Turkey do not commit suicide in inordinately large numbers, so what makes the women of Kars more vulnerable than most? Ka tries to answer that question by investigating the suicides and identifying with the girls who committed them, but he fails to learn much, and he is dismayed. He concludes that the interior realities of the suicide girls are elusive posthumously because they were so faintly present when the girls were alive: “He found it strangely depressing,” the narrator reveals, that the suicide girls had hardly any privacy or time even to kill themselves. Even after swallowing their pills, even as they lay quietly dying, they’d had to share their rooms with others. Ka had grown up in Nisantas reading Western literature, and in his suicide fantasies he had always thought it important to have a great deal of time and space: “at the very least you needed a room you could stay in for days without anyone knocking on the door” (16). In fact, suicide becomes imaginable for Ka only in terms that are strikingly Western: “In his fantasies,” he observes, it “was a final act you performed alone and of your free will.” But amid the stories of suicides that that are too public for him to fathom, “there was one girl with whom he identified, whose sufferings reminded him of his own,” and she was “one of the famous ‘headscarf girls.’ ” Here, the narrator laces the story he tells with what seems like a brief history lesson. The girl who stands out in Ka’s imagination was one who

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became locally “famous” because she refused to remove her headscarf even though it was legally prohibited as dress for school. The narrator recalls how “the authorities had outlawed the wearing of headscarves in educational institutions across the country,” and “many women and girls refused to comply”—including the girl who committed suicide, apparently as a result or an extension of that refusal. The real pressure had come from her school friends who were running the campaign against the banishment of covered women from the institute. So, despite her parents’ expressed wish that she remove her headscarf, the girl refused, thus ensuring that she would frequently be removed by the police from the halls of the institute. When she saw some of her friends giving up and uncovering their heads, and others forgoing their headscarves to wear wigs instead, the girl began to tell her father that life had no meaning and that she no longer wanted to live. (16)

The expository mode of this passage leaves the girl’s interior life untouched by the narrator’s speculation—about the reasons for her suicide, but also about the reasons for her insistence on wearing the headscarf, despite the difficulty it caused. It could have functioned for her as an expression primarily of religious belief, or of a more general wish for autonomy over her dress. In the absence of a clear explanation, the possibility that her suicide represents her protest against the limitations imposed by the secular state reverses a cliché that holds powerfully in Western cultures: that the headscarf is a symbol of patriarchal power, an emblem of the suffering of women under Islam.33 But the headscarf carries exactly the opposite meaning for some of the female characters in Snow, who wear it as an emblem of their individuality and freedom of expression. As Kadife says later, “In Turkey, the rebel heroine doesn’t take off her scarf, she puts it on” (319). These kinds of textual markers lend an associative accuracy to Christopher Hitchens’s erroneous description of Snow as a representation “of suicide by young girls thwarted in their desire to take the Muslim veil.”34 It made the novel legible to many critics as a document of the plight of nonfictional women in Turkey, where Islamist and secularist men seem to exert pressures that seem roughly equal. The critic Colleen Ann Lutz Clemens, for example, reads the novel as a series of “parables about women entrapped in this struggle between a secular state and religious groups,” where “both sides inscribe their ideologies

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on the bodies of the women.”35 In this analysis, Islam animates patriarchal practices in Islamic cultures; the story of the headscarf girls depicts two kinds of Islamic men, neither of whom respect women’s bodies and rights.36 This analysis follows a general tendency among Anglophone critics to overlook how Snow’s narration of the story of the headscarf girls alters the history to which it refers, so the question of what the alteration means has not been available for broad interpretation. Among those who notice the alteration, the Turkish-American critic Elif Batuman observed it with irked dismay, contending that “many reviewers misremember Snow” as a novel about girls who commit suicide because the state prevents them from wearing their headscarves in school. Quoting Margaret Atwood and Christopher Hitchens as illustrative examples, Batuman blames their error on Pamuk, who creates “the replacement of domestic drama by political spectacle, patriarchal repression by secularist repression, real suicide by fake suicide.” 37 His failure of mimesis, in other words, proves untranslatable to readers who can’t read the source text. As world literature, the novel generates an interpretive failure with ethical and political consequences. Batuman and I agree on that much. She is right to observe that only one of the girls’ suicides was related to her inability to wear her headscarf to school; the rest of the suicides go unexplained in the novel, so the critics who describe them as effects of the ban on the headscarf—which is the majority of critics who mention it—make an interpretive error. And, as Batuman suggests, they make that error for a good reason, because Pamuk tempts it by dwelling on the ambiguities surrounding the headscarf controversy and, at the same time, the mystery of the suicides. The causal relation that is implied between the two leaves a reader who is relatively unschooled in Turkish history with a misunderstanding about it. But that does not unsettle me as much as it unsettles Batuman. As I read him, Pamuk uses Ka’s identification with the girl who covers her head to describe her as a victim of a secular fatwa—as he is, too. By the figurative logic that the novel allows, Pamuk aligns his nationalist persecutors with patriarchal oppression in the Islamic world; the secular state becomes the agent of women’s constrained freedom in Kars. Pamuk represents their desire to cover their heads as a desire that is entirely their own, which makes the headscarf legible as an emblem of individual agency against a secular oligarchy and a militarized state.38 Pamuk posits the reli-

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gious expression of the headscarf girls as an expression of civil liberties that obtain in the Islamic East as in the Judeo-Christian West, by narrating how Ka’s literary experience grows increasingly mystical over the course of the novel. He challenges his readers within and beyond Turkey to revisit what they think they know about the divisions between religious and secular people in the real world, and he launches an investigation of the work that fiction can do. This represents a distortion of the national history to which it refers. Batuman is right, then, that the cause that Pamuk supplies diegetically for a rash of suicides among women in eastern Turkey renders him unable to investigate how nonfictional women’s rights are suppressed there. And she is right, too, that further investigation into that question is merited by the facts of the story, which leave opaque the reasons so many women committed suicide in Batman. The inordinate unhappiness of women in eastern Turkey is suggested if not proven by this small sample, as the deputy governor observes, so the question for policy makers and activists is why. And that question is well worth asking—but Pamuk is not the only person who can ask and answer it, and he may not be the best person for the job, at least not insofar as he is the author of Snow. THE GLOBAL NOVELIST IS NOT ACCOUNTABLE AS A HISTORIOGRAPHER

Snow reached a global public that had little context for the cultural landscape it represents, as its reviews in English attest. Anglophone critics recommended the novel as a source of enlightenment about rural life in Turkey and the range of ways that Islam is practiced there, but they demonstrated in those testimonies the incompleteness of that education by failing to distinguish clearly between a veil and a headscarf, much less to know what the difference means. That failure is not inevitable since the novel traffics generically in cultural specificity, and those cultural specifics are readily available in nonfictional texts—but those are not the specific features of Turkish life that Pamuk chooses to convey. Instead, he narrates the politicized personal relations among secularists and Islamists in eastern Turkey, and he does not omit consideration of the ways that those relations are inflected by the gender politics around the headscarf. On the contrary, he studies those inflections in great detail. But

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with a canny awareness of his status as an author of world literature, he focuses his readers’ attention on details that will challenge rather than confirm Western prejudices about the East: “In Turkey,” Kadife says, “the rebel heroine doesn’t take off her scarf, she puts it on” (319). Succinctly, Kadife locates the headscarf outside of the semiotic system that codes it as a tool for the diminishment of women’s rights—and that is a lot for a fictional character to do.39 The novel does not endorse Kadife’s unequivocal position on the headscarf, however. Political but not didactic, Snow puts gender politics at play in a plot that hinges on headscarves without dictating their proper use. The stakes of the question are evidenced in the violence of the suicides, which also leave a lacuna around the private lives of the women who appear as ciphers in the text. Their suicides are too deeply imbricated in the particulars of Turkish politics and culture—in differences of class, culture, and economics as well as religion—to be translated readily for readers abroad. As he foregrounds the illegibility of their interior lives, Pamuk fictionalizes the story he tells in ways that are legible only to his Turkish publics. A reader who knows the real history of the suicides in Batman is directed— as the foreign reader is, too, but from farther away—to forget for the moment the ways that religion oppresses women and to consider instead the ways that a secular state can be oppressive, too. At the same time, Snow draws and redraws the limits on its ability to make that political point or any other. Fiction’s prismatic effects on the history it represents are dramatized most fully when the characters perform a diegetic play titled My Fatherland or My Headscarf. A drama about the enlightenment of a religious girl, its denouement comes when the actress— the “rebel heroine” with a headscarf, Kadife—uncovers her head for the first time on stage. Kadife perceives an ethical conflict inherent in her role, which pits the faith that obligates her to keep her headscarf on against the script that requires its removal. Urging her to perform the role as it’s written, Ka suggests that she reveal only the fictitious hair of a wig. “I don’t fake things,” she says. “If I decide to bare my head, I won’t go halfway” (320). Kadife’s refusal to recognize any difference between her physical body and the fictional character she inhabits on stage is reiterated in stronger terms by the director, Sunay Zaim, who raises the stakes of the problem of mimesis with his appearance on stage. A secularist and republican, Zaim and his play initiate a three-day period of anarchy in Kars that leads to a

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military coup, and he invites a journalist to come to write a report of the production before it happens. He reveals a scoop: “ ‘Write this down, Mr. Journalist,’ bellowed Sunay, glaring at Serdar Bey as if delivering a threat. The headline is as follows. ‘Death on stage.’ ” A real death in a fictional play is reported before it happens, and that temporal inversion is reversed in the narrator’s quotation of the article. “I was able to acquire the final version from Serdar Bey during my visit to Kars many years later,” Orhan the narrator writes. And he quotes the article, which reads: “Yesterday, while appearing in an historic play at the National Theater, Kadife the headscarf girl shocked audiences first by baring her head in a moment of enlightened fervor, and then by pointing a weapon at Sunay Zaim, the actor playing the villain, and firing.” In the diegetic world of the novel, the real death of a human being is mistaken for the fictional death of a character in a play, just as the real deaths of the women in Batman are easily mistaken for the fictional deaths of the “suicide girls” in Snow. The audience is left uncertain about what, exactly, they have seen, and that uncertainty has deeply ethical implications. It is compounded at the theater scene, where the townspeople of Kars encounter conflicting textual evidence about the reality of fiction. Rumors circulate about the newspaper report written in advance of the play’s debut, suggesting that the bullets that will be fired on stage are real. Kadife’s father has heard them, so he warns her not to pull the trigger on any gun that is handed to her as a prop because it could be loaded. The actor Sunay shows the gun’s clip to the audience, demonstrating that it is empty, but Kadife’s father remains concerned, and he places blame equally on the journalist and the playwright. The journalist “is always hoping he can make things happen by writing about them first,” Turgut Bey observes, but he “would never dream of proclaiming an assassination like this unless Sunay had talked him into it” (412). The conspiracy between journalism and theater yields a text that the audience can’t read because fiction and fact are so densely braided together in the world they inhabit. The spectators’ effort to interpret that text appears as a feature of this scene, where the relative modernity of the townspeople of Kars is determined by their ability to rise above naïve practices of reading. The climactic scene of the novel is also the climactic scene of the play, when Kadife bares her head; Sunay hands her a gun and says, “Here you are. This is where you pull the trigger.” The narrator interjects, drawing their audience into

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the narrative frame: “When Kadife took the gun in her hand, Sunay smiled. Everyone in Kars expected the dialogue to continue.” That expectation is confounded as Sunay provokes Kadife to kill him by encapsulating the ideology of patriarchal Islam as a secularist like him might imagine it and saying it on stage: “Your hair is so beautiful, Kadife. Even I would certainly want to guard you jealously, to keep other men from seeing it.” His ploy works, and she pulls the trigger. “All of Kars watched in horror as Sunay shuddered violently—as if he’d really been shot—and then fell to the floor. ‘How stupid all of this is,’ said Sunay. ‘They know nothing about modern art. They’ll never be modern’ ” (412). Kadife shoots him four more times, and his body slumps to the floor, looking heavier and bloodier with each shot. The layers of irony multiply: Sunay deems his fellow citizens primitives from a less civilized era because they fail to understand that his injury is real, but their error lies in the diligence with which they followed the textual cues he gave. And when they fail to recognize his death as such, they draw on a cultural education that has taught them to not to be surprised by quick reversals between the truth and its opposites. As the narrator recalls, most of the townspeople left the theater believing that they’d seen a good play, so they would discover Sunay’s death only when they read of it in the newspapers. And they would believe the second report of his death even though the first was a lie. Other news sources would omit mention of the story, however, and the chaos surrounding the violence in the theater would soon be forgotten. “As Kars was accustomed to military rule and to the sight of police and special operations teams chasing ‘terrorists’ through the streets, it wasn’t long anyway before these three days ceased to seem just ‘exceptional.’ ” Pamuk’s reader is reminded that verisimilitude is historically contingent, so local and foreign audiences will fall prey to different types of misreading. Knowing that authoritarian regimes traffic in fake news, their citizens learn to interpret their sources accordingly. Those contingencies determine the meaning of the story of the director who hands a loaded gun to an actor with a script that writes his own death. As the narrator satirizes the grandiosity of the Turkish writers who liken themselves to Salman Rushdie to imagine the elaborate punishments they will suffer for their art, Pamuk invokes his own biography with dark humor. He had every reason to know that he broke a taboo when he acknowledged the reality of the Armenian genocide, just as Sunay Zaim had every

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reason to know that his nonfictional body would die from the fictional murder he wrote. And when Kadife is jailed for Sunay Zaim’s death and controversy ensues about the degree of her guilt, the audience becomes implicated in the narrator’s analysis, too. “After all, Sunay had gone so far as to advertise his death in advance; and if the people of Kars were so eager to see him kill himself on stage, if they were still prepared to enjoy the drama, telling themselves it was just a play, then they, too, were complicit” (416). An implied reader who is “modern” by Sunay Zaim’s definition is the referent for this damning passage, which has Orhan Pamuk—real and fictional— as its author, narrator, and protagonist. By swathing the narrative he tells in these layers of fictionality, Pamuk unsettles his implied readers’ tendency to identify by reflex with a secular protagonist. The critic Erdağ Göknar shows convincingly how we should read that destabilizing gesture as a feature of Pamuk’s “literary interrogation of the so-called secularization thesis of modernity, according to which social progress requires an ever increasing commitment to rationality and a corresponding reduction in the influence of religion.” 40 By this account, Pamuk uses tropes that are familiar to readers of Turkish literary history to assert a “literary mysticism that allows for the possibility of redemption through authorship and textual production.” Justin Neuman agrees, contending that Pamuk demonstrates a prevailing “desire to refashion both Kemalist laicism and hegemonic conceptions of Islam in the name of reparative religious projects that renegotiate the claims of secularity.” 41 The varieties of faith that enable readers and writers to glean truth from fiction become in this analysis a variety of mysticism, akin to a secular religion. These are strong and mutually supporting analyses of the ways and the reasons Snow cuts across the opposition between the secular and the religious, working toward a Turkish identity that is less invested in that definitional difference. But these analyses underplay the other opposition that is laced through the first: Pamuk blurs the difference between fact and fiction to put at stake the question of the good that world literature can do. In his interviews and with increasing intensity over the years, Pamuk declares his primary allegiance to fiction, and he argues that it works independently from politics with a capital P although it is also deeply political. The novel as he reads and writes it stands in an oblique relationship to the real, so he can use it neither with the clear reference of a social realist nor entirely without that impulse: “It’s a bit ironic that both Turks and Germans place

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so much emphasis on the political side” of his Nobel Prize, he told a German newspaper. “It’s almost as if they were saying that appreciation for the literary quality of my novels isn’t something to be proud of.” 42 But as Pamuk insists on his writerly autonomy from political history, he also writes novels that sift carefully through historical fact, so it is no wonder that he is often asked questions in interviews that he says he would rather not answer. And his novels evince a similarly contradictory view of their legibility as political interventions, professing the same ambivalent faith in mimesis that their author does. Pamuk has said at times that the art of the novel hinges on the imagination of distant people and the literary representation of “black spots” in a national history, but he has also refused to speak on political matters, as I will show in chapter 3. Insisting that matters of state lie outside of his job description as a novelist, he writes characters who use the flexibility of the form they inhabit to similarly express their contradictory relationship to the speech act that they have little choice but to perform: a testimony to a reader who would otherwise find them hard to imagine and impossible to read. Speaking in a foreign language from the pages of novels that are replete with documentary detail, they tell their readers explicitly not to believe a thing that they say. The world they inhabit is populated by words as hard as objects, and it resists translation into legible marks on the page. It insists on the autonomy of the literary in its refraction of the political, as Pamuk does, too, asking for a method of interpretation that more fully respects the politics of mimesis in a multilingual world. With that nuanced understanding of what world literature can and cannot do, his novels announce themselves as reliable narrators of Turkish history while they also identify themselves as liars, or as figments of somebody’s imagination—which, of course, is precisely what they are.

Chapter Three

ORHAN PAMUK AS POLITICAL GADFLY “The Armenian Issue”

I know of no serious historical interpretation of this modern world in which the concept of the bourgeoisie . . . is absent. And for good reason. It is hard to tell a story without its main protagonist. —IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN, “THE BOURGEOIS(IE) AS CONCEPT AND REALIT Y”

In the preceding chapters I described how Orhan Pamuk’s novels circulate through their Anglophone publics: on the strength of their perceived ability to illuminate the humanistic truths that surround the geopolitical news of the day. As I observed that critical consensus, I asked how Pamuk achieves it, and I argued that his novels put new pressure on the granular details that have historically been their genre’s stock-in-trade. Recuperating for contemporary readers the mimetic promise to illuminate nonfictional realities in fictional form, Pamuk’s novels speak meaningfully across the national, cultural, and linguistic differences that structure the literary world at the turn of the twenty-first century. I turn away from Pamuk’s novels in this chapter to make a similar point as it arises around his person. His literary celebrity is also invested with extraordinary ability to satisfy Western readers’ desires to learn more from literature about the nonfictional world, and for corollary reasons. Meeting the criteria for literary value that prevail in his time and place, he becomes the latest protagonist in the grand narrative of cross-cultural enlightenment that underwrites the good of world literature in the contemporary West. Pamuk is welcomed in Western cultures as an advocate for human rights where such advocacy is needed, a brave speaker of truth to power at some peril to himself. This formulation tethers his value as an author of world literature to the political progress he achieves and is reiterated warmly

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throughout his reception in English. It rests on the presumptive goodness of a discourse of human rights that is a cultural legacy of the European Enlightenment, and also on Pamuk’s ability to speak for his fellow citizens with their approval—or, at the very least, for the Turkish demographics that matter most from a literary perspective: the globalists who comprise the “reading classes” in every other nation all over the world.1 That is a lot to assume. In fact, Pamuk has been more infamous than famous in Turkey, where he is more notorious than beloved, even in the regions that most resemble the U.S. blue states. His difficulties with his state extend also to his fellow citizens, who meet him with degrees of ambivalence that make him an unlikely spokesperson for them on a global stage. If an election were held for Turkey’s cultural ambassador to the world, he would be unlikely to win it. But my purpose in this chapter is neither to assert nor to deny his qualification for that nonexistent position. It is instead to ask why Anglophone publics invest so heavily in this question as it is framed, and to argue that Pamuk’s inability to satisfy his readers’ expectations—by working unfailingly for human rights in Turkey and, at the same time, writing at the highest levels of achievement—says more about the contemporary literary world than about him. Pamuk’s celebrity at home and abroad hinges on “the Armenian issue,” as it is known in Turkey, although no complete account of it can end there. The rhetoric surrounding Orhan Pamuk’s statement to the Swiss journalist about the Armenian massacres—”Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me wants to talk about it”2—indexed at least two narratives about the Turkish nation’s role in the geopolitical world, and they are very different. The Western critics who praised Pamuk’s service as a “bridge between East and West” referred with varying degrees of specificity to Anglo-American military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq; his Turkish adversaries shared that impulse to measure his literary achievements against political coordinates.3 Nationalists suspected that Western institutions wanted to see a Turkish person embarrass his state, and they found their suspicions confirmed as Pamuk’s star rose in the West quickly after he satisfied that desire. It was not lost on Pamuk’s fellow citizens that he made his most outspoken remarks about the Armenian massacres just one year prior to his Nobel victory, and he made those remarks to a journalist from a European newspaper, so his speech became audible at the center of the literary world. His figuration as

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a traitor to his nation (vatan haini) coincided with his emergence as a good citizen of the world. That coincidence is meaningful. Turkish media heard his tacit acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide as support for the prejudices that arrayed against them in Europe, while Western media saw his willingness to discuss the worst chapters in his nation’s history as a harbinger of a Europeanness that was latent and desirable in Turkey. His value was assessed on both sides of the Bosphorus by his metonymic representation of his nation, as his domestic and foreign publics brought to him divergent assumptions about the ways that nations should confront their histories, and, moreover, about the responsibility that a novelist bears for forcing those confrontations. The non-Western writer of world literature provides the figure on which those differences are inscribed, so it is by his sacrifice that he enables their reconciliation, as I will argue in chapter 5. To the degree that Orhan Pamuk satisfies his Western readers’ desire to see an outpost of humanistic values where they are unwelcome, he represents the expansion of the cultural logics of the enlightenment throughout the non-Western world. He fosters the imagination of a globe that is unified with Western cultures at its center. PAMUK AS HERO AND TRAITOR

Contemporary readers of postcolonial theory will not be surprised to discover a deep strain of suspicion in Turkish culture about Western desires to see a Turkish person embarrass his state. As colonial powers have historically sought to divide and conquer their imperial subjects, so have the neighbors of empires taught discourses of vigilance in their defense. Those discourses in Turkey refer with some inevitability to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Great Speech (Nutuk) of 1927, which founded the Republic as a consolidation of Turkish identity against the encroachments of European imperialism and the processes of global capitalism that followed. Those discourses were cultivated explicitly through the national curricula of private schools as well as public schools,4 where every Turkish student was required to take a course in national security that emphasized the citizens’ duty to defend the state against its internal and external enemies.5 That duty was increasingly privatized over the course of the late twentieth century, as the sociologist Ezra Özyürek has suggested, when the state’s educational

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program generated a new market for Republican trinkets. By buying an iconic image of Atatürk and displaying it on a refrigerator magnet or a framed portrait in an office, Özyürek argues, Turkish citizens “send the message to the critics of the Turkish state that there is a public that voluntarily and personally embraces the founding principles of the Turkish Republic.” 6 And while the display of iconic images dates back to the Republican era, the voluntary nature of the display is historically particular to the contemporary period, which witnesses the privatization and growing vigilantism of Turkish nationalism. The Turkish citizen is constructed as a neoliberal subject who advances the nation’s place in the global economy on her own time. This is the context in which Pamuk’s acknowledgment of the genocide— even without that word—made him legible to nationalist vigilantes as a traitor to his nation because he aligned himself with the consensus of foreign historians against the dominant narrative in his national culture. That made him available to a nationalist narrative that consolidates the nation against latter-day colonial stooges who do necessary work for imperial powers all over the world. As the political scientist Ayşe Zarakol suggests, resistance to Pamuk is animated by the Turkish people’s abiding “worry about being forever stuck with their ‘stigma(s)’: Eastern, backward, Asian, Muslim, uncivilized, barbaric, etc.”7 As Pamuk gained authority to speak as his nation’s ambassador abroad, his state sought control over its representation by criminalizing his statement four months after he made it, with the addition of article 301 to the penal code. Pamuk was charged retroactively for casting aspersions on the origins of the Republic, and his trial made him a literary celebrity who was assumed to have geopolitical power, but the appeal of the story did not depend on the suspense that it created over its outcome. All parties to it deemed the novelist’s acquittal predictable from the start, but in Pamuk’s case, as in others since, article 301 had devastating effects, and not only for him. Pamuk’s trial coincided with the collapse of Turkey’s accession talks to the European Union, which emboldened nationalists to the dismay of integrationists on both sides. Old images of “the terrible Turk” gave way to new discourses of Islamophobia, which were animated by a variety of antiimmigrant sentiments. Speaking as the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy swore that he would never tell “French schoolchildren that they share a border with Syria and Iraq,” and he proposed a Mediterranean Union that

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would mollify his Eastern neighbors without making them European.8 Turks responded to the discourses that mapped them as Europe’s dark Other with varieties of outrage and dismay that extended to Pamuk, too, when he corroborated Western allegations against the first Turks.9 His denial of the historical narrative that every Turkish student learns in school made him legible as a fulfillment of Atatürk’s prediction that “internal and external enemies” would prove a perpetual threat to the Turkish Republic. Without that cultural history, Orhan Pamuk’s fellow citizens found it hard to see their first Nobel Laureate as a hero for freedom of speech, even if they shared his impulse toward genocide recognition. That difficulty is evidenced in a study conducted by two Turkish sociologists of their national media during the month after the announcement of his Nobel Prize. Among 315 references to Orhan Pamuk after his victory in Stockholm, 45 compliments drowned in 270 insults, nearly all of which were ad hominem. Some read like formal exercises in the grammar of prevailing prejudices: the claim that Pamuk is “homosexual,” for example, or Jewish. More substantial complaints cohere like pixels in a portrait of the novelist as a “collaborator of west/upper class/enemy” who betrays his people because he is “self-interested (award money).” Fourteen major news outlets deemed him an “unread writer,” implying that he must have earned his international acclaim through some extraliterary means.10 This aggregation of Pamuk’s portraits in his national media evokes a character who is hard to like in any culture, but he conforms exceptionally well to the figuration of a traitor to the Turkish Republic—and, equally, to the figuration of a Turkish author of world literature in the West. THE ACTIVIST NOVELIST WHO APPEARS THROUGH WESTERN EYES

The night before he went to court, the EU’s enlargement commissioner declared that it was “not Orhan Pamuk who will stand trial tomorrow, but Turkey,”11 because the verdict would function as “a litmus test” to determine “whether Turkey is seriously committed to the freedom of expression and reforms that enhance the rule of law.”12 Europe’s identification with Pamuk against his state formalized the story of the novelist as an exceedingly sympathetic protagonist beset by small-minded provincials. His

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state played its part in that theater as dutifully as one of Vladimir Propp’s structural foes by filing charges against Pamuk that clanged in Western ears, which are poorly attuned to perceive any legitimate threat a novelist could pose to national security. In the nations that inherit the cultural legacies of the European Enlightenment, Pamuk’s story retraced a familiar narrative that pits the good of free speech against the evils of repressive regimes. The novelist’s ultranationalist enemies were right in this context to worry that his genocide acknowledgment would consolidate Western hegemonic power by advancing cultural logics that had historically worked for that purpose, and Western observers were blithe to dismiss that worry out of hand. Pamuk has observed as much. After he was acquitted, he reminded his readers that he knew from the beginning that his imprisonment was very unlikely, and also that other Turkish writers had suffered much harsher fates, so he found it “somewhat embarrassing to see [his trial] overdramatized” in the international press, and the similarly theatrical quality of his prosecution became “the hardest thing to explain” to his Western observers. He had no simple answers to offer when he was asked why a country officially committed to entry into the European Union would wish to imprison an author whose books were well known in Europe, and why it felt compelled to play out this drama (to use Conrad’s expression) “under western eyes.” This paradox cannot be explained away as simple ignorance, jealousy, or intolerance, and it is not the only paradox involved.13

Indeed. The interlocutors who ask Pamuk to rationalize the prosecution against him put him in a position that is as absurd as it is inevitable. And this logic holds world literature together in the West, where Turkey’s first Nobel Laureate is entrusted to capture the best of his national culture in himself and explain it to the rest of the world, even when he is fighting his state legally and fleeing his nation in fear for his life. A native informant about a place where it has not always been safe for him to travel, he quells Western anxieties about the foreignness of the Islamic world. And their gratitude for that prospect diminishes their will to inquire whether his representation of Turkey is true, even when he writes it as fiction. His translation for Anglophone audiences is eased by his resemblance to the protagonists of the genre in which he works.14 The narrative of Pamuk’s persecution in Turkey and subsequent arrival in New York con-

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structs him in the model of the modern protagonists that Georg Lukács describes: an exemplary individual in tight constraints, Orhan Pamuk is also compelled by his “poetically necessary youthfulness” to be a “seeker,” looking for some global truth to which the more provincial people around him remain blind.15 His adherence to that story line subtends a narrative of progress that is reassuring and easy to read in the literary traditions that Western cultures know best, which is perhaps part of the reason why Pamuk’s story translates so readily for audiences who are relatively ignorant of the histories of Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Ottomans, and Turks.16 As those historical narratives are obscured by a simplified story of the good world literature can do, so are the complexities of its author’s relation to his state and its people. And without those nuances, Pamuk’s Western readers lose the chance to appreciate how the narratives of literary greatness that are the inheritance of our nation-states handicap writers who claim their citizenship outside of them. After all, Western democracies have their own way to silence their writers: by ignoring them. Authoritarian states attend to writers proportionally by taking them to court, where they waste the time a novelist needs to write. THE CONCILIATORY CITIZEN WHO APPEARS IN TURKISH MEDIA

The variation in Pamuk’s domestic and international reception is attributable partly to the differing expectations that his audiences bring to him as a writer of world literature, but it also reflects a stark contrast between what his various audiences know about him. “We can’t quite see Pamuk as ‘one of us,’ ” the Sabah editor Fatih Altayli lamented. “We see him as someone who ‘sells us out’ and . . . can’t even stand behind what he says.”17 This view persists far beyond the circles of ultranationalists in Turkey because there is some evidentiary support for it that is rarely reported in Western media. When Pamuk appeared on CNN-Turk soon after his acknowledgment of the massacres of Armenian Turks, he diminished the significance of the “spontaneous remarks” he had made, and he protested the inaccuracies in the “defamation campaign” that mounted against him nationally. The confrontational Orhan Pamuk of the Swiss interview gave way to a more docile citizen on Turkish television, where Pamuk took statist positions on minority rights, past and present. In the religiously inflected rhetoric that is accepted by his secular state, he underscored military losses

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against ethnic Kurds in an ongoing civil war: “There are martyred Turkish soldiers” in the conflict, so “let’s express our respect to them.” This is the same argument the Turkish state would make for the sustained campaign it waged against the academics who signed a petition declaring solidarity with the Kurds titled “We Will Not Be Party to This Crime.”18 And as Pamuk realigned his sympathies to condone ongoing state violence against Kurds in the Southeast, he also reframed his original remarks to underline his compliance with the language that Turkish textbooks use to exculpate the founders of the Republic: “I did not say, we Turks killed this many Armenians,” he clarified. “I did not use the word ‘genocide.’ ”19 And that is true: he did not. How important is that omission? It stood in stark contrast to the rhetorical activism that Pamuk waged in his interview with Das Magazin, and that contrast convinced his detractors that he changed his politics to suit each audience, speaking like a globalist abroad and a nationalist at home.20 Predictably, that criticism is most prevalent among nationalist Turks who distrust Pamuk for his acknowledgment of “the Armenian issue,” but it also persists across Turkish culture broadly. The literary critic Ipek Celik, for example, has written admiringly of the “significant efforts” by Turkish academics and activists “to break the Turkish state’s silencing and denial of the Genocide,” and she credits Pamuk for the bravery of his statement in 2005, but she laments the inconsistency of his efforts over time. “He has decidedly not talked about the historical violence against Armenians or Kurds,” she writes, “after his initial comment on the issue” shortly before he won the Nobel Prize.21 As these observers debate the implications of Pamuk’s refusal to use the word “genocide,” they agree that it is significant.22 Pamuk’s equivocations over the word are not subjected to interpretation in Western media, where the novelist is known for his unqualified defiance of his nation’s discursive taboos. The CNN-Turk interview received short notices from international journalists, and Pamuk’s shifting position on the question of genocide was often mentioned obliquely. The London Independent announced the “Nobel Prize for Fearless Defender of Freedom of Speech in Turkey,” describing Pamuk as “Turkey’s leading writer and searing social commentator, whose refusal to shy from controversial aspects of his country’s past enraged conservatives at home.”23 This portrait of heroism has verisimilitude without being comprehensively true, but it is easy to

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write and to read. Pamuk contributed to it indirectly through his English-language translator, Maureen Freely, who published an article in the Guardian to share his reflections on his interview on CNN-Turk just one week later. “ ‘It goes without saying that I stand by my [original] words,’ [Pamuk] told me. ‘And, even more, I stand by my right to say them.’ ”24 Those words provided the headline for Freely’s article, and they continue to provide the terms in which Pamuk is remembered in the West, where his statement on the Armenian genocide is represented as if it has not changed over time. In Turkey, his statement and subsequent equivocation become intelligible through the lens of anxieties that fall generally under the rubric of class, which is strangely missing from most accounts of Orhan Pamuk’s troubled relationship to Turkish culture. The socioeconomic differences that make him recognizable to other Turks prove difficult to see through Western eyes, which are more trained to look for distinctions that can be mapped along racialized axes of blue states and red states, West and East: secularists and Islamists; moderates and fundamentalists; miniskirts and veils. Pamuk is easy to place on the left side of that ledger, which leads his Western readers to presume that he inhabits a class position similar to that of most North American and European novelists. Under this presumption, Pamuk has natural allies in a Turkish subculture that is relatively privileged, secular, left-leaning, urban, cosmopolitan, white, and antinationalist—which is true in some ways but is also crucially false. This narration of Orhan Pamuk’s problems relies on a series of false assumptions about the landscape of Turkish cultural politics and Pamuk’s location in it. The associations that Western cultures draw reflexively between secularism, the political left, and the humanities are more tangled in Turkey. Many of Pamuk’s most dangerous enemies in Turkey share with his international admirers a deep conviction in the separation of church and state; known as “Kemalists” for their identification with the legacy of Kemal Atatürk, they have historically been among the most nationalistic Turks by many measures, including but not limited to their sensitivity on “the Armenian question.” Pamuk makes a point to teach his Western readers that Islamists are not his primary or exclusive enemy, noting that the right wing is hardly the province of the religious in Turkey: “Various newspapers launched hate campaigns against me,” he recalls, “with some right wing (but not necessarily Islamist) columnists going as far as to say that I

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should be ‘silenced’ for good.”25 Those hate campaigns posit the global novelist as an obstruction to a narrative of progress that is as secular as it is religious in Turkey. It maintains that Turkey’s greatest promise was most visible in the early days of the Republic, and the duty of every citizen is to recuperate that promise and protect it from foreigners with competing interests. This “nostalgic vision of modernity,” as the anthropologist Esra Özyürek describes it, functions as an alternative to Western narratives of enlightenment for secular Turks: “It is merely a different expression of non-Western modernity that locates modernity in the non-present.”26 That narrative constructs the Republican era as a prelapsarian past against which the Turkish present compares poorly, and to which the nation would happily return if it could. Orhan Pamuk undermines this narrative by affiliating himself with the European Union that would soften Turkey’s borders, and, more important, by admitting a flaw in the very foundations of the Republic. His recognition of the massacre of Armenians becomes legible in this context as a slur against Turkishness at its root, and his proximity to Western cultures makes him seem more than critical of his nation; he seems distant from it and perhaps also ashamed. By this reading, Pamuk appears to many secular Turks like the worst possible person to represent them abroad, because he feels the melancholy of hüzün on the same streets where they feel proud.27 When Pamuk fled Turkey in 2006, he fled what was essentially a fatwa, but it was framed in terms unrelated to religion: he was charged for blasphemy against the national narrative of his secular state. That formulation is paradoxical, but it grows directly out of an educational system that teaches Turkish students to revere Atatürk with a devotion that was once accorded only to religious figures. The sacral quality of Turkish allegiance to the father of their secular state is well known to Turkish scholars,28 but it is readily overlooked by Western observers who rush to see an oasis of laïcité in the Islamic East.29 That rush reflects a topos that is ideologically fraught and commonly held among Western observers of the East, from Lawrence of Arabia to the Cold Warriors. It is the topos of the Westerner avant la lettre, useful for constructing the elite Easterner as a rational thinker in a legion of zealots. This discourse of exceptionalism structures Western ways of seeing the native informant and the colonial elite, and it assumes a reflexive association between secularism and progress. Question-

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ing that reflex, the editors at the Hindustan Times drew a likeness between Pamuk and another global novelist that Indian audiences are more likely to know, asking, “Is Orhan Pamuk the new Salman Rushdie?” The answer began from the premise that “the fervently secular Turkish State can be as uber-sensitive as the best Ayatollah in town.”30 And it is that “uber-sensitive” variety of secular nationalism that marks Turkey’s likeness to as well as difference from its neighbors in the Middle East. The comparison between Pamuk and Rushdie raises the possibility that a writer who speaks freely even when that is dangerous performs a speech act that is as commercially viable as it is ethically and politically brave. Some Turkish nationalists suspected that Pamuk knew—and how could he not?—that Western media would find it easy to sell the story of a Turkish writer who acknowledged the reality of the genocide, so they suspected that his outspokenness evidenced nothing loftier than his literary ambition; he “curses his country in order to win an award,” complained the journalist and producer Fatih Altayli, “to find favor in the eyes of award-givers who do not like Turkey or Turks.” This narrative of Pamuk’s complicity with Western power looped like a refrain through Turkish media, so the announcement from Stockholm “came as no surprise,” shrugged the nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz. “We were expecting it. This prize was not given because of Pamuk’s books, it was given because of his words, because of his Armenian genocide claims. . . . It was given because he belittled our national values, for his recognition of the genocide.”31 By this discursive logic, the Nobel Prize testifies to the solipsism with which the West rewards its own, wherever they claim their citizenship. An honor given in recognition of service, it becomes an instrument of the foreign powers that have historically sought to divide—and thereby conquer— the Middle East. And the need for that species of cultural work is perceived to persist broadly from the colonial period into the present. Kerinçsiz predicted that Pamuk’s was just the first of many Nobel Prizes to go to Turkish novelists who acknowledged the Armenian genocide: “Believe me,” he urged, “the next prize will be given to Elif Şafak.”32 No reader of this text will be surprised to discover that this prediction was wrong; even if the author of Flea Palace (Bit Palas, 2002) enjoyed the literary status it takes to become a regular on pundits’ shortlists of likely laureates—and she does not—the sheer fact of her Turkishness would have mitigated against her victory with the Swedish Academy, which has never honored writers from

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the same nation two years in a row. And its history of avoiding that kind of repetition indicates the larger reason why Kerinçsiz’s prediction looks detached from reality when it is seen through Western eyes. Although the Swedish Academy responds to specific political controversies with regularity, it spreads its attentions from one nation to the next from year to year with a pattern that is empirically evident. That evidence testifies to the Nobel Prize’s intended detachment from the provincial biases that limit its purchase on the world. Kjell Espmark stated that intention when he described the criteria for literary laureates in 1986, quoting Gyllensten’s instructions to maintain that the Swedish Academy should behave always with “political integrity and an expressed desire to stand apart from political antagonisms.”33 Stepping outside of the political altogether, it should judge literature by standards that are deemed fair, universal, and pure—whatever that means.34 This hope for a literary judgment unencumbered by any political allegiances suffuses the deeply Western rhetoric of cosmopolitanism that world literature announces, but it is impossible for literary critics who assume the constructedness of aesthetic value, and it is also irreconcilable with the discourses of Turkish nationalism. These are competing claims to cultural authority, and Orhan Pamuk sits at their violent intersection. His nationalist persecutors can agree with their adversaries about this much: Eurocentrism haunts the processes of the Swedish Academy, which houses a literary culture that is rife with Western fantasies about barbarous Turks.35 But if the advocates of Turkish nationalism rightly diagnose racism and Orientalism in Europe, they venture onto shakier ground when they suggest that Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize because his recognition of the Armenian genocide validates those prejudices. And this suggestion is significant not least because it is frequently made, as when the political scientist M. Hakan Yavuz suggested in the daily Zaman that “the Armenian ‘genocide’ discourse is used to perpetuate the image of ‘the terrible Turk,’ to undermine the legitimacy of the Turkish Republic and to keep Turkey out of the European Union. The genocide narrative is put into use and shared by many who share little else except their dislike of the Turks.”36 This reasoning extends easily to construct the Swedish Academy as a proponent of Western values that work to the detriment of the Turkish Republic, including but not limited to genocide recognition. Following that logic, even many Turkish people who supported Pamuk’s freedom of

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speech on principle looked askance at its practice, suspecting that he was less interested in telling a historical truth than in using it to win the attentions of the West.37 His appearances in Turkish media surrounded by Western admirers made him visible to his fellow citizens as a proxy for Western hegemony abroad—and, by that system of semiotic exchange, as a scapegoat for policies and military actions for which he has no responsibility whatsoever. That symbolic logic forces the Turkish author of world literature to sacrifice by degrees his relationship to his state and its citizens while he also sutures for his Western publics the violent rift they imagine between the hemispheres. He secures the globality that Western institutions strive to create much in the same way as the scapegoats of ancient Greece secured the nascent polis, according to René Girard: the authority of the city-state would “be impossible,” Girard writes, “if no surrogate victim existed, if violence persisted beyond a certain threshold and failed to be transmuted into culture.” 38 Likewise, the authority of Western institutions would be impossible if they did not expand to include erudite foreigners into the halls they hallow. So it is that the Swedish Academy fosters the imagination of a cosmopolitan literary public, sometimes at the expense of the non-Western writer it anoints: it is only by severing his ties to home that he enters the world republic of letters, which consolidates its authority by admitting this exception to the Westernness that has been its rule. Pamuk satirizes his plight as a global novelist threatened by nationalist vigilantes in Snow, where he narrates the experience of life under threat of violence from Turkish nationalists. As the protagonist Ka falls into a shadowy conspiracy that will eventually lead to his assassination, the narrator Orhan makes that ending inevitable to his reader by revealing it proleptically; midway through the story of Ka’s travels in Kars, Orhan visits the sidewalk in Germany where Ka will die from a gunshot wound from an assailant who is never caught.39 And as that inversion of the fabula in the sjuzet gives the reader advance warning of the sad fate the protagonist will suffer, the protagonist also carries a sense of foreboding about his vulnerability to vigilante justice. Ka worries over his vulnerability to assassination, and that does not seem paranoid in light of Orhan’s proleptic revelation. The reader’s foreknowledge of the gunshot on the street rationalizes Ka’s sense that he is strolling into “the murderous Kars night” to ponder whether he will “share

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the fate of so many other luckless writers who had died of multiple gunshot wounds.” And if there is some mysticism in Ka’s predestination, it is also embedded in the historical realities of his national politics. He locates himself in a lineage of writers who precede him when he recalls “the poet Nurettin,” who was accused by Islamists of “insulting our faith” so he was deemed a hero by “the army-backed secular press” and then killed with a car bomb. “And there is the small-town version” of this story, Ka continues, which recounts how regional journalists were killed because they mouthed “fiery anti-religious rhetoric, just so ‘no one can say we’re scared.’ ” Motivated less by any specific ideology than by a narcissistic concern over their reflection in the world, some of those provincial writers “even entertained vain hopes of attracting world-wide attention, ‘like Salman Rushdie’” (305–6). Orhan the narrator toys with the construction of Orhan the author, who is similarly accused of provoking controversy to promote himself. And, in both cases, that provocation has high stakes: the writer gains widespread respect and celebrity for defying rhetorical taboos, but he loses his ability to walk his streets in safety. That threat of violence slips easily between the registers of the factual and the fictional, as the two Orhans work together to play metafictional shell games with this opposition, too: just as the journalistic and the novelistic switch places, the religious and the secular do, too, suggesting that either one can motivate the varieties of violence that Westerners associate with Islamic extremism. In the novel’s fifth chapter, the narrator digresses from the central characters by splicing in a transcript of the final moments before an education minister is killed by an Islamist vigilante, who has threatened the minister repeatedly for complying with the state’s ban on headscarves in Turkish schools. The minister carries a tape recorder in anticipation of an attack, and that device yields the faux transcript that the narrator relays. In it, the minister tries to placate the aggrieved Islamist who will shoot him at the end of this scene. “You’re very upset, my boy,” the minister says. “But has it never occurred to you that foreign powers might be behind all this? Don’t you see how they might have politicized the headscarf issue so that they can turn Turkey into a weak and divided nation?” (43–44). This suggestion of an international conspiracy invites an interpretation of the novel as a critique of larger geopolitical phenomena, but it has gone unremarked in Pamuk’s Western reception, where it is overwhelmed by the more legible conflict between the educator and the

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religious fanatic. The civil servant who is besieged elicits ready sympathy from his Western reader for the same reason that Orhan Pamuk does: they are agents of enlightenment against its opposite. But Pamuk continues to reverse those terms over the course of the rest of the novel. In Snow’s climactic scene, when the audience misinterprets gunfire as part of the drama, the real killing spree is waged by a conspiracy of secularists acting “in the name of republicanism and Westernisation,” which leaves twenty-nine people dead. A colonel in the military is charged with the crime of “establishing a vigilante group,” but he is released on the unenforceable condition that he will not “discuss the coup with anyone.” He spends the rest of his life breaking that condition in an officers’ club, where he drinks and brags that he has “realized the dream of every Atatürk-loving soldier” with the murders he committed. Referring proudly to his example, “he would accuse his friends of bowing to the religious fanatics for want of courage” (416–17). This is a character who has no pride of place in Western literary traditions, and his arrival is significant, but it is rarely mentioned by Pamuk’s Western reviewers. In this scene, world literature gains its first mastermind who murders people to advance the cause of secularism. Orhan Pamuk is uniquely qualified to make this contribution. Born into the same Istanbullu elite as his protagonist, Ka, Pamuk would have known how his Das Magazin interview would sound to many secularists because he had grown up among them,40 and that ancestral history illuminates Pamuk’s celebrity in Turkey. He comes from old money, but by his own reports, he grew up in a family that did not have much money; in both respects, he stands at odds with the Turkey of his age, which belongs to the nouveau riche. The Pamuks amassed great wealth building railroads in the early days of the Turkish Republic, and they lost it over the course of the twentieth century. Orhan Pamuk has written extensively about that disappearance and its effects in his autobiographical writing, where he draws a loose rhyme between his family’s financial decline and his city’s imperial ruins. That parallel drives his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, which supplements the text with black-and-white pictures to suggest a grandeur no longer existent: tuxedoed men with coiffed ladies in ball gowns; the Bosphorous lined with the ornate yalis where the bourgeoisie sought refuge from the summer heat. By his description, an air of molding finery permeates Istanbul, where it is widely felt and commonly acknowledged.

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Pamuk writes that Turks know this feeling as hüzün, which he translates by comparison and contrast to Claude Lévi Strauss’s notion of tristesse. Like tristesse, hüzün by Pamuk’s account is “not a pain that affects a solitary individual” but “a communal feeling, an atmosphere and a culture shared by millions.” Unlike tristesse, this pain derives from an historical narrative that is specific to Istanbul, so it is not felt in poor areas of other cities—Delhi or São Paolo, for example. “The difference,” he argues, “lies in the fact that in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible.” Consequently, the inhabitants of the city experience any pecuniary hardship that comes to them in relative terms, not just as a deprivation but as a downfall: “No matter how ill-kept, no matter how neglected or hemmed in they are by concrete monstrosities, the great mosques and other monuments of the city, as well as the lesser detritus of empire in every side street and corner—the little arches, fountains, and neighborhood mosques—inflict heartache on all who live among them. . . . The people of Istanbul simply carry on with their lives amid the ruins.” 41 There is much in this passage to enrage a Turkish nationalist of Pamuk’s era, beginning with the suggestion that Turkey’s most prosperous days are over. This nostalgia is anathema in an age of enthusiasm for the “emerging markets” in countries like Turkey, which boom with construction of the “concrete monstrosities” that Pamuk deplores. That boom has geographic and cultural contours in a nation where wealth has spread in recent decades from the old coastal elite—like Pamuk’s family—to the new industrial centers of Anatolia.42 The conflicts between secular and religious Turks are inflected, too, by the pace of urbanization, and the protests in Gezi Park in 2013 articulated growing resistance to the rapidity of urban development under the ruling AKP party, whose optimistic mood is captured in an opinion piece titled, “Anatolian Tigers” (2011): “With an increasing interest from investors, funds and private equity,” Zafer Parler wrote, “we will see new developments and Anatolian history will once again repeat itself and act as crossroads for various cultural mixes.” 43 This is the voice of a new wealthy class in Turkey, which celebrates the end of the era when wealth was concentrated among secular “White Turks”—like the Pamuks—and it does not sound hüzün at all. So Pamuk’s compatriots might plausibly resent the expression of his aesthetic sensibility, which cultivates a nostalgic appreciation of the relics from a day when his family was effectively their landlord. They might also

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resent the degree to which he aligns himself with the “many Western writers and travelers” who travel to Turkey in life and literature because they “find [the detritus of empire] charming.” As the critic Azade Seyhan observes, it is somewhat ironic that “many secular intellectual Turks are irritated by Pamuk’s oppositional stance to what Pamuk sees as an intolerant secularist state and its Jacobin advocates from his very privileged space as the freelancer son of a wealthy Istanbul family.” 44 Indeed, and they might also object to the severity of the difference he draws among the natives of Istanbul. The detached pleasure that tourists feel at the sight of his city in ruins is lost to Istanbullus, he observes, but the best sort can savor it in their own hüzün way: “For the city’s more sensitive and attuned residents,” he argues, “these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its former heights of wealth, power, and culture.” 45 The refined aesthete will appreciate the ruins that Westerners find charming while the rabble passes by them en route to the “concrete monstrosities” they call home. Like the protagonists of European novels of sensibility, Orhan Pamuk rises above the masses by virtue of his “fine feeling.” 46 Pamuk frames that fineness as an effect of his class in an essay that is aptly titled “The Rich.” It begins with Pamuk’s recollection of his parents reading the society pages aloud to critique the ways wealthy people carried themselves around town. “That the rich should not flaunt themselves in public was a belief then held,” he recalls, by most people he knew, but that was not the view of the “Anatolian landowners and the second-generation industrialists now pouring into Istanbul.” These newly moneyed provincials scandalized longtime residents of the city because they were “quite daring to flaunt their riches,” he recalls, describing the mix of condescension and wonder that nouveau riche inspire all over the world: “Naturally, those still fearful of the state or people like us who had failed through our own ineptitude to preserve our wealth for more than a generation, found such daring not just foolish but vulgar.” This dislike of ostentation resonates easily with the Orientalist characterizations of Eastern aesthetics that emphasize the gaudy, daring, foolish, and vulgar, but it also sideswipes the newly wealthy classes of Turks. And it is different from the Orientalism that Edward Said described as an effect of European imperialism because it is wholly contained within the bounds of the Turkish state.

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That is the context in which Pamuk becomes recognizable as a legatee of an Istanbullu aristocracy of secular elites, and that is the context, too, in which he issues an offense—presumably unintended—to Turks whose money is new. They are educated enough to read his novels, but their parents probably are not.47 And like most of Pamuk’s natural allies, they are excluded from his domestic audience by their perception that he refuses the terms on which they build their community. To understand that refusal and its effects, comparatists might read Benedict Anderson and think about imagined communities, but we might do equally well to read Pierre Bourdieu and think about the way that a non-Western writer enriches his store of cultural capital by engaging adversarially with his state. In that context, “The Armenian issue” may be the discursive location for Orhan Pamuk’s political activism, but it is far from the only cause of his domestic problems. His relation to his national public is as deeply imbricated in the stratifications of class and race that fix his place in the Turkish Republic as in the “new cultural order” he sees working on a global scale. It is only by a contradictory logic that the readers of world literature trust its authors to tell the truth about their native countries without caring whether their fellow citizens trust them that way, too. That logic depends on the reflex we learn from our literary traditions to identify with the novelist who enrages his nation as well as his state. That identification works toward progressive politics when it is practiced among the citizens of Western democracies, where a writer who resists the state does so under protection of the law. But the politics of identification work with more unintended consequences when they extend across national lines, to writers who have more to risk as citizens of authoritarian states. To recognize that difference, literary critics might follow the model of transnational feminists who lend credibility to their analyses of non-Western cultural practices from the Islamic hijab to female genital mutilation by situating them historically, recognizing what Obioma Nnaemeka describes as “the role of the media in constructing and perpetuating colonial tropes of ‘civilized’ West versus barbaric non-West where the former are rescuers perched on high moral ground ready to swoop and rescue the latter who are incapable of helping themselves.”48 Pamuk’s reception is laced with this assumption that Western logics are so fundamentally right that any opposition to their expression must surely

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be wrong. And Pamuk’s status as a spokesperson for those logics from within the Turkish Republic makes him even more useful to the advancement of Western hegemony around the world. I will develop this argument when I come to the Nobel Prize in chapter 5, where I show how literary writers were weaponized during the Cold War just like other insurgencies that performed cultural work on behalf of Western powers—and I argue that the elaborate constructions of conspiracy theory are not the only way to explain the unequal distribution of world literature’s costs and benefits. It does not impugn Orhan Pamuk’s character to say that he harbors the ambition to capture international attention; that is part of the job he accepts as an author of world literature. To open that field to more writers from the global South and East, U.S.based critics might become more cognizant about the power we wield when we anoint a writer from a nation that has not had much critical attention, historically. Our critical discourses need not task non-Western writers with the production of the political change we would like to see while they also write the literature we would like to read. And we might also acknowledge that those writers are likely to come from the upper strata in national and global economies that are highly stratified. With the education and the resources that a literary career demands in any country, the writers of world literature are likely to descend from colonial elites and oligarchs in the nations that have them,49 and Turkish resistance to Orhan Pamuk makes more sense in this context: he is a remnant of a privileged class whose nostalgia for an authentic Turkey appears to his fellow citizens as a nostalgia for an era when fewer Turkish people held more of the nation’s wealth. As that expression of nostalgia aligns him in his national memory with the oligarchs who held more sway in Turkey’s recent past, it affiliates him also with the hegemons of the contemporary period. It is not Orhan Pamuk’s fault that George W. Bush praised him on his visit to Turkey during the war on Iraq, but it is not insignificant either. Pamuk’s utility as a reference point for the president of the United States during the Iraq War testifies to Pamuk’s symbolic value as a lever to make the Middle East tilt in a Western direction. And it is in that context that Turkish people might reasonably want to control what Orhan Pamuk says to Western media, even as he expresses his willingness to fight for his freedom of speech, and Western readers rightly take his side in that fight. But

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if we don’t take greater care to understand the domestic politics surrounding it and use that understanding to shape the ways in which we intervene, even as readers, we reinforce the uneven globality we critique. And as we see how non-Western writers are put in the service of literary institutions and cultural logistics that cultivate that unevenness, too, we might be less surprised that some are put on trial than that more are not.

Chapter Four

ORHAN PAMUK AS EXILE Pamuk and Auerbach in Istanbul

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. —EDWARD SAID, “REFLECTIONS ON EXILE”

[Orhan Pamuk] is, it could be legitimately claimed, an Istanbullu writer. . . . This is ironic, of course, considering that Pamuk now lives in New York City, that he qualifies now, like Auerbach, for the status of the semi-refugee. —GR ANT FARRED, “TO DIG WELL WITH A NEEDLE: ORHAN PAMUK’S POEM OF COMPAR ATIVE GLOBALIZATION”

Orhan Pamuk has taken pains to say that he has never lived abroad in exile,1 and that is true in a manner of speaking. Neither his state nor its citizens have ever forced him irretrievably away—as Erich Auerbach was forced from Germany, for example, and Edward Said from Palestine—but his ability to live safely in Turkey has not always been certain, either. He was threatened with assassination by nationalist extremists in 2006, and the threat was sufficiently credible to prompt him to flee his native city and country with the help of a security detail. When a prestigious position was offered to him at Columbia University, he took it, returning home only to visit as the threat to his person waned. He has spent much of his time abroad since then, when his international success coincided with his domestic difficulties, making him a citizen of the world by necessity as much as by choice. As he lost the ability to walk freely through the streets he chronicles throughout his oeuvre, he gained canonical status as an author of world literature in English. He was announced in the metropolitan centers of the United States and Europe as an exile in the broad sense of the word. The leitmotifs of exile that shape Pamuk’s entry to Western canons locate him in the tradition of émigré writers who have changed the course of Western letters in the twentieth century. Extending the legacy that also includes Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and all the rest, he is credited with a particular species of literary greatness that is resonant

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with—if not resultant from—a writer’s forced flight from home. And as that narrative of flight makes Pamuk’s public personae marketable to Western audiences, it eclipses the nuances of his domestic position beneath a particularly Western narrative of freedom of speech, as I argued in the preceding chapter. That effect is enhanced by the theories of exile that Emily Apter locates centrally in “the ontology of the discipline” of comparative literature, rendering Pamuk excessively legible as a figure of “exilic consciousness.”2 That trope was devised to describe conditions that predate Pamuk by decades, and it works poorly to describe him, as he insists and denies by turns. But if he has an ambivalent relationship to the critical discourse of exile, that makes sense in light of the cultural and economic work it does: to sell him to his American and European publics as a “bridge between East and West” by heightening his authority over that contested space. HAS ORHAN PAMUK EVER LIVED IN EXILE?

Pamuk is articulate but not always coherent about the geographic contours of his writing life. In some of his interviews and articles, he takes evident pride in the fact that “no one drives me into exile, not even the nationalists— all difficulties aside,” but he also assumes the mantle of the exile willingly elsewhere. In an essay titled “Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World Writers,” he locates himself in a community of lonelyhearts who recognize one another by their shared “sense of being exiled from the world’s literary centers. A Third World writer can choose to leave his country and resettle— as [Mario] Vargas Llosa did—in one of the cultural centers of Europe. But his sense of himself may not change, for a Third World writer’s ‘exile’ is not so much a matter of geography as a spiritual state, a sense of exclusion, of being a perpetual foreigner.”3 This foreignness that is an ontological state structures the world of Pamuk’s novels, and he portrays it as a feature of his spiritual life as well. In this metaphorical usage, exile is scrubbed of the violence that is essential to its definition, historically. By the same logic that Emily Apter uses to posit an “exilic consciousness” as the best vantage from which to read a literary text, Pamuk posits “exclusion” and “foreignness” as productive if somewhat sad states in which a writer can live. That figurative discourse of exile is ubiquitous in literary theories of the late twentieth century, as Apter observes: “The theorization of Heimlosigkheit” emerges “as a mode of critique” and becomes “paradoxically . . . the

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country of comparative literature.” At once an academic field and a state of mind, it provides “a substitute homeland” on the page and “a placeless place that is homely in its unhomeliness.” Apter identifies strongly with this critical tradition that takes exilic consciousness as its elusive goal, cultivating a habit of mind that transcends national borders and provincial ways of reading. A student who is educated in this “institutional and pedagogical space of not being there” learns to see exile as an abstraction and a writerly choice. Theoretical sophistication becomes synonymous with the evacuation of historical fact from the discourse of exile, which is “transformed,” as the German Turkish scholar Kader Konuk observes, “into a theoretical factum and construed as a condition for generating new forms of critical consciousness in the humanities.” 4 An emergent scholar establishes her credentials as a humanist by detaching exilic consciousness from any lived experience of exile, as the University of Alabama’s Kristi Lynn Shaw does in her dissertation on Algerian women’s writing: “Exile,” she writes, “is no longer perceived as a banishment or expulsion from one’s homeland, but rather a condition commonly shared by a network of writers.”5 In a more primitive past—the critic’s, perhaps, or her discipline’s—exile was understood to have historical contours, suggesting a traumatic displacement under political pressure, but that moment is over. In the present, Shaw attests, a good critic understands that exile refers only to a positive feature of literary and critical texts.6 This discursive use of exile frames theory as a mimetic representation of biography; the critic who sits safely in the library imitates in her intellectual work the critic who has lost her home. The lived history of exile is scrubbed from this discourse precisely through its claim on the political—which seems paradoxical, indeed, and also dangerous. To explain the danger I see, I want to return to the story of Erich Auerbach, which is an ur-text in the literature of exile. Western critics have placed high stakes in the degrees of deprivation that surrounded the writing of Mimesis in Istanbul, and a swamp of scholarly debate surrounds the questions of whether Auerbach was bookless, lonely, and persecuted. Wading into that swamp here, I go without the intention to reveal some new historical truth but instead to reframe the question of why it would matter how persecuted he was, or how alienated any global novelist or comparative literature scholar is or should be. I’ll dispense with the obvious first: the story of Auerbach in Istanbul matters first because he makes it matter

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by rendering himself a diegetic character in Mimesis, where he grounds his textual analyses on the authority of his historical location. That makes the narrative of his exile legible as key to his methodology, and also as a mythology. In both of those capacities, his narrative has been enshrined, debunked, and rewritten steadily because it is provides a grand narrative—or, as Apter says, an ansatzpunkt—that works for comparative literary studies. To understand why and how it works, I want to name the rules that govern the world that Western critics create with the story of Auerbach in Istanbul, and to explain why literary critics in the United States like that world so much. THE STORY OF AUERBACH IN ISTANBUL

To answer those big questions, I’ll begin again with what we know. Comparatists have glossed heavily several passages at the end of Mimesis, where Auerbach asks with dramatic modesty whether he might “also mention that [this book] was written during the war.” This “during” signifies more than temporal coincidence, but Auerbach leaves his readers to supply that knowledge by representing his exile primarily as an obstacle to his textual production. The insertion of this fragmentary biography into the text of his literary criticism renders dislocation a model for overwhelmed comparatists everywhere, but woe on the one of us who tries to emulate Auerbach. His faux modesty is chastening because we know that Auerbach did not just write “during” the years of the war but under war’s looming force; after the long years of persecution in Germany, he fled to Istanbul, where he reflected back on the texts that he had studied in Europe. Exile compelled him to work in libraries, he writes, that were “were not well equipped for European studies,” in a city where “international communications were poor,” and philological texts and journals were not always accessible. The implication is that he carried all of Western civilization in his mind, so he managed.7 This narrative is easy to tell, and it constructs a protagonist who exerts a powerful hold on literary critics’ imaginations. Driven out of his home to save his life, the critic seeks refuge, bearing little more than his impossible erudition and his privileged vantage of a more cosmopolitan world. This narration of Auerbach’s biography generates a methodology that renders the exilic synonymous with the worldly. Edward Said writes ad-

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miringly of Auerbach for his “filiation with his natal culture, and, because of exile, affiliation with it through critical consciousness and scholarly work.”8 From the historical accidents of Auerbach’s education in Europe and his subsequent displacement from it comes a critical practice of looking back on European culture actively, with the intimacy of a lived experience that does not extend into the present tense. The criticism of exile becomes the only kind that he can write, and it demands of him the textual creation of a diegetic critic, an implied author who is legible in the text. Auerbach conjures this writerly persona for his reader in “Odysseus’ Scar,” using the epilogue to cast new light on the book that precedes it, and to invoke the authority of his exile over every word that he writes. That authority works powerfully in the discourse that Auerbach bequeaths to contemporary comparatists, as Seth Lerer observed in 2003. Literary critics have retained “a curious defensiveness” about Mimesis, “a need to justify a project through an appeal to the method and the example of the master.”9 And to the degree that the “project” of Mimesis girds comparative study more generally, the “need to justify” it is felt broadly throughout the field. Said suggests as much, noting that the discourse of exile exerts a peculiar appeal among Western literary scholars, who “have become accustomed to thinking of the modern period itself as spiritually orphaned and alienated,” so they embrace seminal texts that are written by “exiles, émigrés, refugees.”10 That conflation of literary values with biographical conditions dovetails in the contemporary period with the material demands of the marketplace, where novelists like Orhan Pamuk are sold on the strength of the campaigns a multinational publishing industry can construct around them. The novelist’s value as human infrastructure connecting East and West depends on the perceived difficulty with which he transports himself across that border. If the passage looked easy enough for anyone to do it, his value as an author of world literature would drop precipitously. The marketing of Orhan Pamuk as a purveyor of information that is hard for Anglophone readers to get represents a crass reduction of the theory by which the experience of exile is causally linked to greatness in the humanities.11 Said qualifies that causal argument, conceding that American intellectual life is crucially shaped by the emigration of refugees and migrants, and for good reason. “It seems proper,” Said writes, quoting George Steiner, “that those who create art in a civilization of quasi-barbarism,

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which has made so many homeless, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across language. Eccentric, aloof, nostalgic, deliberately untimely.”12 But Said resists the temptation to elevate the exile to a position of irreproachability, and he shows how Auerbach makes that temptation work for his purposes. Plotting Auerbach’s rhetorical gestures topologically, Said shows how he uses the discourse of exile to locate his project above critique and even above “the culture itself,” with the “authoritative and authorizing agencies” that would [obstruct] “so audacious a one-man task. Hence the executive value of exile, which Auerbach was able to turn into effective use.”13 Said’s purpose with this analysis is to distinguish carefully between the theoretical and historical, the rhetorical and the real. Those differences have ethical implications that are profound, as Said observes here with a question that is pertinent to Pamuk’s case, too: “If true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture?” WHAT DOES THE RHETORIC OF EXILE DO FOR U.S.-BASED CRITICS?

Said’s question is raised indirectly but plainly by Apter’s essay on Auerbach in Istanbul from 2003. Inverting the terms by which one critic accuses another of insufficient command of the texts, Apter contends that Auerbach read much more in Istanbul than he admits, and he probably had more fun; his scholarly isolation was not so complete as he says, and high stakes attend the difference. Presenting archival evidence to suggest that Auerbach discovered a “sizeable professional artistic and political community that was well established by the time he arrived in Istanbul in 1936,” Apter concludes that his “self-portrait as a lonely European scholar seems increasingly questionable.”14 And if he was lonely, she continues, that was perhaps his fault. Lacking Leo Spitzer’s willingness “to engage with Turkish culture,” Auerbach neither learned to speak the language of his new culture fluently nor deigned to meet its intellectuals as equals. That evidence prompts Apter to dethrone Auerbach “as a figure of transnational humanism avant la lettre” and put Leo Spitzer in his place. Acknowledging that the substitution “may seem forced,” Apter maintains its necessity, “because laying claim to comparatism’s philological heritage is synonymous with securing symbolic capital in the humanities.”15

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This is a startling claim. The humanities rest for Apter squarely on the figure of the exile, which demands a real person to serve as its model. The possibility that exile has meaning beyond the “symbolic” is bracketed, as is the possibility that this critical discourse can operate in its figurative sense without a human referent as an anchor. Excluding the historical fact of exile while also taking it as a precondition for work in the humanities, the literary critic strives to name the intellectual whose biography best exemplifies exile as a theoretical value. Apter proposes Spitzer as a replacement for Auerbach, and in his absence, the living philosopher and UN ambassador Charles Malik. But what do we gain by this substitution, and what would we lose if we left the post empty? There are ethical and political reasons to ask. If Anglophone readers did not measure writers like Orhan Pamuk against the myth of exile in the Western imagination, the writers of world literature might discover more latitude to be the writers they are and have more agency in relations with their states and fellow citizens. Kader Konuk moves toward those possibilities by providing a more nuanced portrait of the figure of exile. She agrees with Apter that Auerbach fictionalized his experience in Istanbul, and she discovers further evidence to suggest that he relied heavily on the Dominican library and other cultural resources while he was there. Like Apter, Konuk concludes that Auerbach was ideologically disposed to diminish the intellectual life he enjoyed in Istanbul, and she observes this provinciality in marked contrast to the cosmopolitan sensibility of his earlier work.16 “How strange it seems,” she observes, “that having moved to Turkey, Auerbach retreated into a Eurocentric mindset and downplayed the world of Islam.”17 But that curiosity is explicable to Konuk as a rhetorical device. Referring to Auerbach’s analysis of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Konuk suggests that Istanbul functions in Auerbach’s text as the lighthouse functions in Woolf’s by his reading; it affords the characters a “space of reflection and creative energy, yet one unconstrained by intellectualism.”18 By Konuk’s account, Auerbach’s lack of engagement with Turkish intellectual life—in Mimesis and in the lived experience to which it refers— represents an authorial choice, made for the sake of textual authority. “The image of working dans un grenier in Istanbul exile must be seen as a modernist trope of authorship,” Konuk writes, “a trope that continues to have some traction to this day. The ‘grenier’ is a peripheral space that facilitates memory for the very reason that it is detached from its immediate surroundings.”19

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As Konuk reads him, Auerbach dramatizes his isolation to fashion himself in the text as its author, set apart from his nation and also from the world. The figure of the intellectual alone in his attic becomes available to him as “a modernist trope” like the flâneur, giving the author who invokes it measures of distance and proximity to the city he describes, so he can range more freely across the historical traditions to which he refers. In the years since Apter’s article on Auerbach in Istanbul appeared, the argument that she made has become accepted by critical consensus: the evidence supports her claim that Auerbach exaggerated his degrees of isolation in Istanbul, and also that his exaggeration worked rhetorically to serve his literary analysis. But there is also a historical reason why Auerbach might have felt real discomfort as a Jew in Istanbul in those years. While he was writing Mimesis, pogroms shook the nearby region of Thrace, forcing Jewish residents to flee. The Turkish government fomented that violence for the same reason as it massacred its Armenian minority: to construct a national identity in ethnic terms.20 Toward this imagination of a more unified republic, a “wealth tax” targeted ethnic minorities in Turkey in 1942, and pogroms would shake Istanbul, too, in the coming years.21 If Auerbach did not feel at home there, that seems to me unsurprising. Konuk alludes to this history briefly, but she does not posit it as a significant factor in the alienation that Auerbach describes. She acknowledges it only to establish the history of Turkish xenophobia, promulgated intentionally by the state, that links Auerbach’s self-described difficulties in Istanbul to Orhan Pamuk’s trial on charges of insulting Turkishness. Konuk notes—as I do, too, in the preceding chapters—that Pamuk’s ascendance globally coincides with the decades in which Turkey watched its prospects of joining the European Union wax and then wane; at the turn of the twenty-first century, the state recast the history of its relationship to Europe for polemical purposes in that context. In 2006, for example, the former president of the republic, Süleyman Demirel, told the European University Association that the war years represent “one of the proudest periods in [Turkish] history,” because “the newly founded [Istanbul] University was able to open its doors to an influx of a large number of Jewish professors at a time when European powers were rushing to appease Hitler.” By constructing the republic retrospectively as a refuge for minorities who were persecuted in Europe, the Turkish government makes a case for its “civi-

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lized nature over and against Germany’s barbaric past,” as Konuk observes, and at a particularly strategic moment. Konuk reads Demirel’s remarks on Turkey’s receptiveness to Europe’s exiles as a response to Europeans’ condemnation of article 301, which criminalized any recognition of the Armenian genocide, including Pamuk’s. While Turkey’s accession talks with the European Union crumbled under the state’s refusal to acknowledge its genocidal history a century earlier, Turkish authorities made polemical use of the recollection that Jewish intellectuals had once found refuge from European anti-Semitism in Turkish universities. “The result is a papering over of Turkish anti-Semitism,” Konuk observes, as well as “the country’s role in the death of refugees in Turkish waters, and atrocities against its Greek, Armenian, and Kurdish citizens.”22 By reviving the story of Jewish émigrés like Auerbach, the Turkish state changed the subject from one genocide to another and suggested implicitly that Europe was in no position to judge. Apter’s argument—that Jewish émigrés were treated well in Turkey—was marshaled to consolidate the Kemalist narrative of national identity and render the Turkish Republic less vulnerable to critique. The differing explanations that Apter and Konuk provide for Auerbach’s alienation in Turkey reflect the difference between their identities as critics: each critic uses the rhetorical gesture of autocritique to explain Auerbach’s exclusion from Turkish culture as an effect of hegemonic forces in the cultures they study, which are different. Apter faults prevailing chauvinisms in the U.S. and European cultures that house her and shape her intellectual formation; Konuk, by contrast, draws on her expertise in the literature of Turkish-German migration to distribute her interest more evenly across the border between East and West, looking critically at chauvinisms that are internal to the Turkish Republic, too. Both critics work toward the same goal that Orhan Pamuk describes as the telos of the novel as a genre: to acknowledge “the black spots” in the national history that produces it. A Turkish novelist by Pamuk’s description strives to represent the distortions of power that grow out of Turkish history and cultural formations; so, too, Western literary figures look critically at the states where they claim their citizenship. And it is precisely in Apter’s scrupulous attention to “the black spots” in Western history that she neglects the corollary problem that Konuk sees in Turkey. Apter overlooks the anti-Semitism that

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Konuk sees in Turkey because she reads Auerbach’s self-representation primarily as an effect of his Eurocentrism. She looks for “black spots” in the history of a world that stops at the eastern border of Europe. Konuk works meaningfully against that Eurocentric tradition. As she observes, exile is the precursor to immigration, not a state of perpetual homelessness, so “exile has a double side: while it triggers reflection and recollection and prompts comparison between the familiar and the unfamiliar, it also demands new affiliations with the place of exile.” The exile leaves one national community but becomes a member of another by some definition—even if she expresses her membership in it precisely by downplaying its influence, as Auerbach does. The exile by this definition is not free from national ties. Rather, she is bound to the nation in ways that are particular to her exilic condition. The impurities of allegiance do not leave her for long, nor is that temporary condition predictive of any theoretical position, necessarily. “I doubt that ontology is directly correlated to epistemology,” Konuk observes. “The assumption—that the loss of home necessarily confers an ‘epistelogical’ advantage over those who remain behind— is, I think, false. It wrongly implies that critical thinking is first made possible by the trauma of deracination, and, hence, cannot be learned.”23 By detaching exilic consciousness from the experience of exile, Konuk opens a space to think about the ways literary critics configure the relationship between the two. But, like Apter, Konuk is compelled to propose an alternative to Auerbach’s negative example, and she alights on Pamuk. As she reads him, the Turkish novelist “introduces a concept of authorship that shows us something different” from the exilic tradition Western readers know via Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and V. S. Naipaul. Pamuk corroborates the “notion of detachment” that literary readers associate with those names, and it is “not irrelevant to his authorship,” but he is not an exile in the true sense of the word because he writes from Istanbul about Turkey. To make this claim, Konuk omits mention of the time Pamuk spends to promote his books globally and to teach at Columbia University, in New York, perhaps because she assumes that such itinerancy is a fact of life for every author of world literature in the contemporary moment. Bu she makes much of the fact that his literary oeuvre represents a globe that was not traveled so easily: “Reflecting on Ottoman and early republican past” throughout his work, Konuk writes, Pamuk nurtures a sensibility of “detachment and es-

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trangement [that] is temporal rather than spatial. Moreover, his authorial position integrates the view of the Western traveler and the exile into his own vision.” This is the conclusion and the weakest part of Konuk’s argument, which works elsewhere to extricate the literal and figurative dimensions of the rhetoric of exile in its scholarly uses in the West. Here, though, Konuk contends that Pamuk writes about the Turkish past from contemporary Istanbul to draw a new connection between his “settled authorship” and “exilic forms of cultural production,” which “shows that in the twentyfirst century, the boundaries between the intellectual exile, migrant, and transnational scholar/author are often blurred. Likewise, it proves that representations of Istanbul are always the product of mimetic appropriations of what we have come to call East and West.”24 The benefits of those blurred boundaries remain undefined, and Pamuk’s “mimetic appropriations” also remain unread. Konuk’s point in making this argument is to show that the Istanbul of Auerbach’s time not only was rich in libraries and vibrant with literary life, as Apter had already shown; it “was gripped by a sense of excitement about its identity as a European city, and this was, in fact, highly conducive to writing a magnum opus that took the history of Europe as its subject.”25 So, for Konuk as for Apter, Istanbul’s openness to Auerbach is a historical fact with broad implications for the comparative methodologies that take Mimesis as a model. Konuk reads Auerbach’s case to testify against “one-sided notions of knowledge transfer,” from the West to the East, and also against the misidentification of Istanbul as “a site that is unquestioningly construed as having been thinly populated by books, ideas, and intellectuals themselves.”26 This imaginary Istanbul that Konuk debunks is the city that Orhan Pamuk represents in Anglophone literary markets, where he speaks for the East—that Edward Said describes as a place of “Oriental, non-Occidental exile and homelessness.”27 And its mythic proportions underwrite its strategic value also to contemporary critics working in the United States. As Aamir Mufti suggests, “What Said cites is not so much the Auerbachian text, the text whose author-function bears the name of Auerbach, but rather Auerbach as text.” That text works toward purposes that are as ethical as they are political, and they are very hard to maintain. Mufti also suggests that Auerbach urges Western critics by his example “to make it perceptible that the expe-

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rience of being at home can only be produced by rendering some other homeless.”28 Knowing that the world’s resources are distributed unequally by design, the critic assumes responsibility for the cultivation of that knowledge; it is the good of comparative literature after Auerbach. Emily Apter picks up this line of argument to ask, “What happens to [the] ethical paradigm of global comparatism if we are compelled to revise the foundation myth of exile?”29 The implication of Apter’s question is this: if Auerbach found a good home in Istanbul and misrepresented his alienation for rhetorical purposes, then the greatest ethical claims of our discipline would fall like a house of cards. To mitigate the damage, Apter proposes dethroning Auerbach as “the ansatzpunkt” for the transnational humanism that we value and replacing him with Leo Spitzer, who prefigures Said himself as the model for the Eastern outpost of Western humanism—the figure, or the fetish, of exile. I am suggesting that we might do better to question our very need for such a figure and fetish at all, not least because the role seems so dangerous for the people who inhabit it. THE LITERARY FIGURE OF THE EXILE

Literary criticism in the United States stands in a discursively oppositional relation to the state and the nation; its rhetorics are those of the globalist, not the nationalist, honed to perform gestures of critique by reflex.30 The discourse of exile serves those gestures well, as Apter writes, because it is “as a mode of critique” that becomes “paradoxically . . . the country of comparative literature,” giving the U.S.-based critic “a substitute homeland” on the page. But while it holds itself above provincial ways of reading, this exilic position has no necessary relation to the geopolitical at all. How could it, when it creates what Apter describes admiringly as an “institutional and pedagogical space of not being there”? That evacuation of historical reference from theoretical discourse becomes at once a precursor to critique and evidence of a species of critique that is claimed to be particularly powerful because it has the authority of the lived experience of displacement. That experience lends ethical and political suasion to the literary as such. Authorizing the rhetorical gesture of critique that structures the field of comparative literature, it is cited as evidence for the value of intellectual work that is hard to quantify in dollars.

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Pamuk’s relation to this critical discourse is complex. He earns his designation as an exile, Konuk argues, even though his exilic status has never been total, and his relationship to other émigré writers is oblique because he represents an experience of exile from Turkish history that Konuk attributes also to every modern Turk. Embodying an exilic consciousness by metonymy rather than metaphor, he captures an exilic habit of mind that Konuk sees among the Turkish people at large. So, as Apter replaced Auerbach with Spitzer, Konuk replaces Spitzer with Pamuk, begging the question, again: why is the figure of exile unduly necessary to comparatists working in Western institutions? Seth Lerer explains its necessity in psychoanalytical terms with his argument that the critics who lionize Auerbach make an error that is ethical as well as methodological, with stakes that are high. They “participate in the moral fiction of Mimesis: in the story of exile and dismissal, the fantasy of homecoming and its parent-child relationships.”31 Recent literary history becomes graspable to Lerer as a “series of reactions to Auerbach’s work,” which is encapsulated in Mimesis: a “book of exiles, an account of separations and errors, of parents and children, and of hoped-for returns home.”32 The Western critical tradition that constructs Auerbach as its father reiterates a narrative that gives the exile a happy ending: a superior vantage from which to see the world. And it gives the critic who tells the story a way to participate in the grand narratives of world war by proxy. In the theoretical Heimlosigkheit that Apter and others describe, the critic identifies with the exile from a position of safety, and the difference between privilege and its opposite disappears. Literary critics lose our purchase on any good of world literature when we lose the language Mufti uses to observe that “the experience of being at home can only be produced by rendering some other homeless.” A PROPOSAL TO RETIRE ALL METAPHORICAL USES OF EXILE

The English language needs words that can refer to the lived experiences that are suffered by fourteen million refugees annually,33 and literary critics need tools to consider any complicity we have in creating the difficult conditions that Orhan Pamuk and so many other non-Western writers experience when they travel into Western literary cultures. As those conditions

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become legible primarily as the precondition for the exilic consciousness they produce in the writers we admire, they become a textual virtue rather than a lived condition that is profoundly negative. The theoretical discourse of exile places any historically induced suffering under erasure because the language that describes it loses any meaning beyond the figurative. This disavowal of the historical fact of exile repels Said, who contends that “exile cannot be made to serve the notions of humanism. To think of exile in this servile position vis-à-vis literature is to banalize its mutilations.” And that fact becomes obvious to the critic who “must first set aside Joyce and Nabokov and think instead of the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies are created.”34 Writers like Salman Rushdie and Pamuk share commonalities with James Joyce and Nabokov in this formulation: they, too, are driven from their nations under pressure that is real, and they also enjoy significant privileges that the vast majority of émigrés and refugees do not. Edward Said’s description of Joyce applies to Pamuk, too, for some but not all of his career:35 “He chose to be in exile: to give force to his artistic vocation. In an uncannily effective way . . . Joyce picked a quarrel with Ireland and kept it alive so as to sustain the strict opposition to what was familiar.” Said refers to a letter in which Joyce wrote of being “alone and friendless,” with the observation that “it is rare to pick banishment as a way of life,” but a novelist might reasonably make that choice for the sake of his work.36 As this critical discourse is handed down from Said over the decades, it loses its reference to the deprivations of an exile who is violently expelled from home, leaving Anglophone critics without the vocabulary we need to ask why so many authors of world literature become unable to live in safety close to their natal homes. Orhan Pamuk has objected gently to his figuration in the discourse of exile, as when he claimed after his trial that he found it “embarrassing” to see it “overdramatized” in international media. But the intensity with which his Western audiences identify with him in that drama suggests that it fulfills some need beyond the obvious. As I read it, that identification vents the same anxieties that Orhan Pamuk confronts in his readers when we ask him, “Who Do You Write For?”: it vents our collective “uneasiness” with “this new cultural order that has come into being over the past thirty years,” where American literary critics inhabit a role that is both powerful and not.37 As U.S.-based literary critics are marginalized in a national cul-

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ture and a global economy that place little value on the humanities, we find an imaginative affinity with people whose cosmopolitanism is less elective than ours. The persecuted exile becomes reducible to a fictional character who elicits a ready identification, and his suffering is emptied of historical content as it is honored symbolically to an exaggerated degree. World literature provides the arena for that transformation, which rationalizes humanists’ nearly inevitable failure to maintain the perpetually unsettled position that we admire so much in Edward Said—who did not choose to be homeless, and nor do we. Said warns us against idealizing the figure that he cuts even as he provides excellent material for that purpose. “There is a poignant irony,” he writes, “to be recalled for the benefit of people who maintain that criticism is art, and who forget that, the moment anything acquires the status of a cultural idol or commodity, it ceases to be interesting. That at bottom is a critical attitude, just as doing criticism and maintaining a critical position are critical aspects of the intellectual’s life.” Said knew that it requires scrupulous attention and a significant quantity of discipline to remain homeless when one could feel at home, and to imagine the writer as a person rather than a protagonist, even when he lives out a story that is so gratifying to tell. Likewise, it requires a significant quantity of discipline for a critic to refrain from inserting a defense of the humanities in an essay about Orhan Pamuk when the value of her work resists quantification in any measure her fellow citizens can read. But to resist it is to engage in the critical practices that Said described: to read ways that are distant—in the sense of refusing an intimacy—but paradoxically close to the text.

Chapter Five

ORHAN PAMUK WINS THE NOBEL PRIZE The Cases of Orhan Pamuk and Mo Yan

The problem at stake in the theorization of literary inequality, then, is not whether peripheral writers “borrow” from the center, or whether or not literary traffic flows from center to periphery; it is the restitution, to the subordinated of the literary world, of the forms, specificities and hardships of their struggles. —PASCALE CASANOVA , “LITER ATURE AS WORLD”

The Nobel Prize for Literature speaks for a critical consensus that claims to belong at once to Sweden, to Europe, and to the world. Clad in formal dress, it recommends one writer annually as necessary reading, and it circulates that recommendation widely through a transnational literary elite. The strength of its authority ensures that the new laureate’s oeuvre circulates, too, in translations that appear with the Nobel stamp on the cover, and a global canon expands to include them. The inevitability of that expansion makes the Nobel Prize interesting as an index of something larger than itself: of the ways that literary value works across cultures and over time, amid the structural inequalities that trouble our relations with each other in the present. I draw on a growing body of scholarship about literary prizes in this chapter to look critically at the ways the Swedish Academy strains against the Eurocentrism of its history, stating good intention to globalize the canons it creates. It hones the criteria it wields to recognize the best writers from traditions it has historically neglected, and it valorizes those writers quite often for defying the repressive machineries of their states. But that investment it makes in the political heroism of the writers it anoints takes shape in the vocabularies of social justice and human rights that are foundational to the literary cultures of the West. The canonization of writers like Orhan Pamuk hinges on their cultivation of adversarial relationships not only to their governments but to vast swaths of their

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fellow citizens. And to that degree, the discourse in which it is written functions—paradoxically—to maintain the Eurocentrism that it ostensibly denies by narrowing the path that a writer travels to reach the podium in Stockholm from locations to the east. WHAT A NOBEL PRIZE MEANS

The global import of the Nobel Prize is hard to appreciate from the metropolitan centers of the United States and Europe, where the announcement of the latest laureate is audible only in the reading classes, among people who could compile a list of ten or twenty likely laureates to win in the years to come. But those announcements also reach a wider audience in the nations at the historical margins of the “world republic of letters”—in China, for example, and in Turkey—and for good reason. Like “emerging markets” in monetary terms, these nations pay close attention to the valuation of their cultures on a global market, and they tally their successes in terms that also have broad political implications. The Nobel Prize is coveted by states and citizens who perceive it as an enhancement to the value of a national culture in “the economics of prestige,” as James English suggests, condensing “a whole range of historically distinct aims and functions, thereby inspiring widely divergent forms of competitive emulation and antagonisms.”1 It assumes meaning far beyond the literary. And economic metaphors are rife in these analyses of precisely what it means, because they fit. Like money, the Nobel Prize translates local values for trade across all manner of borders. Primary among the transnational literary prizes that a writer can win, the Nobel serves as “the greatest proof of literary consecration in the world republic of letters,” as Pascale Casanova writes, “bordering on the definition of literary art itself.”2 And in that definitional capacity, it becomes an object of desire for nations that are particularly interested in increasing their visibility on a global stage. As it demonstrates the competitive strength of a nation and its people, it testifies also to some value that runs deeply through their cultural heritage. In that sense, the Nobel is primary among the literary prizes that function as an “instrument,” according to James English, “for negotiating transactions between cultural and economic, cultural and social, or cultural and political capital—which is to say that they are our most effective institutional agents of capital intraconversion.”3 Literary prizes make a nation’s assets

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not only visible but fungible all over the world; they redistribute cultural capital that becomes available for translation into economic and political terms. And the Nobel Prize is the biggest of them all, by every measure. So it makes sense that the Nobel Prize commands the highest value in the nations that have laureates in the shortest supply. Speakers of Mandarin Chinese, for example, have coined a phrase to name “the Nobel Complex” (Nuobeier qingjie)—the anxieties that policy makers and intellectuals express about the relative dearth of Chinese literary laureates.4 And those anxieties spread through the national culture at large, as sinologist Perry Link observes: Nobel Prizes are tallied in Chinese media “like Olympic gold medals as signs of the world’s respect—which, over recent centuries, many Chinese [people] have felt to be less than it ought to be.”5 A Nobel Prize for Literature is coveted in China as proof that in the nation’s economic and political power is underwritten by a culture that is equally rich.6 Its authorizing power makes it efficient as a mechanism for the redistribution of cultural capital on a global scale, so it is most closely watched by the nations that have the most to gain from that redistribution. And as non-Western nations watch the movements of the Swedish Academy with close attention, the academy returns the gaze. Processes of globalization teach even the most casual observer of cultural history in the twentieth century that institutions relegate themselves to the past when they ignore the global dimensions of the work they do. The Swedish Academy has worked to ensure its currency by expanding its reach to the South and East, and that expansionary project demands a reappraisal of the criteria by which Nobel Laureates are selected. Academy spokespeople have been compelled to speak publicly on matters of importance for literary critics, including me: what kind of literature becomes recognizable as “good” beyond all local and national traditions—and what does “good” mean in this impossibly transcendent context? More broadly still, what good can the best literature do—aesthetically and politically—in the nonfictional world? The annual selection of the Nobel Laureate for Literature answers these questions provisionally by entering a new name in the canon of world literature it constructs. That name aggregates with all that precede it to yield a sustained answer to the critical dilemmas that bedevil the contemporary debates about world literature that I analyze more fully in the next chapter. With those debates in mind, I read Pamuk’s case in the context of other

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non-Western laureates to develop an argument about the terms and conditions of their canonization. My argument operates from the premise that the Swedish Academy goes against the intention it states to promote a literary culture that works on a global scale by the investment it makes in writers who behave like good citizens of participatory democracies even if they are not. That assumption of the universality of the cultural and political legacies of the European Enlightenment secures the enduring Westernness of world literature while it also enables the inclusion of the non-Western writers that literary institutions need to survive in the twenty-first century. To show how this works and what it means for the world literature of the future, I turn here to the cultural processes surrounding Orhan Pamuk’s entry to the Nobel pantheon, and I compare it to the controversies that attend China’s Mo Yan. Mo Yan’s Nobel Laureate for Literature in 2012 was received in ways that were symmetrical but opposite to Pamuk’s. Where Pamuk is understood in the West as a dissident to an oppressive state, Mo Yan is known for complying with the Chinese regime. That compliance polarized Western critics, much as Pamuk’s refusal of a national taboo polarized his Turkish publics. And in Mo Yan’s case as in Pamuk’s, the novelist’s worthiness for a Nobel Prize was judged by his willingness to speak against a state that would silence him: Pamuk was read as a logical extension of the tradition by which the Nobel rewards writers who speak truth to power, and Mo Yan was read as an exception to that rule. These cases that seem diametrically opposite fit together in my analysis, which traces the ways non-Western writers find their canonization contingent on the political work they do, as they are canonized by their willingness and ability to advance the Western cultural logics in the East—and, more particularly, to advance the cultural logic that renders the artist a good citizen of a democratic state. THE PRIZE AS A CULTURAL ARTIFACT

The discourse of the Nobel Prize strains toward universality, but it is an artifact of nineteenth-century Sweden. The prize was the second major invention of the chemist Alfred Nobel, and it has been described as atonement for the first. Nobel inherited a family business in weapons manufacture, and he compounded it by inventing dynamite. His biographers describe the literature prize as his effort to write his own obituary after he read one that

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was published prematurely by mistake when he was quite alive. After the death of his brother, Ludvig, in 1888, a French newspaper mistook one Nobel for another and announced the passing of “a Merchant of Death . . . who made his fortune by finding a way to kill the most people in the shortest time possible.” This unflattering portrait of the scientist seems to have spurred Alfred Nobel to write a counternarrative by constructing the Nobel Prize for Literature as corollary to the Nobel Prize for Peace. He left a chunk of his legacy annually to one writer “who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” The greatness of a literary work was reduced to the good it would do, since every laureate for literature would author “in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an ideal tendency.”7 But what kind of literature is that? The “ideal” that Nobel imagined was wholly free of any national or cultural bias, as evidenced by his admonishment to the judges that “no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, so that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be a Scandinavian or not.”8 This concern that the laureates might come with excessive frequency from the Scandinavian corner of the literary world may seem quaint today, but that semblance only testifies to the academy’s subsequent efforts to make Nobel’s cosmopolitanism manifest. Over the course of the past century, the Swedish Academy has extended its judgments farther away from Stockholm in every sense, consolidating its authority by convincing literary publics of its ability to discover literary texts of an “ideal tendency” wherever such “outstanding work” might reside in the world. That claim to universality is not universal at all. Historically specific to the cultures that descend from the European Enlightenment, it tethers literary value to a writer’s ability to act like a good citizen in very Western terms by critiquing a regime that is transitory, calling attention to flaws in a state that will refuse to fix them. That assumption of the perfectability of the state is built into the mission statement of the Swedish Academy, where it underwrites a corollary assumption of the essential desirability of a participatory democracy populated by citizens who act freely, through processes of inquiry, protest, self-expression, and self-reflection. The good citizen the academy imagines as an author of world literature resembles the nation-state in this sense: imperfect but trying to become better, she works toward perpetual peace on a global scale. But as that globality be-

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comes imaginable only in distinctly Western terms, it affords little space to writers like Orhan Pamuk, who claim their citizenship in states that reject some if not all of these claims for the good that world literature can do. HOW TURKEY RECEIVED ORHAN PAMUK’S PRIZE

That rejection persists unevenly throughout Turkish culture, where it is unconfined to organs of the state. When the news of Pamuk’s his Nobel Prize hit his nation’s mainstream media, the Turkish people pondered what they had gained and lost, and agreement extended only as far as the conclusion that they had a stake in the matter. Pride at the sight of a Turk’s ascent to the podium in Stockholm was matched with worry over what he might say there, and how the Turkish people would appear to the world through him. Beyond the bookish subcultures of Turkey where Pierre Bourdieu—and, for that matter, Orhan Pamuk—is actually read, his cultural currency in a global market was tracked with the close attention that an emergent company might pay to track data about the success of its brand. The prevailing assessment of the data was mixed, as the daily Milliyet discovered by asking Turks around the country whether they felt “happy” to hear the news of his Nobel Prize. The 26 percent who found cause for celebration were dwarfed by the 36 percent who did not, combined with the 21 percent who said they couldn’t describe how they felt.9 The magnitude of Orhan Pamuk’s celebrity among them makes their silence less audible as evidence of apathy than as the expression of an ambivalence that is profound.10 Domestic responses to Pamuk’s Nobel Prize were shaped by a broad recognition of the scarcity of Turkish writers in Western literary canons. A blog poster to the Guardian questioned whether Orhan Pamuk should be—as he inevitably would be—the sole representative of his national culture abroad: “While trying not to drop into nationalist bias,” the poster writes, I must say that Western intellectuals love Pamuk since his style reflects the Orientalist representation of the East from a Turk’s eyes. Actually, that’s an image of the East many Western readers [are] seeking to read, the fantasies and obscurity of the Eastern geography. As Said, “the representation of East from the Orientalist East.” I don’t think [Pamuk] gave a new style to the Turkish literature; he is not an activist political figure, [either]. That’s the way his identity was advertised in

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Western circles. [His Nobel Prize is a] big injustice to many strong writers in contemporary Turkish literature.11

This post captures a wide array of the concerns that are expressed in Turkey’s public sphere about Orhan Pamuk and his Nobel Prize—about Pamuk’s persona as “an activist political figure,” and about the degree to which that figure satisfies Orientalist desires when it appears in the West. Those concerns are exacerbated by the prospect that Pamuk is the victor in a zero-sum game that only one Turkish writer can win, as the Guardian comments attest. When the original poster frames Pamuk’s victory as “a big injustice to many strong writers” who vie with him for the job of representing the Turkish people to the West, another poster chimes in to name the names: “Readers who are wondering about better Turkish writers would be advised to check the works of Leyla Erbil, Tahsin Yucel, Yashar Kemal, Murathan Mungan and Asli Erdogan among others.”12 It is unlikely that many of the Guardian’s readers would take that suggestion, since so few of these writers are available in English translation at all. The poster’s impulse to mention them, anyway, suggests the depth of the wish that the readers who embrace Pamuk as the harbinger of a more global literary culture might read more Turkish writers than one.13 WHAT DO WESTERN PUBLICS WANT FROM A NON-WESTERN LAUREATE?

Notoriously monolingual, Anglophone audiences read very little literature that was not written in English, even in translation, and the narrowness of our reading stands in sharp contrast to the broad access that new media— social and otherwise—provide to people and places all over the world. The parochialism of technology’s users stands in contrast to the globality that technology affords, and the discourses of world literature gain new currency in this moment when humans lag behind the machines that we have created, as I argue in the next chapter. The Nobel Prize serves a useful purpose for readers with this limited attention, too: distilling a whole national tradition into a single name, the judges for the Swedish Academy extend the promise of a text that looks through a “window onto a foreign world,” to invoke David Damrosch’s phrase, and compresses what it sees. World

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literature becomes legible as a humanistic supplement to the data that are readily available in an information age. As the Swedish Academy certifies the consensus of professional literary critics, it also produces the broader literary public it addresses when it broadcasts its verdicts across two different species of distance at once. It states its claim to span the circumference of the globe while it also travels the less mappable geography that exists within every nation: the distances of class and culture that separate literary institutions from the publics that surround them. On that scale, the Nobel Prize communicates the meaning of the literary within and beyond the nation, and it articulates the value of a national culture to the world, generating the imagination of a more transnational literary public. Its symbolic power at both of these registers seems unlikely to diminish in an era of increasing globalization. In the context of that longue durée, it seems particularly significant that Pamuk’s strained relationship to his state and its citizens is more epitomizing than unique among other Nobel Laureates for Literature like him, who travel from the margins of the canon that the Swedish Academy creates. As I have suggested, the small cadre of non-Western laureates—which includes J. M. Coetzee, Imre Kertèsz, Naguib Mahfouz, and Gao Xingjian— have generally found their warm welcome in the West coincident with a chill that grew around them in the national cultures to which they were born, and the historical specificity of each case does not obscure the pattern:14 each was the first writer from his or her nation to become a Nobel Laureate for Literature, and each found that honor linked temporally if not causally to measurable degrees of alienation from home. The repetition of that grand narrative implies that Pamuk’s problems are at least as structural as they are circumstantial. Non-Western Nobel Laureates have frequently found it difficult to bring their literary honors home, which suggests to me that the inverse degrees of warmth that Pamuk receives at home and abroad reflect conditions that are deeply embedded in the processes of world literature. That is also to say that they reflect the conditions by which Western canons expand their reach to the South and East at the turn of the twenty-first century. The animosities that Pamuk elicited from his fellow citizens took shape in nationalist discourses that have a long history in Turkey, but they were inflamed by the very Western discourse in which the Nobel Prize is given. My project here is to analyze that

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discourse that precedes and produces the announcement of Pamuk’s Nobel Laureate and to ask: What do Western critics want from a non-Western writer of world literature? Who is he expected to be, and what is he expected to do? The sacrificial rhetoric I discussed in chapter 3 is surely not intended to make non-Western writers pay elevated prices for their entry to the Anglophone publics they need to attain canonical status, but that is precisely what they do. And Western critics work against their stated purpose in much the same way when they hold Pamuk accountable for the representation of the Turkish publics who hold him accountable, too, to an equal and opposite extent. But if those effects are unintended, they follow directly from the cultural logics that make world literature work, which makes it incumbent on Western critics to ask: what is it about the ways that our institutions honor non-Western writers of world literature that so frequently jeopardizes their security as well as their harmonious relations with their fellow citizens? It seems obvious to me that, as Western critics learn to read non-Western literary traditions and to think on a more global scale, the writers we value most should always retain their ability to leave our company and go home. So it is with that goal in mind that I look critically at the theoretical models and institutional processes that Western critics use to balance our aesthetic, intellectual, and political commitments, including the protection of the writers we value most. THE POLITICS INSCRIBED IN THE PRIZE

These are not entirely new concerns in the history of the Swedish Academy, which has always made explicit its activist intentions, although it has not always made the contours of its politics so clear. The Danish critic Georg Brandes noted the ambiguity of Alfred Nobel’s mission statement, so he asked a friend of Nobel’s what the founder meant when he wrote that the laureate should be the writer who confers in that year “the greatest benefit on mankind.” Nobel “was an Anarchist,” the friend noted, so, “by idealistic he meant that which adopts a polemical or critical attitude to Religion, Royalty, Marriage, Social Order generally.”15 The committee inquired further into this necessary relationship that Nobel saw between the literary and the political, and they found it drawn also in the literature that he wrote. An unpublished but productive poet, Nobel disavowed “the slightest pre-

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tension to call my verses poetry,” claiming that he wrote literature only as a means to other ends: “to relieve depression, or to improve my English.”16 That denial of any specifically literary ambition might be the self-deprecation of a scientist straying beyond the limits of his expertise, but it also expresses a belief that Nobel expressed often: that great literature always does some good in the world, and its primary value lies in that extraliterary benefit. That primacy is assumed and described in a tragedy Nobel wrote under the title Nemesis (1896). Writing in the last year of his life, Nobel imagined the lady Beatrice Cenci’s reflection on the proper development of a child, who “grew and developed into a thinking, sentient being with an inner world of poesy that no tyranny could extinguish.”17 The poem works polemically to assert poetry’s centrality to the education of a “thinking, sentient being,” who is defined in turn by his imperviousness to tyranny, thanks to his engagement with literature. Fostering the interiority that makes individuals sufficiently strong to assert their will in a participatory democracy, poetry serves a political function even if it lacks overtly political content. To the degree that it is good, it turns its readers into good citizens of a nation that relies on literature to do its cultural work. Nobel assumed the necessity of that connection between the literary and the political in ways that are historically particular to his moment. Citing the Romantic poets as inspiration, he constructed the Nobel Prize by the same discursive logic that Percy Bysshe Shelley used to assert that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This assumption that every good poem functions like every good law is inscribed throughout the founding documents of the Nobel Prize, which guides literary readers toward better behavior by identifying the authors who contribute to world peace by writing well. This direct relation between good literature and good citizenship is easy to read as a buttress for the grand narratives of the European Enlightenment, but it also speaks soothingly to the personal anxieties of Alfred Nobel. By resting the tools for peace in the hands of every individual, it holds the inventor of dynamite no more responsible for war than anyone else. Literature enjoys full autonomy from the political while at the same time promising a better world in political terms. The Swedish Academy has maintained this Romantic construction while it also checks the parochialism of its early history. For the first five decades that Nobel Laureates were named, the vast majority came from

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Europe, and a small minority came from the United States. A handful came from the global South and East, like Rabindrath Tagore (1913), but most of the laureates in that category also had meaningful ties to Western nations, like Rudyard Kipling (1907) and Pearl S. Buck (1938). The academy’s failure to appreciate deserving writers from outside the United States and Europe became a matter of public record in 1986, when Kjell Espmark expressed the committee’s intention to “intensify its own investigations of the growth points of literature in various parts of the world.”18 That intensification has happened incrementally since then. Between 1993 and 2013 more than half of the literary laureates were citizens of the European Union, North America, or the United Kingdom. And the “parts of the world” that remain underrepresented among laureates cohere in terms of gender as well as geography, as only six of those who were chosen over those twenty years were women. The persistence with which white men from Western nations remain overrepresented among laureates—even after decades littered with critics’ calls for a canon that is more truly and inclusively global—testifies to the profundity of the problem. The slim quantity of non-Western laureates is matched historically by the poor quality of the recognition they gain. As the Swedish Academy has worked to expand its view around the world, it has also asserted the cultural particularity of literary taste, as in the rationale for the selection of W. B. Yeats in 1922, when the academy’s Anders Österling included an admonishment to a cosmopolitan public that is imagined in the second-person plural: We must be careful to judge literary works that are to us more or less strange, not according to our own standards, but against their proper background and according to what we may infer that they mean to the people of the country where they were produced and whose local traditions and national culture make it easier for them to appraise both the content and the form of such works.19

This cautionary note is striking in many ways, but not least for its emphasis on audience. Österling describes an institution that relies heavily on national publics to reconcile the disproportion it sees between its members’ expertise, which is necessarily limited, and the infinite range of literatures from all over the world.20 If Österling is to be believed, then the Swedish Academy invests less heavily in literary value it can see for itself than in esteem

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the work elicits in its national culture—to the degree that the academy “may infer” that. Gathering those inferences from all over the world, the academy works like a court of law to arbitrate the cases nations make for their greatest writers, and it chooses the most compelling. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it functions like a representative democracy to count the votes of local constituencies and amplify their consensus on a global scale. Clearly, that is not how world literature works. THE SWEDISH ACADEMY AS AN ARBITER OF LOCAL VALUE

Orhan Pamuk’s case suggests that the Swedish Academy is neither willing nor able to depend on the democratic method that Österling describes. If the academy had begun to estimate Pamuk’s literary value by trying to “infer” what his novels “mean to the people of the country,” his candidacy for laureate would have ended there. An editorial from 2005 by Ayşe Özgun might have convinced the academy that the Turkish people would reject Pamuk as their representative in Stockholm if they were given the choice. “He wants to tell the whole world how horrible Turkey and the Turkish people are,” Özgun lamented. That is his one and only message. He gets this message out through his books and speeches. He must write those words with drooling pleasure at his keyboard. He must get so carried away while writing that some nights he forgets to sleep. That’s how I imagine Pamuk at his keyboard writing his world-famous books.21

This portrait of the author as a venomous monster is extreme—overwrought, antiliterary, and perhaps also paranoid—but it is hardly anomalous in Turkey’s public sphere.22 And it has had no discernably negative effect on Pamuk’s reputation in the West. In fact, the animosities that he has elicited from his domestic audience have only heightened his value in Western literary canons, contradicting the logic that rests his literary value on his ability to represent Turkish culture reliably to the world. It is this definition of literary value that I aim to challenge here, noting how it serves the interests of Western critics and institutions at the expense of the non-Western writers they prize. The academy binds itself into illogic when it claims to work by two opposite criteria at once, declaring its authority over a global literary consensus while it

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also amplifies a judgment that is crucially local to the West. There is little wonder that the Swedish Academy cannot—and will not—fulfill both of those mutually exclusive promises. And students of Western history will not be surprised to discover that the cost of our institutions’ relative failures is born disproportionately by the most recent entrants to them—in this case, writers like Orhan Pamuk, who are canonized by discourses that leave them little room to move. The academy has excluded its non-Western laureates from the transcendental scale they need to establish their superlative greatness. Western writers are acclaimed for producing work of such value that it transcends any mark of their locality, as when France’s Claude Simon won his Nobel in 1985 for creating work that showed no traces of its author’s Frenchness, combining “the poet’s and the painter’s creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition.” Such universality is the privilege of the centrally located, and François Mauriac had it, too. He won his Nobel Prize in 1952 “for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life.” By contrast, non-Western literary laureates have won their Nobel Prizes by embodying their particularity rather than transcending it. When Yasunari Kawabata won the prize in 1968, it was for “his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind.”23 Through that essentializing language, the Swedish Academy asserts the value of Kawabata’s literary work as a commodity, but it also asserts the value of its own institutional work as an importer. It contends that Western readers enrich themselves when they gain access to the non-Western world through writers that the Swedish Academy discovers, locating its value in its purchase on essential truths that are hard to find. That hard binarism between Western universality and Eastern particularity softened as the cultural logics of multiculturalism took hold in the West over the second half of the twentieth century, but the particularity of non-Western writers remained central to their canonization. Wole Soyinka won his Nobel Prize in 1987, for example, for “fashion[ing] the drama of existence” that every human experiences, and for doing that aesthetic work in “wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones.” Central to his achievement was this representation of a universal experience in an aesthetic vocabulary that is distinctly Nigerian, harmonizing the local with the global with the strength of his literary craft.24

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And if Soyinka’s ceremony was in his honor, it also congratulated Western cultures on their ability to overcome the racialized prejudices that secure the pantheon of Nobel Laureates as a pantheon of whiteness. By integrating that canon incrementally, the academy advances on a global scale the “geopolitical race narrative” that Jodi Melamed describes as a product of U.S. multiculturalism, which maintains that “African American integration within U.S. society and advancement through equality, defined through a liberal framework of legal rights and racially inclusive nationalism, would establish the moral legitimacy of U.S. global leadership.”25 The Swedish Academy extends that narrative on the scale of the globe by legitimizing Western hegemony, culturally and politically, as an agent of progress for all. Defining progress along the contours of the grand narratives of the European Enlightenment, the academy voices the minority position of humanists in the age of global capital, as I argue in the next chapter, while it also speaks implicitly as an organ of Western nation-states. The imbalance of power that structures those relations is both dramatized and temporarily obscured by the ritual embrace between blackness and whiteness on stage in Stockholm. And as the annual announcement of a new Nobel Laureate consolidates Western power in racialized terms, it also extends the hegemony of the West over a “world literary space,” as Pascale Casanova terms it.26 As the Swedish Academy recognizes the need to expand its jurisdiction farther beyond the borders of Europe, it produces that globality by logic that follows Descartes’: the world republic of letters thinks demonstrably whenever it rationalizes the selection of a new laureate, and that very public act of thinking demonstrates that it exists. And as it confirms that it thinks, therefore it is, it also answers the ontological question of what it is by altering the shape of a global literary canon with every laureate it selects. Seen through this lens, the history of the Nobel Prize in the twentieth century becomes a legible as an account of the changing values of Western cultural institutions and the literary canons they produce as they reach beyond the geographic border between East and West. As the Swedish Academy fulfills its stated intention to honor more writers who claim their citizenship in nations that are neither North American nor European, it cultivates its legitimacy as an institution for the West and the world. When the academy praised Naguib Mahfouz in 1988 for creating “works rich in nuance— now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous, who has formed

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an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind,” the announcement testified explicitly to the cosmopolitan tastes of this institution that resides in the northernmost corner of Europe. It staked a claim also for the global scale of the literary community for which it speaks, asserting the authority of the Swedish Academy over the whole literary world in the emergent discourses of multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and globalisme. PARTICULARITY, REPRESENTATION, AND QUALITY

But as the academy announces its commitment to a criterion for literary value that favors no particular race, gender, or nation, it protests too much. The announcement for Mahfouz addresses an implied reader who cannot be trusted to assume that the greatest practitioners of “Arabian narrative art” exert universal appeal; this has to be said. In saying it, the academy renders the canonization of non-Western writers contingent on their cultural particularity and, moreover, on their utility as instruments to advance the grand narratives of the West. That contingency is captured succinctly in the narrative that Pascale Casanova tells about V. S. Naipaul’s Nobel Prize in 2001: the prize “completed the process of [Naipaul’s] assimilation” from Trinidad to England, Casanova writes, “by giving his literary and national transmutation its highest and most perfect form in him.” His Trinidadian history became essential to his celebrity as “an English writer who has now become universal,” a writer for the whole world. The “supreme recognition” of his laureate “allowed him to ‘justify’ the ambiguities of his position, on the strength of which he claimed to be able to state the truth about the disenfranchised peoples of the earth with greater authority than others, while at the same time taking advantage of his membership in both worlds to adopt the least favorite view possible of these peoples.”27 The Nobel Prize gave Mahfouz new access to literary publics beyond his nation while it also authenticated his relationship to the local constituency that was presumed to stand behind him, and it imagined that locality in impossibly global terms. Affirming the novelist’s ability to represent his people without asking for their consent, the prize certified him as a speaker for the “disenfranchised peoples of the earth”—a voice for the subalterns all over the world who could not speak in Stockholm for themselves. That system of valuation is applied also to writers who occupy marginal positions within Western borders, as the announcement of Toni Morri-

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son’s Nobel Prize in 1993 attests. It is as carefully coded as the announcement of Pamuk’s, and it also works from the assumption that the best literature salves wounds of the political and historical variety. Honoring Morrison in those terms, the Swedish Academy welcomed the first African American writer through its doors by praising her for writing literature of “visionary force and poetic import [that] gives life to an essential”— presumably, African American—“aspect of American reality.” By this description, Morrison’s literary craft is valuable because she uses it as a tool to foster cross-cultural understanding. The aesthetic quality of novels like Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992)—their “visionary force and poetic import”— becomes inextricable from its political utility in the imagination of an implied reader who has no other access to the histories to which Morrison refers. This implied reader needs a literary text to vivify the lives of African Americans, which would otherwise be dead spots in the nation’s historical imagination. Morrison anticipated how her canonization would depend on her utility to a reader whose imagination is limited in precisely this way. She marveled in her Tanner Lectures of 1988 at the frequency with which she was “amazed by the resonances, the structural gearshifts, and the uses to which African-American narratives, persona, and idiom are put in ‘white’ literature” (italics hers).28 Here, Morrison extends a long lineage of American writers of color who have resisted the reductive strategies of readers who interpret their work primarily as a source of information about the marginalized histories from which they come. But as Morrison asserts her literary autonomy against that instrumentalization, she does not replace it with a criterion for judging the value of a text autonomously from the entanglements of race and culture. “Of what use is it to go on about ‘quality,’ being the only criterion for greatness” she asks, “when the definition of quality is itself the subject of much rage and is seldom universally agreed upon by everyone at all times?”29 This is a document of the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, where writers of color gained canonicity among white readers who struggled to learn how to read them. Morrison speaks to that effort by proposing categories for literary judgment that are bound up in racial difference but not beholden to it; she contends that every great work of literature speaks to historical realities while it also remains legible as an end in itself.30 The literary value that she describes is culturally relative and universal at once, with aesthetics and politics that

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are entwined but distinct. These oppositions exist in tension with each other to structure literary experience as Morrison describes it. This understanding of the relation between the literary and the political remains salient in Pamuk’s moment, when writers from the East are valued less often than their Western counterparts, and in terms that are severely straitened. The Swedish Academy might make more progress in its efforts to find more great writers in nations it has neglected if it developed a new vocabulary for honoring writers like Pamuk, and that would require revisiting rather than merely extending the problem of “Quality” that Morrison names. Morrison was right to identify its stultifying effects on writers who come from marginalized groups in hegemonic nations, and the cultural processes she describes operate with a specific toxicity when they cross national lines, as they do in Pamuk’s case. Gayatri Spivak has been making this argument for decades, and Pamuk’s case demonstrates one reason why Spivak is right, too—about critics working not only in the United States but also in Europe.31 The Swedish Academy provides evidence to that effect whenever it cloaks aesthetic value in foreign policy, with effects that run diagonally if not wholly contrary to the activist purpose it states. The academy conceded the difficulty of reconciling political activism with aesthetic judgment after Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in 1980, when committee member Artur Lundkvist conceded that the laureate for the year wasn’t “a very big artist.” But that concession was not an argument against the academy’s decision, which Lundkvist praised as a parry against an adversary that was chilling: “We helped a man in danger, who had important things to say, [so that he would be] able to say them much later.”32 Thus weaponized for use in the Cold War, the Nobel Prize lent Western support to anticommunist insurgencies it embodied in the author of world literature. This discourse instrumentalizes non-Western writers as tools for the promotion of democracy around the world, and it is updated in the announcement of Pamuk’s Nobel Prize in 2006. As the U.S. national media absorbed Samuel Huntington’s language of clashing civilizations into a grand narrative of the way the world would work after the terrorist attacks of 2001,33 the academy honored Pamuk for his discovery of “new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”34 The reparative potential of that discovery was underlined in Horace Engdahl’s accusation—framed as praise—that Orhan Pamuk “has stolen the novel, one can say, from us

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westerners and has transformed it to something different from what we have ever seen before.” Engdahl made that statement on behalf of Western people broadly defined, investing Pamuk with singular authority to “take our own image and reflect it in a partially unknown and partially recognizable image.” As a criterion for literary value, this is strangely narcissistic, honoring the non-Western writer for his representation of Western people, primarily. His literary quality becomes evident in his reflective function; like the protagonist of Snow on the streets of Frankfurt, the author of world literature shows Europeans what they really look like, as described in chapter 2. That expectation that world literature should mirror the West back to itself with the addition of insight from outside leads Engdahl to a claim that is patently false: that Pamuk writes with the wide vantage because he has “roots in two cultures.” In fact, Pamuk’s “roots” lie squarely in Turkey, which is his native country, and from which he did not travel much until he was an adult. In the course of his work, he travels significantly now, and he spends portions of every year at an apartment in New York. He also reads widely in Western literary traditions, and his cultural formation is global in scope. But if that hybridity seems negligible in biographic terms, it is more worrying when it is promoted as a criterion for literary value.35 Engdahl locates Pamuk’s credential for entry to world literature in his identity as a Turk, which is configured here to be ontologically double, reconciling cultures that are opposite if not mutually exclusive. That configuration obscures the ways East and West have always been intertwined, in literature as in everything else; the poets Anglophone readers recognize as Victorians developed their aesthetics through sustained engagement with translation from Swahili, as Annmarie Drury has shown.36 That network of connections is erased in Orhan Pamuk’s representation as a traveler from a very foreign land, which exoticizes him in ways that are familiar to any reader of Edward Said. And as it is factually and politically wrong, the figuration of Pamuk as a legible text from a region that is otherwise inscrutable is also bad for any conception of world literature that is yet to come. It ensures the centrality of the Western literatures that enable a writer to reflect the West back to itself in a new light from a position that seems, impossibly, rooted in two distant locations at once. An aspirant to global literary status might balk at that prescription, which grows logically out of an instrumental understanding of the good

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that literature can do in the world: to the degree that literary texts are judged by the transparency of the windows they offer on people and places that are otherwise hard to see, their value grows exponentially by the size of the view they offer; two cultures yield more to see than one. The literary value of the non-Western writer becomes contingent on the political utility he serves, and that utility is defined in Western terms. The writers who follow Orhan Pamuk across the Bosphorus are expected to operate at the highest levels of achievement in the political sphere, and to reassure Western publics that literature retains extraliterary relevance somewhere in the world. MARKETING WRITERS TO GUILTY TOURISTS

This portrait of the non-Western novelist as a peacemaker between cultures at war advances imperatives that are as commercial as they are political. The Nobel Laureates who promote Western values around the world provide a service that is commodified along with the alterity of their literary texts. The welcome that Anglophone publics extend to Pamuk as the spokesperson for moderate and humanistic Islam reveals the depth of their anxieties about the Islamic world. And as they worry explicitly about the threats of Islamic terrorism, they also harbor less readily expressible worries about the security of the privileged place they inhabit in a globalizing world. Sarah Brouillette makes the convincing argument that a new complicity emerges around the turn of the twenty-first century between “the author and the reader, as both producer and consumer work to negotiate with, if not absolve themselves of, postcoloniality’s touristic guilt.” 37 Cultural institutions like the Swedish Academy are as deeply embedded in the inequities of global capital as the readers and writers that Brouillette describes, so it is with some inevitability that they, too, express Western literary critics’ ambivalence about the cultural, political, and economic processes that structure the globe to work to their broad and collective advantage. The discourse of the Nobel Prize helps the reading classes manage the “touristic guilt” that attends an armchair engagement with people who are relatively poor. The announcement of Orhan Pamuk’s award provides a case in point, demonstrating how Western institutions use non-Western writers to imply the good world literature can do by promoting European

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values all over the world. And if its quick succession after his acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide fulfilled the grand narratives of Turkish nationalists, who suspected that anti-Turkish Europeans sought a ventriloquist’s dummy to utter the insults they said in private about Turks, the Swedish Academy contributed to that effect inadvertently by honoring Pamuk in terms that are so overtly political that they undermine his efforts to claim the autonomy of the literary. His canonization became dependent on the political good he might do, and it packaged his literary oeuvre and his celebrity as new commodities from an exotic place. The good of world literature became part of its brand, guaranteeing absolution for any prurient pleasure a Western reader might take in the reading experience. This discourse surrounding contemporary world literature recuperates for the twenty-first century—and for a global economy—Alfred Nobel’s faith in literature’s peacemaking effects, and it is neatly compressed in Orhan Pamuk’s reception. He appears to his Anglophone publics as a Middle Eastern man38 who defies the Islamophobic stereotypes that would render him a zealot if not a terrorist, offering reassurance with his arrival about fears that secularism and enlightenment exist in the Islamic East. And as he provides evidence of that existence in his person, he bridges the gap that his readers perceive between themselves and his native city and country. He also fills the temporal space between the present that has its problems and the future where they are diminished. Promising an era of greater geopolitical peace, as his reviews so often attest, he enables a discourse that repeats the errors it is designed to correct: it protects the universality of Western standards of judgments by reducing the paths for literary circulation from East to West and back again. THE NOBEL PRIZE REWARDS ART THAT SERVES THE PEOPLE

To consider that parochialism and what to do about it, I want to trace it also through the controversies that surrounded Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize in 2012. The first Chinese laureate who is neither in exile nor in jail, Mo Yan fails utterly to conform to the history and the trope that cast the Nobel Laureate as a speaker of truth to power. His passivity as a citizen is perhaps most evident in his silence on the subject of the state’s ill treatment of writers more activist than he is—most notably, the writer and activist Liu Xiaobo. Liu was arrested in 2009 on charges of “inciting subversion of state

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power” with his work as the publisher of a prodemocracy magazine and the president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center from 2003 to 2007. After Liu won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2010, the state prevented him or any proxy from accepting the award, and dozens of writers and artists protested Liu’s imprisonment. Mo Yan was notably absent among them, and his silence prompted the artist Ai Weiwei to conclude that Mo Yan had “no involvement with the contemporary struggle.” 39 That impression was reinforced by Mo Yan’s participation in a state-sponsored ceremony in 2012. Along with other writers who had won state sanction, he copied excerpts from Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” and lent his implicit support to the Maoist doctrine that puts that literature in the service of the people.40 Mo Yan’s submission to that doctrine made him unworthy of the Nobel Prize in the eyes of many Chinese dissidents, who took risks that Mo Yan that did not and suffered accordingly. Ai Weiwei declared that “giving the award to a writer like this is an insult to humanity and to literature,” 41 and the writer Yu Jie agreed, comparing his compatriot to “German writers [who lavished] praise on Hitler and Goebbels.” 42 The metaphor is inflammatory, perhaps by intention, but the point stands even without it. While other artists were harassed and imprisoned for their insistence on their autonomy from the state, Mo Yan’s silence made him an instrument for the regime that renders art an instrument of the state. That Maoist description of literary value sounds doctrinaire in English, but it echoes in a different context the expectation written throughout AngloAmerican literary publics, which also hold a great writer responsible for political good. That definition of literary greatness finds expression through the cultural legacies of the European Enlightenment, where it is assumed that literature occupies a helpfully critical relation to the nation-state as imagined by John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Maximilien Robespierre. A good citizen in this tradition is an individual who represents herself meaningfully in the public sphere, and a good writer facilitates that act of representation—by rendering visible people and places that might otherwise go unseen; and, perhaps, by engaging in political activities that also illuminate those marginalized spaces in the cultural landscape. The announcement of Alice Munro’s Nobel Laureate in 2013 displays this logic by which Western writers gain canonical status for putting literary form and content to new use. When the Swedish Academy hon-

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ored Munro as a “master of the contemporary short story,” it located her relevance in her mastery of content as well as form. “Set in small town environments,” the academy declared, her stories shed light on corners of the world “where people’s struggle for a decent life often result in difficult relationships and moral conflicts.” 43 Giving institutional contours to the activist credo that the personal is political, the Swedish Academy assumes the broad significance of Munro’s revelation of “cultural nooks that are obscure,” and that assumption is made plainer elsewhere. Michiko Kakutani praised Munro in the New York Times as “one of the foremost practitioners of the [short story] form” while she also noted Munro’s contributions to the literary representation of her gender by “mining the inner lives of girls and women.” 44 Munro’s ability to pull those gendered experiences to light from the depths of the earth lends political utility to her aesthetic achievements, affirming this truth that works axiomatically in the contemporary West: the texts that are canonized as world literature innovate existing genres and forms to widen the space that marginalized peoples occupy in the public sphere. The Swedish Academy’s description of Munro’s oeuvre might apply to Mo Yan’s as well if he and his characters lived in Canada rather than China. Like Munro, Mo Yan attends closely to “small town environments, where the struggle for a socially acceptable existence often results in strained relationships and moral conflicts.” 45And as Munro brings her readers into the lives of people who are marginalized by their geography and their gender, Mo Yan fosters his readers’ identification with characters who live far away from the metropolitan centers of his national culture; they are humble people in rural locales that are rarely seen in Western media. Like Munro, Mo Yan is rarely seen performing political work outside of his literary texts; like Munro, he lives in a nation and a world in which there is political work to be done. But Mo Yan is judged much more harshly for his myopic focus on the literary at the expense of the political, prompting Salman Rushdie to call him “a patsy for the regime.” EVERYBODY IS A PATSY

Rushdie was not alone in that judgment, but he has singular authority to issue it publicly. His “blasphemous” portrayal of the prophet Mohammed in his Satanic Verses (1988) prompted Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a

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fatwa that called pious Muslims to impose the death sentence on him. Rushdie went into hiding in London as his publisher and booksellers confronted the threat, and writers all over the world spoke in his defense. As his security expanded to allow it, U2 invited him onstage at Wembley Stadium in a “gesture of solidarity.” The Irish Independent described the event as a meeting between “the most infamous author on the planet and the most famous singer in the world.” The rock photographer Anton Corbijn captured an image of the pair trading glasses and mugging for the camera,46 and Rushdie ascended to celebrity status in his new home in New York City,47 although his name remained on an Al-Qaeda hit list as late as 2010.48 In that context, Rushdie’s judgment of Mo Yan implied an unfavorable comparison to himself with a strain of self-promotion, but it seems credible, too, by widely held standards. In the history of the Nobel Prize, Mo Yan’s political reticence stands in contrast to laureates like Harold Pinter, who become known for the confrontations they stage with the excesses of their states. Pinter had become a prominent figure in British opposition to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan when he won the Nobel Prize in 2005, and some critics suspected that the academy selected him to represent that position that was widely held in literary circles. And Pinter spoke as a proxy for others who held that view—whether or not that service was actively sought—by using his acceptance speech to call the world’s attention to the huge numbers of civilians killed in the military conflict. Quoting a poem by Pablo Neruda to render the violence of war more vivid, Pinter sought to bring the leaders of the United States and Great Britain to trial in the International Criminal Court, and he volunteered to write the speech that George W. Bush could give to clarify the foundations of his foreign policy: “You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.”49 Announcing the good that world literature can do against a geopolitical bully, his speech was amplified by the microphone that Alfred Nobel bought a century earlier with an inheritance gained in munitions. Pinter concluded his remarks by turning his audience’s attention away from the war and toward the playwright on stage, declaring himself painfully exposed. But he also contended that such exposure is unavoidable in “a writer’s life,” which “is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it.” By Pinter’s analysis, protection is afforded to a writer only through the

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unsavory alliances he makes with the powerful forces he should oppose. Of the rest, Pinter says, “it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb—unless you lie—in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.”50 The writer becomes recognizable by his difference from politicians like George Bush and Tony Blair, but also by his direct and dangerous confrontation with them. But this Harold Pinter who has become an elder statesman of British literary culture and a vocal critic of his government bears little resemblance to the youthful Pinter, who was much more like Mo Yan. Disavowing political commitments altogether, Pinter claimed Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco as his early influences, and he was received among the least overtly political in that school. Martin Esslin—who coined the term “the theater of the absurd”—observed that Pinter “has occasionally wanted to create the impression” that he had no politics at all.51 And that impression was arguably desirable for Pinter at the time, when he jockeyed for position among modernists who posited “absurdism” and “engagement” as mutually exclusive opposites.52 In that binary division, Pinter aligned himself with Beckett’s absurdism and against the “didactic and moralistic theater” he saw in writers like Peter Brook. He affirmed in 1961 that he “was not committed as a writer, in the usual sense of the term, either religiously or politically,”53 because his primary commitment was to his art, and that commitment was understood to be exclusive. Nearly twenty-five years later, Pinter described that exclusivity as an attempt to write literature that transcended “politicians and political structures and political acts,” which he saw “with detached contempt.”54 The contempt endured longer than the detachment, however, as Pinter’s political engagements grew increasingly direct over the course of his career. In 1979 he unearthed a play that he wrote in 1958 but suppressed, apparently because the bluntness of its politics contrasted too sharply with the aesthetic subtlety to which he aspired. The Hothouse narrated the suffering and subsequent uprising of inmates in a “rest home,” and it was received as a representation of the ways that individuals suffer under the pressures of authoritarian institutions. It is also read as the mark of a transitional moment between Pinter’s early “comedy of menace” and his later works, which consistently staged scenes of domination and victimization. And as his plays turned with regularity to nonfictional abuses of human and civil

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rights, the playwright became more confrontational in his public appearances. He spoke in his interviews as an ardent critic of Tony Blair, and that position was acknowledged tacitly in the announcement of his Nobel Laureate, which honored him as a writer who “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.”55 That announcement typifies Pinter’s Anglophone reception in recent years, when his early disengagement from politics is largely obscured by his reputation as an energetic activist for the marginalized and oppressed.56 But it is significant that Pinter waited until his career was established before he made those oppositional gestures, and his more attentive critics have asked what changed to prompt them. Mark Taylor-Batty speculates that the “domestic stability” Pinter found with Lady Antonia Fraser gave him the energy and motivation to confront institutional power directly,57 while Charles Grimes suggests that Pinter never “objected to political art per se but rather its obviousness, its tendency to reduce complexity to slogans and clichés.” 58 Whatever the cause, it seems that the early Pinter concurred with Mo Yan about this: a writer has a primary obligation to maximize the greatness of his art, and any political work he might do should be subordinated to that effort—if it is done at all. But that subordination of the political to the aesthetic registers differently when non-Western writers assert it, particularly when they speak as citizens of states that represent some economic or cultural threat to Western hegemony—like China, for example, or Turkey. A writer from North America or Europe might gain canonicity through the same trajectory that enabled Harold Pinter to spend the early portion of his career gaining the literary credibility he needed to make his politics audible to a national public in his later years. Alternatively, she might gain canonicity as Alice Munro did, by innovating a literary form to give new representation to people and cultures that tend to go unseen. In either of those cases, she might spend decades of her career without any overtly political engagements at all. She might spend the bulk of her days learning how to write better books, leaving others to do the labor of improving the world in which literature appears. And if she writes sufficiently well to gain a global audience, she might ascend a podium to express a humanist’s predictable—and predictably neglected—critique of her state, whatever it is. The nations that grow out of the French Revolution marginalize writers and outlaw their imprisonment, but those legal protections are less indica-

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tive of any ethical or political superiority than of the comparative history that enables them to construct state power in different ways. The global currency that China and Turkey seek through their literary writers gives national prominence to Mo Yan and Pamuk that is structurally unavailable to writers like Morrison, Munro, and Pinter. In nations that already figure hegemonically on a global stage, literary writers voice a critique of the center from the margins with predictable regularity and predictably scant result. They lack the status and the agency that Margaret Atwood attributed to Pamuk when she described him only somewhat correctly as “the equivalent of rock star, guru, diagnostic specialist and political pundit” in Turkey.59 Lacking that centrality to the dominant culture, writers in Western nations gain the privilege of safety: they know that there is nothing they can say that would jeopardize their ability to go home from an awards ceremony and write. The political speeches of Western laureates are effectively silenced by the cacophony of the culture industry; no trial is necessary to prevent them from mounting an effective subversion against the state. Orhan Pamuk’s words prove more audible in his national culture, and his freedom is proportionally less. But he is obligated by the conditions of world literature to advocate for freedom of speech and human rights while he also devotes his life to his art. He becomes functionally obligated to do two very demanding jobs at once: while he produces literary work that demonstrates the aesthetic quality of a masterpiece, he also engages in political action that is unambiguously on the side of right against his state—and those abstract nouns work as they do in the lexicon of Western humanism, extend to fit the scale of the globe. LITERARY AUTONOMY AND THE FREEDOM TO BE SILENT

Mo Yan has frequently noted that political critique exists in terms that are relative, not absolute. “Many of the people who have criticized me online are Communist Party members themselves,” he observes. “They also work within the system. And some have benefited tremendously within the system. . . . I am working in China. I am writing in a China under Communist Party leaders. But my works cannot be restricted by political parties.” Locating his clearest statement of his politics in his literary work, Mo Yan argues—as Pinter did, too, decades earlier—for the autonomy of the

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literary sui generis. Mo Yan has reiterated that assertion throughout his career, as in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, when he urged his readers to ignore his interviews and public appearances, contending that “you will find everything I need to say in my works.” 60 This removal resembles the early Pinter’s “detached contempt” for the political as such, and it also squares easily with the modernist trope of the writer who locks himself dans le grenier, far away from worldly demands. That figuration of the solitary writer is easy to read in this context as a defensive gesture, rationalizing Mo Yan’s silence to make it appear more principled than it is. And his silence may or may not be principled, but its intentionality seems clear. Mo Yan suggests it with his adoption of a pen name that means “don’t speak.” Every enunciation of his name—卓妨— reiterates that command, and journalists have asked him to interpret its meaning in this context. Born Guan Moye (䭉嫐㤕) to a family of farmers, Mo Yan explains his chosen name very differently to his domestic and foreign interlocutors. To Chinese journalists, he says that he wanted to chide himself perpetually toward greater productivity, so he urges everyone around him to repeat the injunction to speak less—to turn away from the clamor of everyday life, toward literary experience; to write more. The decision has a more political valence as he explains it to Western journalists by locating it the Chinese culture of his birth.61 At that time, Mo Yan observes, “people’s lives were not normal. So my father and mother told me not to speak outside. If you speak outside, and say what you think, you will get into trouble. So I listened to them and I did not speak. When I started to write, I thought every great writer had to have a pen name. I remembered my mom and my dad telling me do not speak. So I took Mo Yan for my pen name. It is ironic that I have this name because I now speak everywhere.” 62 So, by Mo Yan’s description, he responds to every injunction not to speak—that is his name—by speaking “everywhere.” The irony of that command lies perhaps in its defiance of the rules for literary writers who are beholden to a multinational publishing industry, which makes press junkets and literary speeches integral parts of their job. But that irony is compounded in Mo Yan’s reception, where his detractors contend that he may speak frequently, but he doesn’t say much. Against that criticism, he locates the political outside of his job description, contending that a writer should create art for art’s sake and leave the rest to others.

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Mo Yan is exceptional in the history of Nobel Prizes for renouncing political engagement so explicitly and consistently, and the exception marks a notable revision to the standards for canonization in world literature. In the West as in China, many observers lamented the Swedish Academy’s deviation from its mission statement as it is generally understood—to honor writers who speak on behalf of marginalized peoples who are unable to speak for themselves. That lament was phrased most pointedly and perhaps most effectively by Salman Rushdie, whose criticism of Mo Yan as “the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov” 63 was cited by other critics who also asked why the Swedish Academy honored a writer known for his compliance with a state that tramples its citizens’ human rights, and what that selection means for the Nobel Prize and the global culture it constructs. Some critics have argued that Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize means less in this context than it seems because he exerts greater resistance to his regime than his detractors allow. The Chinese scholar Chengzhou He, for example, contends that Mo Yan “performs rural Chineseness” in his literary texts as “a counterdiscourse to subvert, revise, and supplement if not subvert, the dominant grand discourse of modern China in a reflective or corrective manner.” 64 Comparatist Sabina Knight agrees, asserting that “astute readers recognize [Mo Yan’s] veiled yet clear political critiques” throughout his literary oeuvre. For Knight, Mo Yan’s subversive potential becomes evident precisely in the reticence that he explicates in his essay “To Defend the Dignity of the Novel,” which locates the value of literature in its full autonomy from other social and political forces: “A great novel has no need to roll around like a pet,” Mo Yan writes, “or to howl with the pack like a hyena. It has to be like a whale, roaming alone and breathing resonantly in the depths of the sea.” 65 With fins rather than feet, the writer that Mo Yan depicts exists outside of human society, but that is not to say that he is apolitical. As Knight suggests, Mo Yan’s characters “don’t generally exhibit the uncorrupted core of individual selfhood common in U.S. fiction,” and “the characters who qualify as heroes evince an almost libertarian allegiance to personal freedom.” 66 They are by this account like the writer as Mo Yan describes him, enjoying an ontological distance from human society. This rhetorical construction of the writer who lives outside of politics altogether enables the novelist to represent himself traveling through a politicized world without being

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touched by it, and without touching it in return. Like the early Pinter, he stands apart from the political altogether and views that detachment as a useful condition for his aesthetic work. But if the novelist locates himself outside of politics, his critic sees politics inherent in that stance. Knight describes Mo Yan’s rejection of the political as “libertarian” and uses the German word realpolitik to suggest that his politics are among the most “liberal” available to a working writer in China. The context of her argument on Mo Yan’s behalf implies that she does not intend the negative connotations these words carry for many U.S.-based critics, who associate realpolitik with Henry Kissinger’s justificatory usage. By contrast, Knight locates literary value in historical contingencies to agree with Chengzhou He that Mo Yan’s subversion of state-sanctioned discourses is more slyly disruptive than openly adversarial, and that might be the best world literature can do under the circumstances. THE BULLY PULPIT IN STOCKHOLM

The Swedish Academy seemed to take that position when it brought Mo Yan into the company of the more directly oppositional laureates who precede him, and he responded in kind. The day after his reception ceremony, he was asked to comment on the continued imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo, and his response was much more pointed than any he had given before: he expressed his hope that Liu would “get his freedom as soon as possible—get his freedom in good health as soon as possible—and then be able to study his politics and study his social systems as he likes.”67 That gentle criticism of Liu’s imprisonment prompted celebration among Chinese dissidents like Ai Weiwei, who saw it as a departure from Mo Yan’s prior refusal to comment, and he said that he wanted “to welcome Mo Yan back into the arms of the people. If this sort of courage is the result, I hope more Chinese writers will be given Nobel Prizes.”68 The dissident Hu Jia concurred, and he located the cause of Mo Yan’s shifting position in his recent reception of the Nobel Prize: “What has happened in the last 24 hours has changed him. A Nobel Prize, whether for peace or for literature, bestows on one a sense of wrong and right.”69 The prize’s enlightening effects on its winners are less evident than the material support it lends to good causes that need it—not least, to the dawning recognition of the Armenian genocide in Turkey. Just three years

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after Pamuk was charged with the crime of “insulting Turkishness” for speaking of that history, thousands of Turkish people signed a petition that said approximately the same thing he did.70 And as the national culture broached the subject discursively, the state broached it officially, too, by building a rapprochement with Armenia in the wake of Pamuk’s prize.71 The Swedish Academy’s relative influence on that political progress is finally unknowable, but it is also presumed to exist, and not only by Alfred Nobel. After Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Prize was announced, the executive director of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity urged the Turkish people to use it as a tool for progressive reform in open letter published in the daily Hürriyet. Conceding that the prize might be interpreted as “a rebuke” from a domineering neighbor, David L. Philips proposed that it could also function as “a meaningful catalyst” for change that Turkish people want. Progressive Turks could claim ownership of the prize in that context, Philips suggests, and take it as a tool to “strengthen democracy in Turkey and address European concerns.”72 They could, in other words, use the Nobel Prize to move the Turkish people closer to genocide acknowledgment by reframing that political position in strategic terms, noting the material benefits that the nation would gain by following the EU’s guidelines for freedom of speech. This argument empties the Nobel Prize of literary significance altogether, and it also empties genocide acknowledgment of its ethical content by rendering it newly compatible with the discourses of Turkish nationalism that genocide enabled in the first place. Creating a rhetorical position from which Turks could find new agreement with the EU in its national interest, this argument typifies a general tendency to receive every Nobel Prize as an instrument for political change and to ask: what good can it do? MO YAN’S LITERARY QUALITY AND POLITICAL GOOD

That question about the utility of the prize as a bully pulpit underwrites the debate between Mo Yan’s defenders and detractors about his worthiness as China’s second literary laureate. The opposing arguments in this debate are encapsulated by the critics Charles Laughlin and Perry Link, who wrote dueling polemics about three distinct but related hypotheses: that Mo Yan was complicit with his state’s ill treatment of other writers; that his political

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complicity mars his aesthetics; and that this weakness—which traverses the political and the aesthetic—renders him unworthy for canonization in world literature.73 Link contended that Mo Yan has recourse to no language except that which has been eviscerated by his state, so he is unable to write honestly about all manner of “sensitive subjects.” Cloaking them in layers of jokes because he cannot address them directly, he writes with “a kind of daft hilarity,” no matter what he writes about. His narration of the famine that devastated rural China in Big Breasts and Wide Hips (2009) is stripped of any account of human suffer, and it produces inversions of expected reality that are less painful than funny.74 An absurd chain of events concludes with interspecies breeding, as a rabbit is inseminated with the sperm of a sheep, and the characters collapse in giggles at the thought of the result. Link acknowledges as counterargument the critics who read a salutary “black humor” in this representation of the devastating effects of Mao’s agricultural policies during the Great Leap Forward, but he contends that the novel works ultimately to serve the state that aims to put the famine under erasure entirely. Link is right to observe that Mo Yan leaves a lacuna in the text where the suffering of Chinese citizens under Mao goes unrepresented, because either it is too terrible to recall or the description is too threatening to write. For Link, the difference becomes semantic: “From the regime’s point of view, this mode of writing is useful not just because it diverts a square look at history but because of its function as a safety valve.” By this reading, Mo Yan commits a grievous political error by alluding to state violence without representing it—even indirectly—because that allusion supplies evidence of Chinese literary life that the government can use against its critics. In its sheer existence, Mo Yan’s oeuvre implies to Link that the Chinese writer enjoys sufficient freedom to speak out about his history and supports the statist position that Chinese citizens don’t have much to say. Mo Yan’s writing is bad by this assessment because it lends itself so well to bad politics. The critic Anna Sun refines the argument that Link makes more obliquely: that Mo Yan does not deserve a Nobel Prize because his writing exhibits an aesthetic weakness that is causally related to his complicity with the regime. Where Link catalogs Mo Yan’s failures in the realm of literary content, Sun describes them as a problem of form: “The discontent lies in Mo Yan’s language,” she writes. “Open any page, and one is treated to a jumble of words that juxtaposes rural vernacular, clichéd socialist

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rhetoric, and literary affectation. It is broken, profane, appalling, and artificial; it is shockingly banal. The language of Mo Yan is repetitive, predictable, coarse, and mostly devoid of aesthetic value.” This linguistic impoverishment is for Sun the inevitable result of Mo Yan’s cultural education in the age of Mao. “No matter how sincere a critic Mo Yan might be of the social and political regime,” Sun argues, “his language is a language that survived the Cultural Revolution, when the state deliberately administered a radical break with China’s literary past. Mo Yan’s prose is an example of a prevailing disease that has been plaguing writers who came of age in what can be called the era of Mao-ti, a particular language and sensibility of writing promoted by Mao in the beginning of the revolution.”75 Sun traces Mo Yan’s deficiencies as a writer to his fluency in this language that serves literature poorly because its primary aim is political. As “a child of the revolution,” Sun writes, Mo Yan was educated in a historical moment when “a new literary language was invented” and alternative literary languages were obscured, rendering the nation’s cultural history illegible. Along with his contemporaries, the nascent laureate was schooled to read no Chinese literature except “social realist work written between 1949 and 1966 that bore a strong influence of Mao’s political aesthetic doctrine.”76 The rest of his nation’s literary traditions became as inaccessible to him as literatures written in other languages, just as literatures written in Turkey before Atatürk’s language reforms became inaccessible to Orhan Pamuk. Both writers were severed as readers from the texts that their ancestors wrote because both learned new languages that were artificially constructed to serve the needs of the state. TRANSLATING CRITIQUE

Like Pamuk, Mo Yan is said to be extraordinarily indebted to his translator, and particularly to the translator who conveys him into English. Anna Sun echoes an argument that is made about Orhan Pamuk, too,77 when she proposes that Mo Yan might have his English translators to thank for his international success because “the English translations of Mo Yan’s novels, especially by the excellent Howard Goldblatt, are in fact superior to the original in their aesthetic unity and sureness.” To describe that superiority of the English translation to the Mandarin original, Sun cites a positive review of Goldblatt’s translation of Mo’s The Republic of Wine (1992/2000) in

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the Washington Post. The reviewer who praised “Mo Yan’s shimmering poetry and brutal realism as work akin to that of Gorky and Solzhenitsyn” was praising the translator, Sun contends, rather than the writer: “Only the ‘brutal realism’ is Mo Yan’s. The ‘shimmering poetry’ comes from a brilliant translator’s work.” And by Sun’s analysis, that limitation is shared widely among writers of Mo’s time and place, since the only language available to them was a language that is “diseased.” “This is perhaps the ultimate tragedy of the fate of contemporary Chinese writers,” Sun writes. “Too many of them can no longer speak truth to power in a language free of the scars of the revolution itself.”78 Sun’s argument points to broader questions about the ways that Western cultural and educative institutions expand their reach to include the literatures of the rest of the world: tethering literary greatness to freedom of speech in the public sphere limits our access to writers in states that make that kind of political activism so dangerous that it is hard to reconcile with intellectual life. This limitation seems worth noting as a problem for Western literary institutions, particularly since it sets two of their stated intentions in conflict with each other. On one hand, the Swedish Academy aims to anoint more laureates who come from non-Western locations, while, on the other, it selects its laureates by their likeness to the ideal citizen of a participatory democracy. It seems incumbent on Western critics to observe that this contradiction serves Western writers from Toni Morrison to Harold Pinter at the expense of non-Western writers like Orhan Pamuk and Mo Yan. All of them live and write in a world where the strong tend to dominate the weak, and all of them look critically in their work at the governmental and economic structures through which that domination is maintained. But their relations to those structures in their lived experiences vary greatly, and those variations shape the terms on which they enter a global literary culture. Pamuk and Mo Yan live in states that threaten to imprison them and eviscerate their literary language, while the only silencing effects that Morrison and Pinter experience come from their relative and unequal access to microphones in their media-saturated cultures. As U.S.-based literary readers wage broad resistance to creeping authoritarianism at home and abroad, we overlook how the exigencies of authoritarian states are suppressed in the critical discourses we use. Placing the greatest burden for activist work on the writers who come from the states that are farthest from

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Europe, the critical discourse surrounding the Nobel Prize builds a literary world on the very wrong assumption that writers in the West have less political work to do as if the states and institutions to which they belong do less than their share of harm. COMPLICITY IS A UNIVERSAL BUT RELATIVE CONDITION

The critic Pankaj Mishra traces this assumption and its consequences in his polemic against the Western critics who deemed Mo Yan unworthy of the Nobel Prize. Mishra did not dispute Mo Yan’s complicity with the communist regime; he agreed with Salman Rushdie that Mo Yan has often held silent while his state has abused its power over its citizens. But he placed that reticence in the relative context of Anglophone writers—Martin Amis, for example, Salman Rushdie, and John Updike—who are held to a much lower standard for political activism. As examples, Mishra cites the moment when Salman Rushdie supported George Bush’s military foray into Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of 2001, and when John Updike detailed the quotidian lives of white suburbanites during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Those moments may not be wholly forgotten, as Mishra argues, but nor are they are overdetermining, because “we almost never judge British and American writers by their politics alone.”79 Their relative lack of accountability for their politics suggests to Mishra—and to me—an “unexamined assumption” that persists throughout Western literary cultures, and it has broad implications: that the writers who are culturally most proximal to Western democracies are “naturally possessed of loftier virtue” because they “stand along with their governments on the right side of history.” That ontological rightness is assumed to inhere in Western humanism and the nation-states it creates, freeing writers in the United States and Europe from the expectation “to take a public stance against their political class for waging catastrophic—and wholly unnecessary—wars.” The Western writer gains the luxury of literary autonomy by living in a nation and culture aligned with the highest aims of Western humanism. Bound by the perimeter of the Western nation, any oppositional gesture that a writer like Toni Morrison or Harold Pinter makes is understood as something like a quibble among friends, and one that need not occupy the writer throughout her career. More sustained opposition is demanded, however,

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from writers who belong to states and cultures that represent a threat to Western values and Western power—a nation in the Islamic East, perhaps, or with the economic might of China. That unevenness underwrites the humanism that is the cultural legacy of the Swedish Academy in the age of neoliberal globalization, where it works to contrary purposes. As it asserts explicitly a less Eurocentric imagination of the world, it limits the entry of writers from the East by holding them to a standard for political work that they are unequally able to do. This contradiction is not easily addressed because it rises out of two assumptions that run deep through the discourses of world literature in the West: first, that European humanism is fundamentally correct; and, second, that literature does political good as humanism agent and promoter. These assumptions work together to obligate Nobel Laureates to hold their nations accountable to the values of the European Enlightenment; a great writer with bad politics becomes a contradiction in terms. And that contradiction is an artifact of the contemporary West, where it becomes hard to imagine a non-Western laureate who devotes as little time and energy to activism against her state as Alice Munro, Harold Pinter, and company. That inequality is written into the discourses by which the Swedish Academy leads Western institutions in the construction of a literary canon that purports to be global. And it will not be easily dispelled. Its authorizing power in Western cultures is evidenced in Perry Link’s rebuttal to Pankaj Mishra, written under the title “Politics and the Chinese Language: What Mo Yan’s Detractors Got Wrong.” Link reasserts his argument that Mo Yan’s literary achievements are limited by his reliance on Mao-ti, but he remains less interested in literary craft than in its political consequence. Imagining that he and Mishra agree about matters of importance unrelated to literature, he writes in a speculative mode: “My guess is that Pankaj Mishra, if you could shake him by the shoulders, would say (as I would) that any citizen of any country should be free to criticize any government anywhere that oppresses anyone. But his article does not leave that impression.”80 This critique leaves unexamined the possibility that Mishra distinguishes more sharply than Link does between what is best for China and what Mo Yan should do to advance that goal. Pankaj Mishra might wish the Chinese people had more freedoms without holding Mo Yan accountable for orienting his working days toward that result.81 After all, Alice Munro is not well

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known for her activism against the myriad conditions that structure the wealth and poverty on which every Canadian’s privilege depends, and the early Harold Pinter spent his time writing plays rather than protesting against his state’s behavior in the Middle East. Life in the twenty-first century renders every writer—indeed, every person—compromised while it also ensures that the pressures that are put on those compromises are relative indeed. To suggest otherwise is to imagine the world as if it is a nation, and to hold the writers of world literature to the standards of political engagement that Western critics would hold the citizens of participatory democracies. Gayatri Spivak has been articulate about the tendency of North American critics to project our imagination of the nation on the world, and I analyze the construction of that imaginative projection more fully in the next chapter. But the events surrounding Pamuk’s Nobel Prize demonstrate that we are not alone in this error, and Spivak’s analysis is illuminating about that, too. She takes pains to say that she is not “against the tendency to conflate ethnos of origin and the historical space left behind with the astonishing constructions of multicultural and multiracial identity for the United States.” Rather, she is against the tendency to use those constructions as “the founding principle for a study of globality. In the most practical terms, we are allowing a parochial decanonization debate to stand in for the study of the world.”82 This parochialism that Spivak sees in the United States persists in more general terms throughout European institutions, too, as the events surrounding Pamuk’s Nobel Prize attest: the enduring Westernness of “world literature” is protected by the cultural logic of the nation as we know it. When Alfred Nobel instructed the Swedish Academy to reward literature of an “ideal tendency,” he assumed a definition of the ideal that collapses the literary with the political in the discourse of the nation that is imperfect but trying to be better. It guarantees freedoms but distributes them unequally, and the humanities teach its citizens how to make that wrong right. That cultural legacy laces literary work tightly with political good, which is a happy thought for a critic. But it is hard to think at the turn of the twenty-first century, when the networks of global capital diminish any value that can’t be monetized, and the rantings of literary writers and critics sound faintly in the maw of that machine. That was the context in which Harold Pinter used his Nobel speech to inveigh against British

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involvement in the Iraq War, knowing—for better and for worse—that his government would not flinch. Literature is subordinated to politics and economics in most of our national cultures, all over the world, but that subordination works in very different ways—and the cultural logic of the Nobel Prize works against some kinds of subordination better than others. By honoring non-Western writers for behaving like good citizens of participatory democracies and representing freedom of speech even if they don’t have it, it places an undue burden on those writers who already have a significant job to do. It advances a standard for literary merit that consolidates Western hegemony around the world by rendering canonization contingent on political activism that is much riskier in some regions of the world than in others. For consistency’s sake and also for the good of a more global literary culture, Western institutions might make more transparent the criteria by which they work, so that national publics like Orhan Pamuk’s would not have to speculate how or whether the prize was laced with political interests. And if Philip Roth wins the Nobel Prize in 2019, or Karl Ove Knausgaard in 2020, somebody should lament his reluctance to spend his days doing anything other than living, writing, and selling books.

Chapter Six

WORLD LITERATURE AS AN ARTIFACT OF THE UNIVERSITY IN THE UNITED STATES The Part About the Critics

The key institution in the creation of World Literature has not been the literary festival, or even the commercial publishing house, but the university. —EDITORS OF n + 1

How do Western institutions convey non-Western writers to their Anglophone publics—under what pressures, by what logics, with what effects that are intended and not? I took up those questions in the preceding chapter by looking critically at the high honors that Orhan Pamuk wins in the West, including the Nobel Prize, while I also affirmed his worthiness to win those honors more fairly by better criteria. In this chapter, I further that line of critique by turning from the cultural institutions that have historically housed a “world republic of letters” in Europe1 to universities in the United States, where the critical discourses that circulate through the rarefied air of the Swedish Academy grow more terrestrially. That is to say that they grow more publicly, out of debate that traces their relative merits with as much precision and nuance as possible.2 That debate unfolds in Departments of English and Comparative Literature in the United States, among other places, where literary critics like me argue over the best ways to understand literature transnationally from the institutional location we share.3 That location is tiny relative to the national culture that contains it, but it exerts influence beyond the audience for conference papers, journal articles, and monographs. The scholarly debate over world literature shapes the curricula that teach sizable Anglophone publics how and what to read, which means that it also conditions the shape of the literary world to come. I began this book by asking what a writer has to do to travel from the margins

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to the center of that global literary culture, where an increasingly Anglophonic public will greet the next generation of writers to follow Orhan Pamuk into Western canons from locations to the east.4 With their future in mind, I am reading the debate for and against world literature with less interest in taking sides than in taking the polarity apart. By reading it rhetorically and historically, I want to show how it works as a product of its institutional location and, at the same time, as a producer of the globality it describes.5 The debate over world literature has kinds and degrees of that globality that it announces in its name; as the comparatist Longxi Zhang observed in 2014, “the most noticeable development in literary studies in the last decade or so is undoubtedly a renewed interest in world literature, and this is happening not only in the United States but also in China, India, Japan, and many other countries in Asia as well as in Latin America and other parts of the world.” 6 The term that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe pulled from the archives of German law in the eighteenth century is translated into the languages that enable literary scholarship all over the world, but that is not to say that its meaning is universally understood. Each translation of weltliteratur reflects the local concerns of its authors, who consider the specific ways that the national and linguistic traditions they study operate in a more global system, but they also reflect institutional pressures that vary greatly.7 As the translation that circulates among comparative critics in the United States represents a view of the world from a hegemonic nation in it, that translation also reflects the world as it appears from a Department of English or Comparative Literature, at a university like Harvard, Stanford, or UCLA.8 Globally central to literary critics but marginal to its national culture, that institutional location provides the meeting place for critics on every side of this scholarly debate, and it conditions the form and content of the arguments that constitute it. So while those polemics lack the rhetorical frame that pushes the Swedish Academy annually toward a consensus that can be stated on a stage, they cohere nonetheless as an artifact of the local culture of literary critics at universities in the contemporary United States. In the idioms of that time and place, “world literature” refers less to a canon of any kind than to a method of reading across borders of all sorts. And it is tested as an alternative or complement to other ways of meeting that interpretive challenge: via area studies, for example, critical race studies, Marxist theory, postcolonial theory, and translation theory. The debate

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that ensues places those theoretical approaches against each other for appraisal; they are valued for the degrees of purchase they give on literary texts in a global landscape that is varied and uneven. This criterion is particular to the contemporary moment, when scholarly critics seek new insight about the ways that literature works across differences of language, culture, power, and wealth, so heightened value accrues to the methods that work best for that purpose.9 A theoretical approach gains currency when it enables more critical analysis of literature’s complex relationships with the political and economic structures that have historically rendered difference as inequality and violence: neoliberal globalization, for example; colonialism and its legacies; gender discrimination; and white supremacy. The urgency of these concerns registers institutionally as well as intellectually on university campuses from Berkeley to Yale, where students voice new resistance to the ways that their identities are defined and constructed, and literary scholars measure the worth of their tools in their purchase on “the world.” As Eric Hayot suggests in a different context, “the status of the concept of the world” acquires “rhetorically unmatched prestige in literary criticism” of the contemporary period, when the “imaginaries and implications of the history of globalization” function as a “sign of political, social, and economic engagement (by both the critic and the artwork).” That protective sign hangs over world literature as a promise of the good a literary critic can do by reading the literary text in terms of its purchase on—or embeddedness in—the world. That promise sets the stakes for the debate over world literature; by taking a position for or against it, a critic asserts her ability to use the tools of her trade to illuminate or possibly even change the economic and political realities that fall loosely under the heading of globalization. These big claims for the good a literary critic can do without leaving her office are suggested in the invocation of “the world,” which signifies an abstraction but also has an appealing semblance of concreteness, as Hayot contends. That semblance “justifies, implicitly, the continued importance of humanistic study of culture,”10 and not a moment too soon. World literature arrives to do that cultural work, and the critics who argue “against” it stage a competition for the authority it confers. The most convincing of these define the stakes of their arguments clearly, marking the difference between theoretical arguments and the historical conditions that occasion them; between the figurative and the literal. Gayatri Spivak,

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for example, argues for postcolonial theory’s superior purchase on the political as a feature of literary interpretation because—unlike world literature—it takes the alterities within and among nations as its starting premise.11 Confining her argument within the university’s walls, Spivak argues for a better way to interpret a text, in which “better” means more revelatory of the relationship between the text and the world that contains it. The world lies outside of the purview of a critic who works on texts; to fill that distance with “substance would take us into the UN and international NGOs,” as Spivak argues, “the real players in a dominant feminist collectivity crossing borders—activist comparatism today. The obvious gap between the two cannot be filled by only academic labor.” That gap may be obvious to Spivak, but it is not obvious to all, perhaps because it is inconvenient: any acknowledgment of the limits of what “academic labor” can accomplish echoes the arguments that conservative politicians and anti-intellectual populists lodge with some success in the contemporary United States, where scholarly work in the humanities threatens to become optional because it is ornamental; in times of precarity, it is perhaps not worth the money. But the least convincing arguments that scholarly critics make against world literature are more interesting for my purposes, because they show how and why this term has become rhetorically aligned with features of contemporary life—and, specifically, with features of the U.S. university— that pose an institutional threat to literary critics. As an object of critique that is often poorly defined, “world literature” performs the same rhetorical function that “neoliberalism” does for contemporary humanists, as documented by the media theorist Terry Flew, who shows how neoliberalism emerged as “an all-purpose denunciatory” category that is “intellectually unsustainable.” Without lodging a defense of neoliberalism or any of the practices that fall under that rubric, Flew uses empirical evidence to analyze the ways that humanists use the term rhetorically. He documents its appearance in humanistic inquiry over a decade when references to neoliberalism multiplied by a factor of nine (1997–2007) without a proportionate rise in definitions of the term. Consequently, humanists who lack specific expertise in economics write with “a surprisingly strong degree of confidence about what it means” to suggest a broad array of cultural and economic practices that are anathema to the humanities. Neoliberalism refers to “the way things are” and, presumably, the way they should not be.12

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As U.S.-based critics invoke neoliberalism to create this bogeyman effect, so do they invoke world literature, which is presumed to be the handmaiden of neoliberalism in Departments of English and Comparative Literature. The Belgium-based scholar Pieter Vermeulun uses the firstperson plural to suggest the pervasiveness of this usage of world literature in a critical community that has no stated borders: “We all know what’s wrong with world literature,” he contends. It gives primacy of place to “domesticated differences” that prove more placating than disturbing, so they work more readily to protect the status quo than to alter it. “More damningly,” world literature offers its readers a “carefully calibrated mixture of the exotic and the familiar” that sells predictably well. And in that capacity, it reinforces “the material inequalities forged and perpetuated by the market” under its pretense as “an imaginary dispenser of equality.” Not only does it ignore the economic and political mechanisms that privilege the West at the expense of the rest; it helps “entrench actual global unevenness” by subtending the processes of global capital that enrich the rich and gut the poor.13 It flattens the differences among the languages, cultures, and aesthetic forms that literary critics study, so it is anathema to everything we do. By this account, world literature is a friend to an enemy of the faculty in Departments of English and Comparative Literature: it works in tandem with the institutional practices that make global capitalism resident in the university, where they array against every individual humanist as well the intellectual project we undertake collectively. The theorist Henry Giroux describes how the humanities are devalued in this moment when “democratic values give way to commercial values,” and “neoliberalism wraps itself in what appears to be an unassailable appeal to common sense.” And as “academic capitalism” marginalizes “intellectual ambitions,” literary study is “reduced to an instrument of the entrepreneurial self and social visions are dismissed as hopelessly out of date.” That dismissal applies to humanists categorically, and it diminishes the value of our work. By virtue of the professional investment we make in projects that don’t make money, we become recognizable as relics of a prior historical moment, when ideas had worth that retained its value beyond the university. Today, by contrast, “anyone who does not believe that rapacious capitalism is the only road to freedom and the good life is dismissed as a crank.”14 And no one wants that.

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This is an argument on behalf of the humanities, categorically, but it also works on behalf of the individual humanist—in this case, Henry Giroux— who fears that he will be prematurely aged as his work is devalued relative to his peers’ by its reduction to cash dollars. The humanist’s inability to generate the capital that a scientist can bring to the university becomes the sign but also the cause of his diminished ability to compete successfully in his field, which is no less a “field of struggle” than the demimondes that Pierre Bourdieu studied in modern Paris. Like those avant-garde artists, academics in the United States vie for the kinds of capital that we can spend in our local economy, and we win whenever we convince our audience of our contemporaneity, as evidenced in our ability to use the most current tools.15 At present we win by claiming a victory over the forces of global capital that pose a threat to us all—but those victories are rely heavily on the species of magical thinking that equates talk of revolution for revolution and “the world” for the world The n+1 editors sounded retrograde but were also sort of right when they lamented the tendency of the university to get sidetracked with “language questions” when there are “material issues” to solve. WHAT GOOD IS A LITERARY CRITIC?

The critics who argue for and against world literature convene under the auspices of the university in the United States, which pays us for that intellectual labor in amounts that vary greatly. As the mechanisms of global capital deepen the inequalities between rich and poor transnationally, they deepen the inequalities among tenured and contingent faculty, too. The most prominent authors of this body of scholarship are thoroughly insulated from the real precarity that is systemically inflicted on their least privileged colleagues,16 who teach nearly half the courses in the universities where they work.17 And that disparity grows by every measure in the early twenty-first century, as institutions of higher education embrace the market logics that stratify this sector of the economy like every other. This is to the general opprobrium of researchers in the humanities, who produce a growing body of scholarship about debt, monetization, and the ravages capitalism imposes on the most vulnerable people in the world. And, yet. As literary critics work against the cultural logics of global capitalism in theory and resist the intrusion of those logics in the institutions where we work, a notable silence still surrounds the ways those logics

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condition the scholarship we produce and structure our relations to one another. That silence was broken momentarily at the ceremony for the Truman Capote Award in 2017, when the first adjunct to win the prize turned to his audience to say, “If you are a tenured (or tenure-track) faculty member teaching in a humanities department with Ph.D. candidates, you are both the instrument and the direct beneficiary of exploitation.”18 This should not come as news to any literary critic in the United States, where the anxieties that attend the scarcity of tenure-track jobs for specialists in our field become readily apparent to anybody who has participated in the job market in any capacity—as a job seeker, an adviser, or a member of a search committee—in the past decade or so. But if those anxieties are easy to perceive, they are hard to discuss because they grow out of the inequality among us. In inchoate ways and inevitably, they suffuse the claims we make for the good that our scholarly work can do to dismantle the sources of inequality in the contemporary world. The theoretical arguments that literary critics make about the best ways to read globally become inscribed with a subtextual argument over the best ways to advance institutional interests that have nothing directly to do with Orhan Pamuk or any other writer; they are the interests of literary critics— individually and collectively—at U.S. universities. But they shape the discourses that are available for Pamuk’s reception, so they condition the ways he is read in Anglophone markets, where he is tasked with cultural work that belongs more rightfully to the faculty in English and comparative literature at universities in the United States. David Damrosch wrote at the apex of that institutional culture when he posed the titular question of world literature’s definition. Writing as tenured faculty at Columbia University and as the sitting president of the American Comparative Literature (ACLA), he translated Goethe’s phrase into the American English that is the lingua franca for literary scholarship across national lines.19 World literature gained currency quickly at conferences and in journals bearing the insignias of the country’s most prestigious universities. It remains contested among prominent figures in those institutions: Bruce Robbins and Gayatri Spivak at Columbia University; David Damrosch, Martin Puechner, and Mariano Siskind at Harvard; Emily Apter at New York University; Wai Chee Dimock at Yale; Eric Hayot and Djelal Kadir at Penn State; and Franco Moretti at Stanford. Bringing scholarly expertise and lived experience from the rest of the world to the

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United States, they convene in an institutional culture whose Americanness is more enhanced than diminished by its reliance on scholarship that is “not American” by every possible definition. As the Swedish Academy consolidates its authority by expanding its reach on a global scale, so does the U.S.-based university, building a brand on the strength of the research it produces and imports. The national specificity of world literature in this context is acknowledged by its advocates and its detractors alike. Primary among the detractors, Gayatri Spivak makes the convincing argument that world literature works epistemologically to project the cultural logics of American multiculturalism beyond the limits of their jurisdiction.20 While she appreciates the good that multiculturalism does within national borders, she objects to its use as “the founding principle for a study of globality” because it nurtures a false equivalence between the United States and the globe that contains it, which limits the ability of U.S.-based critics to understand a literary sphere that does not take this nation as its model: “In the most practical terms,” she argues, “we are allowing a parochial decanonization debate to stand in for the study of the world.”21 David Damrosch concedes that point to a degree with another titular question, “How American Is World Literature?,” and his answer: very. “The relative invisibility of our American standpoint is itself a characteristically American trait,” he contends, and literary critics can hardly claim immunity from that blindness. We hone theoretical models and discourses to analyze a world that resembles the United States on a larger scale, taking multiculturalism as a constitutive feature,22 and participatory democracy as its governing logic. The result is a globality where the United States is everywhere and nowhere at once. Its cultural logics become normative and, as such, invisible. That Americanness shapes the way world literature becomes legible in the U.S. university, where the divisions among departments render the national literature oddly displaced, as Damrosch and many others have observed. Subordinated to British literature in English departments and excluded from comparative literature altogether, U.S. literature is primary nowhere, which is not to say that it is ignored.23 The cultural logics of U.S. traditions—exceptionalism and, more recently, multiculturalism—structure global studies, too, for reasons that are a historical anomaly. As Damrosch observes, transnational literary study was institutionalized “in the 1950s at the hands of European émigrés who were pleased and relieved to find

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themselves at universities that did not give pride of place to a national literature and a jingoistic cultural agenda.”24 Those scholars who had fled the brutality of National Socialism in Germany wrote curricula in the humanities that subverted the nationalisms of their new nation, where their legacy works over time against the cosmopolitan spirit with which it began. By placing the United States under erasure in the curriculum, it promotes a view of the world that is distinctly American. Because it is more solipsistic than jingoistic, this logic that draws a false equivalence between the United States and the world is wholly compatible with the variety of leftist politics that guide contemporary literary criticism, and it is written into the institutional structure of the university in the United States. As David Damrosch observes, the critical discourses that U.S.-based critics deploy well against the Eurocentrism and racism of our traditions coexist readily with the “largely unacknowledged Americentrism . . . that is at once repressed and pervasive in American comparatism.” And if this myopia is deeply rooted in literary studies in the United States, it becomes more troubling as it grows with the expansion of U.S. hegemony in the contemporary period, since the world as it appears to the most powerful always threatens to pass itself off as a synonym for the world. The dominance of the United States in global markets subtends what Damrosch describes as a “longstanding occlusion of America in American presentations of world literature.” And it renders the implications of that occlusion more significant but also harder to see, lending urgency to Damrosch’s observation that “American-based comparatists have yet to think through the impact of our cultural and institutional location, both as a limiting factor and as an arena of possibility.”25 I agree. If U.S.-based critics have been slow to situate our work in its national context, we have been slower still to situate it in the institutions that house it, and that slowness has a purpose: it enables a critical discourse that works reflexively against U.S. hegemony and global capitalism as if from a position outside of the spheres of privilege they create. Literary critics in the United States have devised a way to write against every affiliation and complicity with global capital that structures our lives and our work as surely as it structures the world. By concocting a rhetorical position that stands in an impossibly autonomous relation to it, the critical discourse surrounding world literature gives rise to the contradiction that interests me here: on one hand, U.S.-based critics debate how and whether world literature is

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complicit with global capitalism, neoliberalism, and the exercise of U.S. hegemony around the world; on the other, we use those arguments to secure a position we inhabit individually and collectively in the institutions that rely increasingly on these logics we resist. Literary critics work through that contradiction in every debate over world literature, and it is inscribed throughout the critical tools that are honed in the process. That is worrying. As the Swedish Academy maintains its authority over a globalizing world by ushering Orhan Pamuk into Western canons, so do U.S.-based critics refine the discourses of globality we need to vent the pressures that work at the institutional location we share, whether we intend to or not. The non-Western writers who accrue the most value in Western canons are freighted with anxieties that have little to do with them directly. WORLD LITERATURE AND ACADEMIC CAPITALISM

“World literature” was added as a category to the MLA’s Job Information List (JIL) in 2004, as the job market for new Ph.D.s contracted markedly. The number of jobs advertised has shrunk steadily since then, reaching a total reduction of one-third or more by 2014. The numbers for world literature ascended before falling, rendering a new Ph.D.s’ odds of success in this category not too bad, but only by the relative measure of badness that applies in the context.26 As the job market becomes an increasingly straitened game of chairs, it generates anxieties that are keenly felt but unevenly distributed in Departments of English and Comparative Literature. Tenured faculty who are hard to fire mentor graduate students who face dim prospects of ever getting hired, while a national culture marginalizes even the most successful among us all.27 The rhetoric of worldliness demonstrates its utility in this moment as an alternative to the discourses that devalue humanistic work: The debates that literary critics wage in the United States over the best way to interpret a literary globality are inscribed with anxiety about the best way to justify that intellectual labor to its doubters and its funders closer to home. The rhetoric of literary criticism arrays the critics against the common enemy we find in corporatization of the university and the world while it also enables us to compete with one another for resources whose finitude is obvious. As humanists resist hyperbole about a “crisis in the humanities,”28 we launch polemics against the intensification of corporate practices in uni-

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versity life, where our work is devalued by its assessment through measures designed for other purposes entirely. The critic Wendy Hui Kyong Chun captures that feature of the contemporary zeitgeist with the contention that “the humanities are sinking—if they are—not because of their earlier embrace of theory or multiculturalism, but because they have capitulated to a bureaucratic technocratic logic.”29 That logic is known to its analysts as “academic capitalism,” and it is evident in universities’ adaptation of practices that are widespread across all sectors of the economy: a growing reliance on a contingent workforce;30 the bloated ranks of middle management;31 and the replacement of salaried workers with cost-cutting technologies.32 These trends become evident in a university culture where administrators “[go] beyond thinking of the student as a consumer,” as Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades suggest, “to consider the institution as a marketer.”33 To the degree that the value of a university becomes measurable in the quality of its brand and the quantity of dollars it amasses annually, humanists are poorly equipped to contribute to it.34 The critical discourse of world literature coincides meaningfully with the rise of academic capitalism because it provides an alternative system of valuation through which to negotiate the humanities’ relationship with wealth and power. This is nothing new; the rhetoric of weltliteratur has worked to redistribute capital—cultural and otherwise—since Goethe coined the phrase in the early nineteenth century. He used it to imagine how German poetry would rise above the rest to become “the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men.” Enlightened, those foreign masses would recognize the superior value of the Germanic, which would set a global standard. His countrymen would project their imagined community outward, imbuing it with sufficient elasticity to contain all mankind in “an expanded fatherland.” Weltliteratur by this description prefigures the varieties of “soft power” that would secure empires more than a century later.35 Weltliteratur was for Goethe a stage on which the nation could establish its credibility and assert its authority beyond its borders, gathering the world under itself. Decades later, Karl Marx reframed Goethe’s formulation in monetary terms. He drew a straight line from the “material production” that capital requires to the “intellectual production” that is just as necessary, linking the globalization of national economies to the globalization of culture.

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Both become equally inevitable in Marx’s description of the ways that “the intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.” Weltliteratur is symptomatic of the economic compulsion that Marx sees chasing “the bourgeoisie over the surface of the whole globe,” compelling them to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”36 A cause as well as an effect of those economic machineries, it is the province of the bourgeoisie and the repository of the nation’s cultural wealth. It is also the means by which the nation dilates to capitalize on the wealth of the globe. The contemporary meaning of the term varies greatly depending on who uses it, but all of its usages distinguish between literature that is good or successful by some criterion. To a publisher, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) is a great work of world literature, not least because it is a best seller. A literary critic or novelist defines world literature’s goodness by aesthetic rather than commercial criteria, citing J. M. Coetzee, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami, or Orhan Pamuk. The editors of n+1 conflate those two usages to define them against a third in a footnote to their polemical essay “World Lite.” They alternate between “World Literature” and the same phrase in lowercase, using “capital letters to refer to a publishing category and object of academic study; this is in contrast to the ‘world literature’ that would be everything ever written in all languages.”37 This clarification is useful, and it is not always made. When Emily Apter argues “against world literature,” for example, she leaves her key term undefined to swing broadly at all its manifestations, for commerce and education alike. She critiques them all at once in her account of world literature’s “reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities.’ ” 38 No credible scholar could like world literature by this definition because it is everything that a university and its inhabitants are not supposed to be: politically naïve, theoretically unenlightened, and crucially caught up in the business of making money. More proximal than critical of capitalism, world literature connotes to its critics the reduction of cultural complexities to “cosmo-kitsch” that has all its edges sanded off, so it is easy to sell.39

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In this respect, world literature is charged with the same fault as Orhan Pamuk: distorting cultural realities for personal gain in a global marketplace that values difference without discord. This is the charge that Emily Apter makes glancingly when she writes of world literature’s “drive to anthologize and curricularize the world’s resources”; Gayatri Spivak developed it more fully a decade earlier, in Death of a Discipline (2002). Spivak positions herself as a holdout from an earlier moment, before world literature supplanted comparative literature as the dominant logic for reading globally, and “publishing conglomerates [recognized] a market for anthologies of world literature in translation.” That was before the corruption of “academics with large advances,” who are prevented from the careful work of literary analysis because they are “busy putting these [world literature anthologies] together.” Seeing himself charged with the ambition to make money, Damrosch denied it: “Who are these academics with large advances for their anthologies? I wish I knew!” 40 He protests that Spivak’s concern about his personal interest in world literature is misplaced; the anthologies he edits lack global distribution, and the sums he receives from their sale are small. But he also identifies three of her concerns as his, too: “the philological one of translation, the methodological one of American specialists presuming to put together world anthologies, and the ideological one of the publishing conglomerates trying to Americanize the world.”41 This broad agreement between two of the most prominent adversaries in the debate over world literature leads me to suspect that “world literature” is not the primary problem at all. Something else is at stake in this fight. AGAINST WORLD LITERATURE

The proxy quality of the war over world literature is evident in Emily Apter’s polemic, Against World Literature (2013). As the title suggests, Apter uses the rhetorical conventions of critique to fire against world literature like an enemy, but it is more accurate to say that she leans against it like a plank on a wall, because she contributes to a critical conversation where these questions have only one good answer: can a translation replicate its original exactly (no), and should we worry about that (yes)? From those assumptions, Apter advances a thesis that elicits no argument at all: something always gets lost in translation. The truth in that cliché is vulnerable, Apter argues, to critics who overlook it in their zeal to make world literature smooth

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of surface and ready to sell by making translation look easy. Valuing efficiency over exactitude, these antagonists read The Divine Comedy as a perfect replica of Divina Commedia, and they teach others to repeat their error. To slow their progress, Apter proposes the idea of “the Untranslatable,” and she assembles a list of words that illustrate it—fado, for example, Cyclopedia, checkpoint. She traces the meanings that get lost when these words are conveyed to rough synonyms in other languages, testifying to the semantic richness and cultural specificity that inheres in language more generally. But she leaves unnamed the critics who fly too swiftly to worry over such subtle things, and names seem necessary because the scholars most closely associated with world literature—Vilashini Coopan, David Damrosch, Djelal Kadir, Franco Moretti, Rebecca Walkowitz—have written substantially on the interpretive problems translation poses. Damrosch devotes a full chapter to them in his pedagogical text How to Read World Literature, and he cites translation theory on the first page of the introduction to The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Such efforts to theorize translation might arguably be called inadequate, but those inadequacies would have to be filed under “not for lack of trying.” And Apter does not acknowledge them at all, nor does she cite any contrary evidence to show how she is alone in recognizing “the importance of non-translation, mistranslation, incomparability and untranslatability.” 42 In fact, the book works holistically to advance world literature as a study of the ways that literature “manifests differently abroad than it does at home,” in Damrosch’s phrase, which puts Apter’s analyses at odds with their stated raison d’être. But the richness of those readings suggests some other raison that works in its place, which prompts the suspicion that Apter is really for and against something else altogether. World literature is invoked as an enemy because it works rhetorically to locate the author outside of the institutional structure she represents fully. That rhetorical frame contains strong textual analyses that are unrelated to it and often convincing. A chapter called “Marx’s Bovary,” for example, studies the implications of this odd fact of intellectual history: Eleanor Marx, youngest daughter of Karl, translated Madame Bovary for its readers in English, and her translation was later revised by none other than Paul DeMan. By reading these translations comparatively against the French original, Apter shows how the translators accomplished the “ ‘Englishing’ of French realism’s language of class, luxury,

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and commodity fetishism.” 43 She writes a “biography of translation,” as she describes it, that has broad significance for readers of Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, translation theory, and feminist scholarship; she illuminates the complicated processes by which literature travels across time and space, culture and language.44 But the quality of this chapter by all these measures calls the thesis of the book into question: if Apter’s analysis of Madame Bovary in the context of its circulation via its translators isn’t world literature, then what is? And if it is world literature, then its critical gesture works in unacknowledged ways against itself. David Damrosch makes that case in the first sentence of his review of Against World Literature. As he reads it, the oppositional stance that Apter takes toward the field he founded testifies to its overarching authority among the colleagues they share: “It is surely a mark of some kind of success,” he observes, “when a movement begins to be attacked by its own participants.” 45 Damrosch likens that rhetorical gesture of unintended auto-critique to the discomfort that prominent surrealists expressed with that category in the 1920s, and also to Roland Barthes’s insistence that he was not a structuralist, notwithstanding the evidence to the contrary. Likewise, Damrosch observes, Apter strikes at the goal that she, too, worked to construct with her strong history of publication in world literature and her founding membership at Harvard’s Institute of World Literature. Finding parts of the university that seem proximal to global capital and the inequities it creates, Apter isolates herself and her audience from them by locating them under the banner of “world literature” to argue against it. “Hardly programmatic,” she writes, her analysis implies “a politics of literature critical of global literary management within corporate education.” 46 This is an expression of anxieties that are prevalent among literary critics about the ways that U.S. universities are complicit with and useful to a money-driven world. Those anxieties are articulated more clearly in n+1’s sortie, “World Lite.” Allying with Apter without acknowledgment, the editors write in the wearied voice of a protagonist post-bildung to represent world literature as “a nice idea” that must be trimmed to fit “a sick, sad world” in an era when “the word literature itself has come to sound fake.” “Is there something the addition of world is making up for,” the editors muse collectively, “a blemish it’s trying to conceal?” That stain is feared to have economic contours, because a global literary canon “can’t help but reflect global capitalism in

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its triumph, inequalities, and deformations.” Indeed, but so what? By all its definitions, world literature is about as bound up with the economic conditions as other cultural phenomena—which is to say, completely. So world literature reflects global capital by definition, and some literary meaning gets lost in translation, and it is irrelevant to ask whether global markets exert corrupting influences on literary works. That easy question masks better ones like where, how much, to whose advantage, and in what way. To answer those good questions, the editors of n+1 posit world literature as a finite set of texts that spans popular and literary fiction, and it is a canon of complicity with Citibank and its beneficiaries, more redolent of capitalism’s “triumphs” than its “deformities.” To illustrate the point, they name names: V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Mohsin Hamid, Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, Michael Ondaatje, and Orhan Pamuk. They read this body of work as “an empty vessel for the occasional self-ratification of a global elite.” And who could like that? But if world literature is a set of literary texts that enables the rich and powerful to stay that way, the criterion by which it works matters, and it is not readily apparent. Most readers who know the writers in the n+1 editors’ list will admire some much more than others and wonder what common fault binds them together. They take a shared interest in the European tradition of the realist novel, perhaps, and they have biographies that begin in wealthy strata of nations not known for great wealth; they are left leaning and politically provocative to some people in the world but not to many Western readers of literary fiction. None of these arguments is made in “World Lite” although all are arguable, and the most obvious commonality that holds these writers together is their global success. But it seems tautological to complain that the most successful authors are the most accessible, or the most heavily invested in the status quo, since that is true by definition. All these writers enjoy a close relationship to an American university. “Every World Lit writer seems to have an appointment” as faculty somewhere, the editors observe, and college campuses figure prominently in many of the novels they write; at the turn of the twenty-first century, “the university becomes the key institution in the creation of World Literature.” To explain this undue influence of American college life on world literature, the n+1 editors gesture toward an earlier generation of “academic theorists of hybridity, the postcolonial, and World Literature.” These scholars opened

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institutional doors by lending literary writers “from the global south an authority that no longer emanated from themselves.” And if this authority must have enriched the writers, it must have damaged their work, since “the university always threatens to insulate World Lit from the world it wants to describe and address.” From this premise, the argument against world literature becomes legible as an argument against university literature, which is a very different thing. And the difference has political implications, as Poorva Rajaram and Michael Griffith argued in a critical response to “World Lite” in the Indian news organization Tehelka. If global capital “is responsible for eliding the local,” they argue, “then so is any cultural criticism that sees the whole world and all its writers as a valuable unit of analysis.” In that context, Rajaram and Griffith see the rise of university novels among non-American novelists as a refreshingly honest departure that frees privileged people from all over the world to write what they know. “We will happily choose experience-based novels set in universities,” they write, “over a transnational literary elite that insists on ventriloquising the poor.” Accusing the n+1 editors of fetishizing the politics of less privileged others, they raise a rhetorical plea: “When will certain strands of the left stop requiring the high-culture novels they love or hate to spark off revolutions?” 47 That is a wish that world literature and the debates around it might not be made to do so much extraliterary work, but it is also a wish to see U.S.-based writers— critical as well as creative—acknowledge the privilege we find in the institutions that pay us. But that wish will not come true. The arguments for and against world literature are invested in the repression of the material conditions of their production. A tenured professor at NYU who does not work in a Marxist tradition, Apter assumes without argument that her work on Untranslatables functions as “anti-capitalist critique” because it puts philosophical pressure on what it means to “ ‘have’ a literature or to make claim to aesthetic property” as nations and languages do.48 This figurative use of ‘to have’ is trusted to enjoy a direct relationship with possession in a literal sense, as Apter sees her inquiry into linguistic ownership as a study also of the economic structures of a globalized world. That enables her to claim that her work has tangible if indirect effects on people far beyond the university’s walls while she also claims the variety of privileges that global capital affords within them.

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That is a tenuous claim, and the n+1 editors make it, too. They write with at least half of their feet outside of a university, and they find the time it takes to think of “having” as a metaphor without relying solely on its institutional resources. But they, too, assert without argument that political good follows directly from the act of reading the literary writers they like best. Contrasting the world literature they dislike with a “thorny internationalism” they would like better, they posit its virtues with abstract nouns that are vaguely suggestive of political engagement: “opposition, project, and most embarrassingly truth.”49 They populate it with writers like Elena Ferrante, Kirill Medvedev, and Yan Lianke, and claim that it is more “radical” by some definition. But that definition remains unstated, leaving a reader to wonder how it fits the aesthetics or politics of Ferrante’s harrowing Days of Abandonment (2005) but not to Coetzee’s also harrowing Disgrace (1999), just to take one example from each list. Another adjective that could describe the n + 1 canon is avant-garde, as the editors argue implicitly that relative difficulty plus obscurity equals a revolutionary potential by necessity. But, as I have argued elsewhere, there is a logical fallacy that has ethical implications in this elision of the metaphor that makes intellectual work stand in for something else that could plausibly put food on a table. Apter agrees with me about this in some moments, and when she does, she stands in opposition to most of her own work. In her study of Untranslatables, she asserts the need to retain the first meanings of the words that structure global capital—checkpoint, for example—against the theoretical alternatives that she wields against them elsewhere. She argues forcefully against that kind of substitution with her reading of work by the Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar, who has performed the ritual of border crossing in locations where no border is crossed, like the Ramallah Central Bus Station. “I want to welcome people, as a Palestinian, to Palestine,” he said, and to “provoke the whole idea of a state.”50 By performing a checkpoint himself in a place where no nation demands one, Jarrar questions the authority of the state and the occupation; he asks who has the power to maintain national boundaries, through what means, at what cost, by what violence. Apter recounts this performance to align her project with Jarrar’s recovery of the literal meaning of “border-crossing,” against a critical conversation that renders the discourse of borders “an all-purpose, ubiquitous way of talking about translation.” In that debate among translation theorists,

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Apter argues, any “purchase on the politics of actual borders—whether linguistic or territorial—has been attenuated.” That attenuation comes from a perceived inability to distinguish between the literal and figurative uses of “translation,” which “is both a metaphor for border control and a practice availed of by state agents to determine the legal standing of persons at the gate.”51 This is an odd rhetorical move. Apter locates herself in opposition to an unnamed scholar who fails to see the difference between the borders that people cross under surveillance by the state, often at peril to themselves, and a border that works as a metaphor to describe the difficulty of translation. The likelihood that a literary scholar would fail to see that difference seems too insignificant to merit discussion. So why does Apter discuss it? This invocation of the straw dummy vents a discomfort that is pervasive among literary critics in the United States: we know that we live in a world where millions of people become refugees annually, and national borders witness all manner of violence and humiliation, so it can hardly be ethical to strip these terms of their first meanings—and yet we remain susceptible to well-turned metaphors, and we are glad to have the time that global capital affords us to enjoy them. Apter voices that ambivalence when she writes that Jarrar speaks to her “unease” and “worry” when he “raises the issue of how legal, territorial markers are used figuratively in translation theory.”52 In fact, Jarrar doesn’t engage directly with translation theory at all; if his work “raises issues” about the internecine fights among scholars, it raises them from the outside, as a conversation about apples might raise issues about oranges by indirection. It says literally nothing about the borders that distinguish words in books, or scholars in universities. In her self-contradiction, Apter wrestles with the question that world literature’s advocates and opponents raise together whenever they talk about it: how much should literary critics trust the metaphors we use to bind our work to material realities, and how can we engage most meaningfully with a world that needs new ideas but is uninterested in ours? It is perhaps for obvious reasons that literary critics fall easily into a rhetorical mode that exaggerates the purchase of our work on extraliterary realities. As we set rhetorical traps for writers like Orhan Pamuk by holding them accountable for cultural diplomacy that is not in their power to provide, we set those traps for one another, too. The best arguments on every side of this theoretical debate are degraded by the bad logic that links

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world literature to neoliberalism and academic capitalism, as Emily Apter does when she writes of its “entrepreneurial, bulimic drive to anthologize and curricularize the world’s cultural resources.”53 To “curricularize” is not necessarily wrong; it is also, perhaps, “to teach.” But that rendering of a verb out of a common noun allies world literature with the pernicious impulse to monetize intellectual labor that is hard to quantify, and it lends rhetorical force to Apter’s otherwise unsubstantiated claim that the theoretical model she challenges is more complicit than its corollaries with the cultural logic of the multinational corporation and the neoliberal university. And she can trust her audience of literary critics to share her antipathy to everything related to that. This argument represents a more general tendency in the critical discourses surrounding world literature to draw false equivalencies between the theories we debate and the forces of academic capitalism against which we are united. That rhetorical slippage enables literary critics to claim a victory against malign forces in the world—the corporations that poison water and exact profit at other people’s expense, or the flows of capital that enable those corporations’ expansion—without leaving the field of the literary. Paradoxically, it is precisely by arguing against the cultural logics of neoliberalism that the literary critic competes successfully in the temporalized “field of the present” of the neoliberal university, following Pierre Bourdieu’s model: “New entrants are bound to continually banish to the past—in the very process through which they achieve existence, that is, legitimate difference, or even, for some shorter or longer time, exclusive legitimacy—those consecrated producers against whom they measure their themselves, and, consequently, their products and the tastes of those who remain attached to them.”54 Bourdieu describes an endless cycle of greed for contemporaneity that is also a zero-sum game, as each critic secures her position only by relegating another to the past. Literary critics achieve that effect by aligning a competitor with an unsavory but largely theoretical complicity with the institutional practices that pose a threat to our profession. A bad critic is represented rhetorically as a dupe of the administration and possibly also Citibank. That is a distortion of the ways that the debate over world literature is bound up in the institutional processes and pressures surrounding its production. But at the same time, if scholarly critics in the United States incline to make grandiose claims for the political work we achieve with our

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literary analysis, we might have reason. Our achievements resist description in the terms that our educative institutions and our national culture can hear, so it is perhaps an expression of disciplinary frustration that we rely so heavily on the abstractions we neglect to define. By invoking our scholarly readers’ antipathy to academic capitalism—through broad reference to neoliberalism and world literature—we make that affect available for our rhetorical purposes to demonstrate the urgency of our claims. And with that demonstration, we amass the cultural capital we need to get and keep a tenure-track job, perhaps, or just to support ourselves in the institutional economy of the university where we live and work. “Uneasiness about this new cultural order” animates the debate over world literature in much the same way that it drives Orhan Pamuk’s readers to ask him whom he writes for.55 As Western critics embrace Pamuk in the hierarchical terms that mark their difference from their less cosmopolitan neighbors, so do scholarly critics use polemics against world literature to establish their authority in the university as formidable opponents of security. But that opposition entails no sacrifice of the varieties of power and wealth that educative institutions afford; quite the contrary, it represents a bid for cultural capital in that environment where capital of all sorts is limited. It is a rhetorical gesture of parallipsis, in which a speaker conveys information or performs a speech act by saying that he or she will not convey it or perform it. The literary critic amasses power locally, in practice, by critiquing it globally, in theory. That critique often entails a wishful rejection of the need to make money, and when it does, world literature works well as a straw man. The Australia-based critic Simon During, for example, sees a troubling causality in the temporal coincidence between the rise of interest in world literature and the corporatization of literary life, as witnessed in “the recent rapid extension of cross-border flows of tourists and cultural goods around the world, including literary fictions.” The theoretical method of world literature works symbiotically for During with “a complex leisure industry involving writers’ festivals, literary-prize junkets and publicity, literary tourism, adaptation and spinoff opportunities—an industry only rather indirectly dependent upon the actual reading of books.” The complexity of the relation between the publishing industry and “actual reading” seems apparent, but During’s readiness to assume an adversarial relation to selling books is also striking. In a moment when publishers struggle to stay

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afloat, During writes without evidence of “a complex dynamic between literature’s increased participation in the genteel leisure industry and the relative decline of literary writing’s importance both in the education system and in the market.”56 How do we know this, and if we do, how is it related to world literature? During shares my skepticism about the clarity of that relation to some degree, as he contends that “the renewed attention to world literature [is] as much an expression of anxiety concerning literature’s decline as a response to its commercial cross-media globalization.”57 But for him, the commerce required to get books from one place to another is a dirty business from which literary writers and readers should steer clear, and I am not so sure. If we rest on our claims on a wish to extricate ourselves and the writers we want to read from the processes of global capital, then we rest our claims on air. A more honest critical discourse would locate literary criticism squarely in the institutions and markets that enable it within and beyond the university, so literary critics could launch critiques from that admittedly compromised position—just as Orhan Pamuk locates his literary oeuvre in the market where it is bought and sold—because it is the only position we have, as I suggest in the coda at the end of this book. Pamuk recognizes that his intellectual labor exists in an inescapable relation to economic and political realities, and in this respect he is like Spivak and me but unlike Apter and During. He writes with subtlety about the ways he and his literary oeuvre circulate across the borders that structure his world, figuratively and literally, taking the first as a literary project and the second as a fact of life. Apter resists its inevitability by locating the Untranslatable magically outside the complicitous relations global capital demands from us all, and she cites the limitations of World Literature as reasons “why literary studies falls short as anti-capitalist critique.” 58 This is a category error, trusting the literary to do work for which it is not designed, and Apter uses magical thinking to make it. “World Literature fosters ownership, assimilation, and easy consumption,” she writes, “while the Untranslatable—which is present in every act of translation, despite whatever myths of easy transfer we maintain—somehow manages to resist all these drives.” 59 But how? Sarah Brouillette marshals empirical evidence about transnational copyrights to contend that the Untranslatable is not as resistant to capitalism as Apter suggests, 60 but Apter eschews that kind of documentation because she takes little interest in the conditions by which actual money changes hands. The

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absence of that kind of reflection invites a skeptical reader to ask: what evidence does Apter give for her implication that she takes “anti-capitalist critique” as her goal, and, moreover, for her assertion that all of “literary studies” does, too? An interloper at the MLA’s annual convention held at the Hilton or the Marriott might be forgiven for overlooking the revolutionary purpose of the meeting, and she might also be struck by the paradoxical fit between these recurrent themes: the theoretical barbs that literary critics fling against neoliberalism and global capitalism run roughly contrary to the instrumental arguments that are commonly made for the good that literary study can do; hence the need to spend more money to support it. Where should the money come from if not from capitalism, and how can literary critics live and work without money? To raise these questions is not to advocate a more quietist literary criticism that would comply more easily with the status quo but rather to advocate a literary criticism whose political utility rests on something more solid than the misreading of a metaphor. That kind of literary criticism begins by acknowledging the ugly fact that U.S.-based critics depend on the global systems that exploit the poor and pollute the earth to generate the money to make our universities go; it is also acknowledges that we inhabit a privileged position in those systems, which afford us sufficient resources to read novels by Orhan Pamuk and write books like this. With those acknowledgments, we might use our rejection of corporate logics in the university to more meaningfully reject those logics in other sectors of the economy that have historically had less protection from them. It seems meaningful that humanists’ critical interest in neoliberalism coincides with the imposition of Fordist technologies on university faculty, who find our workplace newly proximal to the private sector. By invoking that proximity as a basis from which to work, we might renew the variety of leftist politics we express in the critical discourses we devise for and against world literature. And we might disavow the wish that the professoriate should be exempt from these practices that have been pervasive in other sectors of the economy for decades. The sociologist Martin Oppenheim saw the end of that exemption coming in 1972, when he predicted that white-collar workers would soon be subject to the mechanisms of assessment and supervision that already governed more “proletarianized” labor. Oppenheim contrasted work that gets done under the watchful eye of “higher authorities (private or public bureau-

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cracies)” to “artisan or craftsman-like work,” and he posited the growing obsolescence of the difference. Autonomous labor “in the upper strata of professional-technical employment” to create “an entire product, whether it be a painting, a surgical operation, a book, a bridge, or an idea” became a thing of the past in the 1970s, Oppenheim argued, when all workers fell under the controls that were once reserved for the uneducated and the unskilled. “A white collar proletarian type of worker” emerged, “replacing the autonomous technical type of worker”;61 this species includes the contemporary North American literary critic, who creates ideas under measures of assessment designed for other purposes entirely. Any effective resistance we mount to that imposition must begin with the assumption of common cause62 we have with other workers who are subject to it, too, often under greater duress—including “global novelists” like Orhan Pamuk, and the literary publics who participate in the “genteel leisure industry” Simon During contrasts to the university. The rhetoric of weltliteratur could work extraordinarily well as a frame for that purpose because the debates that surround Goethe’s phrase have always expressed more local contests about the lines of inheritance—cultural and otherwise—that separate high from low, smart from dumb, timeless from temporary, haves from have-nots. It makes sense, then, that world literature would capture the attention of critics in the contemporary United States, as we gain degrees of cultural capital in the “world republic of letters” while we lose it in a nation that invests its future in disruptive technologies and the corporate cultures that surround them. The arguments we wage over the discourses that greet Orhan Pamuk vent the hopes and anxieties that attend this compromised position, where literary critics use our work to manage the ways we are marginalized and privileged at once.

CODA Now, What?

There must be a better way. And if it has yet to appear at U.S.-based universities,1 that is not because nobody has looked there, nor is it merely because the search is hard. Faculty in English and comparative literature have convened at regular intervals on college campuses from the Northeast to the Southwest to weigh the tools at our disposal for reading on a more global scale. We have argued for and against Marxist theory, for example, postcolonial theory, translation theory, and world-systems theory. And as we have weighed their relative merits with stated intentions that are good, we have made it our job to expand Western literary imaginations around the world while we also dismantle the imperial logics that have driven so many similarly expansionary gestures. Debate ensued, and it continues. But as it works explicitly toward the high-minded goals it announces, it also vents anxieties that are particular to its authors’ institutional location. And that secondary purpose impedes the first, as I have argued in the preceding pages. So here we are. Now what? I would like to reorient the debate over world literature around two premises that seem to me as latent in it as they are obdurate, while I also consider the oddity that these things need to be said at all. Both are statements of fact. The first is that literature is written and read only by actual people living in the actual world, where everybody needs money to live. The second is that even the most polyglot among us lacks the linguistic

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fluency we would need to read most of the world’s literature in the language of its authorship. Every critic has a body that needs food and shelter, so it needs money, which comes only from some engagement with the mechanisms of global capital that control its flow. And every critic’s body promises to die before her mind has time to learn all the languages in which literature is written. We know these as unlovable but inarguable facts of life, but we have yet to acknowledge the compromises they force us to make as we strive to become better readers of all the literature in the world. If we are to read on any scale near the global, we will have to read some texts in translation, and if we are to read them well, we will have to learn to read a translation as such.2 For those of us who read most comfortably in English, that also entails learning to read literarily in the language that has hegemonic status among the professional classes of the global economy.3 And for those of us who live in the United States, it means also finding a way to live in a nation that works hegemonically, too, while we also survive as a humanist in a national culture and economy that do not make that feel easy, ethically or otherwise. These are conditions under which world literature gets read today, and they are the conditions by which the Anglophone world will receive the next generation of writers who follows Orhan Pamuk to their global publics. So it is with them in mind that literary critics should teach ourselves and our students to read. But the tools we have on hand are ill suited to that task because they are devised for an approximately contrary purpose: to locate the value of the literary in its capacity for the transcendence of worldly things. This assumption of literature’s antithetical relation to the muck of the world is not unique to the United States, but it works in peculiarly American ways at the U.S.-based university, where it thwarts humanists’ best efforts to think critically about the unevenness of any literary globality we can see. As Louis Menand contends, the architects of the U.S.-based university designed it with “a wall between the liberal arts and the professions” to cultivate an “an allergy” among humanists “to the word ‘vocational.’ ” And if that allergy followed a good institutional logic at the time of its inception, it retains its appeal at the turn of the twenty-first century, when it mitigates the pressures the creative economy puts on any area of human experience that has yet to be monetized.4 And yet. “There is some self-deception involved,” as Menand also notes, when contemporary humanists protect the nonfungible value of our work against

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the money-grubbing ways of the vocations, because “there is one vocation, after all, for which a liberal arts education is not only useful but deliberately designed: that of a professor.”5 Literary critics disagree about the best way to negotiate that “self-deception” and others that our work entails; the scholarly conversation surrounding world literature provides the terrain for that debate, which becomes more pressing as the university imposes increasingly corporate logics on us. As professors become obligated to represent ourselves to our employers as good neoliberal subjects, we write scholarship that is laden with the tension between the lofty goals of the humanities and the worldly business of working in a university. And the debate over world literature works extraordinarily well for that purpose because it works explicitly to justify the relevance of the humanities in a globalizing age. Cohering as a document of its authors’ sustained preoccupation with the identification and removal of some strain of complicity—with capitalism, imperialism, neoliberalism, and the hegemony of global English—it yields a corpus that promises its purity from such pollutants. But that purity is a fantasy that is historically specific to humanists at U.S.-based universities, where it shapes the way we imagine the rest of the literary world. So while this scholarly archive hones the tools and methods Anglophone readers need to receive literature like Orhan Pamuk’s, it also reiterates the literary critic’s version of “the lie of purism,” as the philosopher Alexis Shotwell describes it in a different context. For Shotwell, this is the logic by which any consumer good, from a face lotion to a political campaign, can establish its value by claiming its distance from the toxic effects of the world as it is. Writing conversely “against purity,” Shotwell contends that “living ethically in compromised times” means talking about “impurity, implication, and compromise” to foreground “the fact that we are not all equally implicated in and responsible for the reprehensible state” of things.6 For literary scholars to work in this vein, we would need to admit that all of us live by our embeddedness in structures and processes we deeply oppose.7 While we array against capitalism, imperialism, and neoliberalism in different ways and degrees in our work, we maintain our ability to read and write only within those structuring logics, at their pleasure. And if we could admit that structural dependency as an unavoidable fact of life in late capitalism, we could become more articulate about the varieties of ambivalence it produces, so we could devise the rhetorical models we need to differentiate among our kinds and degrees of imbrication with the sources

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of real suffering in the world. As Shotwell suggests, “If hypocrisy were the problem, it really it wouldn’t be much of a problem; at least on the surface, it is something we could give up. In contrast, being co-constituted with the world, ontologically inseparable, just seems to be our condition.”8 As the world is governed by global capital, and as the university is neoliberal, so are we. The debate over world literature leaves us woefully unable to confront those realities that condition every feature of the literary world. Invested instead in the false dream of an unremittingly harmonious relation among literature’s readers, writers, and texts, Anglophone readers curtail our engagements with the literatures we gain access to only through some feat of cultural and linguistic translation, even as we try to expand them. That curtailment takes shape in the lie of purism, which is perpetuated whenever a non-Western author gains entry to Western cultural and educative institutions only on the strength of the value he claims as a bridge between East and West; a gadfly who speaks truth to power; a humanist who heals the world. It is perpetuated, too, when a critic gains success in the literary field contingent on her proximity to an ideal of “homelessness” that rests on an impossibly pure relation to the text with reference to Edward Said, who, as I have argued, surely didn’t mean it that way.9 Through these formulations, literary value becomes contingent on the renunciation of worldly attachments, which then become unavailable to analysis. Compromise falls under a categorical prohibition, so the relative ethical and political possibilities of any particular compromise become impossible to weigh. There are historical reasons for this. Departments of English and Comparative Literature were built in the United States as the institutional haven for pale young men who could afford to retreat from the worldly business of the hard sciences and professional schools to have a good think on a book.10 Vestiges of that elite species of antimaterialism remain in contemporary fields of literary study, but it rings more hollowly among aspirants to the tenure track who cannot escape the knowledge that their salaries may always hover close to precarity. Bearing that knowledge that is built into the institutional culture of the humanities today, literary critics witness the commercialization of higher education writ large as well as the privatization of all manner of state endeavors. At the same time, we also see the center of the “world republic of letters” shift ineluctably toward the United States, where economic imperatives elevate the numbers of American workers who spend some time in college.11 Literary critics in the United

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States have more education than most of their compatriots and more wealth than most people in the world, but we also experience new kinds and degrees of insecurity—culturally, economically, and politically. That paradoxical relation to wealth and privilege provides the context in which the internecine argument over world literature gains influence through its exportation, which its interlocutors rarely see firsthand, and it shapes the curricula that students all over the world will read. That influence is subtended by the U.S. ascendance in an economy that is deemed “creative,”12 which also lends degrees of hegemony to the idioms of American English that enable transnational conversation in every field. As the universities that teach those lingua franca as native languages13 import students and faculty from all over the world,14 they also export their institutional culture through branch campuses that dot Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.15 The debate over world literature gathers influence far beyond the obvious, and it constructs the literary world unwittingly in the image of the United States. U.S.-based critics could look more directly at this complicated relation of our work to the world by reading literarily against purity, ceding the possibility of political perfection to look for better ways to do political good. I see signs of movement in this direction in recent efforts to work creatively across the fields of Marxist, postcolonial, and world-systems theory, by critics from Aamir Mufti to the Warwick Research Collective. Their synthetic approach fashions the critic rhetorically as more pragmatist than zealot, assuming rather than repressing the realities of a fallen world that leaves no critical approach without its limitations. From that premise, contemporary critics become better able to work from the desire that we broadly share to chip away at the structural sources of hegemony and domination, as we generally agree, too, about what “better” means in this context. And we can identify our points of disagreement about the best ways to get there, while we also admit our attenuated purchase on the problem. It extends far beyond its manifestations at universities and in literary texts, as Sarah Brouillette and David Thomas suggest when they pose a question that is crucial to the study of the world literature of the future. In their review of the Warwick Research Collective’s work “toward a new theory of world literature,” Brouillette and Thomas express enthusiastic support for the WRC’s work before questioning the larger endeavor of reading literature critically at all. If the purpose is to think about the ravages that

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global capital imposes on the world, they ask, “is there any good reason, aside from the fact that we are trained in literary studies and teaching literature, and working in situations in which literary study is, as a whole practice, under threat, to persist in treating literature as offering any unique insight into the dynamics that are identified in this study?”16 That is, if literary critics want to oppose neoliberalism or global capital, or if we want to bridge the gap between East and West, why do we look for those nonfictional goods in literature? By asking that question seriously, we could lift some of the most unbearable expectations Western cultures place on writers and critics alike. We could, for example, give literary establishments of the United States and the European Union a vocabulary through which to see the complexity of Orhan Pamuk’s relation to the nationalist discourse that every Turkish person learns in school, which obligates him to modulate his speech about the Armenian genocide if he wants to maintain a literary livelihood and go home. And we would think more seriously about the degrees of compromise scholarly critics make to maintain our livelihoods, too, noting that some are much worse than others. We could stage better confrontations with the paradoxical logic that requires us to quantify the books and articles we write inveighing against neoliberalism to get paid by “the neoliberal university,” which is, after all, the only university where we can seek employ.17 And it is among the most benign of the corporate and state entities that keeps each of us alive by degrees in the age of late capital. By looking more directly at the terms of that survival, we could think about the costs and benefits of the discourses surrounding world literature, noting how their capacity to help us read literature like Orhan Pamuk’s is diminished by their service to the very local interests of humanists at U.S.-based universities. Those interests are not irredeemably bad, but they fit poorly together with the more global aims that bring Western readers to Pamuk, and that ill fit has especially deleterious effects when it goes unacknowledged. The scholarly conversation surrounding world literature sinks under the weight of its subtextual burden to devise better answers to questions that have nothing to do with the best way to interpret literature that travels to its readers from far away: Why is research in the humanities worth the trouble and the money? Why should states and universities spend their finite resources to support intellectual work that will never pay for itself, and why

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should a budding humanist earn a degree that will not promise to help her earn a livable salary? What good do the dwindling number of tenure-track faculty in the humanities do—for our universities, our nation, and our world? These questions are too persistent and urgent to be wished away, which makes it incumbent on critics like me to read more meaningfully and more literarily with them in mind. To do that, we need critical methods for comparing our kinds and degrees of complicity with the realities of global capitalism, which suffuses the air we breathe and subtends the work we do. It is discomfiting to know that this book was written in a privileged stratum of a deeply uneven world that gives only a tiny fraction of people sufficient time and energy to read novels like Orhan Pamuk’s, and even to write books about them. Enjoying that time and energy to an extraordinary degree, those of us who hold tenure-track positions in Departments of English and Comparative Literature live in a systemic relation to the deprivation that is opposite. Some of our colleagues in the contingent workforce have familial access to the time for research that money can buy, while others work too hard and too much to join us in this scholarly conversation or any other. As Alexis Shotwell suggests, “To say that we live in an unjust world is to hold a clear recognition that there are people who gain immense power and profit from this situation—and in real ways, the people who benefit from the lie of purism are the people who reiterate it.”18 Literary critics benefit from the lie of purism in many ways. When we deploy timeworn discourses that cultivate the autonomy of the literary as such, we also cultivate the myth of the humanities’ extricability from the world such as it is. That myth girds the magical thinking that enables contemporary humanists to exaggerate the scale of the victories we can achieve against neoliberalism and global capital without looking up from literature. Positing our texts and theoretical tools as weapons that work necessarily against the systemic forces that govern the contemporary globe,19 this critical mode is rife in the debates surrounding world literature, where it constructs a notional place for a critic to stand outside of those forces that leave none of us untouched. That semblance of autonomy from the world as it is works as an existential balm and a rhetorical trick, positing the humanist as a strong adversary of these forces with which all of us are complicit, too, as it obscures our smallness in relation to them. Distorting that scale, it enables a body of work that announces itself as a sustained polemic

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against hegemonic forces while it also consolidates its authors’ relatively privileged place within them. U.S.-based humanists work in an institutional home of global English, and we guard our centrality in the world inadvertently with the methods we use to make literature available for serious study only in the language in which it is written. The exclusivity of that linguistic arrangement does not follow logically from the very good reasons we can cite to teach foreign languages and use them for literary study at U.S.-based universities. By promoting a model of literary comparatism that demands the rigorous study of languages, critics pay respect to the losses that attend the conveyance of a text from one language to another as well as the gains that follow from learning more languages than one. Those claims for reading a Turkish novelist in the Turkish language include a particular caveat against reading him in English, which is important, too, in this moment of the global dominance of the Anglophone. When literary critics in the United States and the United Kingdom confine ourselves to the literary traditions we can read without a translator, we signal our willed difference from the imperialists who saw distant cultures as colonies they were authorized a priori to possess. That difference is crucial to the legitimacy of literary studies today, and also to the future of any world literature yet to come. But those good arguments work to bad ends when they create a disciplinary division of labor that relegates all literatures not originally written in English into the sparsely populated space between English and comparative literature. The effect is to maintain the relative illiteracy of U.S. university students in the literature of the rest of the world, which has the further effect of ensuring that future generations of non-Western writers will travel the same narrow strait Pamuk took to reach the Anglophone audiences he needs to circulate far beyond his national public. They protect Anglophone readers’ ignorance of the ways global English works hegemonically in the contemporary world, and they foster a literary culture that is ill prepared to read beyond the limits of nation, language, and culture. I see that lack of preparation when I ask my students in the English Department at Queens College, CUNY, to name a work of world literature that they have read. The most frequently cited example is Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, which is taught frequently in city high schools under an ill use of the term. Without a methodology to name precisely what puts the “world” in “world literature,” or to think about the qualitative and cat-

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egorical features of the texts that fit that description, a general reader can find little import in the fact that Hosseini’s work was originally written in English by an Afghani American author, and it was published by an American imprint. The novel’s distant setting signifies its purchase on the cultural and linguistic difference inherent in world literature, which enables the literary representation of immigrants’ thoughts in the United States to stand in for the literature of the world. A body of literature like Orhan Pamuk’s becomes available only to the tiny fraction of critics who can read it in the language of its authorship. The readers who have access to Pamuk in Turkish gain the ability to claim ownership of an impossibly pure relation to the text, too, using the lie of purism to obscure the investments they make in it. The institutional contours of those investments ere dramatized for me over the three years that I held a tenure-track job at a Turkish university just outside of Istanbul, with English as its language of instruction. Founded by one of the nation’s two super-rich families in 1993, Koç University hired me as one of two faculty in its first department for literary study. It had previously offered a handful of courses in literature every semester through the English Language Center (ELC), which was designed to help the Turkish student body gain sufficient fluency in the language of global business to use it to learn everything from math to history. The university’s proximity to business is evident to Turkish people who know its name, which belongs to the oligarchic Koç family as well as to the largest investment company in Turkey.20 The university was founded ostensibly to bring the youth of the secular elite into the global economy, and the discourse of Turkish nationalism mingles readily with the rhetoric of the creative economy in its mission statement. It cites the frequency with which graduates “become leaders in their professions, and, true to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s principles, contribute to the betterment of society. Combining traditional academic paradigms with innovative programming and successfully attracting top-tier students, faculty members and research programs, Koç University aims to ‘raise the bar’ for higher education in Turkey.”21 To get to campus requires driving north of the city through scrubby hillsides dotted with brush, half-built houses, and dun-colored apartment buildings. Tall gates delimit the tan and tony campus—an array of very modern buildings looking over a village where a woman was stoned to

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death for adultery in 1995. A granite entryway asserts the boundary between the university and the town with the sharpness of barbed wire, and a series of inscriptions reads, in large letters, in English: “Every truth begins as a blasphemy,” George Bernard Shaw. “The road to progress is neither swift nor easy,” Marie Curie. “The truth is rarely pure, and never simple,” Oscar Wilde.

The narrative of enlightenment that is written here buttresses the arguments my students made when they explained why they could never admire Orhan Pamuk or anybody else who shared his politics. “When Atatürk carved the Republic out of the Ottoman Empire,” they say, “he had to take drastic measures. And if some Armenians got killed, well . . . It was a time of war.” Indeed, the truth is rarely pure, and never simple. “Pamuk knew he was lying when he talked about the genocide issue. He’s an educated person, and every educated person knows that the genocide is just a lie Europeans tell. Pamuk told it, too, because he wanted to win a Nobel Prize.” Every educational system consolidates the logic of the state that creates it, and ours is no exception. Every writer and critic also compromises to advance her career. But not all compromises are equal, nor are the logics of all states. Reading world literature well means negotiating this space “between complicity and pollution, between righteousness and compromise,” as Shotwell suggests. And we need new critical methods to read that way. World literature has been posited as a source of the cross-cultural enlightenment that the rhetorics of liberalism deem most crucial to the diminishment of suffering. George Eliot wrote that “if art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,”22 and she is not alone in trusting the novel uniquely to accomplish that act of enlargement. Pamuk has sometimes demurred from overtly political questions by maintaining that he is just a novelist, and his only politics are those that come built into the novel as a genre: “We might feel that a German novelist who wished to speak to all of Germany, and who failed explicitly or implicitly, to imagine the country’s Turks along with the unease they cause, was somehow lacking. Likewise, a Turkish novelist who failed to imagine the Kurds and other minorities, and who neglected the black spots in his country’s history, would

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have, in my view, produced something hollow.”23 By this account, the novelist and his reader engage in a shared project that becomes political only by an apolitical definition. As we identify with a fictional character, we  practice habits of thought that are trusted to be politically potent— antinationalist, cosmopolitan, left-leaning—and dictated by the novel’s aesthetic form. But neither writer nor reader has anything to lose from this act of identification that is constructed as the mechanism for the political in the literary sphere, lending a semblance of political efficacy to a reading experience that does no other apparent good in the world. When I teach Snow at my public university in New York City, most of my students come to the novel hoping it will have this species of quality that ranges freely across the registers of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political. That hope exists in proportion to my students’ awareness that their knowledge of Turkish politics and culture is limited, so they are not surprised to find that gap in their education highlighted for them by their initial foray into Snow, and they wonder how well they can read the novel without knowing more. As they read the narrator’s descriptions of Ka’s travel to the remote eastern city of Kars, they perceive themselves to be out of their depth—not knowing, for example, what is implied by Muhtar Bey’s assertion to Ka that the religious men in town are “unlike Westernized Turks” because “they don’t instinctively despise the common folk” (62). They wonder what it means that the denizens of Kars suspect a conspiracy around the Kurdish sherbet shop, or, more centrally to the plot, precisely why some Turkish girls prove unwilling to remove their headscarves in school and on stage. My Turkish students, by contrast, had a wealth of knowledge about “the headscarf issue,” but they did not feel certain, either, about their inclusion in Snow’s implied audience. Studying at a private university in a suburb of the nation’s cultural capital, they were conversant in the debates about secularism and national identity that suffuse Snow. But they had little engagement with Turkish people like the fictional fundamentalist boy, Fazıl, or the provincial Muhtar Bey, who live on the opposite side of Turkey, at the end of long and treacherous mountain roads that my students would have no reason to travel. In fact, few of them had traveled east of the coastal swath of the country that has historically been home to the most educated Turks. The sons and daughters of the secular elite, they belong to a demographic that is educated and acculturated to be a likely audience for Pamuk,

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and they demonstrated to me the mutual exclusivity between his potential readership and the characters he depicts in Snow. The Europeanized protagonist, Ka, provides the only cultural coordinate that is proximal to Turkish literary circles, which are approximately as far away from Kars as my students in Queens are from a fictional North Dakotan. We trace that distance that is internal to the text by mapping Ka’s dislocation in Google maps. And as that distance was palpable to my students at Koç, so too did their distance from the European realist tradition that Pamuk extends leave them uncertain of how to adjust to his pace. Granular descriptions of details bury the plot of Snow as steadily as snowflakes blanket the city of Kars in drifts, creating an effect that my students in North America notice, too—but they describe it with reference to literary traditions that they recognize at least by reputation. They are not surprised to learn that Pamuk cites Fyodor Dostoevsky among his influences, along with Gustave Flaubert and Thomas Mann, all of whom write novels that an undergraduate might initially deem “boring,” “slow,” and “unrelatable.” With those adjectives, my students at Princeton and Queens locate Snow in the realist tradition that they know in the broadest sense—if not via Pamuk’s influences, then through their literary relatives who appear more regularly on North American reading lists: Jane Austen, Herman Melville, or John Steinbeck. On both sides of the Bosphorus, then, Pamuk asks his readers to negotiate a path between the foreign and the familiar, and to use that path to extend their imaginations beyond the point at which they travel with ease. He writes in cultural grammars that they do not know well, drawing refer-

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ences from the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) to Emma Bovary, which are known to subcultures that are mostly exclusive from each other. With this breadth of reference, he renders virtually all his readers uncertain of our inclusion among his implied audience. I tell my students that their uncertainty is widely shared among Pamuk’s readers in Turkey and beyond, which suggests that it illuminates questions that matter beyond the classrooms where we work. Snow makes its readers’ relative ignorance a constitutive feature of the text and renders its implied reader a thought experiment in the workings of world literature; it guarantees that all its readers will sometimes read beyond the limits of our expertise. Translation in the literal and metaphorical senses of the word seems essential to that project. And translation always entails compromise. To read Orhan Pamuk in this light means reading the incoherence between his statements to his domestic and global audiences not as evidence of his hypocrisy but rather of his embeddedness in a world that makes contradictory demands on him. It means thinking about the ways those demands are inscribed in every word he writes, and, equally, in the ways we read them. That requires methods of interpretation that take self-contradiction not as a flaw but as a feature of living in the twenty-first century, which leaves none of us innocent of relation to institutions we believe to be quite often if not always bad. For U.S.-based critics, it means acknowledging the ways we benefit from the hegemonic status of our universities in that imperfect world, and we benefit also from our access to the lingua franca for the literature of the global economy. And as we enjoy those privileges that accrue to us by virtue of our institutional location, it becomes incumbent on us to take better measure of the scale of the compromises we make. That requires standards for literary value that work in a relative sense—ethically, aesthetically, and politically—to negotiate the terms of literature’s circulation as a good on a global market. Seeing imbrication in those markets as a consequence of being alive today, we might end the futile search for a place to read literarily outside of the world to move on to better questions: Under what conditions does literature get read in this world, at what cost, to whose benefit? How can those of us who are lucky enough to get paid to read make the balance better?

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: SLIPPERY WORDS: ORHAN PAMUK, GOOD, AND WORLD LITERATURE 1. Wendy Griswold writes convincingly about “the reading class” as it takes shape within nations, but her argument applies across national borders, too. Pamuk’s audience belongs to a transnational class that is “modest in size but immense in cultural influence,” and it shares the “stable set of characteristics” that mark “a reading class” more generally. It becomes visible in terms of “its human capital (education), its economic capital (wealth, income, occupational positions), its social capital (networks of personal connections), its demographic characteristics (gender, age, religion, ethnic composition), and—the defining and noneconomic characteristic—its cultural practices. A reading class is not the same thing as a reading culture. A reading class is a social formation, while a reading culture is a society where reading is expected, valued, and common. All societies with written language have a reading class but few have a reading culture.” Wendy Griswold, Regionalism and the Reading Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 37. 2. Cf. Pascale Casanova, “Literature as World,” New Left Review 2, no. 31 (February 2005): 71–90. 3. Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors: Essays and a Story, reprint (New York: Vintage, 2008), 242. 4. Unlike Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, Pamuk argues, he and his colleagues lack an audience who recognizes “in the books of [their] respective national author[s] every city, street, house, room, and chair.” But what these readers lose in local knowledge they gain in the scale of their imaginations, which are proportionately—or, perhaps, potentially—less parochial: they “await a new book by García Márquez, Coetzee, or Paul Auster the same way that their predecessors awaited the new Dickens—as the

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latest news. The world audience for literary novelists of this cohort is far larger than the audience their books reach in their country of origin.” Ibid. 5. Pamuk’s honors include Ireland’s International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (2002); France’s Prix Médicis étranger (2005); and the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Prize (2006), which Pascale Casanova cites as “the greatest proof of literary consecration in the world republic of letters, bordering on the definition of literary art itself.” Casanova’s account is rightly criticized for its Eurocentrism, but it provides an apt representation of that cultural logic as it works for world literature. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 147. See chapter 5 for analysis of the import of literary prizes. 6. As global English enables conversation across linguistic differences in other specialized fields, it also enables scholarly conversation about literary texts. See, for example, Jennifer Jenkins, English as a Lingua Franca in the International University: The Politics of Academic English Language Policy (New York: Routledge, 2013). For more on the hegemony of English in academic settings, see, for example, http://www .helsinki.fi/englanti/elfa/project.html. 7. Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez (London: Verso, 1996), 17. 8. Nobel Prize, “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006” (Stockholm: Nobel Foundation, October 12, 2006), http://www.nobelprize.org /nobel_prizes/literature/laureates /2006/press.html. 9. John Updike, “Anatolian Arabesques,” New Yorker, August 30, 2004, http://www .newyorker.com/archive/2004/08/30/040830crbo_books?currentPage=all. 10. Tom Payne, “Alone in Turkey,” Telegraph, accessed November 4, 2011, http:// www.telegraph.co.uk /culture/books/3617511/Alone-in-Turkey.html. 11. Cf. David Damrosch: “In the nineteenth century, devotees of the classics were distressed that modern European masterpieces were displacing Anacreon, Statius, and even Virgil. In recent decades, lovers of the European masterpieces have felt a comparable alarm in turn, as literary studies in an increasingly multicultural North America have opened the canon to more and more works in the third category: hence D’Souza’s outrage—and Beverley’s satisfaction—at the widespread adoption of I, Rigoberta Menchú in many world literature and “Western Civ” courses.” David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 15. 12. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xvi. 13. On his book tour for Snow, Pamuk acknowledged his transnational success as a fact: “I am aware that my audience is no longer an exclusively national audience.” He reflected that “there is a problem of being aware of one’s readership, whether it is national or international. I cannot avoid this problem now. My last two books averaged more than half a million readers all over the world. I cannot deny that I am aware of their existence.” Ángel Gurría-Quintana, “Orhan Pamuk, The Art of Fiction No. 187,” Paris Review (Fall/Winter 2005), http://www.theparisreview.org /interviews/5587/the -art-of-fiction-no-187-orhan-pamuk. 14. Pamuk, Other Colors, 244. 15. Ibid., 245. 16. Pamuk adheres to the consensus position—advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukács, Franco Moretti, and Ian Watt—that theorizes the novel in the historical con-

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text of modern Europe, where it coincided with industrialization, capitalism, and the nation-state. Contesting that narrative to varying degrees, the critics Margaret Doody and Thomas G. Pavel locate roots for the novel outside of Europe altogether, and Michael McKeon traces its origins farther back in Europe, to premodern literary forms. 17. Timothy Aubry argues that the “middlebrow” readers who constitute the publics for literary fiction seek on one hand to acquire cultural capital from the literature they read, but they also turn to literature to help them “mediate encounters across racial and cultural boundaries.” Aubry sees this particular turn toward literature as “not a retreat from, but rather an effort to theorize, social space.” Timothy Aubry, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011). 18. Pamuk, Other Colors, 243. 19. Ibid. 20. Ha Jin, The Writer as Migrant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 29. 21. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters. 22. The “hypercentrality” of English on a global market is documented by book scholars and sociologists, “using a simple definition of centrality” that Johan Heilbron describes: “One can say that a language is central in the world-system of translation when it has a larger share in the total number of translations worldwide. The international figures unambiguously indicate that English is by far the most central in the international translation system.” Heilbron cites a wide range of sources to show that English language translations provide the text or source text for 40 percent of all books published worldwide and 50–70 percent of all books published in Europe. David Damrosch, “How American Is World Literature?” Comparatist 33 (May 2009): 13–19. 23. Sarah Brouillette quotes Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, who contends that “English is the vernacular of the world because power is assigned in the interstices between linguistic supremacy and control of the industries that capitalize on content, information, knowledge, or other assets of intellectual property in that language.” Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 59. 24. Cf. Brouillette: English is “more and more the global vernacular of literary fiction, despite the fact that it is not the world’s dominant first language,” because it is the dominant language of the U.S. in an era when the U.S. wields hegemonic power. Ibid. 25. Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 16. 26. Rebecca Walkowitz, “Future Reading,” State of the Discipline Report, American Comparative Literature Association, January 1, 2015. 27. Aubry, Reading as Therapy. 28. Cf. Rachel Greenwald Smith: “These have been described as a compromise between opposites, as a checkpoint, and as a network. While the particularities of compromise aesthetics have varied from critic to critic, genre to genre, most share the foundational assumption that contemporary literature is formally interesting primarily in its efforts to produce a compromise between experimentalism and convention; difficulty and readability; and the underground and the mass market.” Rachel Green-

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wald Smith, “Six Propositions on Compromise Aesthetics,” The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought, accessed February 22, 2015, http://theaccountmagazine .com/?article=six-propositions-on-compromise-aesthetics. 29. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 30. Sianne Ngai, “Network Aesthetics,” in American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions, ed. Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Patrick Jagoda, “Terror Networks and the Aesthetics of Interconnection,” Social Text 28, no. 4 (December 21, 2010): 65–89, doi:10.1215/01642472–2010–011. 31. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 32. The political philosopher Mathias Risse describes it as a “global order” that depends wholly on its connectedness. Possessing “no actual government, it is ruled through a network of organizations, a phenomenon captured by the term ‘global governance.’ At the political level, the state system is governed by a set of rules, the most significant of which are codified by the UN Charter. Our current global society has arisen from developments that began in the fifteenth century through the spread of European control, and continued with the subsequent formation of new states through wars of independence and decolonization. At the economic level, the so-called Bretton Woods institutions (International Monetary Fund, World Bank, later the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs / World Trade Organization) provide a cooperative network intended to prevent wars and foster worldwide economic betterment. These institutions, together with the more powerful states acting alone or in concert, shape the economic order.” Mathias Risse, “How Does the Global Order Harm the Poor?,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 33, no. 4 (September 1, 2005): 349–76, doi:10.1111/j.1088–4963.2005.00036.x. 33. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello locate this “new spirit” in the historical moment that begins in the middle of the 1970s, when the governing metaphors of a global business culture shifted from the hierarchies of the national corporation to the networks of the multinational. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 356. 34. Cf. Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 35. Henry Giroux, “Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture, and the Promise of Higher Education: The University as a Democratic Public Sphere,” Harvard Educational Review 72, no. 4 (December 1, 2002): 425–64, doi:10.17763/haer.72.4.0515nr62324n71p1. 36. As Terry Flew has observed, the referent for neoliberalism is hard to find among humanists, who use the economic term as “all-purpose denunciatory category.” Terry Flew, “Six Theories of Neoliberalism,” Thesis Eleven 122, no. 1 (June 1, 2014): 49–71, doi:10.1177/0725513614535965. 37. This is consistent with more reliance on discourses of globality in testimonies to the social and economic benefits of higher education. On one hand, the higher education consultant Madeline F. Green expresses a widely held view when she argues that, “if colleges and universities can produce graduates with the knowledge and the disposition to be global citizens, the world would certainly be a better place.” But that notion of what is “better” is historically particular to our neoliberal moment, and it suggests the fraught relationship between “global citizenship” and “global capital,” as British geographers Matt Bailie Smith and Nina Laurie contend. Studying programs that bring university students from Britain to do low- or unpaid labor abroad, Smith

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and Laurie show that “international volunteering seems to both exemplify neoliberal ideas of individual autonomy, improvement and responsibility and at the same time allies itself to notions of collective global citizenship, solidarity, development and activism.” Madeline F. Green, “Global Citizenship—What Are We Talking About and Why Does It Matter?,” Inside Higher Ed,” accessed November 27, 2016, https://www.inside highered .com /blogs /globalhighered /global -citizenship -%E2%80%93 -what-are -we -talking-about-and-why-does-it-matter; Matt Bailie Smith and Nina Laurie, “International Volunteering and Development: Global Citizenship and Neoliberal Professionalisation Today,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36, no. 4 (October 1, 2011): 545–59, doi:10.1111/j.1475–5661.2011.00436.x. 38. See chapter 6. Cf. Brendan Cantwell and Ilkka Kauppinen, Academic Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 39. I have in mind here Sarah Brouillette’s convincing analysis of the ways that literature works in the service of “creative-economy discourse,” which “refers regularly to the benefits of cultural diversity.” Sarah Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014), 116. 40. James Engell, “Your Future,” accessed June 4, 2015, http://artsandhumanities.fas .harvard.edu/pages/your-future. 41. That “metaphysics of purity,” as the philosopher Alexis Shotwell describes it, “is necessarily a fragile fiction, a conceit under constant but disavowed threat—to affirm a commitment to purity is in one move to glance at the entanglements and coconstitution, the impurity, of everything and to pretend that things are separate and unconnected.” Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 16. See the coda of this book. 42. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, “Images of the Outsider in American Law and Culture: Can Free Expression Remedy Systemic Social Ills?,” Cornell Law Review 77 (September 1992): 1258. 43. Philip G. Altbach, “The Globalization of College and University Rankings,” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 44, no. 1 (January 4, 2012): 26–31, doi:10 .1080/00091383.2012.636001; Altbach, “Globalisation and the University: Myths and Realities in an Unequal World,” Tertiary Education and Management 10, no. 1 (January 1, 2004): 3–25. doi:10.1080/13583883.2004.9967114. 44. I take up this debate over the Americanness of world literature in chapter 6. Cf. David Damrosch and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with David Damrosch and Gayatri Spivak,” Comparative Literature Studies 48, no. 4 (December 1, 2011): 455–85, doi:10.5325/complitstudies.48.4.0455. 45. Damrosch proves the point by citing Didier Coste’s critique of Spivak’s “myopic and ahistorical” elegy for comparative literature, which presumes that the death of the discipline in American universities after September 11 renders it dead all over the world. That false presumption of the universality of the conditions Spivak sees locally makes her recognizable to Damrosch as a fellow American, institutionally. 46. Damrosch, “How American Is World Literature?,” 13. 47. Orhan Pamuk, Snow, export ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 282–83. 48. And, also on its face, it is a representation of the benefits that Turkish people gain with their complicity in those processes. By distilling their various viewpoints

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into a singular statement, the townspeople make themselves legible to readers who are far away. If they refuse, they are effectively silenced. 49. Pamuk, Snow, 283. 50. The political economist David M. Kotz captures the symbiosis between neoliberal ideology and the globalization of capital in the contemporary period: “The resurgence and continuing dominance of neoliberalism can be explained, at least in part, by changes in the competitive structure of world capitalism, which have resulted in turn from the particular form of global economic integration that has developed in recent decades.” David M. Kotz, “Globalization and Neoliberalism,” Rethinking Marxism 14, no. 2 (June 1, 2002): 64–79, doi:10.1080/089356902101242189. 51. Drawing on a wealth of data, the social scientist Irena Kogan contends that guest workers form a “stable service class” in Germany, where “immigrants, particularly Turks, are not only more likely to be long-term unemployed, they are also pushed into unskilled occupations. The second-generation immigrants, although displaying the strongest degree of similarity to the employment career patterns of native-born Germans, do not fully catch up with the socio-demographically comparable native-born when it comes to occupational assimilation.” Irena Kogan, “A Study of Immigrants’ Employment Careers in West Germany Using the Sequence Analysis Technique,” Social Science Research 36, no. 2 (June 2007): 491–511, doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2006.03.004. 52. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 39. 53. Cf. Elena Russo: the Enlightenment philosophes reimagined “the social function of the arts” by redefining “the identities of the artist and the audience,” so the writer was cast alongside Robsepierre categorically, advancing aesthetics whose opponents were “the class of citizens the [French] Revolution was to eliminate.” Elena Russo, Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 2, 3, 8. 54. Nouritza Matossiann, “They Say ‘Incident.’ To Me It's Genocide,” Guardian, February 27, 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk /world/2005/feb/27/turkey.books. 55. Ayşe Gül Altınay, The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 56. Yüksel Taşkin, “Upsurge of the Extreme Right in Turkey: The Intra-Right Struggle to Redefine ‘True Nationalism and Islam,’ ” Middle Eastern Studies 44 (January 2008): 131–49, doi:10.1080/00263200701711895. 57. Article 301 was amended in 2005 with the apparent intention of closing these gaping loopholes. As the legal scholar Bülent Algan observes, the original article was formulated broadly “to embrace several ‘values’ and to protect governmental bodies from attacks. The text was very comprehensive; Turkishness, the Republic, the Parliament, the Government, the judicial institutions, the military and security structures were protected against ‘public denigration,’ ” also translated as “humiliation” and “insult.” Bülent Algan, “The Brand New Version of Article 301 of Turkish Penal Code and the Future of Freedom of Expression Cases in Turkey,” German Law Journal 9, no. 12 (2008): 237–52. 58. Maureen Freely, “Why They Killed Hrant Dink,” Index on Censorship 36 (May 2007): 15–29, doi:10.1080/03064220701334477. 59. “Pamuk’s Nobel Divides Turkey,” Guardian, October 13, 2006, http://www .guardian.co.uk /books/2006/oct/13/nobelprize.turkey. 60. As the political scientist Nora Onar suggests, Pamuk’s remarks played a crucial role in a roiling culture war about nationalist discourse in Turkey. “The nationalist

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lawyers, led by Kemal Kerinçsiz, found their ‘goldmine’ in novelist Orhan Pamuk, who would go on to win the Nobel prize in literature a year after being hauled before an Istanbul court. Pamuk was summoned to defend his statement to a Swiss newspaper that a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds had perished in Turkey. His case became an international cause célèbre, which in turn meant that scenes of nationalists attacking the mild-mannered author and his entourage—which included the likes of European Parliament Speaker Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Turkey–European Union Parliamentary Joint Commission Co-chairman Joost Lagendjk—received worldwide coverage. International condemnation in turn fueled a divisive domestic debate. Even those opposed to Article 301 questioned the legitimacy of the international community’s call for government intervention on Pamuk’s behalf when Turkey was at the same time constantly reprimanded for failure to respect rule of law and judicial independence.” Nora Onar, “Kemalists, Islamists, and Liberals: Shifting Patterns of Confrontation and Consensus, 2002–06,” Turkish Studies 8, no. 2 (2007): 281, doi:10.1080/14683840701312252. 61. As I suggest in chapter 3, Pamuk’s genocide acknowledgment is more tentative than his international reputation would suggest. Soon after his statement to the Swiss newspaper, he clarified it on CNN-Turk: “I did not say, we Turks killed this many Armenians. I did not use the word ‘genocide.’ ” “Novelist Denies ‘Genocide’ Claim,” Guardian, October 17, 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk /world/2005/oct/17/turkey.books?INT CMP=ILCNETTXT3487. 62. Dink also expressed some discomfort with a line in the national anthem that erases ethnic minorities from the citizenry, who are named with a reference to “my heroic race.” “I was against using the word ‘race’ ” to locate Turkishness, Dink recalled, because it “leads to discrimination.” English PEN, “Case of the Month October 2005 Hrant Dink,” English PEN, October 17, 2005, https://www.englishpen.org /campaigns /case-of-the-month-october-2005-hrant-dink /.“ 63. “Suspect in Killing of Journalist Threatens Turkish Novelist Pamuk,” Guardian, January 25, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk /books/2007/jan/25/orhanpamuk. 64. See, among others, Merve Kavakçı, “Turkey’s Test with Its Deep State,” Mediterranean Quarterly 20, no. 4 (September 21, 2009): 83–97, doi:10.1215/10474552–2009–026. Maureen Freely also observes that “the deep state is Turkish shorthand for a faceless clique inside the Turkish state that has, some claim, held the reins of real power throughout the republic’s 84-year history. There are some who see it on a continuum with the shady networks that ‘took care of business’ (including, some believe, the Armenian business) in the last years of the Ottoman Empire.” Maureen Freely, “Why They Killed Hrant Dink,” 20. 65. Martha Nussbaum, For Love of Country?, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 15. 66. That benefit is called elsewhere an “exilic consciousness” because it is relatively detached from the narrow prejudices of the nation, as I argue in chapter 4. 67. See the epigram for this book; Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1983). 68. Johan Heilbron, “Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World-System,” European Journal of Social Theory 2, no. 4 (November 1, 1999): 429–44, doi:10.1177/136843199002004002; Victor Ginsburgh, Shlomo Weber, and Sheila Weyers, “The Economics of Literary Translation: Some Theory and Evidence,” Poetics 39, no. 3 (June 2011): 228–46, doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2011.04.001.

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69. Erdag Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London: Routledge, 2013). 70. He wrote the novel in Turkish well before those attacks transpired, which prompted Margaret Atwood to wrongly call the novel “prescient.” In fact, it was descriptive of realities that were not obscure in the world outside of North America before September 11, 2001. 71. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (September 1, 2002): 783–90, doi:10.1525/aa.2002.104.3.783.L 72. Nergis Ertürk, “Those Outside the Scene: Snow in the World Republic of Letters,” New Literary History 41, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 633–51. 73. Cf. James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Casanova, The World Republic of Letters. 74. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). 75. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 102. 76. I do write more extensively about teaching Pamuk in the forthcoming MLA Approaches to Teaching Orhan Pamuk, ed. David Damrosch and Sevinç Türkkan. 77. https://www.hrw.org /news/2017/01/12/turkey-alarming-deterioration-rights. 78. http://bianet.org/english/human-rights/183427–330-academics-from-48-univer sities-discharged-from-public-service. 79. Matthew Weaver, “Turkey Rounds up Academics Who Signed Petition Denouncing Attacks on Kurds,” Guardian, January 15, 2016, http://www.theguardian .com/world/2016/jan/15/turkey-rounds-up-academics-who-signed-petition-denouncing -attacks-on-kurds; “POLITICS—Erdoğan Slams Academics Over Petition, Invites Chomsky to Turkey,” accessed January 13, 2016, http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com /Default.aspx?pageID=238&nID=93760&NewsCatID=338. 80. Modern Language Association, “MLA Statement of Support for Turkish Academics,” accessed January 29, 2016, https://www.mla.org/About-Us/Governance/Exec utive -Council /Executive -Council -Actions /2016 /MLA -Statement-of -Support-for -Turkish-Academics. 81. The mission statement asserts Koç’s ambition “to cultivate Turkey’s most competent graduates, well-rounded adults who are internationally qualified; who can think creatively, independently and objectively; and who are confident leaders.” ku.edu .tr, accessed September 8, 2017. 82. Literature’s function in the national curriculum as an adjunct to history is written into the foundations of the Republic and monitored by the government through the ministry of education (YÖK). See Özlem Berk, Translation and Westernisation in Turkey from the 1840s to the 1980s (Istanbul: Zero Prod., 2004); Kader Konuk, “Erich Auerbach and the Humanist Reform to the Turkish Education System,” Comparative Literature Studies 45, no. 1 (2008): 74–89, doi:10.1353/cls.0.0014. 83. In comparison to the general population of Turkey, my students were disproportionately wealthy, secular, urban, and young. However, their youth makes them part of a demographic that drives important cultural and political shifts. As the anthropologist Jenny B. White suggests, the historically strong connection between secu-

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larism and nationalism is weakening rapidly in this country where just over half of the population is under thirty years old. Jenny B. White, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013), 3.

CHAPTER ONE: A NOVEL CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE 1. Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 65. 2. This instrumental view of the literary is articulated clearly in the arguments that are made for the medical humanities, for example. As the philosopher Charlotte Blease observes, “The idea that a study of the humanities helps to humanize doctors has become a leitmotif within the field. It is argued that the humanities (especially, literature) help to foster insights beyond those provided by biomedical training. Healthy young medics, it is claimed, can thereby gain significant insights into patienthood, and obtain important skills that may be valuable for their professional life.” Charlotte Blease, “In Defence of Utility: The Medical Humanities and Medical Education,” Medical Humanities 42, no. 2 (June 1, 2016): 103–8, doi:10.1136/medhum-2015–010827. 3. Margaret Atwood, “Headscarves to Die For,” New York Times, August 15, 2004, http: //www.nytimes .com /2004 /08 /15 /books /headscarves -to -die -for.html?page wan ted=all&src=pm. 4. Contemporary ways of thinking about world literature as a source of cross-cultural information grow out of traditions that run deeply through Western literary culture, as I suggest in the preceding paragraph with implicit reference to the history that David Damrosch recounts in What Is World Literature? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). 5. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 176. 6. Jodi Melamed divides the history of multiculturalism in the United States into three phases, beginning with the early precursors in the 1940s and 1940s. Of most interest to my analysis, however, are the second two phases, which coincide meaningfully with Pamuk’s career: the “liberal multiculturalism” of the 1980s to 1990s and the “neoliberal multiculturalism” in the 2000s. Pamuk helps consolidate “the rhetorical trope” that Melamed describes, which represents “the United States as always having been ‘a great multi-ethnic democracy.’ ” The rhetorics of world literature that bring a Turkish writer into that harmonious relation with U.S. multiculturalism serve the larger project Melamed theorizes by “[restructuring] neoliberalism as the global duty of the U.S. nation.” Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 137. 7. Christopher Hitchens, “Mind the Gap,” Atlantic (October 2004), http://www .theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/10/mind-the-gap/3487/. 8. I contrast Pamuk with Hosseini later in this chapter, drawing on the arguments of Timothy Aubry, but I leave Nafisi to critics writing with and against Hamid Dabashi, who famously compared Reading Lolita in Tehran to “the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India.” Dabashi observes that Nafisi’s glowing por-

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trait of the liberating effects of Western classics on Iranian women lent ideological support to the most neoconservative American foreign policies. In that sense, he posits her cultural contribution as a singularly destructive one, noting the rarity with which “an Oriental servant of a white-identified, imperial design managed to pack so many services to imperial hubris abroad and racist elitism at home—all in one act.” Hamid Dabashi, “Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire,” Al-Ahram Weekly, June 1, 2006, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg /2006/797/special.htm. 9. Aamir Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 130. 10. As Azade Seyhan contends, the narrative of the rise of the novel looks different in Pamuk’s native country because “one cannot speak in historical terms of the rise of a Western-type bourgeoisie in Ottoman society. On the other hand, the intellectual elite of Ottoman society at the end of the nineteenth century saw literature as a medium to marshal national energies for social mobilization.” Azade Seyhan, Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008), 22. 11. I draw here on Mufti’s argument that world literature is conditioned by “the (bourgeois) understanding and experience of the world as an assemblage of ‘literary’ or expressive traditions, whose very ground of possibility was the Orientalist knowledge revolution, thus functioned as the means for the insertion of the new ‘national’ class of natives into the bourgeois world system.” Orhan Pamuk belongs to precisely that class, as I argue more fully in chapter 3. Mufti, Forget English!, 90. 12. Pamuk has cited these writers prominently among his influences, and the Turkish critic Erdağ Göknar has argued that they suggest the complexity of his relationship to the social realism that prevails in modern Turkish literature. “Consciously negotiating his first and second readers,” Göknar argues, “national on one hand and international on the other,” Pamuk “experiments with fictional forms from social realism to modernism and from traditional narratives to postmodernism before settling confidently into complex contexts of Istanbul cosmopolitanism that synthesize internal and external influences.” Erdağ Göknar, “Secular Blasphemies: Orhan Pamuk and the Turkish,” Novel 45, no. 2 (June 20, 2012): 305, doi:10.1215/00295132–1573985. 13. Orhan Pamuk, Snow, export ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 4. Citations to this novel are hereafter given as page numbers in the text. 14. Pamuk is joined on this literary terrain by Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novel The Unconsoled (1995) deploys the strategy of the mind-reading narrator to an even greater degree. Cf. Natalie Reitano, “The Good Wound: Memory and Community in The Unconsoled,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49, no. 4 (2007): 361–86. 15. The significance of this distance is more visible to Pamuk’s Turkish readers than to his international audience, as I suggest in the coda. 16. Istanbul gained prominence as a tourist location for Westerners after the terrorist attacks of 2001, but its tourism industries have suffered from Turkey’s bad press in more era of the AKP, ISIS, and the migrant crisis. In more halcyon days, the New York Times recommended a thirty-six-hour trip to Istanbul with an emphasis on the city’s potential to serve the same bridge-building function as Pamuk: “From a skyline featuring both minarets and church spires to the call to prayer competing with lounge music in a hip cafe, Istanbul is the only major city to span two continents.” “36 Hours

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in Istanbul, the New York Times, February 4, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02 /07/travel/07hours.html. 17. Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012); Reitano, “The Good Wound.” 18. “Response—Lana Turner Journal,” accessed September 4, 2015, http://www .lanaturnerjournal.com/blog /response. 19. Some characters become iconic as signifiers of cultural phenomena even to people who haven’t read the works in which they appear (e.g., Hamlet, Dr. Jekyll, Big Brother), while others “never come to stand for anything at all except an ancient memory” (e.g., Leopold Bloom, Clarissa Harlowe, Humbert Humbert). “If we look at the first list,” Vermeule reflects, “we can see that the most famous literary characters are the most Machiavellian. Not that they are the most manipulative, although some of them are. In their original habitats, they provoke reflection. They are the most penetrating, quick-sighted, far-seeing, and all knowing. They are the richest in mind reading. And that explains, I think, why they endure and why they spread.” Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?, 51–52. 20. Ibid., 55. 21. I provide more context for this chapter of Snow in the introduction. 22. Cf. Mikhail  M. Bakhtin: “The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even a diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour (each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases)—this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensible prerequisite for the novel as a genre.” M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). 23. The “speech genres” that Bakhtin describes raise thorny problems for translators, as Lawrence Venuti and others suggest when they argue that every translation works through deep layers of metatextual references. In that light, Venuti concedes “the absence of cross-cultural conversations unaffected by domestic intelligibilities and interests” and asks “what kinds of communities translation can possibly foster.” Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 483. Theorists like Paul F. Bandia have drawn on this argument to locate the politics of translation in “heteroglossic linguistic practice.” Paul F. Bandia, “Literary Heteroglossia and Translation: Translating Resistance in Contemporary African Francophone Writing,” in Translation, Resistance, Activism, ed. Maria Tymoczko (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 169. 24. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “Comparison Literature,” New Literary History 40, no. 3 (2009): 567. 25. These protestations notwithstanding, Pamuk is best known in Turkey for saying that one sentence that was neither in nor about literature. (One can hardly imagine that he said it without expectation of the response that followed, but that is a story

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for another chapter.) Orhan Pamuk, interview by Charlie Rose, May 13, 2011, http:// www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11670. 26. “Orhan Pamuk Interview: On Taksim Square, Erdoğan & Literature,” New Republic, accessed January 27, 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/113948/orhan-pamuk -interview-taksim-square-erdogan-literature. 27. In chapter 5 I analyze the implications for world literature of this narrative of the Turkish author’s biography, which puts the most overtly political portion of his career near the beginning. This contrasts with the model that is pervasive in the West, where writers like Harold Pinter have established their prominence in literary terms before using that standing to advance a political argument. 28. Nergis Ertürk, “Those Outside the Scene: Snow in the World Republic of Letters,” New Literary History 41, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 641. 29. As examples, Evans cites “the conversation in a coffee shop between the director of the education institute and his assassin about the state’s banning of headscarves.” Julian Evans, “Veiled Hatred,” New Statesman, May 10, 2004, http://www .newstatesman.com/200405100050. 30. Stephen O’Shea, “Snow,” Independent, May 23, 2004, http://www.independent .co.uk /arts-entertainment/books/reviews/snow-by-orhan-pamuk-564547.html. 31. “In Turkey,” O’Shea observes correctly, “the novel was criticised for its use of caricatures. Not those of the foolish pasha of tired European travel writing, but the Turk-on-Turk variety: the spent leftist, the brainless policeman, the head-scarf passionaria, the miserable Anatolian.” Ibid. 32. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 50. 33. Here and elsewhere, Pamuk writes knowingly and ironically about the ways his fellow citizens view him. I describe the context for that fraught relationship between the Turkish author and his nation most fully in chapter 3. 34. Erdağ Göknar historicizes this engagement in the context of Turkey’s culture wars in Orhan Pamuk, Secularism, and Blasphemy, and I discuss it more fully in chapter 2. Erdağ M. Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (New York: Routledge, 2013). 35. Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 16. 36. This quality in Pamuk’s work is situated in a Turkish context by Erdağ Göknar in Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy, and it is theorized as a feature of world literature by Rebecca Walkowitz in Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 37. Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8–9. 38. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 39. Ibid., 21. 40. Ibid., 12. 41. Timothy Aubry, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 3. 42. Ibid., 191. 43. Ibid.

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44. Ibid., 193. 45. Ibid., 194. 46. Ibid., 196. 47. For a fuller analysis of the ways literary identification serves “the creative economy,” see Sarah Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014). For more on the ways that the affects of literary experience advance the cultural logics of neoliberalism, see Rachel Greenwald Smith, Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 48. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2007), xv, 137. 49. “Why Don’t Republicans Write  Fiction?: Benjamin Nugent Has Found Just One,” n+1, accessed February 4, 2012, http://nplusonemag.com/why-dont-republicans -write-fiction.

CHAPTER TWO: A NOVEL CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE’S HISTORY 1. Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Vintage, 2006), 187. Citations to this novel are hereafter given as page numbers in the text. 2. Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), 34. 3. In these respects, Freely resists the pervasive tendency of Anglophone readers to ignore the translator of the Turkish text. The translation theorist Sevinç Türkkan theorizes that tendency in an unpublished manuscript that analyzes Anglophone reviews of The Black Book. Türkkan observes how reviewers in the United States and United Kingdom “assume fundamental distinctions between Western and Turkish literatures. There is an expectation of what Turkish literature in translation should be. Any deviation from this expectation is negatively reviewed and the text is deemed lacking. If acknowledged at all, the translator is the suspect of any shortcomings of the text or blamed as such. Underlying these reviews is an attitude of superiority coupled with lack of knowledge, understanding, and interest in the actual book being reviewed, its author, and the original language. Almost always, the book is reviewed in relation to Western or globally well-known authors and the novel is judged using European literary yardsticks. Compared to literary giants’ writings and reviewed with already accepted measures, the text is deemed insufficient.” See also Sevinc Türkkan, “Pamuk’s Kara Kitap,” in Global Perspectives on Orhan Pamuk: Existentialism and Politics, ed. Mehnaz M. Afridi and David M. Buyze (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 157–76. 4. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence (New York: Knopf, 2009), 157. 5. Ayla Jean Yackley, “Nobel Winner Pamuk Opens Novel Museum in Istanbul,” Reuters, April 27, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-museum-pamuk -idUSBRE83Q18G20120427. 6. Apter, Against World Literature, 34. 7. The massacres of Armenian Turks were only part of this homogenizing project, which is also evident in the state’s historic insistence that its ethnic Kurds renounce

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their language and culture. As Doğu Ergil writes, “The root of this intolerance is to be found not in the character of the Turkish people or their political leaders but in the very nature of the Turkish state. This state is based on a conception of ‘nation-building’ that calls for standardizing the citizenry to make them Turkish in language and nationality, secular in orientation, and obedient to the state.” Doğu Ergil, “The Kurdish Question in Turkey,” Journal of Democracy 11, no. 3 (2000): 122–35. See also Thomas W. Smith, “Civic Nationalism and Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey,” Human Rights Quarterly 27, no. 2 (May 1, 2005): 436–70, doi:10.2307/20069794. 8. “Dress became a cornerstone of Turkey’s modernist transformation,” as White observes. That transformation was accomplished also through the reformation of the Turkish language, which testifies to the Republican belief that “modernity and law and order were best imposed by a strong center.” White, “State Feminism.” 9. Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3. 10. As Alev Çinar observes, “Islam was marked as the backward, the uncultured and uneducated, the rural, the traditional, the particular, the lower class, so as to allow secularism to enjoy the unmarked position of being the advanced, the cultured and educated, the urban, the modern, the universal, the upper class. The authority and privilege of secularism was predicated upon the preservation of these binary oppositions that kept Islam as the marked, underprivileged other.” Alev Çınar, “Subversion and Subjugation in the Public Sphere: Secularism and the Islamic Headscarf,” Signs 33, no. 4 (June 1, 2008): 891–913, doi:10.1086/528850. 11. Ayşe Saktanber and Gül Çorbacioğlu, “Veiling and Headscarf-Skepticism in Turkey,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 15, no. 4 (December 21, 2008): 514–38, doi:10.1093/sp/jxn018. 12. Margaret Atwood, “Headscarves to Die For,” New York Times, August 15, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/books/headscarves-to-die-for.html. 13. “I Want to Unveil My Views on an Important Issue,” Telegraph .co.uk, October 6, 2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk /news/1530718/I-want-to-unveil-my-views-on-an -important-issue.html. 14. As the political scientist Michael Thumann observes, Turkish social formations elude Westerners who seek mirror images of their culture wars, because the divisions that matter most in Turkey do not pit Islamist Turks against “those with a secular Western orientation,” nor do they simply stratify rich versus poor—although all of those demographic terms are relevant. The most trenchant divisions stand “between a long-reigning urban elite and a rising class of newcomers with roots in cities and towns far away from Istanbul, whose members happen also to be religiously observant. The elites, who have ruled Turkey for more than eighty years, are losing their grip, and they don’t like it. Headscarves are the emblematic feature of this change.” Michael Thumann, “Turkey’s Role Reversals,” Wilson Quarterly 34, no. 3 (July 1, 2010): 28–33, doi:10.2307/41000952. 15. Saktanber and Çorbacioğlu, “Veiling and Headscarf-Skepticism in Turkey.” 16. I place those terms in proximity advisedly to refer to lo real maravilloso, the aesthetics that propelled Latin American literatures around the world in the “boom” of the 1980s. Since Alejo Carpentier coined the term and Gabriel García Márquez demonstrated it for audiences all over the world, magical realism has become legible as a “global mode” and a “global commodity” that satisfies—and to some degree even

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creates—the same literary markets that sustain Pamuk. Cf. Anne C. Hegerfeldt, Lies That Tell the Truth: Magic Realism Seen Through Contemporary Fiction from Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005); Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). With this observation, I do not intend to debate Pamuk’s position on the long list of latter-day magical realists but to pursue the question that Michael Valdez Moses asks about Márquez and company: “Why has [their habit of contrasting the magical and the real] proven universally popular, or at least globally adaptable?” (109). 17. Adam Shatz, “Wanting to Be Something Else,” London Review of Books, January 7, 2010. 18. John Freeman, “In Snow, an Apolitical Poet Mirrors Apolitical Pamuk,” Village Voice, August 10, 2004, http://www.villagevoice.com/2004/08/10/in-snow-an-apolitical -poet-mirrors-apolitical-pamuk /. 19. Nergis Ertürk, “Those Outside the Scene: Snow in the World Republic of Letters,” New Literary History 41, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 634. 20. The majority of the women who killed themselves in Batman were between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four when they died. Rüstem Erkan, “A Small Trail Out of Patriarchy: A Progressive NGO & Abused Women in South-Eastern Turkey,” Women’s Health and Urban Life (n.p.: Pristine Publications, 2003), https://tspace.library .utoronto.ca/bitstream/180/1015/2/rustem.pdf. 21. Abdurrahman Altindag, Mustafa Ozkan, and Remzi Oto, “Suicide in Batman, Southeastern Turkey,” Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior 35, no. 4 (August 2005): 478–82. 22. Dan Bilefsky, “How to Avoid Honor Killing in Turkey? Honor Suicide,” New York Times, July 16, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/world/europe/16turkey.html. 23. Erkan, “A Small Trail Out of Patriarchy.” 24. Mazhar Bagli and Aysan Sev’er, “Female and Male Suicides in Batman, Turkey: Poverty, Social Change, Patriarchal Oppression and Gender Links,” May 2003, https:// tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/17381/1/bagli_sever.pdf. 25. Bilefsky, “How to Avoid Honor Killing in Turkey?” 26. This culture war divides Turkey’s national landscape between “the more sociocultural liberal and secular coastal provinces” and “the more religious conservative hinterland.” Cf. Ersin Kalaycıoğlu, “Kulturkampf in Turkey: The Constitutional Referendum of 12 September 2010,” South European Society and Politics 17, no. 1 (2012): 1–22, doi:10.1080/13608746.2011.600555. 27. Esra Özyurek, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 28. For Pamuk’s narration of his experience of this kind of nostalgia, see Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (New York: Vintage, 2006), 190. 29. Orhan Pamuk, Snow (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 27. Citations to this novel are hereafter given as page numbers in the text. 30. Prominent in the national news as the site of ongoing skirmishes between the Turkish Army and the Kurdish minority, Kars remains the location in Turkey where the national fabric wears most visibly thin—where the specters of civil war and national dissolution that the founders of the Republic raised rhetorically seem most palpably real. 31. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “Comparison Literature,” New Literary History 40, no. 3 (2009): 567–68.

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32. Elif Batuman, “Natural Histories,” New Yorker, October 24, 2011, http://www .newyorker.com/reporting /2011/10/24/111024fa_fact_batuman. 33. Madeleine Chapman, “Feminist Dilemmas and the Agency of Veiled Muslim Women: Analysing Identities and Social Representations,” European Journal of Women’s Studies, October 18, 2015, doi:10.1177/1350506815605346. 34. Christopher Hitchens, “Mind the Gap,” Atlantic, October 2004. http://www .theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/10/mind-the-gap/3487/. 35. Colleen Ann Lutz Clemens, “ ‘Suicide Girls’: Orhan Pamuk’s Snow and the Politics of Resistance in Contemporary Turkey,” Feminist Formations 23, no. 1 (2011): 138–54. 36. For more on this argument, see Sibel Irzık, “Orhan Pamuk's Snow: Re-imagining the Boundaries Between East and West, Art and Politics,” in Europe and Its Boundaries: Words and Worlds, Within and Beyond, ed. Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, 189–202 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2009). 37. More precisely, Batuman quotes Atwood’s description of the plot’s dependence on “the suicides of a number of young girls forced by their schools to remove their headscarves,” and Hitchens’s similar description of “an epidemic of suicide by young girls thwarted in their desire to take the Muslim veil.” Batuman, “Natural Histories,” 60, 61. 38. This reading of the headscarf controversy is corroborated by the critic Justin Neuman, who argues that Pamuk advances an argument for a more cosmopolitan literary imagination when he “reconfigures modernist and Islamic tropes in order to dissolve secularism and religiosity as putatively oppositional discourses.” Justin Neuman, “Religious Cosmopolitanism?: Orhan Pamuk, the Headscarf Debate, and the Problem with Pluralism,” Minnesota Review 77, no. 1 (n.d.): 156. 39. Ka extends that effort, too, by narrating acts of literary creation that become inseparable from his spells of mysticism and religious belief in ways that are disturbing to a secularist like him, as I argue in the preceding chapter. 40. Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (New York: Routledge, 2013). 41. Neuman, “Religious Cosmopolitanism?,” 158. 42. “Orhan Pamuk and the Turkish Paradox,” Spiegel Online, October 21, 2005, http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,380858,00.html.

CHAPTER THREE: ORHAN PAMUK AS POLITICAL GADFLY: “THE ARMENIAN ISSUE” 1. I borrow the term “reading classes” from Wendy Griswold and explain my use of it in the introduction. See Wendy Griswold, Regionalism and the Reading Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); also Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, “Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century,” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005): 127–41. 2. “Nationalist Discourses in the Coverage of Nobel Prize in Turkish Press,” accessed July 29, 2012, http://jiwajigwaliormp.academia .edu /AshishPuranik /Papers/1276269 /Nationalist_Discourses_in_the_Coverage_of_Nobel_Prize_in_Turkish_Press. 3. The sociologist Emre Gökalp summarizes the popular view of Pamuk’s statement in Turkey: “His remarks especially on this most controversial episode in Ottoman-Turkish history were widely seen as recognition of the so-called ‘Armenian genocide thesis,’

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a claim Turkey fiercely rejects. Turkish state officially acknowledges that large numbers of Armenians died, but says the overall figure is inflated and that the deaths occurred in the civil unrest during WWI and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In accordance with the dominant official ideology, for mainstream media discourse only ‘terrorist organization-PKK’ has been held responsible for the loss of 30,000 lives in Turkey. Together with the Kurds, Armenians have been also one of most important internal and/or external negative others of the Turkish national identity in the historical context.” Ibid. 4. See, for example, Jennifer M. Dixon, “Education and National Narratives: Changing Representations of the Armenian Genocide in History Textbooks in Turkey,” International Journal for Education Law and Policy, Special Issue (2010): 103; Fatma Ulgen, “Reading Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the Armenian Genocide of 1915,” Patterns of Prejudice 44, no. 4 (2010): 369–91, doi:10.1080/0031322X.2010.510719. 5. Ayse Gül Altinay, The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 6. Ibid., 95. 7. Ayşe Zarakol, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 8. Norman Bowen, “France, Europe, and the Mediterranean in a Sarkozy Presidency,” Mediterranean Quarterly 18, no. 4 (September 21, 2007): 1–16, doi:10.1215 /10474552-2007-023. 9. As Pamuk allied himself with the Europeans who closed their doors to Turks en masse, he also became legible in Turkey as a self-promoter who had something to gain by “making Turkey sound like a Middle Eastern country,” as the critic Alper Yağci suggests. Alper Yağci, “The Perils of ‘Too Successful’ Marketing, or Why Turks Don’t Like Orhan Pamuk” (December 4, 2011), http://fikirmahsulleriofisi.blogspot.com/2011 /10/perils-of-too-successful-marketing-or.htm 10. Esra Arcan and Murat Iri, “The Orhan Pamuk Case: How Mainstream Turkish Media Framed His Freedom of Speech,” Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi (Journal of Social Sciences) 18 (2007): 17–24. 11. Some observers—including Orhan Pamuk’s English-language translator, Maureen Freely—have argued that perhaps that was part of the prosecutors’ point. Resisting membership in the European Union on nationalistic grounds, they made Turkey unpalatable to Europe as they also created an occasion for European lawmakers to make disdainful remarks that would dismay the Turkish public. Maureen Freely, “Why They Killed Hrant Dink,” Index on Censorship 36 (May 2007): 15–29, doi:10.1080 /03064220701334477. 12. “Turkey ‘on Trial’ in Writer Case,” BBC, December 15, 2005, http://news.bbc.co .uk /2/hi/europe/4531782.stm. 13. Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors: Essays and a Story (New York: Vintage, 2008), 238–39. 14. The narrative of Pamuk’s trial is domesticated for Western readers in the entwined discourses of secularism and human rights, which arose in tandem in modern Europe, as Joseph R. Slaughter and others have shown. Consequently, Slaughter argues, “human rights discourse and narrative theory draw upon much of the same conceptual vocabulary of plot, character, and setting in their respective analysis of the sociology of human development.” Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 91.

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15. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), 60, 85. 16. Writing in the Telegraph, for example, the British journalist Tom Payne begins his rave review of Snow with an apology for Pamuk’s more overtly foreign qualities and concludes with the reassurance that he is human, too. “It’s impossible to recommend [My Name Is Red] without sounding eccentric,” Payne writes. “You try urging a friend to read a Turkish novel, brimming with stories within stories and Koranic dialectic, about murderous miniaturists working in the court of Sultan Murat III in 1591.” It is with some incredulity that Payne observes that this very Turkish novel “could almost be read for entertainment. The book showed Pamuk could do everything—jokes, horror, plot, structure, erudition, love.” Tom Payne, “Alone in Turkey,” Telegraph, accessed November 4, 2011. http://www.telegraph.co.uk /culture/books /3617511/Alone-in-Turkey.html. 17. “Pamuk’s Nobel Divides Turkey,” Guardian, October 13, 2006, http://www. guardian.co.uk /books/2006/oct/13/nobelprize.turkey. 18. Modern Language Association, “MLA Statement of Support for Turkish Academics,” accessed January 29, 2016, https://www.mla.org /About-Us/Governance/Ex ecutive -Council /Executive -Council-Actions /2016/MLA-Statement-of-Support-for -Turkish-Academics. 19. In the same interview, Pamuk also asserted his enthusiastic embrace of statist narratives about the ongoing violence between the Turkish military and the Kurdish minority. “Novelist Denies ‘Genocide’ Claim,” Guardian, October 17, 2005, http:// www.guardian.co.uk /world/2005/oct/17/turkey.books. 20. As the journalist Dilek Zaptçıoğlu reported, Pamuk appeared in Turkey as “an opportunist willing to play to his respective interviewers.” Dilek Zaptçıoğlu, “Nobel Prize Winner Pamuk Divides Turkey,” Spiegel Online, October 13, 2006, http://www .spiegel.de/international/0,1518,442419,00.html. 21. İpek Çelik, “Armenian Genocide in Cultural Terms: From Testimonies in Turkey to Atom Agoyan’s Ararat,” paper presented to American Comparative Literature Conference, Providence, R.I., 2012. 22. The word “genocide” carries legal obligations, so its applications are closely watched. Like Pamuk, Barack Obama omitted it from his reference to “that dark moment of [Turkish] history,” when “1.5 million Armenians were massacred or marched to their death in the final days of the Ottoman Empire.” Peter Baker, “Obama Marks Genocide Without Saying the Word,” New York Times, April 24, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com /2010/04/25/world/europe/25prexy.html. 23. Elizabeth Davies, “Nobel Prize for Fearless Defender of Freedom of Speech in Turkey,” Independent, October 12, 2006, http://www.independent.co.uk /news/world/ europe/nobel-prize -for-fearless -defender-of-freedom-of-speech-in-turkey-419876 .html. 24. Maureen Freely, “ ‘I Stand by My Words. And Even More, I Stand by My Right to Say Them . . . ,’ ” Guardian, January 10, 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk /world/2005 /oct/23/books.turkey. 25. Pamuk, Other Colors, 238. 26. Esra Ozyurek, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 11.

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27. For more on the complexity of Pamuk’s class position in Turkey, see the introduction as well as the subsequent sections in this chapter. Erdağ Göknar also maps that location literarily in Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (New York: Routledge, 2013). 28. Ayşe Kadioğlu, “The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism and the Construction of Official Identity,” Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 2 (April 1, 1996): 177–93, doi:10.1080 /00263209608701110. 29. This was particularly evident in accounts of “the Turkish model” written during the period during and soon after the “Arab Spring,” when it was hoped that the secularism of the Turkish state might extend eastward into Egypt, Tunisia, and beyond. Cf. Meliha Benli Altunışık, “The Turkish Model and Democratization in the Middle East,” Arab Studies Quarterly 27, no. 1/2 (January 1, 2005): 45–63; and Aslı Ü. Bâli, “A Turkish Model for the Arab Spring?."  Middle East Law and Governance  3, nos. 1–2 (2011): 24–42. 30. “Keeping the Past Under Lock and Key,” Hindustan Times, January 27, 2006, http: //www.hindustantimes .com /india /keeping -the -past -under -lock-key /story -gNmNXJTPlZV0zBveDexJdI.html. 31. “Pamuk’s Nobel Prize Sparks Mixed Reaction Back Home in Turkey,” International Herald Tribune, October 12, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/arts /12iht-web.1013pamukmix.3137789.html. 32. Ibid. 33. Kjell Espmark, The Nobel Prize in Literature: A Study of the Criteria Behind the Choices (Boston, Mass: G. K. Hall, 1991). 34. I theorize this more fully in the coda with reference to Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 35. European literary traditions yield a rich catalog of anti-Turkish prejudice and imperial desire, from Gustav Flaubert’s Tales of the Orient to Lord Byron’s Turkish Tales, and it is theorized in an equally rich body of scholarship. Turkish scholar Jale Parla shows convincingly how the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the nineteenth century is reflected in a parallel shift in European rhetorical traditions: when the empire was a formidable power, Parla argues, Europeans demonstrated a “tendency to Orientalise the Orient, to make it strange.” As Ottoman power declined, European writing shifted to a rhetoric that is “more straightforward, more directly colonialistic.” Jale Parla, “From Byron’s Giaour to Jezernik’s Wild Europe: Theory or History?,” in Imagining “the Turk,” ed. Božidar Jezernik (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). The Swedish scholars Per M. Görloff and Robert Gustafsson show how the imagination of a “terrible Turk” extends throughout northern Europe as well: “The word Turk was used in a range of negative ways mainly associated with bloodlust and savagery,” they write. “In Germany, the word der Türkenhund, i.e., the dog Turk [sic] was a common insult, and in Sweden the same word (Swedish Hundturken) was used to describe a half-human monster feeding on human flesh supplied by agents from the Swedish Order of Freemasons.” Per M. Gjörloff and Robert Gustafsson, “The Terrible Turk: Anti-Ottoman Representations in the 19th Century Swedish Rural Press,” Bachelor’s thesis, Linnaeus University, 2013, http://www.diva-portal.org / smash/record.jsf ?pid=diva2%3A589194&dswid=-8718.

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36. M. Hakan Yavuz delineates that nationalist logic more fully, contending that “the Armenian genocide paradigm, which mostly shies away from methodological, conceptual and theoretical debate in academic circles, revitalizes the arsenal of politically motivated Orientalist images to perpetuate the ‘bloodthirsty’ Turkish image along with that of intolerant Islam. As long as we allow ourselves to be influenced by the racist discourses of John Henry Newman, William Gladstone, Viscount James Bryce and Henry Morgenthau Sr., we cannot fully understand this modern ‘crusade’ discourse against Muslim Turks. These men were racists, and their writings are the basis for the debate over the Armenian issue against the Ottoman state and Turks. Newman, who never had anything neutral to say about the Turks, said that he considered the Ottoman state to be an ‘infamous power, the enemy of god and man.’ ” Jezernik, Imagining “the Turk.” 37. Zaptçıoğlu, “Nobel Prize Winner Pamuk Divides Turkey.” 38. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred: René Girard, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 144. 39. The narrator looks briefly for clues to solve Ka’s murder long after the fact, but he is disabused of that hope for enlightenment. The police “didn’t find anything,” according to the narrator’s guide, “a Turkish-German literary enthusiast” who seeks him out. “And the German police aren’t like our Turkish police—they do their job well” (259). The temporal inversion that structures this scene is typical of the proleptic structure that, as I argue elsewhere, does important work for the global novel. Gloria Fisk, “Putting Tragedy to Work for the Polis: The Rhetoric of Pity and Terror, Before and After Modernity,” New Literary History 39, no. 4 (2008): 891–902. 40. Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy. 41. Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (New York: Vintage, 2006), 101. 42. The spread of wealth around the country becomes evident in the construction of shiny factories, shopping malls, and technology centers in regions not historically known for contributing significantly to the GDP. And Turkish wealth spreads geographically, political power spreads, too, and that expansion is paralleled in demographic shifts. The gains of Islamist Turks gave rise to the AKP, and the supporters of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan—as well as Erdogan himself—testify to what Jenny White calls “the evolution of the Islamist yuppie.” Jenny B. White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). 43. Zafer Parlar, “Anatolian Tigers,” Hurriyet, February 18, 2011, http://www.hurri yetdailynews.com/default.aspx?pageid=438&n=anatolian-tigers-2011–02–18. 44. Azade Seyhan, Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008), 100. 45. Pamuk, Other Colors, 101. 46. Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener, The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 47. Their education does not encourage them strongly to read novels like Pamuk’s, as the critic Alper Yağci suggests. Educated on the political utility of social realism of writers like Yaşar Kemal, they deemed Pamuk’s “writing style tedious, his sentences too long, his characters too cynical and unlikeable, and his references too Islamic and oriental.” Alper H. Yağcı, “The Perils of ‘Too Successful’ Marketing, or Why Turks

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Don’t Like Orhan Pamuk,” Fikir Mahsulleri Ofisi, October 4, 2011, http://fikirmahsul leriofisi.blogspot.com/2011/10/perils-of-too-successful-marketing-or.html. For more on this response to Pamuk, see the coda. 48. Obioma Nnaemeka, Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005). 49. Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

CHAPTER FOUR: ORHAN PAMUK AS EXILE: PAMUK AND AUERBACH IN ISTANBUL 1. In a 2007 interview, Pamuk contrasted himself to the fictional protagonist of Snow in these terms, claiming that Ka was exiled from Turkey by his literary failure. Noting that it is only after Ka “tries his luck as a poet” in Istanbul that he becomes “frustrated and hangs out abroad, in Germany,” Pamuk contended that “I am more successful,” by contrast, “and no one drives me into exile, not even the nationalists— all difficulties aside.” Orhan Pamuk, “No One Drives Me into Exile,” Spiegel Online, February 5, 2007, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world /spiegel-interview-with -orhan-pamuk-no-one-drives-me-into-exile-a-480550-2.html. 2. Emily Apter, “Global Translatio: The ‘Invention’ of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 2 (January 1, 2003): 253–81. 3. Pamuk, Other Colors, 169. 4. Kader Konuk, East-West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 15. 5. Kristi Lynn Shaw, “Re-Creating Identity in Exile: Hybridity and Gender in the Works of Assia Djebar, Leila Sebbar, and Malika Mokeddem (Algeria)” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alabama, 2006), 24, http://gradworks.umi.com/32/36/3236800.html. 6. My point is not to pick on Shaw as a singular example but to demonstrate how well she has learned to use the tools of the critical trade. For another example of this usage, see Huma Ibrahim’s analysis of the work of the South African novelist Bessie Head. Huma suggests the subversive power of “the exilic consciousness,” which initiates “the resistance that subject identities confront. My notion of exilic consciousness constitutes an escape from systems of oppression that give rise to desires which encompass the sphere of belonging not to your own but to another people.” Huma Ibrahim, Bessie Head: Subversive Identities in Exile (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 2. 7. Auerbach laments his inability to “treat the siglo de oro more extensively,” for example, and to insert the “additional chapters” that he envisions, “to deal with English, German, or Spanish texts.” Whole linguistic traditions fall by the wayside. “The difficulties,” as he observes—famously, and plainly if not plaintively— “were too great.” Primary among those difficulties is the breadth of textual time and space that he aims to cover. Even “as it was,” he writes, with those unwritten chapters and unstudied traditions, “I had to deal with texts ranging over three thousand years, and I often had to go beyond the confines of my own fields, that of the romance literatures.” Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 557.

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8. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 16. 9. Seth Lerer, Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 10. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic. 11. Well before Emily Apter, George Steiner also made figurative use of exile to assert a new system of literary value. See, for example, George Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1997). 12. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 174. 13. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 8. 14. Ibid., 88. 15. Apter, “Global Translatio.” 16. Konuk refers to a lecture that Auerbach gave to his students in Germany in which he demonstrated how the West grew out of a Greco-Roman past with distinctly Egyptian, Babylonian, and Perisan features; he suggested the global dimensions of a “Völker- und Mythengewimmel” or “throng of peoples and myths” that made East and West enmeshed. 17. Konuk, East-West Mimesis, 156. 18. Ibid., 162. 19. Ibid., 164. 20. Hatice Bayraktar, “The Anti-Jewish Pogrom in Eastern Thrace in 1934: New Evidence for the Responsibility of the Turkish Government,” Patterns of Prejudice 40, no. 2 (2006): 95–111, doi:10.1080/00313220600634238. 21. Aysun Akan, “A Critical Analysis of the Turkish Press Discourse Against Non-Muslims: A Case Analysis of the Newspaper Coverage of the 1942 Wealth Tax,” Middle Eastern Studies 47, no. 4 (2011): 605–21, doi:10.1080/00263206.2011 .589987. 22. Konuk, East-West Mimesis, 173. 23. Konuk, East-West Mimesis, 166. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 137. 26. Ibid., 134, 137. 27. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 8. 28. Aamir R. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 1 (October 1, 1998): 106. 29. Apter, “Global Translatio.” 30. Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: Norton, 2010). 31. Lerer, Error and the Academic Self, 255; emphasis is his. 32. Ibid., 224. 33. This is a very conservative number, including only those refugees who meet the United Nations’ definition. That excludes the much larger number of people who enter into states of exile through poverty and other difficulties that do not meet legal criteria. “Refugee status precedes its recognition,” as the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigration reports, noting that “most of the world’s refugees do not receive

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formal determinations of their status under the 1951 Convention.” U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, “World Refugee Survey 2009,” n.d., https://grupa484.org.rs /wp-content/uploads/2012/09/WRS-2008-Statistics.pdf. 34. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 137. 35. This does not diminish the necessity of Pamuk’s flight under duress in 2006, nor does it diminish the suffering he endured as a result of that pressure in the months and years that followed. See the introduction and chapter 3 for a more detailed account of Pamuk’s persecution by nationalist extremists. 36. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic. 37. See introduction; Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors: Essays and a Story (New York: Vintage, 2008).

CHAPTER FIVE: ORHAN PAMUK WINS THE NOBEL PRIZE: THE CASES OF ORHAN PAMUK AND MO YAN 1. The Nobel Prize dominates the hierarchy of literary prizes that James English analyzes, so its operations epitomize the effects that he describes. James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). 54. 2. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 147. 3. English, The Economy of Prestige, 54. 4. In China during the 1980s, as Julia Lovell argues, “the quest for a Nobel Prize was promoted to the level of official policy and Nobel anxiety evolved into a ‘complex,’ (Nuobeier qingjie).” Julia Lovell, The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 3. I discuss the Chinese case at greater length later in this chapter. 5. Link observes that “the insecurity that underlies this quest for respect appears in especially sharp relief in the case of the Nobel literature prize, where China in essence hands over judgment of its cultural achievement to a committee of Swedes.” Perry Link, “Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?,” New York Review of Books, December 6, 2012, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/06/mo-yan-nobel -prize/. 6. Domestic anxieties about the Nobel Prize have grown in tandem with China’s GDP and its political might, which sparks other anxieties in the West. See, for example, G. John Ikenberry, “The Rise of China and the Future of the West,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 1 (February 2008): 23–37. 7. Espmark, The Nobel Prize in Literature: A Study of the Criteria Behind the Choices. Boston, Mass: G. K. Hall, 1991. 8. “Full Text of Alfred Nobel’s Will,” accessed January 28, 2016, http://www.nobel prize.org /alfred_nobel/will/will-full.html. 9. “Türkiye Nobel’e sevindi mi?” HaberTurk, December 4, 2006, http://www.haber turk .com/gundem/haber/7916-turkiye-nobele-sevindi-mi 10. Ayşe Zarakol, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2.

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11. For ease of reading, I have corrected only the largest and most straightforward of the typographical and syntactical errors that characterize the blogging occasion. Other errors remain because they suggest meanings that are less certain. Richard Lea, “Orhan Pamuk Wins Nobel,” Guardian, October 12, 2006, http://blogs.guardian.co .uk /culturevulture/archives/2006/10/12/orhan_pamuk_win.html. 12. Ibid. 13. Lawrence Venuti brought this problem of access to the attention of comparatists in 1999, when he wrote that “British and American book production increased fourfold since the 1950s, but the number of translations remained roughly between 2 and 4 percent of the total—notwithstanding a marked surge during the early 1960s, when the number of translations ranged between 4 and 7 percent of the total. In 1990, British publishers brought out 63,980 books, of which 1625 were translations (2.4 percent), while American publishers brought out 46,743 books, including 1380 translations (2.96 percent). Publishing practices in other countries have generally run in the opposite direction.” Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 11. 14. It is notable that this character is usually but not always a “he.” We might add to this list Guatemala’s Rigoberta Menchú, whose autobiography is studied in the context of world literature by David Damrosch, among others. But she won the Nobel Peace Prize, not the Nobel Prize for Literature, and it is worth noting that the representation of women is much higher in that category, particularly over the course of the past century. 15. Quoted in Espmark, The Nobel Prize in Literature, 4. 16. Åke Erlandsson, “Alfred Nobel—The Poet,” Nobel Prize.org, accessed July 18, 2014, http://www.nobelprize.org /alfred_nobel/biographical/articles/erlandsson-2/. 17. Ibid. 18. Richard Jewell, “The Nobel Prize: History and Canonicity,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 33, no. 1 (January 1, 2000): 168, doi:10.2307/1315120. 19. Anders Österling, “The Literary Prize,” in Nobel—The Man and His Prizes, ed. H. Schuck R. Sohlman (n.p.: Grizzell Press, 2007), 88. 20. The problem of expertise is captured succinctly in Franco Moretti’s confession that he works “on West European narrative between 1790 and 1930, and already feels like a charlatan outside of Britain and France. World literature?” Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Pendergrast (New York: Verso, 2004), 148–49. 21. Ayşe Özgün, “Orhan Pamuk vs. Michael Moore,” Hürriyet, February 25, 2005, http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com /h.php?news=ayse-ozgun-orhan-pamuk-vs.-mich ael-moore-2005-02-25. 22. As Erdağ Göknar argues, “media polemics” about Pamuk “encapsulate Turkish Republican logic. Not only do they reveal the political landscape, they delineate the struggle over representation that pits discourses of state against dissidence of authors.” Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (New York: Routledge, 2013), 8. 23. All press releases are available at Nobelprize.org. Julia Lovell insightfully describes the categorical differences among the releases for Western and non-Western winners. See Lovell, The Politics of Cultural Capital, 68–69. 24. Over the same historical period, literary critics in the United States struggled to describe how that harmony between the local and the global was grafted onto the

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equally binary relationship between literary form and content. At the cusp of the twenty-first century, Franco Moretti built on Frederic Jameson’s account of the coincidence between “the abstract formal patterns of Western novel construction” and “the raw material of Japanese social experience.” “For me,” Moretti wrote, “it’s more of a triangle: foreign form, local material—and local form. Simplifying somewhat: foreign plot; local characters; and then, local narrative voice.” These are variations on the theme that prevailed among critics who debated the best ways to read globally and locally at once, seeing that simultaneity as a new possibility that grew increasingly urgent. 25. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 53. 26. Pascale Casanova describes the Nobel Prize as “a prime, objective indicator of the existence of a world literary space.” Pascale Casanova, “Literature as World,” New Left Review 2, no. 31 (February 2005): 75. 27. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 212. 28. Ronald Dworkin et al., Tanner Lectures on Human Values 11, ed. Toni Morrison (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), 136. 29. Ibid., 124–25. 30. Cf. Ross Posnock, “The Dream of Deracination: The Uses of Cosmopolitanism,” American Literary History 12, no. 4 (2000): 802–18. 31. Spivak takes care to say that she is not “against the tendency to conflate ethnos of origin and the historical space left behind with the astonishing constructions of multicultural and multiracial identity for the United States.” Rather, she is against the tendency to use those constructions as “the founding principle for a study of globality. In the most practical terms,” she argues, “we are allowing a parochial decanonization debate to stand in for the study of the world.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 2008), 87. 32. Quoted in Lovell, The Politics of Cultural Capital, 63. 33. As the historian Ervand Abrahamian observes, American media “automatically, implicitly and unanimously adopted Huntington’s paradigm to explain September 11.” Ervand Abrahamian, “The US Media, Huntington and September 11,” Third World Quarterly 24, no. 3 (June 1, 2003): 529–44. 34. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006,” Nobel Foundation, October 12, 2006, http://www.nobelprize.org /nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/press.html. As I suggest in the introduction, broad gestures toward Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” structure this description of Pamuk’s achievement, which rests on a paradox that is politically fraught: the Islamic East and the Judeo-Christian West clash and interlace simultaneously at the specific location where Orhan Pamuk sits. He stands in metonynomically for Istanbul and its frequently cited bridge between East and West. His infrastructural function lends new urgency to his literary work in its historical moment, which needs someone like him: a novelist who can repair the severed halves of the geopolitical world in himself. 35. Annmarie Drury, Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 36. Engdahl attributed Pamuk’s transformative power to the fact that he has “roots in two cultures,” but it would perhaps be more accurate to say that two cultural paradigms inhere in the singular culture of his native Turkey, giving him the vantage of an outsider with the access of an insider in Europe.” Ian Traynor, “Nobel Prize for Hero

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of Liberal Turkey Stokes Fears of Nationalist Backlash,” Guardian, October 13, 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk /world/2006/oct/13/books.turkey. 37. Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 7. 38. The “Middle Easternness” of Turkey is arguable, since the Turkish Republic claims few allegiances to Arabic and Persian cultures, and it is described by some experts (as well as many nonexperts) as an intermediary cultural space between the Middle East and Europe. In Western cultural imaginations, however, Turkey is easy to see as a Middle Eastern culture. More than 99 percent of its citizens declare Islam as their official religion, which makes Turkey visible from the United States and Europe as the westernmost location in the Muslim world. 39. Nick Clark and Clifford Coonan, “Ai Weiwei Brands Nobel Prize for Literature Decision an ‘Insult to Humanity’ as China’s Mo Yan Named Winner,” Independent, October 11, 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk /arts-entertainment /books/news/ai -weiwei-brands-nobel-prize-for-literature-decision-an-insult-to-humanity-as-chinas -mo-yan-named-winner-8207109.html. 40. Chenzhou He, “Rural Chineseness, Mo Yan’s Work, and World Literature,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, ed. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2014), 79. 41. Clark and Coonan, “Ai Weiwei Brands Nobel Prize..” 42. “Mo Yan’s Silence on Liu Xiaobo Angers,” News24, December 7, 2012, http:// www.news24.com/World/News/Mo-Yans-silence-on-Liu-Xiaobo-angers-20121207. 43. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013—Prize Announcement,” accessed December 1, 2014, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2013/announcement .html. 44. Michiko Kakutani, “Alice Munro, Nobel Winner, Mines the Inner Lives of Girls and Women,” New York Times, October 10, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com /2013 /10/11 /books/alice-munro-mining-the-inner-lives-of-girls-and-women.html. 45. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013—Prize Announcement.” 46. Barry Egan, “Rushdie: How Bono Annoyed the Gardai by Taking Me for a Pint,” Independent.ie, September 23, 2012, http://www.independent .ie/woman /celeb -news /rushdie-how-bono-annoyed-the-gardai-by-taking-me-for-a-pint-28812957.html. 47. His celebrity has worked against his literary reputation, which has diminished in proportion as his fame has grown. The critic Graham Huggan describes Rushdie as a “celebrity minor” writer who consolidates “commodified perceptions of cultural marginality,” and Rüdiger Kunow writes of the “Americanization” of Rushdie: “Such a move to the U.S. has taken the trajectory of Rushdie, a voice from the margin, to a new domain. His subject position is no longer grounded in the postcolonial terrain organized around the center/margin-dichotomy; instead, he has in significant and signifying ways written himself into the center.” Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (New York: Routledge, 2002), xxii; Rüdiger Kunow, “Architect of the Cosmopolitan Dream: Salman Rushdie,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 51, no. 3 (January 1, 2006): 369. See also Ana Cristina Mendes, Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). 48. Scott Stewart, “Fanning the Flames of Jihad,” Stratfor, July 22, 2010, https:// www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100721_fanning_flames_jihad.

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49. Harold Pinter, “Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth & Politics,” accessed December 2, 2014, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html. 50. Ibid. 51. Charles Grimes, Harold Pinter’s Politics: A Silence Beyond Echo (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 16. 52. Ibid., 15. 53. Mark Taylor-Batty, The Theatre of Harold Pinter (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2014), 162. 54. Grimes, Harold Pinter’s Politics, 17. 55. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005.” 56. Grimes, Harold Pinter’s Politics, 17. 57. Taylor-Batty, The Theatre of Harold Pinter, 162–63. 58. Grimes, Harold Pinter’s Politics. 59. Margaret Atwood, “Headscarves to Die For,” New York Times, August 15, 2004, http: //www .nytimes .com /2004 /08 /15 /books /headscarves -to -die -for .html ?page wanted=all&src=pm. 60. Mo Yan, “Nobel Lecture: Storytellers,” December 7, 2012, http://www.nobel prize.org /nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2012/yan-lecture_en.html. 61. Sabina Knight, “The Realpolitik of Mo Yan’s Fiction,” in Duran and Huang, Mo Yan in Context, 94. 62. “The Real Mo Yan,” Humanities 32, 1 (January/February 2011), http://www.neh .gov/humanities/2011/januaryfebruary/conversation/the-real-mo-yan. 63. David Daley, “Rushdie: Mo Yan Is a ‘Patsy of the Regime,’ ” Salon.com, December 7, 2012, http://www.salon.com /2012/12/07/rushdie_mo_yan_is_a_patsy_of_the _regime/. 64. He, “Rural Chineseness.” 65. Knight, “The Realpolitik of Mo Yan’s Fiction,” 100. 66. Ibid., 103. 67. “Nobel Laureate Mo Yan Hopes for Liu Xiaobo’s Freedom,” China Digital Times, October 2012, http://chinadigitaltimes.net /2012/10/nobel-laureate-mo-yan-hopes-for -liu-xiaobos-freedom/. 68. Ibid. 69. Michael Martina and Maxim Duncan, “China Nobel Winner Mo Yan Calls for Jailed Laureate’s Freedom,” Reuters, October 12, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article /2012/10/12/us-china-moyan-idUSBRE89B0FJ20121012. 70. The “I apologize” campaign of 2008 stopped short—as Pamuk did, too—of using the word “genocide,” but it acknowledged the violence that the Turkish government committed against its Armenian minority. By 2014 more than 32,000 Turkish people became signatories to this document, which reads: “My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them.” “Özür Diliyorum [I Apologize],” n.d., http://www.ozurdiliyoruz.com/default .aspx. 71. Aybars Görgülü, “Towards a Turkish-Armenian Rapprochement?,” Insight Turkey 11, no. 2 (April 2009): 19–29.

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72. Chiefly, Philips suggested that Erdoğan might “leverage Pamuk’s Nobel to press the Turkish Parliament to reform Article 301 [and] also assuage critics by encouraging Turks and Armenians to discuss their shared history and explore practical strategies fostering contact and cooperation.” David L. Philips, “Using the Nobel Prize to Leverage Reforms in Turkey,” Hürriyet, November 3, 2006, http://www.hurri yetdailynews .com /default .aspx?pageid=438&n=using-the-nobel-prize-to-leverage -reforms-in-turkey-2006–11–03. 73. Perry Link, “Why We Should Criticize Mo Yan,” NYRblog, December 24, 2012, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog /2012/dec/24/why-criticize-mo-yan/; Charles Laughlin, “What Mo Yan’s Detractors Get Wrong,” ChinaFile, December 11, 2012, https://www.chinafile.com/what-mo-yans-detractors-get-wrong. 74. Link, “Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?”; Link, “Why We Should Criticize Mo Yan.” 75. Anna Sun, “The Diseased Language of Mo Yan,” Kenyon Review Online” (Fall 2012), http://www.kenyonreview.org /kr-online-issue/2012-fall /selections/anna-sun -656342/. 76. Ibid. 77. I discuss Pamuk’s perceived indebtedness to his translators, particularly Maureen Freely, in the preceding chapter and the coda. 78. Sun, “The Diseased Language of Mo Yan.” 79. Pankaj Mishra, “Why Salman Rushdie Should Pause Before Condemning Mo Yan on Censorship,” Guardian, December 13, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk /books /2012/dec/13/mo-yan-salman-rushdie-censorship. 80. Link, “Why We Should Criticize Mo Yan.” 81. “It would be wrong for spectators like you and me, who enjoy the comfort of distance, to demand that Mo Yan risk all and be another Liu Xiaobo. But it would be even more wrong to mistake the clear difference between the two. Link, “Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?” 82. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 87.

CHAPTER SIX: WORLD LITERATURE AS AN ARTIFACT OF THE UNIVERSITY IN THE UNITED STATES: THE PART ABOUT THE CRITICS 1. The Eurocentrism of Pascale Casanova’s analysis is widely noted and symptomatic of the culture she inhabits as a literary critic working in French institutions today. 2. This is by contrast to the states of the European Union, which have historically allocated many more public resources to cultural and arts organizations that construct the literary world outside of the university as well. 3. This chapter expands on earlier work; cf. Gloria Fisk, “Against World Literature: The Debate in Retrospect,” The American Reader, April 9, 2014, http://theamerican reader.com/against-world-literature-the-debate-in-retrospect. 4. Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, “Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century,” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005): 127–41. 5. This chapter benefits from Alexander Beecroft’s account of “an emergent global literary ecology,” and I find that metaphor instructive. My purpose here is to describe

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the ecological conditions for Orhan Pamuk’s arrival in the West. Alexander Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (New York: Verso, 2015). 6. Zhang’s career demonstrates the global influence of the U.S. university, too: with an M.A. degree from Peking University and a Ph.D. from Harvard, Zhang currently holds a post at the City University in Hong Kong. Cf. Longxi Zhang, From Comparison to World Literature (SUNY Press, 2014), 1. 7. See, for example, America Latina en la literatura mundial, edited by the U.S.-based critic Ignacio Sanchez-Prado and published by the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana at the University of Pittsburgh. The volume gathers critics within and beyond the United States to debate the ways that Latin American literatures operate in la literatura mundial. Ignacio M. Sanchez-Prado, America Latina en la literatura mundial (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2006). 8. Many of the contributors to this scholarly debate work in the United States as immigrants or expatriates by some definition, like workers in many other sectors of the U.S. economy. Many others fly in for conferences and submit their work to journals from institutional locations outside of the United States: Jacob Edmond at the University of Otago in New Zealand; Jale Parla at Bilgi University in Turkey; and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen in Denmark, among many others. 9. As New Critics devised new methods that worked like levers to open up a text, contemporary critics devise new ways to understand the relation between literature and this uneven world. See, for example, the theme for the 2016 MLA Conference, which invites participants to “consider the public face of all our objects of attention: literature and other kinds of texts, as well as film, digital media, and rhetoric,” and “to discuss how these objects move among the arts and how our field engages other intellectual disciplines; to reflect on literature’s past publics and speculate on its future publics; and to think about media, reception, audience, commentary, translation, and adaptation—and more—as ways of connecting to a public.” Modern Language Association, “2016 Presidential Theme: Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future,” accessed January 1, 2016, https://www.mla.org/Convention/MLA-2016/2016-Presidential-Theme. 10. Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 30. 11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Wellek Library, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 12. As Terry Flew observes, neoliberalism was “rarely used” as a rhetorical object “prior to the early 1990s,” and “it has become a ubiquitous concept in critical discourse” less than two decades later. Flew cites the “inclusiveness and apparent interdisciplinarity of the term.” Terry Flew, “Six Theories of Neoliberalism,” Thesis Eleven 122, no. 1 (June 1, 2014): 49–50, doi:10.1177/0725513614535965. 13. Pieter Vermeulen, “On World Literary Reading: Literature, the Market, and the Antinomies of Mobility,” in Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, ed. Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen (New York: Routledge, 2015), 79. 14. Henry Giroux, “Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture, and the Promise of Higher Education: The University as a Democratic Public Sphere,” Harvard Educational Review 72, no. 4 (December 1, 2002): 428, doi:10.17763/haer.72.4.0515nr62324n71p1. 15. A whole corpus of work exists to critique this logic in other contexts. “In academia,” as Lauren Berlant suggests, “reputation is gossip about who had the ideas,” so the rhetorical forms of that “gossip” have determining effects over which kinds of ideas gain value within it. Lauren Berlant, “Affect Is the New Trauma,” Minnesota Re-

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view 2009, no. 71–72 (March 20, 2009): 131–36, doi:10.1215/00265667-2009-71-72-131. That logic underwrites the “postcritical” turn, which theorizes the agonistic quality of literary criticism that Rita Felski describes in The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 16. The depth of poverty among university faculty is documented in a report from by U.C. Berkeley’s Labor Center, which concluded that “fully one-quarter of part-time college faculty and their families are enrolled in at least one of the public assistance programs analyzed in this report.” Ken Jacobs, Ian Perry, and Jenifer MacGillvary, “The High Public Cost of Low Wages,” U.C. Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, Research Brief, April 2015, http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/pdf/2015/the -high-public-cost-of-low-wages.pdf, 3. The concentration of that poverty among contingent faculty is documented in greater detail by James Monks, who observes that “full-time non-tenure-track faculty earn approximately 26% less per hour from their academic institution and 18% less in total earnings from all sources per hour than comparable tenure-track assistant professors. Part-time non-tenure-track faculty earn 64% less per hour from their institution, but only 1% less in total earnings per hour, than tenure-track assistant professors.” James Monks, “The Relative Earnings of Contingent Faculty in Higher Education,” Journal of Labor Research 28, no. 3 (June 23, 2007): 487, doi:10.1007/s12122-007-9002-5. 17. Randall Bowden and Lynn P. Gonzalez, “The Rise of Contingent Faculty: Its Impact on the Professoriate and Higher Education,” Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education 4, no. 1 (April 20, 2012): 5–22, doi:10.1108/17581181211230603. 18. Blaine Greteman, “Don’t Blame Tenured Academics for the Adjunct Crisis,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 22, 2017, http://www.chronicle.com /article /Don-t-Blame-Tenured/239268?cid=wcontentgrid_hp_2; David Damrosch, “Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability by Emily Apter (Review),” Comparative Literature Studies 51, no. 3 (2014): 504. 19. Damrosch moved from Columbia to Harvard, where he was hired to be the chair of the Department of Comparative Literature following the publication and success of What Is World Literature? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). 20. Here, as elsewhere in the chapter, I’m focusing on world literature as a method for scholarly critics. Other convincing arguments are made against world literature as a market or category of fiction. 21. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 2008), 87. 22. As a paradigmatic example, Damrosch cites the exclusion of American literature from the field of comparative literature at U.S.-based universities. It includes all the world’s literatures except for that of the United States, generating a category unified by nothing other than foreignness to Americans. By this definition, comparative literature becomes like “world music”: it is defined less by what it is than by what it is not. That negative definition is, as Damrosch observes, “atypical for comparative literature transnationally,” and it leaves residents of the United States without an institutional location for studying their national literary traditions in a comparative frame. 23. The modifier that suggests comparison functions like the adjectival “world” of “world music” to signal “foreignness” in a linguistic sense, denoting a comparative approach that excludes Anglophone literatures categorically.

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24. David Damrosch, “How American Is World Literature?,” Comparatist 33 (May 2009): 14. 25. Ibid. 26. http://www.mla.org /pdf/rpt_jil_1314web.pdf. 27. This was asserted to the University of Wisconsin by its governor Scott Walker, who burnished his bid for a presidential run in 2016 with the exhortation to college “faculty and staff” to “think about teaching more classes and doing more work.” But what counts as “work”? As the difference shrinks between the educative and private sectors, scholarly labor becomes less distinguishable from any other kind, which handicaps humanists against our colleagues in fields that have more proximal relations to capital. In 2012 the state of Florida considered scaling tuition at state schools to expected salaries so that a student in computer science or business would pay less than an English major for a college degree because her greater earning power would put more money in state coffers via taxes over her lifetime. “The higher education system needs to evolve with the economy,” the chair of the committee argued, articulating with extraordinary clarity an assumption that is more often implied: “People pay taxes expecting that the public good will be served to the greatest degree possible. We call that a return on investment.” Lizette Alvarez, “Florida May Reduce Tuition for Select Majors,” New York Times, December 9, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/educa tion/florida-may-reduce-tuition-for-select-majors.html. 28. Scholarly critics in philosophy, history, and literary studies have cited figures to suggest that the rhetoric of a “crisis” is hyperbolic, since students continue to take courses in the humanities in proportions that have remained generally stable over time. For an illustrative example, see Paul Jay, The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 29. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities—Part 1, ” Thinking C21, January 9, 2013, http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/01/09/the-dark-side-of -the-digital-humanities-part-1/. 30. Martin Finkelstein, “The Morphing of the American Academic Profession,” Liberal Education 89, no. 4 (Fall 2003), http://aacu.org /publications-research/period icals/morphing-american-academic-profession. 31. Jon Marcus, “New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom in Higher Ed Administrators,” New England Center for Investigative Reporting, February 6, 2014, http://necir.org /2014/02/06/new-analysis-shows-problematic-boom-in-higher-ed-administrators/. 32. Robert A. Rhoads et al., “The Massive Open Online Course Movement, xMOOCs, and Faculty Labor,” Review of Higher Education 38, no. 3 (2015): 397–424, doi:10.1353/rhe .2015.0016. 33. Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 34. In this new economic landscape, administrators pay private companies for educational technologies like MOOCS and amenities for students; the contingent workforce grows at the expense of tenure-track lines, and administrative budgets grow at the expense of faculty salaries. The “management thinkers” Clayton Christensen and Henry J. Eyring see promise in these developments, and their analysis typifies the logic of academic capitalism. Welcoming the entry of “disruptive technologies” into academic culture, Christiansen and Ewing acknowledge the value of “traditional universities” only begrudgingly because they depend on face-to-face interaction between stu-

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dents and faculty that is expensive. “Any who pay those prices [for tuition] are judging them to be too high. Given new competitive alternatives, that puts traditional universities at a grave risk, their unique physical and human assets notwithstanding.” Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004), 2, 31. This logic is also evident in the aspiration of the Chinese state to secure a Nobel Prize for the nation. 35. Frederick Engels and Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx/ Engels Selected Works, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore with Frederick Engels, ed. Andy Blunden (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), Marxist Internet Archive, https://www .marxists.org /archive/marx /works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf, 16. 36. “World Lite,” n+1, accessed December 18, 2015, https://nplusonemag.com/issue -17/the-intellectual-situation/world-lite/. 37. Apter, Against World Literature, 2. 38. Berthold Schoene, “Cosmo-Kitsch vs. Cosmopoetics,” accessed January 5, 2016, https://www.academia.edu/1379270/Cosmo-Kitsch_vs._Cosmopoetics. 39. Spivak and Wellek Library, Death of a Discipline, vii. 40. Damrosch and Spivak, “Comparative Literature/World Literature,” 457. 41. Ibid. 42. Apter, Against World Literature, 4. 43. Ibid., 288. 44. Ibid., 266. 45. Damrosch, “Against World Literature,” 504. 46. Apter, Against World Literature, 16. 47. n + 1, “World Lite.” 48. Ibid. 49. http://blog.tehelka .com /why-world-literature-looks-different-from-brooklyn /#sthash.pb2umhLJ.dpuf. 50. Apter, Against World Literature, 15. 51. Ibid. 52. Apter, Against World Literature, 100, 107. 53. Ibid., 2, 3. 54. Bourdieu et al., The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1996), 157. 55. I return to this passage throughout this chapter as well as in chapter 3 and the coda, but I frame it originally in the first section of the introduction. 56. Simon During, Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory and Post-Secular Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2009), 57–58. 57. Ibid., 70. 58. Apter, Against World Literature, 15. 59. Ibid. 60. By studying the ways that copyright travels with a text through its translations, Sarah Brouillette shows that Apter’s argument for the Untranslatable as a tool against capitalism “does not jibe with basic features of the material organization of the publishing industry and the intellectual-property regime on which it depends.” Sarah Brouillette, “Wither Production?,” Historical Materialism 23, no. 4 (November 27, 2015): 203, doi:10.1163/1569206X-12341440.

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61. Martin Oppenheimer, “The Proletarianization of the Professional,” Sociological Review 20, no. S1 (May 1, 1972): 213, doi:10.1111/j.1467-954X.1972.tb03218.x. 62. I have in mind here something like the “affirmative speculation” proposed by the anonymous authors of Speculate This!: “Affirmative speculation affords modes of living that creatively engage uncertainty. Its stakes are resolutely collective; often sabotaging individuated and privatized prescriptions, it builds on the tentative mutualities that arise in the face of uncertainties. In short, affirmative speculation embraces ways of living in common.” Uncertain Commons, Speculate This! (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013).

CODA: NOW, WHAT? 1. I refer here to universities that are culturally proximal to the United States whether or not they are geographically near. My experience of teaching in Turkey evidences the more general conditions by which the institutional practices of North American universities are exported globally through what educational theorists refer to as the “Emerging Global Model” (EGM) of higher education: “To join the international marketplace of ideas, especially in science, requires acceptance of the methods, norms, and values of the universities in Western Europe and North America that dominate the system.” Kathryn Mohrman, Wanhua Ma, and David Baker, “The Research University in Transition: The Emerging Global Model,” Higher Education Policy 21, no. 1 (March 2008): 20. 2. I make the case for this necessity in more pedagogical terms, too, in “Teaching Snow as a Translation,” forthcoming in MLA Approaches to Teaching Orhan Pamuk, ed. David Damrosch and Sevinç Türkkan. 3. David Crystal, English as a Global Language, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) ; Haruo Shirane, “What Global English Means for World Literature,” Public Books, October 1, 2015, http://www.publicbooks.org /nonfiction/what -global-english-means-for-world-literature. 4. Sarah Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014). 5. Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: Norton, 2010), 34. 6. Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 19. 7. My thinking here is shaped by my discussions with Rachel Greenwald Smith about her significant work in progress on compromise and conflict. I also have in mind the debates that array literary critics around the rhetorics of critique and the possibility of surface reading, both of which suggest the possibility that looking for a subtextual or unintended contradiction is just one critical model among many. 8. Shotwell, Against Purity, 7. 9. I am referring here to the argument I make in chapter 3 about Said’s critical discourse of exile, which loses its historical reference to ill effect in contemporary usages. 10. This history is narrated with a helpful emphasis on the very Americanness of it in Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas, and also in Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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11. This rise is commonly cited, and it fits with common sense. As manufacturing is exported to the global South, more workers in wealthy nations enter jobs in the professional and service sectors; they facilitate those careers with some college education if not completion of a degree. Manuel Castells cites data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to conclude that the most rapidly growing fields require training after high school, while the most rapidly shrinking do not. Still, he also cites data to suggest that the growing stratification of the U.S. economy diminishes this effect domestically. Between 1992 and 2006, the U.S. workforce saw a modest 1.4 percent rise in the proportion of workers who are college graduates. During the same period, the workforce concentrated at the top and bottom of the education ladder. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (New York: Wiley, 2011). 12. Humanists claim our fraction of those resources by asserting the utility of cultural knowledge in an information economy. See also Jacques Mélitz, “The Impact of English Dominance on Literature and Welfare,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 64, no. 2 (October 2007): 193–215, doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2006.10.003 13. Cf. Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy. 14. Pascale Casanova modulates her thesis that Paris is the center of the literary world by observing the growing hegemony of global English and the marked shift in the “world republic of letters” toward the Anglophone world. The U.S.-based editors of the literary magazine n+1 describe that movement as a fait accompli, writing in the past tense of “the long Parisian period of World Literature—before headquarters were relocated to London and New York.” “World Lite: What Is Global Literature?” n+1 17 (Fall 2013), https://nplusonemag.com/issue-17/the-intellectual-situation/world-lite/. 15. Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, “Higher Education Empirical Research Database—The International Branch Campus—Models and Trends,” September 12, 2012, http://heer.qaa.ac.uk /SearchForSummaries/Summaries/Pages/INT22 .aspx. 16. Barbara Harlow et al., “First Responses,” Comparative Literature Studies 53, no. 3, ed. Sarah Brouillette and David Thomas (September 20, 2016): 512. 17. See, for example, Henry Giroux, “Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture, and the Promise of Higher Education: The University as a Democratic Public Sphere,” Harvard Educational Review 72, no. 4 (December 1, 2002): 425–64, doi:10.17763/haer.72.4.0515nr62324n71p1. 18. Shotwell, Against Purity, 19. 19. In addition to the texts that I cite in chapter 6, see also Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Giroux, “Neoliberalism.” 20. As of May 2015, Koç Holding was listed as number 496 on Forbes’ Global 2000, with a market cap of $12.4 billion. For an analysis of the company’s role in the formation of the Turkish bourgeoisie after Atatürk, see Ali Arslan, “Emergence of the Turkish Bourgeoisie and Business-Political Relations in Turkey,” Journal of Human Sciences [online], 1, no. 1 (2004): n.p. 21. ku.edu.tr. 22. George Eliot and Gordon S. Haight, The George Eliot Letters, vol. 8 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978). 23. Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors: Essays and a Story (New York: Vintage, 2008), 247.

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INDEX

Abrahamian, Ervand, 227n33 absurdism, 52, 151, 158 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 24 academic capitalism, 11, 168–69, 174–77, 184–85, 233n33 aesthetic value: compromise aesthetics, 9, 205–6n28; Eastern, 109; hüzün, 108–9; network aesthetics, 9; Pamuk’s, 77–78, 104, 153; political complicity and, 157–59; political utility and, 3–4, 7–8, 130, 149; Swedish Academy and, 130, 139–40, 143–44, 149, 160 affirmative speculation, 235n62 Afghanistan, 59–61; Pinter’s opposition to war, 150, 163–64 Against World Literature (Apter), 177–84 Agos, 20 Ai Weiwei, 148, 156 AKP (Islamist Justice and Development Party), 79, 80, 108 Algan, Bülent, 208n57 Algerian women’s writing, 115 Altayli, Fatih, 99, 103 Alvarez, Lizette, 233n27 American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), 171

Amis, Martin, 161 Anderson, Benedict, 110 Anglophone markets: globality, 13, 35–36, 134–35, 145–47, 171; hegemony in world literature, 8–9, 134, 165–66, 196. See also literary market, transnational anthologies, 177 anti-capitalist critique, literary criticism as, 181, 186–87 anti-immigrant sentiments, 96–97 anti-Semitism, Turkish, 121–22 anti-Turkish prejudice, 221n35 anxieties: about “new cultural order,” 6–7, 110–26–127, 185, 189; Pamuk’s reassurance of Western readers, 42–44, 52, 56, 58–59, 146–47; scariness of other people, 56–59; self-consciousness and, 59–60 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 62–63 Apter, Emily, 26–27, 121–25; ansatzpunkt, view of, 116, 124; on Auerbach, 118–19; on borders, 182–83; exilic consciousness, view of, 114–15; Untranslatables, 68, 75, 86, 178, 181–82, 186–87, 240n60; Against World Literature, 177–84

252 INDEX

Arab Spring, 221n29 Armenia, Turkish rapprochement with, 157 Armenian massacres, 9, 120, 197, 215–16n7, 219n3; “genocide” as term, 19, 96, 99–100, 209n61, 220n22; “I apologize” campaign of 2008, 157, 229n70; Nobel Prize and coincidence of Pamuk’s comment, 94–95, 97; Pamuk’s “Armenian issue” comment, 18–22, 23, 25, 47, 79, 94–100, 99–101, 102, 109, 147, 214–15n25; Pamuk’s equivocation, 99–101 Article 301 (Turkish penal code), 19–20, 121, 208n57, 208–9n60; effect on other novelists, 96, 98; as secular fatwa, 102 Atatürk, Kemal Mustafa, 75, 77, 95, 101, 102; university education, effect on, 197–98 Atwood, Margaret, 36, 50, 86, 152, 153, 210n71; on headscarf controversy, 76; on Ka’s journalistic function, 34, 42 Aubry, Timothy, 9, 59–61, 205n17, 211–12n8 Auerbach, Erich, 26, 223n7, 224n16; biography, 116–17; Eurocentrism, 119, 122; in Istanbul, 113, 115–18; replacement with Spitzer, 118, 119, 124; self-portrayal as lonely scholar, 115, 118; as text, 123 Auster, Paul, 1 authoritarianism, 29–30, 76–77, 160; fake news, 90; risks of identificatory politics, 110 authority: asserted by Swedish Academy, 128, 132, 141–42; of exile, 114, 116–18; given by universities, 180–81; of state, questioning of, 182 autocritique, 121, 179 autonomy, literary, 206–7n37; imposition of Fordist technologies and, 187–88; literary, 17, 143, 153–55, 161 Bağli, Mazhar, 79 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 46, 213n23, 213n25 Bandia, Paul F., 213n23 Barthes, Roland, 179

Batman, Turkey, suicides of women, 24, 25, 78–84, 87–89, 217n21, 218n37 Batuman, Elif, 86–87, 218n37 Beecroft, Alexander, 230–31n5 Beloved (Morrison), 143 Berlant, Lauren, 231–32n15 Big Breasts and Wide Hips (Mo Yan), 158 Bilefsky, Dan, 79 Birmingham, Kevin, 171 The Black Book (Pamuk), 1, 22, 25, 66–67; diegetic present tense in, 67; Mars Mannequin Atelier allegory, 66–67, 69–70, 78; untranslated terms, 67–69 Blair, Tony, 151, 152 Blease, Charlotte, 211n2 Boltanski, Luc, 9–10, 206n33 borders, 33; absent in world literature, 169; marginalized writers within Western, 142–43, 153, 160; multiculturalism attempts to expand, 172; reading across, 166–67; translation as metaphor for, 129, 182–83 Bourdieu, Pierre, 110, 133, 170, 184, 232n15 bourgeoisie, 176, 212nn10,11 Brandes, Georg, 136 Britain, headscarf controversy, 76 Brouillette, Sarah, 146, 186, 193–94, 205nn23, 24, 207n39, 234n60 Buck, Pearl S., 138 Bush, George W., 29, 111, 150, 151, 161 Candido, Antonio, 8 canonization as world literature: adversarial stance of writer to home country as required, 128–29; exile of writer resonant with, 113–14; exiles from Africa, China, and the Middle East, 21; non-Western laureates, 130–31; Pamuk, 2, 10–11, 18, 22–23, 35, 48, 113; safety, loss of, 113, 126, 136, 140, 152–53; Western desires for rapport with East, 26. See also world literature

253 INDEX

capital intraconversion, 129 capitalism, academic, 168–69, 174–77, 184, 233n33 Carpentier, Alejo, 216–17n16 Casanova, Pascale, 8, 17, 24, 48, 129, 141, 204n5, 227n27, 230n1, 236n14 Castells, Manuel, 236n11 Çelik, Ipek, 100 characters: circulation of, 45; Galip (The Black Book), 66–67, 69; individual selfhood, Western, 155; İpek (Snow), 37–38, 81–82; Kadife (Snow), 46, 85, 88–91; Machiavellian, 45, 58; mannequins as in The Black Book, 70; mimetic limitations, 48–52; mind-reading roles, 45; Muhtar (Snow), 40, 41, 45; objects as placeholders for, 55–56; representative types, 46; seen as nonfictional, 34; society, relationship to, 53; Sunay Zaim (Snow), 88–91; Western identification with, 24, 33, 37, 52, 60–64. See also Ka (character, Snow) checkpoints, 178, 182 Chengzhou He, 155 Chiapello, Eve, 9–10, 206n33 China, 225nn4, 6; Great Leap Forward, 158; Mao-ti era, 159, 162; “Nobel Complex,” 130; suppression of Liu Xiaobo, 147–49, 156 Chow, Rey, 50–51 Christensen, Clayton, 233n34 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 175 Çinar, Alev, 216n11 citizenship, 83; as criterion for Nobel laureates, 131, 138, 160, 164; as Eurocentric logic in world literature, 17–18, 98–99, 110–11, 131–33, 137–38, 148, 162–64; global, 20–21, 82–83, 114; Turkish, 75, 94–97, 102–3, 121, 135–36 civil liberties, 87 clash of civilizations, 3, 144, 227nn33, 34 classical traditions, 3 Clemens, Colleen Ann Lutz, 85–86 CNN-Turk, 99 Coetzee, J. M., 1, 21, 135, 176, 180; Disgrace, 182

Cold War, 111, 144 colonization, in postcolonial world, 17 Columbia University: Committee on Global Thought, 20 comparative literary studies, 10; American-based, 172–73; Auerbach as ansatzpunkt, 116, 124; exilic writing, tradition of, 26, 116; Heimlosigkheit, theorization of, 114–15, 125; philological heritage, 118–19; supplanted by world literature, 177 comparison literature, 46–47, 81 complicity: aesthetic value and, 157–59; of humanities scholars in neoliberalism, 2, 8–12, 173–74, 192; of literary critics in global capital, 8–12, 25–27, 30, 173, 192–93; purity vs., 27, 191–93, 207n41; universality and relativity of, 161–64; of world literature in neoliberalism, 169, 192–93 compromise aesthetics, 9, 205–6n28 conspiracy theory, 111 contingent faculty, 10, 170–71, 174, 181, 185, 192, 195, 197, 232n17, 233–34n34 Coopan, Vilashini, 178 copyrights, transnational, 186 Corbacioğlu, Gül, 77 Corbijn, Anton, 150 corporate logics, 1, 187–91 “cosmo-kitsch,” 176 cosmopolitanism, 21, 25, 53, 104, 119, 173; principles of, 62–64; Swedish Academy and, 132, 138 creative economy, 11–12, 190–91, 193, 197, 207n39 cross-cultural enlightenment, 5–6, 11, 81, 93, 185; mimetic limitations, 48; Pamuk as protagonist in, 93, 98–99; as political action, 32–33, 143; reading across difference, 33. See also enlightenment, narrative of cultural capital, 129–30 cultural specificity, 78, 87 culture wars: Turkey, 79–80, 208–9n60; United States, 1980s, 3, 34–35, 143, 163, 216n14

254 INDEX

Dabashi, Hamid, 212n8 Damrosch, David, 3, 11, 13–14, 27, 134, 171–73, 177, 204n11, 207n45, 232n19, 233n24; “How American Is World Literature?,” 172; How to Read World Literature, 178; review of Against World Literature, 179 Das Magazin, 100, 107 Days of Abandonment (Ferrante), 182 Death of a Discipline (Spivak), 177 deep state, 20, 209n64 Delgado, Richard, 12–13 DeMan, Paul, 178 Demirel, Süleyman, 120–21 Descartes, René, 141 detachment, 119, 122–23 dezinformatsiya, 82 dialogism, 46 Dink, Hrant, 20, 209n62 Disgrace (Coetzee), 182 distance: emphasized by translator, 68; proximity and, 59–62 “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” (Abu-Lughod), 24 dragoman, 19, 35 Drury, Annmarie, 145 During, Simon, 185–86, 188 East: aesthetic values, 109; network of connections with West, 145; Pamuk as bridge to West, 4, 32, 57–58, 94, 114, 192, 227–28n36; particularity required of writers, 140, 142–46; Western desire for rapport with, 26. See also Islam; Istanbul economic metaphors, 129 Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, 157 Eliot, George, 198 empathy, 3; empathic fallacy, 12–13; in Snow, 3, 43–45, 57, 59 Engdahl, Horace, 144–45, 227–28n36 Engell, James, 12 English: Anglophone readers limited by, 67–68, 195–96; global centrality of, 1, 8, 23, 63, 193, 205nn22, 24;

role in transnational literary market, 23–24 English, James, 129, 225n1 Enlightenment, European, 94, 98, 131, 141, 148, 162 enlightenment, narrative of, 9–11; non-Western writers sacrifice to, 26, 95, 105, 136. See also cross-cultural enlightenment Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 29, 76–77, 222n42 Ergil, Doğu, 216n8 Erkan, Rüstem, 78–79 Ertürk, Nergis, 24, 48, 78 Espmark, Kjell, 104, 138 Esslin, Martin, 151 Eurocentrism, 104, 119, 122 European Union, 79, 104; accession talks, 19–20, 96–97, 120, 121 Evans, Julian, 49–50, 214n29 exceptionalism, discourse of, 102–3 exile, 20–21; ambivalence of, 114–16; appeal of to U.S. critics, 117, 118–24; authority of, 114, 116–18; biography synonymous with, 116–17; figurative discourse of, 114–15; as grand narrative, 116, 125; historical reference erased from, 124–26, 127; homelessness model, 26, 114–15, 122–25; irreproachability of author, 117–18; leitmotifs, 113–14; literary figure of, 124–25; lived conditions, 125–27; as necessary to comparatists, 118–19, 124–25; precursor to immigration, 122; proposal to retire metaphorical uses of, 125–27; psychological explanation, 125; reduced to fiction, 119, 125, 126–27; sense of foreignness, 114; worldly and, 116–17 exilic consciousness, 125–26, 209n66, 223n6; detached from experience of exile, 122; as habit of mind, 114–15 extraliterary work of literature, 27, 181, 186, 193–94 Eyring, Henry J., 233n34

255 INDEX

fatwa, secular, 102 Ferrante, Elena, 182 fiction: blurred with nonfiction, 32–33; exile reduced to, 119, 125, 126–27; fictional worlds translated to foreign worlds, 56–59; historicity in Snow, 80–83; materiality of, 73; metafictional strategies, 40, 51, 59, 66, 106; reality translated to in Museum of Innocence, 70–75 flâneur, 120 Flea Palace (Şafak), 103 Flew, Terry, 11, 168, 206n36, 231n12 Fraser, Antonia, 152 freedom of speech, 22, 98, 101; EU guidelines, 157; literary greatness tethered to, 26, 160; non-Western writers obligated to represent, 25–26, 98, 114, 153, 164 “freedom to be silent,” 153–56 Freely, Maureen, 22, 70–71, 209n64, 215n3, 220n11; The Black Book, translation of, 67, 75; Guardian article, 101 Freeman, John, 77–78 future, literature of, 9 Galip (character, The Black Book), 66–67, 69 Gao Xingjian, 21 García Márquez, Gabriel, 1, 216–17n17 genocide, as term, 220n22, 229n70. See also Armenian massacres geopolitical race narrative, 57, 141 German poetry, 175 Germany: gästarbeiter legislation, 17; Turkish workforce in, 17 Gezi Park protests (2013), 108 Girard, René, 105 Giroux, Henry, 169–70 global capital, 1, 7, 9–10, 208n50; allegory of, 69–70; literary critics complicit in, 8–12, 25–27, 30, 173, 192–93; Turkey’s role, 95–96; writing against, 2, 7, 9, 173–74 global citizenship, 20–21, 82–83, 114 global society, 9–10, 205–6n28, 206–7n37

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 3, 166, 175, 188 Gökalp, Emre, 219n3 Göknar, Erdağ, 23, 91, 212n12, 226n22 Goldblatt, Howard, 159–60 goodness: argument for institutional spending on humanities, 11; characters question, 47; defense of humanities, 11, 26–27, 191; fellow citizens’ ambivalence, 21; of human rights discourse, 94; of literary as such, 18; of literary criticism, 170–74; of novel, 32; of novelist, 2; Pamuk’s Norton Lectures, 32, 50, 53; political, 3–4, 8; of readership, 15; as requirement for Nobel Prize, 130–32; in service to the people, 148; traversing contested borders as, 33 good of world literature, 25, 52–53, 75, 83, 93, 99, 125, 147; extraliterary work, 27, 137, 181, 193–94; homelessness of other, 123, 125; political utility of, 145–46; reading as political action, 32–33, 143, 182, 184–85, 198–99; Swedish Academy’s role, 130–32, 137 Great Speech (Atatürk), 95 Green, Madeline F., 206–7n37 Griffith, Michael, 181 Grimes, Charles, 152 Griswold, Wendy, 203n1 Guardian (London), 50, 76, 101, 133–34 guest workers, 17, 208n51 Ha Jin, 7 Harney, Stefano, 28 Harvard, Institute of World Literature, 179 Hayot, Eric, 167 headscarves, 56, 75, 216n14, 218nn37, 38; as emblem of individual agency, 86–87; facial expression and, 76; inversion of historical terms, 83–87; meaning of to Westerners, 79–80, 85–86; nonfictional referent in novels, 78–80; semiotics of, 75–78; in Snow, 56, 76, 83–89, 199

256 INDEX

hegemony, Western, 11, 14; complicated relation of critics to, 2, 8–9; condescension, 44–45; consolidated by non-Western novelists, 7, 16, 18, 110–11, 141, 164; critique of, 2, 43; neoliberal multiculturalism, 57–58, 141; non-Western writers obligated to represent, 25, 98, 114, 153–55; progress, narrative of, 57, 91, 99, 102–3, 141; reader participation in, 5, 16, 18, 43; reproduction of, 21–22; of United States, 8–9, 22, 30, 173–74; of universities, 21–22, 166; world literature cultivates, 25. See also universities, U.S. Heimlosigkheit, 114–15, 123, 125 heteroglossia, 46 Hindustan Times, 103 history: historical reference erased from exile, 124–26; inversion of terms, 83–87; novelists not adept for, 87–92; Pamuk’s paradoxical limits on, 65–66, 73, 83; scariness of other people and, 56–59 Hitchcock, Peter, 27 Hitchens, Christopher, 35, 85, 86 Holden, Gerard, 27 Holland, Tom, 3 homelessness model, 26, 122, 192; Heimlosigkheit, 114–15, 123, 125 “honor killings,” 78–79 Hosseini, Khaled, 35–36, 59–61, 176, 196, 211–12n8 The Hothouse (Pinter), 151 How to Read World Literature (Damrosch), 178 Huggan, Graham, 228n47 Hu Jia, 156 Huma Ibrahim, 223n6 humanism, 8, 43; non-Western writers used to justify, 26, 57; Western, as ontologically correct, 161–64 humanities: competing claims, 26–27; complicity of scholars in neoliberalism, 2, 8–12, 173–74, 192; courses, 233nn27, 28; defense of, 11–12, 26–27, 127, 174–75, 191; devalued by

commercial values, 169–70; loss of value, 126–27, 141; reproduction of hegemony, 21–22; as source of information about nofictional world, 10. See also literary criticism human rights discourse, 25, 93–94, 100–101, 128 Human Rights Watch, 29 Huntington, Samuel, 144, 227nn33, 34 Hürriyet, 157 hüzün (tristesse), 102, 107–9 I, Rigoberta Menchú (Menchú), 3, 204n11 ideal, concept of, 163 “ideal tendency” of world literature, 132–33, 163 identification, 23–24, 33, 37, 52, 60–64, 145; contemporaneity of, 62–64; unintended consequences, 110 identity, 34; construction of, 82; national, 20–21, 29, 36, 60, 75–76; secular education and, 82; Turkish, 91, 95–96 images, solidity and, 54–56 imagination, 4, 15–16, 32, 34; literary, 43, 52, 189, 218n38; scariness of other people, 56–59; solidity, 54–56 imagined communities, 110, 175 immigrants, 16–17, 96–97, 197, 208n51 Independent, 50, 100, 150 Independent Chinese PEN Center, 148 Institute of World Literature (Harvard), 179 interpretation, dragoman figure, 19, 35 İpek (character, Snow), 37–38, 81–82 Iraq War, 111, 150, 163–64 Islam, 222n42; attention to after September 11, 2001, 8; birth certificates, 76; as Other, 216n10 Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), 79, 80, 108 Islamophobia, 75–76, 96–97; Batman suicides and, 79–80; Pamuk reassures Westerners, 18, 146–47; United States, 29, 30 Istanbul, 41–42, 200, 213n17; Auerbach’s misrepresentation of, 118–19, 123; hüzün (tristesse), 102, 107; mimetic

257 INDEX

appropriations of East and West, 123; as palimpsest, 69; Pamak’s artifacts, 73; re-creation of Museum of Innocence, 71–75, 72, 74 Istanbul: Memories and the City (Pamuk), 107 Istanbul University, 120 Jagoda, Patrick, 9 Jarrar, Khaled, 182 Jazz (Morrison), 143 Jewish intellectuals, refuge in Turkey, 120–21 job market, academic, 171, 174 journalistic content: in The Black Book, 77; faux journalism in Snow, 14, 34, 39, 42, 47, 51; in novels, 7–8, 14, 77 Joyce, James, 126 Ka (character, Snow), 37–47, 199–200; impoverishment and self-deceits, 37–38, 82; insight into other characters, 38, 41, 42–45, 53, 58; internal experience, 39–40; reader identification with, 23, 33, 37, 52. See also Snow (Pamuk) Kadife (character, Snow), 46, 85, 88–91 Kadir, Djelal, 178 Kafka, Franz, 52 Kakutani, Michiko, 149 Kars (Turkey), 41–42, 80, 200, 217n30. See also suicides of women, Batman Kawabata, Yasunari, 140 Keen, Suzanne, 24, 51 Kerinçsiz, Kemal, 103–4, 208n60 Kertesz, Imre, 21 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 149–50 Kipling, Rudyard, 138 The Kite Runner (Hosseini), 35, 59–61, 176, 196–97 Knausgaard, Karl Ove, 4, 164 Knight, Sabina, 155, 156 Koç Holding, 197, 236n20 Koç University (Turkey), 24, 28, 197–98, 200, 210n82; Department of English and Comparative Literature, 24, 30–31; English Language Center

(ELC), 197; student responses to Pamuk, 30–31, 199 Kogan, Irena, 208n51 Konuk, Kader, 26, 115, 119–23, 122 Kotz, David M., 208n50 Kunow, Rüdiger, 228n47 Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK ), 42, 201 Kurds, 42, 79, 215–16n7; Pamuk on Turkish military losses, 99–100; “We Will Not Be Party to This Crime” campaign, 100 laicism, 91, 102 Lana Turner Journal, 43 language, state construction of, 159–60 Latin American literatures, 216–17n16 Laughlin, Charles, 157–58 Laurie, Nina, 206–7n37 leisure industry, literary, 185–86, 188 Lerer, Seth, 117, 125 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 108 Lewis, Pericles, 53 liberalism: early nineteenth-century, 53 (See also neoliberalism); racial, 57–58 Link, Perry, 130, 157–58, 162, 225n5 literary autonomy. See autonomy, literary literary credibility, 49–50, 110, 152 literary criticism: bad logic, 183–84; compromised position, 6, 7–8; erasure of historical references, 124–26; exile, discourse of, 124–25; as globalist, 124; magical thinking, 28, 33, 170, 186, 195; marginalized position, 8–9; multiculturalism, 56–59; as vocation, 190–91. See also humanities; universities, U.S. literary globality, 1, 7, 17, 166; limits of, 23, 83, 160 literary market, transnational, 4, 12, 22–23, 34; exile as selling point, 117; global English, role in, 23–24; literary criticism located within, 185–86; Pamuk’s oeuvre as archive of intelligence, 36; speeches as requirement of, 154

258 INDEX

literary prizes, 26; as national asset, 129–30; scholarship about, 128. See also Nobel Prize for Literature literary studies, 231n9, 235n7; as anti-capitalist critique, 181, 186–87; instrumental view, 11–12, 26–27, 211n2 Liu Xiaobo, 147–49, 156 Longxi Zhang, 166 Lovell, Julia, 226n4 Lukács, Georg, 99 Lundkvist, Artur, 144 lyric traditions, Western, 38, 145 Machiavellian literary characters, 45, 58 Madame Bovary (Flaubert/Eleanor Marx’s translation), 178–79 Mafouz, Naguib, 21 magical realism, 77, 216–17n16 magical thinking, 28, 33, 170, 186, 195 Mahfouz, Naguib, 141–42 Malik, Charles, 119 Mao-ti era, 159, 162 Mao Zedong, 148, 159 marginalization: of academics, 8–9, 174; literature in service of, 148–49; of writers within Western borders, 142–43, 153, 160 Marx, Eleanor, 178–79 Marx, Karl, 175–76 masterpiece category, 3 Mauriac, François, 140 Melamed, Jodi, 9, 141, 211n6; racial neoliberalism, concept of, 57–58 Menand, Louis, 190–91 Menchú, Rigoberta, 226n14 metafictional strategies, 40, 51, 59, 66, 106 metatextual references, 37 middlebrow readers, 59–61 Milliyet, 133 mimesis, 6, 25, 48; citizenship and, 83; cultural specificity, 78, 87; inversion of, 70; limitations of, 48–52, 83–86; mimetic gap, 10, 34, 36; paradoxical relations to reader, 48–50; remembrance and, 71

Mimesis (Auerbach), 115–17, 123, 125 mindreading, 45, 58 Mishra, Pankaj, 47, 161, 162 modernity, 90–91; non-Western, 102 Modern Language Association (MLA), 30, 174 Monks, James, 232n16 Moretti, Franco, 2, 178, 226n23, 227–28n24 Morrison, Toni, 142–43, 160; Tanner Lectures, 143–44 Moses, Michael Valdez, 217n16 Moten, Fred, 28 Mo Yan, 26, 147–49, 152, 230n81; compliance with Chinese regime, 131; as exception to adversarial rule, 131; freedom to be silent, 153–56; intentionality of silence, 153–54; literary quality, 157–59; pen name, 154; subversive potential, 155–56; Works: Big Breasts and Wide Hips, 158; The Republic of Wine, 159–60; “To Defend the Dignity of the Novel,” 155 Mufti, Aamir, 8, 24, 35–36, 123–24, 125, 212n11 Muhtar (character, Snow), 40, 41, 45 multiculturalism, 3, 140, 211n6; Americanness of, 13, 172–73; geopolitical race narrative, 57, 141; neoliberal, 57–58; normative logics of, 37; scariness of other people, 56–59; three phases, 211n6; United States as model, 172 Munro, Alice, 148–49, 152, 162–63 The Museum of Innocence (Pamuk), 22, 25, 66; headscarf, semiotics of, 75–78; reality translated to fiction, 70–75; recreation of museum in Istanbul, 71–75, 72, 74 My Name Is Red (Pamuk), 66, 77, 220n16 mystery, conventions of, 66 mysticism, 87, 91, 218n39 n+1, 27, 165, 170, 176, 179–82 Nafisi, Azar, 35–36, 211–12n8 Naipaul, V. S., 142

259 INDEX

narcissism, Western, 43–44, 52 national culture: importance of literary prizes to, 129–30; selection of Nobel laureate and, 138–39; U.S., marginalization of academics, 8–9, 174 nationalism, Turkish, 94–95; assassination and threats, 20; formalized by article 301, 19; university education and, 197 nation-state, novel represents, 2, 5–6 Necip (character, Snow), 49, 58 Nemesis (Nobel), 137 neoliberalism, 206–7n37, 208n50; bad logic connecting world literature to, 183–84; humanities scholars complicit in, 2, 8–12, 173–74, 192; identification and, 62; as rhetorical trope, 10–11; as term, 11, 168–69, 206n36, 231n12; Turkish subject, 96; world literature as complicit in, 169, 192–93; writing against, 2, 7, 9 neoliberal multiculturalism, 57–58, 62 Neruda, Pablo, 150 network aesthetics, 9 Neuman, Justin, 91, 218n41 newspaper clippings, in novels, 59, 77 Ngai, Sianne, 9 Nnaemeka, Obioma, 110 Nobel, Alfred, 131–32, 147, 150; meaning of mission statement, 136–37 Nobel, Ludvig, 132 Nobel laureates, 21; early careers, 150–52; as good citizens of participatory democracies, 131, 138, 160, 164; national prominence of marginalized writers, 153 Nobel Prize for Literature, 128–64, 204n5, 223n1, 227n27; Anglophone readers, 134–36; armchair tourists, marketing to, 146–47; China and, 130, 225nn4, 6; coincidence of “Armenian issue” comment and, 94–95, 97; Cold War weaponization of, 111, 144; as cultural artifact, 131–33; eastward expansion of Western canons, 26, 128, 130; emphasis on political

aspects, 91–92; expansion of Western hegemony through, 17, 26, 95, 105, 128–30, 138, 141, 174; “freedom to be silent,” 153–56; global import of, 129–31; goodness as requirement, 130–32; literary meaning conveyed by, 135; national publics considered, 138–39; political implications, 19, 103–4, 136–39, 143, 157; rewards art that serves the people, 147–49; Romantic construction, 137; subordination of literature to politics, 163–64; Turkish reception of Pamuk’s, 133–34; as Western instrument, 103. See also Swedish Academy Nobel Prize for Peace, 132 nonfictional world, 6, 10, 22; in Snow, 24–25, 32–34, 43–44, 50, 59, 77–78 non-Western writers: adversary stance increases cultural capital, 110; canonization as world literature, 130–31; hegemony consolidated by, 7, 16, 18, 110–11, 141, 164; limited to likeness of Western citizens, 160; obligated to represent freedom of speech, 25–26, 98, 114, 153, 164; particularity required of, 140, 142–46; as peacemakers, 18, 146–47; political utility required of, 25, 98, 114, 153–55; protection of, 136; realist novels, 35–36; sacrifice to enlightenment narrative, 26, 95, 105, 136; what Western critics want from, 135–36. See also novelists nostalgia, 67–71, 74–75, 108–9, 111 nouveau riche, 107–10 novel, 213n25; allegory of, 70; bourgeois literature and rise of, 35–36; conventions, 52–54; European context, 205n16; fictional and nonfictional worlds blurred, 32–33; formal techniques, 53; global, 5–6, 22; goodness and, 32; granular details, 2; heteroglossia, 46; journalistic content, 7–8, 14, 77; mystery, conventions of, 66; nation-state

260 INDEX

novel (cont.) represented in, 2, 5; nineteenthcentury, as national art, 5, 203n4; political work of, 32–33, 36, 46–47, 143; realist, 35–36, 38, 53, 61, 65, 180, 200 novelists: legally actionable observations, 29; not accountable as historiographers, 87–92; reader identification with, 110; responsibility for confrontation, 95; silencing of, 96, 98, 106. See also non-Western writers Nussbaum, Martha, 21, 43 oath of national identity, 20 Obama, Barack, 220n22 “Odysseus’ Scar” (Auerbach), 117 Onar, Nora, 209n60 Oppenheim, Martin, 187–88 Orientalism, 69, 104, 212n11, 221n35; non-Western writers supply, 36; vulgarity of nouveau riche, 109 O’Shea, Stephen, 50, 214n31 Österling, Anders, 138–39 Ottoman Empire, 75, 212n10, 218–19n3, 221n35 Özgun, Ayşe, 139 Özyürek, Esra, 79, 95–96, 102 Palestine, 182 Pamuk, Orhan: ancestral history, 107–10; “Armenian issue” comment, 18–22, 23, 25, 47, 79, 94, 99–101, 110, 147, 208–9n60, 213–14n25, 221n22; assassination threats, 113; as “bridge between East and West,” 4, 32, 57–58, 94, 114, 192, 228n36; canonization as world literature, 2, 10–11, 18, 22–23, 35, 48, 113; as case study, 22–23, 27; celebrity, 93–95; as character in Snow, 37, 38; Columbia University position, 113, 122; complexity of domestic position, 25; declines requests for journalistic analysis, 47; European identification with, 97–99; exile as ambivalent, 114–16; expectations of, 25, 36–37, 45; as fiction writer, not

bridge, 47–52; flees Turkey, 20–21, 98–99, 102; genocide acknowledgment, 209nn60, 61; global reach, 2–6; goodness of, 2, 94–95; as hero and traitor, 95–97; honors received, 204n5; human rights advocacy, Western views of, 100–101; human rights positions, 25, 93–94; innovations, 38, 53, 58, 59; interviews, 47, 65, 91–92, 99–101, 105, 114; located in two cultures, 227nn34, 36; nationalist opposition to, 19–20, 86–87, 101–2; as native informant, 43, 98, 102–3; Nobel Prize awarded to, 2–3, 91–92, 94–95, 209n60, 220n13, 225n1; Norton Lectures, 32, 50, 53; novel as negotiation, 63–64; as novelist in transition, 53; as opportunist, 103–5, 219n9, 220n20; paradoxical relation to historical truth, 65–66, 73, 83; persecution by nationalist extremists, 225n35; polarizing effects, 18–22; political matters, refusal to speak on, 47–48, 92, 198; as protagonist in crosscultural enlightenment, 93, 98–99; as purveyor of artifice, 66; reassures Western readers, 14, 42–44, 52, 56, 58–59, 146–47; secularization thesis, interrogation of, 90–91; trial, 19, 96, 97–99, 120, 219n14; wealthy background, 107–9; Works: Istanbul: Memories and the City, 107; “Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World Writers,” 114; My Name Is Red, 66, 77, 220n16; “The Rich,” 109; “Who Do You Write For?,” 4–5, 126. See also The Black Book (Pamuk); The Museum of Innocence; reception of Pamuk’s novels; Snow (Pamuk) parallipsis, 184 Paris, 236n14 Parla, Jale, 23, 221n35 Parler, Zafer, 108 parochialism, Western, 116–19, 147–48, 163 particularity, as Eastern, 140, 142–46 patriarchy, 78–79, 85–86

261 INDEX

Payne, Tom, 220n16 peace, global: conformity to Western terms, 132–33, 146; criticism of trust in novelist, 50–51; non-Western writers as peacemakers, 18, 146–47; world literature as solution, 3, 10, 14, 18, 32, 34, 192 perception, 54–56 perfectability, 132–33, 163; reading against, 193 Philips, David L., 157, 230n72 Pinter, Harold, 150–54, 160–64; Nobel speech, 163–64 Plato, 83 political utility of literature, 3–4, 7–8, 33, 46–47, 143; extraliterary work, 27, 181, 186, 193–94; goodness of world literature, 145–46; obligation of non-Western writers, 25, 98, 114, 153–55 politics: aesthetic value and, 3–4, 7–8; inscribed in Nobel Prize, 136–39; unintended consequences, 110; Western publics decide, 3–4, 7–8 “Politics and the Chinese Language: What Mo Yan’s Detractors Got Wrong” (Link), 162 postcolonial studies, 26–27 postcolonial theory, 168 prestige, economics of, 129 privilege, 7, 16, 201; of U.S. university critics, 8, 22, 181 progress, narrative of, 57, 91, 99, 102–3, 141 Proust, Marcel, 54–55 proximity, 59–62 purism, lie of, 191–93, 195, 197, 207n41 purity, 25, 27 race narrative, geopolitical, 141 racial liberalism, 57–58 Rajaram, Poorva, 181 readers, Turkish, 69–70, 73–74, 80 readers, Western: compassionate response as redemption of, 60–62; desire to see Turkish state embarrassed, 94–95; as dupes, 83;

identification with characters, 24, 33, 37, 52, 60–64; lack of context and information, 23–25, 76–77, 87, 99; middlebrow, 59–61; misreadings, 23, 48, 78, 82–83, 85–86, 90; orientation to global capitalism, 9–10; reassurance of, 42–44, 52, 56, 58–59, 61–62, 145–46; self-consciousness, 59–61 reading: across difference, 32–33; as political action, 32–33, 143, 182, 184–85, 195, 198–99 reading classes, transnational, 1–2, 5–6, 94, 203nn1, 4; touristic guilt, 146–47 Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi), 35, 36 realism, 5–6 realist novel, 35–36, 180, 200; innovations in, 38, 53, 58, 61, 65 realpolitik, 156 reception of Nobel Prize winners, 142, 156; Mo Yan, 154 reception of Pamuk’s novels, 147; expectations of, 25, 36–37; Nobel Prize reactions, 133–34; paradoxical assumptions about mimesis, 49–50; Turkish, 31, 36, 94; Western selfreflection, 42–43 reception rhetoric, 3, 13–14, 21–23, 34 refugees, 224–25n33 relatability, 58 relativism, 56–59 religiously inflected rhetoric, 99–100 remembrance, 67–71, 70–71, 74–75, 108, 111 remorse, 60 Republic, 208n57, 209n64, 210n82, 216n8, 217n30, 226n22 rescuer trope, 110 Rhoades, Gary, 175 Risse, Mathias, 206n32 Rorty, Richard, 4 Rose, Charlie, 47 Roth, Philip, 164 The Routledge Companion to World Literature, 178

262 INDEX

Rushdie, Salman, 90, 103, 106, 126, 149–50, 155, 161, 228n47 Ruskin, John, 12–13 Russo, Elena, 208n53 sacrificial rhetoric, 26, 95, 105, 136 Şafak, Elif, 103–4 Said, Edward, 21, 27–28, 109, 116–18, 123, 145; on Auerbach, 116–17; in exile, 113; on exile, 126 Saktanber, Ayşe, 77 Sanchez-Prado, Ignacio M., 231n7 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 96–97 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 55 Satanic Verses (Rushdie), 149–50 Scarry, Elaine, 24, 53–56, 59 secularism, 75, 79, 80, 102, 221n29; Pamuk’s opposition to intolerance of, 108–9 secularization thesis of modernity, 90–91 self-contradiction, 183, 201 September 11, 2001, 8, 144, 161, 207n45, 210n70, 227n33 Sev’er, Aysan, 79 Seyhan, Azade, 23, 109, 212n10 Shatz, Adam, 77 Shaw, Kristi Lynn, 115, 223n6 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 137 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 155 Shotwell, Alexis, 27, 191–92, 195, 198, 207n41 Simon, Claude, 140 Slaughter, Joseph R., 219n14 Slaughter, Sheila, 175 Smith, Matt Bailie, 207n37 Smith, Rachel Greenwald, 205–6n28, 235n7 Snow (Pamuk), 1, 22, 24, 145, 204n13, 220n16; address to reader, 48–49; allegory of Turkish relationship to Western world, 14–17; as comparison literature, 46–47, 81; conspiracy theme, 106–7; diegetic narrator, 37–41, 59, 80–83, 105–6; empathy in, 3, 43–45, 57; faux journalism in, 14, 34, 39, 42, 47, 51; foreknowledge in,

39; Frankfurt scene, 42–43, 145; gender politics in, 38, 87–88; goodness of solidity in, 52–56; headscarf plot in, 56, 76, 83–89, 199; heteroglossia in, 46; historicity and fiction, 80–83; hotel room meeting, 45–47; identification with characters, 33, 37, 52, 60–64; as interpretive failure, 86; inversion of historical terms, 83–87; journalistic content, 14, 34, 39, 42, 47, 51, 80–81, 82, 89–91; layers of doubt in, 48–49; limited intimacy, 61; literary identifications between Turkish characters and Anglophone readers, 24, 145; love story, 37–38, 81–82; mediated narration, 52; My Fatherland or My Headscarf diegetic play, 88–89; mysticism in, 87, 91, 218n39; nonfictional insight in, 24–25, 32–34, 43–44, 50, 59, 77–78; paradoxical relations in, 48–50, 61; political issues in, 77–78; proximity and distance in, 59–62; reassurance of Western readers, 42–44, 52, 56, 58–59, 61–62; reversal of terms in, 106–7; reviews in West, 3; satirization of global novelist, 105–6; suicides of women in, 39, 40, 80–87; symbolism of passage from West to East, 39; teaching, 199–201; thematization of economic and cultural processes, 14–18; translations, 52; twice removed narration, 41; voice and character in, 37–47; world literature conventions in, 40; world readers as primary subject, 48. See also Ka (character, Snow) social contract, reasoning about, 45–46 social speech types, 46 society, character’s relationship to, 53 Socrates, 83 solidarity among strangers, 4 solidity, 54–56, 58 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 144 Soyinka, Wole, 140–41 Spitzer, Leo, 118, 119, 124

263 INDEX

Spivak, Gayatri, 11, 13, 27, 143, 163, 167–68, 172, 207n45; Death of a Discipline, 177 Stefancic, Jean, 12–13 Steiner, George, 117 Straw, Jack, 76 suicides of women, Batman, 24–25, 78–84, 87–89, 217n20, 218n37; as function of location, 79; inversion of historical terms in Snow, 83–87; nonfictional referent in novels, 78–80; in Snow, 39, 40; Western terms applied to, 84 Sun, Anna, 158–60 Sunay Zaim (character, Snow), 88–91 Suskind, Mariano, 27 Sweden: Nobel Prize as cultural artifact of, 131 Swedish Academy, 2–3, 17, 103–4, 128; as arbiter of local value, 139–42; assumption of universality, 131; authority asserted by, 128, 132, 141–42; as bully pulpit, 156–57; complicity, universality and relativity of, 161–64; double aesthetic and political goals, 139–40, 144, 160; early parochialism, 137–38; Eurocentrism, 104; globalization of canons, 26, 128, 130; mission statement, 136–37, 155, 163; quality, problem of, 143–45. See also Nobel Prize for Literature Tagore, Rabindranath, 138 Taksim Square protests, 47 Taylor-Batty, Mark, 152 technology, 134–35 “terrible Turk” images, 19, 79, 96, 104, 221n35 therapeutic paradigm, 9, 59 Thomas, David, 193–94 Thrace, 120 Thumann, Michael, 216n14 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 119 tourism, 41–42, 146–47, 212n16; leisure industry, literary, 185–86, 188 translation, 4, 8, 128, 201; biography of, 178–79; The Black Book, 67; borders as metaphor for, 129, 182–83; causal

relation to authors’ exile, 21; distance emphasized by translator, 68; heteroglossia, 46; interpretive challenges, 9, 177–78; learning to read, 190; legibility to English readers, 67–68; limits on world literature, 75; market for, 22, 177–78; monolingual Anglophone audiences and, 134; of Mo Yan, 159–61; publishing practices, 226n13; theorists, 23; Untranslatables, 67–68, 75, 86, 178, 181–82, 186–87, 234n60 transnational reading classes. See reading classes, transnational tristesse, 108 Truman Capote Award, 171 Trump, Donald, 29, 30 Turkey: academics, persecution of, 29–30; anti-Semitism, 121–22; Atatürk’s language reforms, 159; authoritarianism, 29–30, 76–77; birth certificates, 76; citizenship, 75, 94–97, 102–3, 121, 135–36; coup d’etat of 2016, 29; cultural centers, 41–42; culture wars, 79–80, 208–9n60; deep state, 209n64; educational curriculum, 95–96, 210n82; European Union accession talks, 19–20, 96–97, 120, 121; left subculture, 101; modernization, 8, 215–16n8; religiously inflected rhetoric, 99–100; as secular state, 75, 79, 108–9; standardization, 216n9; vigilantism, 95–96; in Western cultural imagination, 19, 79, 96–97, 104, 221n35, 228n38 Turkish language, 159, 196, 215–16n8 “Turkish model,” 221n29 Turkish national anthem, 209n62 Turkishness, 75, 77; in The Black Book, 67; threats to, 20 Turkish Republic: Atatürk’s legacy, 75, 77; iconic images, 95–96; selfconstruction as refuge for minorities, 120–21; suicides and divisions within, 79–80; Thrace, pogroms, 120 Türkkan, Sevinç, 23, 68–69, 215n3

264 INDEX

U2, 150 United States, 211–12n8, 226–27n24; authoritarianism, rise of, 29–30; culture wars, 3, 143, 163, 216n14; economic stratification, 236n11; under erasure in curriculum, 172–73; Islamophobia, 29–30; literary hegemony, 8–9, 22, 30, 173–74, 193; myth of exile, 117, 118–24; racial liberalism, 57–58. See also literary criticism; multiculturalism universality, 18, 25, 61–63; of complicity, 161–64; cosmopolitan view, 62–63; as criterion for Nobel Prize, 104, 132; critique of, 56–57; limited to Western authors and standards, 140, 147; as Western, 18, 25, 132 universities, 7, 22, 28–29; Americentrism, 13–14; Emerging Global Model (EGM), 235n1; “field of the present,” 184; hegemony of Western, 21–22, 166; Turkey, 24, 28–31. See also Koç University (Turkey); universities, U.S. universities, U.S., 43, 165–88, 233n27; academic capitalism, 168–69, 174–77, 184–85, 233–34n35; contingent faculty, 10, 170–71, 174, 181, 185, 192, 195, 197, 232n16, 233–34n35; corporate logics, 187–91; curricula, 165, 172–73, 184; imported research, 171–72; local culture, 166; market logics, 170–71; nationally marginal, 8–9, 166; tenure track faculty, 10, 170; wall between liberal arts and professions, 190–91. See also literary criticism university novels, 181 Untranslatables, 68, 75, 86, 178, 181–82, 186–87, 234n60 Updike, John, 3, 161 urbanization, 108 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 114 Venuti, Lawrence, 213n23, 226n13 Vermeule, Blakey, 24, 34, 45, 58, 169, 213n19

Walkowitz, Rebecca, 9, 46, 81, 178 Warwick Research Collective (WRC), 24, 193 weltliteratur, 13, 166, 175–76, 188 West: binary oppositions, 101, 105; network of connections with East, 145; reassurance of readers, 42–44, 52, 56, 58–59, 61–62, 145–46; safety of writers in, 152–53; “terrible Turk” images, 19, 79, 96–97, 104, 222n36, 228n38 Western writers: marginalized writers within Western borders, 142–43, 153, 160; ontological rightness, 161–64 “We Will Not Be Party to This Crime” campaign, 100 White, Jenny B., 210n83, 222n42 “white collar proletarian worker,” 187–88 “White Turks,” 108 Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs, 205n23 Wood, Marcus, 43 Woolf, Virginia, 119 “World Lite” (n+1), 176, 179–82 world literary space, 141 world literature: as alternative system of valuation, 175; Americanness of, 13, 172–73; anthologies, 177; ascendance of, 11; comparison literature, 46–47; in contemporary period, 167; conventions, in Snow, 40; cosmopolitanism, 104; cultural work of, 167–68; as field of study, 26–27; globality produced by, 166; global peace as goal, 3, 10, 14, 18, 32, 34; Goethe’s view, 175; “ideal tendency,” 132–33, 163; identification as work of, 62; interpretive failures, 86; as job category, 174; limits of translation, 75; Marx’s view, 175–76; as method of reading across borders, 166–67; modernist trope of authorship, 119–20; new criterion for, 62–64; political utility of, 3–4, 7–8, 33, 46–47; predicated on sacrifice of relationship to domestic culture, 25, 95, 105, 136; processes require alienation from

265 INDEX

home country, 135; proximity and distance in, 59–62; readers’ lack of context, 23, 24–25; readers’ trust in, 50–51, 60–61, 65, 83, 110; reassurance of Western readers, 42–44, 52, 56, 58–59, 61–62, 145–46; relationships with American universities, 180–81; scholarly debates about, 130–31, 165–67, 172; standard for entry into, 17–18; as term, 3, 25, 166, 171; theoretical framework for teaching, 22; Turkish audience, educated, 42; unequal distribution of costs and benefits, 111–12; as weltliteratur, 13, 166, 175–76, 188; writers descended

from colonial elites and oligarchs, 111–12. See also canonization as world literature world republic of letters, 17, 48, 129, 165; assumption of writer’s purity, 25; housed in West, 7–8 Yağci, Aler, 219n9, 222n47 Yavuz, M. Hakan, 104, 222n36 Yeats, W. B., 138 Yu Jie, 148 Zaptçıoğlu, Dilek, 220n20 Zarakol, Ayşe, 96 Zhang, Longxi, 231n6