Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel [1 ed.] 0415505372, 9780415505376

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Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy

Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy is the first critical study of all of Pamuk’s novels, including the early untranslated work. In 2005 Orhan Pamuk was charged with “insulting Turkishness” under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code. Eighteen months later he was awarded the Nobel Prize. After decades of criticism for wielding a depoliticized pen, Pamuk was cast as a dissident through his trial, an event that underscored his transformation from national literateur to global author. By contextualizing Pamuk’s fiction in the Turkish tradition and by defining the literary and political intersections of his work, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy rereads Pamuk’s dissidence as a factor of the form of his novels. This is not a traditional study of literature, but a book that turns to literature to ask larger questions about recent transformations in Turkish history, identity, modernity, and collective memory. As a corrective to common misreadings of Pamuk’s work in its international reception, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy applies various analytical lenses to the politics of the Turkish novel, including gender studies, cultural translation, historiography, and Islam. The book argues that modern literature that confronts representations of the nation-state, or devlet, with those of Ottoman, Islamic, and Sufi contexts, or din, constitute “secular blasphemies” that define the politics of the Turkish novel. Concluding with a meditation on conditions of “untranslatability” in Turkish literature, this study provides a comprehensive and critical analysis of Pamuk’s novels to date. Erdag˘ Göknar is Assistant Professor of Turkish Studies at Duke University and the award-winning translator of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red. He holds a Ph.D. in Near and Middle Eastern studies and has published various critical articles on Turkish literary culture. He is also the translator of A.H. Tanpınar’s novel of Turkish modernity, A Mind at Peace, and co-editor of Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida (North Carolina, 2008).

Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy The Politics of the Turkish Novel

Erdag˘ Göknar

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Erdag˘ Göknar The right of Erdag˘ Göknar to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Göknar, Erdag˘ M. Orhan Pamuk, secularism and blasphemy : the politics of the Turkish novel / Erdag˘ Göknar. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Pamuk, Orhan, 1952- - -Political and social views. 2. Turkish fiction- 20th century- -History and criticism. 3. Politics and literature- -Turkey- History- -21st century. 4. Censorship- -Turkey- -History. 5. Nationalism and literature- -Turkey. 6. Secularization- -Turkey. I. Title. PL248.P34Z73 2012 8940 .3533- -dc23 2012023134 ISBN: 978-0-415-50537-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-50538-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-08010-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

To authors who turn contradiction into ways of being

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: The Polemics of the Author The Interview 2 The Ergenekon Conspiracy 5 Overview of the Chapters 8 The Death and Resurrection of the Author

x xii 1

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PART I

Tropes of “Turkishness” from Sufism to State

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Literary Revisions of the Secular Modern Insulting Turkishness 19 Pamuk as Dissident 20 The Secular Masterplot of the Republican Novel Orthodoxies of Islam and State 27 Mapping Pamuk’s Literary Modernities 34 Conclusion: Secular Blasphemies 47

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The Untranslated Novels of a Nobel Laureate The Empire-to-Republic Bildungsroman: Cevdet Bey and Sons (1982) 53 Nâzım Hikmet’s “Revolution” in Literary Modernity: Human Landscapes (1965) 67 The Silence of the Secular Modern: The Silent House (1983) 71 Yas¸ar Kemal’s Mystification of Social Realism: Iron Earth, Copper Sky (1963) 83 Conclusion: Making Din Legible to Devlet 85

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Contents

PART II

The Archive of Ottoman Istanbul

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3

A Voice from the Ottoman Archive The Ottoman Legacy 93 Early Modern Ottoman Istanbul: The White Castle (1985) 96 Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Poetics of Paradox: A Mind at Peace (1949) 112 The Counter-Archive of Istanbul 122 Conclusion: Postsecularism 124

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Reimagining the Ottoman Legacy Orientalizing the Ottoman Legacy 127 The Writer Manqué and the Writing-Subject 130 The Art of the Book as Blasphemy: My Name is Red (1998) 132 Halide Edib’s Gendering of Ottoman Modernity: The Clown and His Daughter (1935) 150 Conclusion: Postorientalism 159

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PART III

The Literary Politics of the Secular-Sacred

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Political Parody from Coups to Conspiracies The Literature of Conspiracy 167 Conspiratorial Logic: The New Life (1994) 168 Yusuf Atılgan’s Existential Crisis of Secular Modernity: Motherland Hotel (1973) 181 Melodramas of Conspiracy, Burlesques of Coup: Snow (2002) 183 Og˘ uz Atay’s Parody and the Dissidence of Metafiction: Misfits (1971–2) 204 Conclusion: The Crisis of Homo Secularis 207

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Novelizing Secular Sufism 210 Black Bile, Black Humor, and Black Ink: The Black Book (1990) 213 Mystical Melancholy, or Hüzün in Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005) 227 A Novel of Objects: The Museum of Innocence (2009) 234 Conclusion: The Hidden Symmetry of Secular Sufism 240

Contents

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Conclusion: The Blasphemies of “Turning Turk”

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Notes Bibliography Index

252 286 299

Acknowledgments

Numerous individuals and institutions have helped me over the years during which this book was conceived, researched, written, and rewritten. My primary thanks go to my colleagues and mentors in the US and in Turkey, whose generosity in sharing their learning and whose encouragement provided the foundation for producing this work. I would like to thank all those who supported and furthered my interests in Ottoman, Turkish, literary, and cultural studies over the years, beginning with Garrett Hongo (whose encouragement led to my first Fulbright to Turkey), Nüket Esen (for her guidance and support at Bog˘ aziçi), Yurdanur Salman (who introduced me to the possibilities of translation), Tony Greenwood (who welcomed me to the world of the American Research Institute in Turkey), Kemal Silay (for his support during my master’s work), Selim Deringil (for insight into the intersections of Turkish literature and history), Duygu Köksal (for advice and feedback on historico-literary methodologies), Saliha Paker (who brought theories of translation to bear), Ranji Khanna (for insights into psychoanalysis and colonization), Walter Andrews (for guiding my research at the University of Washington), Res¸at Kasaba (for his disciplinary insights and endless encouragement), Selim Kuru (who supported my work and pointed out research gaps), and Laurie Sears (whose notions of identity and subjectivity were formative to my theoretical framework). This project was given inspirational momentum through the “Turkey: Literary and Political Intersections” conference convened by Fredric Jameson at Duke in 2007 and through the insights of speakers Jale Parla, Sibel Irzık, and Azade Seyhan, a group later augmented by Nurdan Gürbilek and Murat Belge in follow-up sessions on Turkish literature in Istanbul and New Orleans. The steadfast advice and encouragement of a coterie of Duke friends and colleagues made this work a reality: Nancy Armstrong, miriam cooke, Andrew Janiak, Bruce Lawrence, Rebecca Stein, and Leonard Tennenhouse. I would like to especially thank Srinivas Aravamudan, Peter Burian, Kelly Jarrett, George McLendon, Gil Merkx, and Aron Rodrigue. The senior faculty in my home department has always been a wellspring of strong support and collegiality: Edna Andrews, Jehanne Gheith, and Beth Holmgren.

Acknowledgments

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Special thanks also to Duke research librarian Greta Boers, who helped with formatting of the manuscript. To the members of my family who have supported me as I worked on this book, I would like to express my love and gratitude. My parents, Meral Ülker . Ili and Mehmet Kemal, and my aunts and uncles, in many ways “children of the revolution,” provided the psycho-social context which made the process of writing this study personal as well as scholarly. My extended family and in-laws in Istanbul helped in day-to-day matters too numerous to mention. My twin brother Evren and my sisters Esin and Eren have been a continuing source of support and good humor. I would also like to thank my friends, especially those in New York, Seattle, Istanbul, and Durham, who were always ready with advice and to put the project in perspective for me when it became difficult. Not least of all, I would like to thank the institutions and foundations whose assistance made the research and writing of this book possible: the National Humanities Center, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Duke University Middle Eastern Studies Center, and the Duke Islamic Studies Center. Thanks also to Joe Whiting and Kathryn Rylance of the Routledge Middle East and Islamic Studies division. Finally and most importantly, I would like to thank my colleague and partner Banu and our son Levent Sa’y, without whose companionship, love, and humor none of this would have materialized.

Preface

In 1990 The White Castle came across my desk at my first job as a fact-checker in New York. I’ve had an interest in Pamuk’s fiction ever since. His work represented a cosmopolitan Istanbul that contrasted sharply with “third world” images of Turkey popular in the US then. My interest deepened in 1995 after I spent a year as a Fulbright fellow in Istanbul and read his work in Turkish. Even before I met the author himself in 1997, as a graduate student, I had begun essays on The White Castle and The New Life. A few years afterward, I spent a year translating Pamuk’s My Name is Red, a novel that changed my life. The year of its publication in 2001, I was offered a position at Duke University in Turkish Studies. My Name is Red appeared in September, a week before the attacks of 9/11. With the publication of the novel, enthusiastic reviews, including one in the New York Times Book Review, began to mention Pamuk in conjunction with the Nobel Prize for the first time. The novel became a part of international geopolitics in an unexpected way, mimicking Turkey’s own global emergence. In 2003 Turkey refused to let the US and its coalition open a northern front in its ill-fated invasion and occupation of Iraq. The same year, My Name is Red was awarded the international Dublin IMPAC literary award, one that is unusual in that it recognizes translation and the translator. Two years later, Turkey began accession talks with the EU; the same year, Pamuk was drawn up on charges for “insulting Turkishness.” A year later, Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize. The continuing importance of the novel to Pamuk’s oeuvre and its place in world literature is attested to by its selection in 2010 as part of the Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics series. Thus, the roots of this study, which contextualizes Pamuk’s rise as a global author, stretch back to 1995 when I was living in Istanbul as a Fulbright fellow. That was a formative year in which I published my first critical analysis of Turkish literature, co-translated Halikarnas Balıkçısı’s The Voice of Anatolia, studied Ottoman Turkish, and read the classics of modern Turkish literature. I saw Pamuk for the first time then, speaking as part of a public lecture series held at the Cumhuriyet bookstore in Beyog˘ lu, where he gave a provocative lecture on how modernist author Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar – a great influence whom Pamuk refers to in Other Colors and Istanbul – was not,

Preface xiii in fact, a modernist at all. What drew me to Pamuk was his complexity: The complexity of his registers of language, of his affect, of his sarcasm, wit, and bitterness; at times, his work entered a penetrating blackness that was inscrutable. In subsequent years, I began to see the outlines of what that blackness concealed. This book is conceived and framed with various constraints in mind. One is the smallness of the field of Turkish Studies in the US. The second is the dominant discourses with which the US academy approaches fields like Turkish and Middle Eastern studies. This required the use of conceptual terms and framing that are legible to my colleagues in the US, but not necessarily current in the Turkish context, which is more strictly disciplinarily bound. As such, this is not a traditional scholarly analysis, in that it has multiple, disparate audiences in mind. The book is, furthermore, what might be termed a work of Duke scholarship; that is, it is informed by the intellectual debates that occur on campus and foregrounds a theoretical framing that is cross-disciplinary and meant to signify to other fields in the humanities and social sciences (religion, literature, cultural anthropology, history, and area studies). The title captures this interdisciplinary approach. That said, the focus of the analysis is the novels of the main literary representative of a globalizing country and the literary culture of a little-known national tradition. The reader will immediately understand that for this project, literature is the staging ground for broader interventions into politics, culture, and dissent. As a Turkish-American scholar, I have always been drawn to the ambivalences and paradoxes of modern Turkish culture and life. These are reflected in the divided selves, frustration, anger, hatred, parody, and loss that fill the texts of Turkish literature and history that I read, research and teach. Turkey has redefined itself considerably in the last few years, and Istanbul more so, as it eclipses the place of the nation. Pamuk and his Turkish literary influences have enabled me to understand what it means to live through – or rather live with – paradox. In addition to the interpretations of Turkish texts that follow, these are the insights that I share with my readers.

Introduction The Polemics of the Author

The removal of the Author … is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text. (Barthes 1977: 5) Wise up if you don’t want to die. (Death threat against Orhan Pamuk by nationalist Yasin Hayal)1 I saw their plans. The police had me listen to their phone conversations about my assassination. … The police informed me about the details of an Ergenekon plot to kill me about eight months before the Ergenekon investigation fully started. The government assigned me a bodyguard. Now some papers understate this organization. I don’t like talking about politics, but this is a reality. This organization exists. I have seen their plans; I have listened to their phone conversations about killing me. (Orhan Pamuk interview, October 12, 2008)2

Orhan Pamuk has long been the focus of various media polemics in Turkey. He occupies the paradoxical position of being both an icon of serious literature as well as a spectacle of popular culture. He is a best-selling author whose works are debated at the highest academic levels. Yet he is also the focus of tabloid sensationalism that at times veers into the realm of conspiracy. The media often discusses what Pamuk is perceived to represent as a “Turk” and his authenticity as a writer, which revolves around his relationship to orthodoxies of Turkish secularism and national identity. Extreme commentaries accuse Pamuk, a secular Turk, of being a Jewish convert, or dönme, of being an enemy of Turks or a self-hating Turk, of opposing Kemalism, of being entrepreneurial, apolitical, a comprador, a bourgeois elitist, a commodifier of literature, of being in the service of foreign lobbies or conspiratorial networks, and of selling out his country for personal gain. As a corollary, his writing is often dismissed out of hand. He is accused of writing for non-Turkish (Euro-American) audiences, of writing in dense prose that his readers can’t fathom or finish, of writing ungrammatically, of orientalism, and even of plagiarism. These polemics alone could be the topic of an academic study, but they would tell us little about the author’s novels, their

2

Introduction

insights and complexities, their literary innovations and transformative functions for the Turkish and world novel. If we read the situation in its reverse, however, approaching popular reactions to the author with the understanding that what is being revealed has less to do with the author and his work per se than with the tectonics of cultural and political power in Turkey today, we’d be better served. Such an approach would help survey the cultural logic Pamuk has had to negotiate to write novels which question that same logic. Much of the media hype amounts to the defamation of an author who has successfully negotiated conflicting sites of power and an ideological minefield from socialism to nationalism to Islamism, and who has, in the process, garnered an international audience exponentially larger than his Turkish readership. As an author with a global profile, Pamuk has been put in the unwitting position of representing the Republic of Turkey, something he has never sought, aspired to, or desired. One of Pamuk’s repeated complaints is that he is pigeonholed as a “Turkish” author rather than as a novelist per se. It is this “Turkishness” that preoccupies, frustrates, and restricts him. It is more than ironic, then, that this is one of the main subjects of his fiction. The clash of politics and representation in the figure of Pamuk is a symptom of larger changes in Turkey. Over two short decades since the end of the Cold War in 1991, processes of globalization have transformed Turkey from an inward-looking third world nation-state to a resurgent economic and political leader in the region. Its economy is the sixteenth largest in the world, it is involved in high-level diplomacy and foreign policy, and it is considered to be one of the most viable geopolitical models for the union of democracy and Islam in the Middle East.3 Turkey’s growing pains, which have severely questioned the secular state model that dominated until the end of the Cold War, have found a convenient outlet in the cosmopolitan intellectual Pamuk. He is, as headlines reveal, the author Turks love to hate. Many of these reactionary attacks emerge from a perceived threat to discourses of modernity, secularism, national self-determination, “Turkishness,” and the Kemalist cultural revolution. In other words, Pamuk, an author of culturally and politically challenging novels, is considered to be a threat because he transgresses epistemological boundaries established by the state. Consequently, he is a lightning rod for the frustrations of socialists, secular Kemalists, and nationalists. We could summarize by saying that the tabloid debates revolve around a collective anxiety: Does Pamuk represent the end of the social and national project of progress, development, and modernity that has defined the Republic of Turkey since its establishment in 1923? In other words, does Pamuk spell the end of homo secularis, the human subject produced by ideologies of secular modernity, Kemalism, and Turkism?

The Interview Turkish authors have often struggled against the state since the establishment of the Republic. Aspects of this struggle spill into the international arena

Introduction

3

when they become politicized matters of human rights and freedom of expression. On February 5, 2005, an interview with Pamuk appeared in Das Magazin; it would put him at the center of an international polemic. Timed to promote the German translation of Snow, the interview was conducted by journalist Peer Teuwsen (Teuwsen 2005). This tense conversation between a European and a Turk originally appeared in German and has never fully appeared in English. Teuwsen’s editorial angle was a provocative inquiry into Pamuk as an object of hatred in Turkey. Relying on popular media representations, Teuwsen’s subsequent line of questioning cites rabid critics of Pamuk in Turkey, asks him to respond to the comment that he is a best-seller that no one reads, and excavates Pamuk’s compromised position in his own country. Pamuk, insulted, immediately threatens to cancel the interview: “Listen, I’ll end this conversation right now if you mention those names [of Turkish pundits]. … It’s a mistake to take these guys seriously” (Teuwsen 2005). Teuwsen changes his tack slightly. A bout of repartee and ridicule begins as the topic moves from Pamuk to Snow, to Turkish nationalism, and to Turkey’s EU accession. The interview itself recalls tropes of Pamuk’s fiction as the “European” has adopted a Turkish national perspective, while the “Turkish author” tries to distance himself from clichéd representations of his country and its people. Pamuk, openly disturbed by Teuwsen’s approach, states that Teuwsen is conveying a resurgent Turkish nationalist perspective. To make his point, Pamuk reveals that in Turkey he is a victim of slander where he has been maligned by extremists as a “secret Jew”. In evoking such personal attacks, Pamuk links Turkish nationalism and Teuwsen’s line of questioning with antiSemitism. The topic veers into Pamuk’s favorable view on Turkey’s EU accession. Teuwsen then returns to his main theme, this time with reference to Snow, in which he notes Pamuk’s parody of political Islam and secularism as a possible reason for negative reactions to him in Turkey. What is ironic is Pamuk’s attempt, throughout the interview, to position himself as being something other than a Turkish writer. He struggles to exorcise the specter of the “Turkish author” from his persona. Pamuk states, “There is a long tradition of [European] writers … who kept a distance from their own kind. We [in Turkey] have many writers who are proud to be ‘Turkish’” (Teuwsen 2005). When Teuwsen asks what “Turkish” means, Pamuk responds ambiguously, “‘Turkish’ is another word for ‘confused’,” then continues: “But once again: These people [Turkish writers] who are so proud to be more Turkish than others, aren’t being read.” As if to underscore the obvious point that Pamuk is a Turkish writer, Teuwsen dismissively responds: “They say the same about you.” Insulted, Pamuk interrupts the interview for the second time, criticizing Teuwsen’s approach and accusing him of representing the nationalist approach of a “Turkish journalist”. In this rhetorical inversion, the “European” has become a “Turk”! The interview is oddly reminiscent of the pole switching of master and slave in The White Castle. Meanwhile, throughout the interview, the figure of the “Turk” has

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Introduction

been uncritically defined through common stereotyping as being poor, unread, nationalistic, and provincial. Pamuk, striving to transgress his own “Turkishness,” refuses to be pigeonholed from a nationalistic perspective. (The levels of irony build as Pamuk will be charged for “insulting Turkishness” due to this very interview.) Pamuk’s now notorious comment effectively redirects the focus of the interview from tabloid controversies surrounding him and his literature toward an indictment of the identities and ideologies of Turkism. After Pamuk compares the nation to a family with secrets, Teuwsen asks, “But you talk about it [the nation’s ‘family secrets’] anyway. Do you just want to get in trouble?” Pamuk, taking this opening, reinforces the position of dissident intellectual-author over that of the best-seller maligned in his own country, and responds: “Yes, everyone should do that. 30,000 Kurds were killed here. And a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to talk about it. So I do. And that’s why they hate me” (Teuwsen 2005). Discursively, the root cause of the local animosity toward the author has now been altered successfully from tabloid slander and polemics about his fiction to Pamuk’s dissidence as a public intellectual. His comment links two disparate periods of history: The Ottoman ethnic cleansing of Armenians in 1915 and casualties in Turkish military operations against the Kurdish PKK insurgency in the 1990s. Pamuk’s comment conjures a well-known opposition of dissidence between “author” and “state” (in this case, Ottoman and Republican states, which are effectively conflated). For Pamuk, this comment also functions to construct a revised subject-position by separating the ethnonym “Turk” from “author,” thus liberating Pamuk from what is a problematic label in European (especially German) contexts. By the end of the interview, Pamuk occupies a position that contests the “Turkishness” that the interviewer has consistently evoked. Allegorically, he has become something of an “other” to the “self” with which Teuwsen has been attempting to invest him. In the interview, Pamuk establishes his alterity by describing a position of victimhood with respect to the media and one of dissidence toward the state while reinforcing his (European) literary credentials. He succeeds in providing Teuwsen with an answer to his main question by effectively declaring “I am hated because I am a dissident author and public intellectual.” This position of alterity allows Pamuk to transgress the parochial Turkish perspectives to which his interviewer has alluded repeatedly. An excerpt from the interview appeared in the Turkish press days later. This led to a defamation campaign, the burning of Pamuk’s books, and his appearance in a nationally televised interview on CNN-Turk on October 15 of the same year, in which he intended to clarify his statements (Parla 2005; Radikal 2005). In this Turkish interview, which was not as widely reported in the international media, Pamuk defended himself. He said he stood by his statement, but clarified it (Guardian 2005). Pamuk emphasized that he had been the victim of the interviewer’s and the media’s provocation:

Introduction

5

My statement was transformed through exaggeration into a kind of campaign, a campaign to put words in my mouth, to declare me a “traitor to the nation,” to toss my thirty-year career as an author into the trash and cast me as a national traitor. … This turned into a political campaign. … In this country there’s a tradition of belittling authors. Don’t harass me, don’t attribute falsehoods to me. I’m a citizen of this nation, despite all the hardships, I live here. … I’m a Turk. I want the Republic of Turkey as it exists in its present geographical borders to enter the EU. (Radikal 2005) By now the case had assumed an international scale. Salman Rushdie wrote a piece defending Pamuk in The Times of London, taking the geopolitical angle that the EU should intervene (Rushdie 2005).4 The affair culminated in an unsuccessful attempt by the state to try Pamuk under Article 301–1 of the penal code for “insulting Turkishness.” The case was dropped in early 2006. In this atmosphere of media polemics, Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize, which fed the Turkish media machinery and further divided Turkey along political fault-lines (Zaptçıog˘ lu 2006). In the ensuing din, Pamuk’s novels and the significance of his literary innovations had been lost. His fiction had become a casualty of recurring polemics about Turkishness.

The Ergenekon Conspiracy In 2007 Pamuk was targeted for assassination by an ultranationalist group. For a time he went into hiding and left the country; he is still often protected by security guards when in Istanbul. Such groups are believed to be linked to what has been termed the “deep state,” or clandestine organizations with military and judicial ties within the Turkish state operating outside the law (Jenkins 2009). Details of the Pamuk assassination plot emerged through an on-going investigation into a political conspiracy labeled “Ergenekon” (Ünver 2009; Sever and Pamuk 2008). Since 2007, over 20 police operations have targeted the purported Ergenekon deep state organization, whose aim is claimed to be an overthrow of the Islamically oriented AK Party (or the Justice and Development Party) that came to power in 2002 and was easily reelected in 2007 and 2011. As part of the Ergenekon conspiracy, hundreds of people have been arrested as suspects – from journalists to lawyers, police chiefs to ultranationalists, politicians to professors, businessmen to mafia, and from retired to active military personnel.5 The operations have led to the most controversial case in Republican history, one that promises to forever alter the Turkish political landscape. The arrested are charged with conspiring to overthrow the government, inciting armed uprising, and preparing the groundwork for secular military coups. The Turkish government sees the prosecutions as necessary to defend Turkey’s democratization process, but many human rights groups have criticized legal irregularities, including long

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Introduction

imprisonments without convictions. The Ergenekon conspiracy is in some respects a preemptive coup against the possibility of a traditional secular military intervention. While some see it as a conspiracy against the ruling government, others argue that it is a counter-conspiracy that targets the secular establishment.6 To some, Ergenekon is implicated in failed coup attempts against the current AK Party government. To others, variations of the group are responsible for the 1997 “postmodern” coup that removed the Islamic-leaning Welfare Party from power and later outlawed that party. Nothing has been determined beyond doubt; there is even a searchable website devoted solely to archiving Ergenekon-related indictments, documents and following developments in the arrests and trials.7 Politics, Turkish cultural logic, and literature all intersect in the Ergenekon conspiracy. The name “Ergenekon” itself has mythical and nationalist overtones. There are many versions of this Central Asian foundation myth, which finds its way into late Ottoman Turkish literature through an epic poem by nationalist Ziya Gökalp and another by Ömer Seyfeddin (Seyfeddin 1912; Gökalp 1914). The early republican author Yakup Kadri Karaosmanog˘ lu, in a collection of essays on the national war of independence, was the first author to link the Ergenekon myth to the historical events of the establishment of the Republic of Turkey (Karaosmanog˘ lu 1928). In its early Republican version, Ergenekon became a foundation myth of the Turkish nation. It tells the story of the Turkish race faced with extinction in the stony Ergenekon valley. The last remaining Turks manage to survive by following a wolf that leads the nation to salvation. This results in deliverance and an eventual re-propagation of the race, which goes on to rule over a vast geography. Even today, the grey wolf is the symbol of Turkish ultranationalists and is used by followers of the National Action Party. But even the communist dissident poet Nâzım Hikmet lauds Mustafa Kemal as “a blonde wolf” in his historical poem on the Turkish war of independence, Kuvayi Milliye (Hikmet 1968: . 105). Inspired by the phrase and its symbolism, left-leaning author Attila Ilhan published a novel with that same title as late as 2007 . (Ilhan 2007). The myth is one about survival and, in its updated version, national self-determination. The current Ergenekon polemic, however, is an attempt to redefine Turkish national identity. Pamuk has found himself in the middle of the fray. A novelist, a Nobel laureate nonetheless, might seem to be an unlikely introduction into this raging conspiracy. Yet the cultural logic of Turkey has always implicated its writers, who, in the social and public space of the novel, have the agency to make various transgressions. Located at the fault-line of secularism and Islamist politics in Turkey, the Ergenekon conspiracy is a struggle over political power in globalizing Turkey. What does it mean that a Nobel laureate should be targeted for assassination as part of that struggle? The Ergenekon conspiracy represents more than a judicial matter – it marks the extreme polarization of Turkish society and politics between secular elites and an imperfectly democratic, legitimately elected Islamist, populist

Introduction

7

and mainly Anatolian elite (represented by the AK Party). It is the contemporary pitting of a tradition of secular state, or devlet, against a politically enfranchised Islam, or din. Moreover, it is an ever-changing hybrid of fact and fiction with real consequences. From its discursive links to the narration of the nation to the exercise of state power, Ergenekon represents the melodramatic intersection of the literary and the political. Not least of all, Ergenekon, as an epic of conspiracy, is the raw material of Pamuk’s fiction, which inscribes conspiracy as a trope (see Chapter 5). It is an outgrowth of the political contexts Pamuk has written about and lived through. Conspiracy, counter-conspiracy, and political assassination are themes in many of his novels. Much as Pamuk has made a career of blurring the boundaries between reality and its representation, Ergenekon is an instance of multiple inversions of fact and fiction in the attempt by political parties to maintain power. These are conspiratorial contexts that function to construct the figure of the author as an object of suspicion and betrayal. Pamuk’s trial and the subsequent plot to assassinate him reveal the political instrumentalization of the author by state power and national ideology. That is, the trial is related to the extra-judicial targeting of the author in a way that traces the workings of state ideologies from Kemalism to Turkism, delineating the pernicious attitude toward the author in such a state. The Ergenekon conspiracy is pertinent because it links author and state through networks of secular ideology, dissidence, literary representation, and political power. Not just Pamuk, but almost all of the Turkish authors under consideration in this study have had conflicts with the secular state. To better understand these conflicts, this study aims to provide a much-needed literary and political context to Pamuk’s work and the Turkish novel canon. Broadly, my focus in each chapter is to weave together analyses based on literary texts, political contexts, and cultural theory. Such an analysis will take us from Pamuk’s work to the Turkish novel and to the representational politics of Turkishness. As such, this study traces the forces of secularism on the figure of the author, who is often cast, through the discursive power of the state, as an agent of “blasphemy” against national modernity. The religious connotations are intended: what I term literary blasphemy begins to ironically redefine secularism and its formations as sacred. Media polemics tied to Pamuk, such as his trial and Ergenekon, serve as a starting point for this study because they encapsulate Turkish Republican cultural logic. Not only do they reveal the political landscape, they delineate the struggle over representation that pits discourses of state against the dissidence of authors. This is a world in which, and against which, Turkish authors have produced their literature – often at considerable risk to themselves. As should be evident from this brief introduction, Pamuk and his work are susceptible to multiple distortions and misreadings. One aim of this study is to read Pamuk and his work as a means of accessing concealed cultural, historical, and literary contexts. I argue that international readers must have access to the actual contingencies from which his novels developed. The

8

Introduction

following chapter-by-chapter summary presents these contingencies, resituating Pamuk’s novels in a Turkish cultural field that has suffered from a debilitating condition of “untranslatability.”

Overview of the Chapters Among other things, this study explores the limits of the secularization thesis in Pamuk’s work and Turkish literature, redefining that literature as a public space of political contestations.9 It is divided into three conceptual parts. Part I, “Tropes of ‘Turkishness’ from Sufism to State,” situates Pamuk’s work into the secular, Republican literary tradition, as well as details his early attempts at transgressing that tradition. Here, I introduce tropes that reflect the cultural politics of religion and state (or din and devlet), what I argue is a dominant antinomy of Turkish literary modernity and “Turkishness.” Part II, “The Archive of Ottoman Istanbul,” describes the “otherizing” cultural function of European, and in turn Republican, orientalism toward the Ottoman Islamic past and Istanbul cosmopolitanism, as well as Turkish literature’s recuperation of that past as part of a sustained critique of secular modernity. Part III, “The Literary Politics of the Secular-Sacred,” explains how Pamuk’s work re-sacralizes social realist narratives through writing that novelizes secular and Sufi subjects. Here, the cosmopolitan spaces of Istanbul re-emerge as sites of secular-sacred manifestations and of a redefined literary modernity situated between the national tradition and world literature. Chapter 1, “Literary Revisions of the Secular Modern,” situates the Turkish novel at the intersection of literary and secular modernity. In Turkey the development of the novel and modernization history are entwined. However, the literary sphere often contests the authoritarian tendencies of the secular state. When the Turkish state charged Pamuk with “insulting Turkishness” in 2005 it emphasized a long-standing opposition between “author” and “state” that juxtaposes contested versions of modernity. Though Pamuk’s trial gave him the status of “dissident,” it also contradicted his class background, literary subject matter, cosmopolitanism, and cultural nationalism. This chapter maps Turkish literary politics by surveying tensions between “literary modernity” and the “secular modern.” Though the secular masterplot of the Republican novel adopts the secularization thesis, it paradoxically harbors remainders of various Ottoman and Islamic traditions. The Turkish literary critic Jale Parla has argued that the guiding epistemology of the early Ottoman novel is predicated on a traditional Islamic worldview (Parla 1990). In other words, in the Turkish novel form, narratives of secular devlet are articulated along with aspects of enchantment, redemption, and mysticism that evoke din. Tropes of din and devlet function together to define the scope of Turkish literary modernity. Conceptually, by identifying the paradoxes produced by the rub of din and devlet, we can also define an illuminating frame of literary analysis. Such an analysis reveals that though narratives of the nation-state

Introduction

9

are bound to the secularization thesis, they have always been qualified and contested by tropes of tradition, Islam, and Sufism. It is the unresolved opposition between the secularist narratives of devlet and the redemptive narratives of din that are productive of the modern Turkish novel and define Turkish literary modernity. I argue, further, that literary contestations of the nation-form and revisions to the secularization thesis represented by tropes of Ottoman Islamic history, Istanbul cosmopolitanism, and Sufism constitute “secular blasphemies” that delineate the Turkish literary sphere and Pamuk’s project as a novelist. Chapter 2, “The Untranslated Novels of a Nobel Laureate,” argues that the first mode of Pamuk’s literature, as conveyed in his early novels, is historical, or more accurately, historiographic. Pamuk’s first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons (Cevdet Bey ve Og˘ ulları, 1982) – originally titled Darkness and Light (Karanlık ve Is¸ık, written in 1979) – traces a dialectic of “enlightened” forces of modern progress versus “dark” forces of Ottoman Islamic tradition over three generations from 1905 to 1970.9 In keeping with the social realist Republican imperative of devlet, this novel is structured by an Empire-toRepublic narrative that functions as a bildungsroman. Pamuk began writing about bourgeois Istanbul families during the Second Republic (1960–80), posing something of a challenge to the dominant mode of social realist literature on Anatolia represented by authors from Nâzım Hikmet (1902–63) to Yas¸ar Kemal (1923–present). Iconic works like . Nâzım Hikmet’s Human Landscapes from My Country (Memleketimden Insan Manzaraları, written 1938–50, published 1967)10 identified Anatolia as the site and object of Turkish modernization and the appropriate setting for modern, revolutionary literature with a socialist orientation. The Silent House (Sessiz Ev, 1983), Pamuk’s second novel, also maintains a three-generation Empire-to-Republic periodization, this time between 1910 and 1980. However, The Silent House introduces modernist techniques and black humor that parody the Turkish Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman. In time, the parody enables Pamuk to move from a focus on secular materialism to explore varieties of mysticism and Sufism. The unlikely link between social realism and mysticism can be found in novels such as Yas¸ar Kemal’s Iron Earth Copper Sky (Yer Demir Gök Bakır, 1963), a story in which harsh material conditions enable the construction of divine identity for a dispossessed villager. Pamuk’s first two novels are not as accessible to most readers because, until recently, they have remained untranslated into major languages by the will of the author.11 The absence of these texts in translation presents critics not literate in Turkish with a pervasive problem leading to misreadings and inaccuracies in interpretation. The “untranslated Pamuk,” including important non-fiction articles and essays, serves to establish the vital point that Pamuk’s literary modernity emerges from a genealogy tied to social and historical realism and projects of national modernization.12 These comparisons also reveal that Turkish literary modernity, in its development from social and historical realism to modernism and to metafiction and

10

Introduction

metahistory, functions to make redemptive narratives of Islam and Sufism (or din) legible to the secularism of the state (or devlet). Chapter 3, “A Voice from the Ottoman Archive,” describes a second mode of Pamuk’s literature based in techniques of metafiction and metahistory. Here, the literary focus is on the recuperation of dismissed historical narratives based in Ottoman culture. Broadly, metafiction and metahistory are selfreflexive understandings of the function of literary and historical narratives in the construction of identity (White 1987; Hutcheon 1990). Both interpretive processes are significant to the political critique of secular modernity. In the Turkish context, this mode pertains to the recuperation of sacralized and redemptive narratives of din. In his Ottoman fiction, not only is Pamuk translating a concealed Ottoman past to his modern Turkish readership, he is translating both aspects (of din and devlet) into the world literary system. In The White Castle (Beyaz Kale, 1985), Pamuk’s first novel to appear in English translation, he revises the received Republican historiographic framing of his early work and begins to manifest comprehensive innovations in literature that mediate between local and foreign models of form. This variety of writing begins to question the internalized Republican orientalism that cast the Ottoman past as the “other” of Turkish nationalism. By recuperating the cosmopolitanism of Istanbul in an era of nationalism, Pamuk accesses an urban archive of the Ottoman and Islamic past that was first excavated by modernist authors such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–62). Tanpınar’s fiction develops the idea of Istanbul as an archive-city, most notably in A Mind at Peace (Huzur, 1949). Both authors rely on Istanbul cosmopolitanism as a counter-archive to discourses of secularization. Furthermore, this literature of Istanbul demonstrates the first stirrings of what could be termed “Turkish postsecularism”: a cultural and literary process that excavates the elisions and repressions of the Kemalist cultural revolution of the 1920s and 1930s. The objects, texts, stories, and histories that emerge from these excavations serve as models of literary form and function to politicize Turkish literary modernity as a space of critique. Chapter 4, “Reimagining the Ottoman Legacy,” describes Pamuk’s further transformation of Turkish literary modernity through an “archive” of Ottoman cultural history and material culture. Pamuk’s fiction reimagines denigrated aspects of the Ottoman legacy and updates contexts of din to mount a critique of the internalized orientalism of Turkish secular modernity. For example, My Name is Red (Benim Adım Kırmızı, 1998) appropriates the archival object of the Islamic miniature as a model of literary form that transgresses image/text boundaries. This method challenges a common misconception about the novel in non-European and world literature contexts: the assumption that dominant “European” forms contain various “local” contents.13 My Name is Red represents a pinnacle in Pamuk’s redefinitions of literary modernity and is constructed through a combination of genres attempted successfully in previous novels. With the publication of the novel’s English translation in 2001, Pamuk’s name began to be mentioned internationally in

Introduction

11

conjunction with the Nobel Prize for the first time.14 Recapitulating his literary innovations up to that point, Pamuk combines the following literary forms and techniques in My Name is Red: the social and historical realism and autobiography of Cevdet Bey and Sons; the first-person stream-ofconsciousness and multiperspectival modernist structure of The Silent House; the metafictional and metahistorical allegory of The White Castle; the intertextual, multi-genre detective story framing of The Black Book; and the political parody and mystical unrequited love of The New Life. In short, My Name is Red demonstrates how the denigration of the Ottoman legacy can be rewritten as a positive source for innovations in literary modernity. The reimagining of the Ottoman legacy was first explored by early Republican Istanbul authors, including Halide Edib (1884–1964). Though she is rarely compared to Pamuk, such a comparison reveals the continuity of deep structures in the Istanbul novel. Halide Edib acknowledged the importance of the Ottoman past, and sought to include cultural legacies of Sufism, Islamic tradition and Istanbul life in their depictions of Turkish modernization as reflected in novels like The Clown and His Daughter (Sinekli Bakkal, 1935). This gesture of revising official perspectives on the Ottoman legacy through literature introduces challenges to European orientalism as well as to Turkish nationalism, which is informed by orientalist structures. Such Istanbul novels mount a political critique that describes a condition of “postorientalism.” Postorientalism thus emerges as a characteristic of the Turkish novel that targets the timeless, ahistorical, dehumanizing, anti-Islamic, and essentialized aspects of the all-pervasive “discourse of the Turk.”15 Chapter 5, “Political Parody from Coups to Conspiracies,” returns to the context of devlet and the conflicted relationship between state and author with which this study begins by focusing on Pamuk’s use of political parody. Between 1908 and 1997, a total of seven times, or an average of once every 12 years, the military (whether late Ottoman or Republican) intervened in the political process for the sake of Turkish secular modernization.16 Often, the rationale for intervention was construed as a leftist or an Islamic conspiracy against the political order.17 Consequently, as a literary trope that evokes devlet, the “coup” came to represent a compulsive and at times paranoid reenactment of the establishment of the nation-state and a metonym for modernization by cultural revolution.18 The coup punctuates Pamuk’s literary oeuvre. It is variously treated as being revolutionary, apocalyptic, or both. It is always fed by conspiracy and ideological discourse, and is countered by textual production and authorial agency. Pamuk’s protagonists actually write against the coup to escape the confines that it imposes on self and society. Thus, writing becomes an act of liberation and redemption. Parody and irony are dominant techniques with which Pamuk treats the coup to establish a vantage of critique and dissidence. Often in Pamuk’s novels the coup emerges as a symptom of the logic of conspiracy. The New Life (Yeni Hayat, 1994) delves into that logic by exploring the structure of

12

Introduction

conspiracies and counter-conspiracies: a literary interrogation that builds into a parody of nationalist thought. Additionally, for Pamuk, the “coup” represents an existential crisis of secular modernity. This crisis finds its iconic example in novels such as Motherland Hotel (Anayurt Oteli, 1973) by Yusuf Atılgan (1921–89). Motherland Hotel is a novel that stresses the alienation effects of the secular state. Pamuk’s parody of coups and conspiracy finds its fullest development in his seventh novel, Snow (Kar, 2002). Here, characters occupy such unstable ideological positions that the Republican “coup” becomes what can only be called a melodrama with real-life consequences. Just as Pamuk’s Snow parodies the logic of coup and conspiracy, Misfits (Tutunamayanlar, 1972) by Og˘ uz Atay (1934–77) parodies the attempts of Republican intellectuals to belong to a socially engineered society fraught with the ideological confinements of secularism and Turkism. Political parody allows Pamuk to transcend the existentialism and materialist nihilism of the coup as it manifests as a symptom of secular modernity. This nihilism is represented by the trope of suicide in the works of Yusuf Atılgan and Og˘uz Atay. Throughout this study, I describe subjects produced under a regime of secular national modernity as “homo secularis.” In Turkish literature, homo secularis is continually confronted by impasses such as nihilism and suicide, or conversely, by the possibility of redemption through varieties of mystical experience, including writing. Not surprisingly, such moments of grace in Pamuk’s fiction are vital to the creation of the literary text. Chapter 6, “Novelizing Secular Sufism,” describes intersections of secular modernity and mystical Islam (or Sufism) in the form and content of Pamuk’s work. Both Pamuk’s use of intertextual allusions to mystical Islam and his adoption of metafictional narrative structures serve to revise and “re-enchant” the secular teleology of Republican fiction. Secular Sufism, as a specific experience of sacredness in secular Turkish contexts, appears early in the Republican novel and can be traced through almost every period of Turkish literary modernity.19 Pamuk develops the trope of secular Sufism out of the dilemmas of everyday Istanbul life beginning in The White Castle, a trope which reappears in all of his later novels. These are novels that allude to the literary conventions of one of the oldest traditions of “Eastern” literature: the mystical romance quest to reunite with a beloved. In the Turkish tradition, the mystical romance appears through the literary influence of Rumi and S¸eyh Galip, among others. Bringing the novel form and the Sufi tale together, Pamuk updates the traditional genre of the mystical romance to recast unrequited love as knowledge of an authorial self (or the “writing-subject”). In The Black Book (Kara Kitap, 1990), for example, Pamuk, relying on various Sufi literary traditions, reimagines the peripherialized Istanbul of the late 1970s (just prior to the 1980 coup) as a site of literary production that is both secular and sacred. Pamuk’s eighth novel, The Museum of Innocence (Masumiyet Müzesi, 2008), again brings the mystical and the material together through the exaltation of material objects and remnants of an unrequited

Introduction

13

love between the main characters. Rather than arguing, along with the secularization thesis, that society moves from religion to secularism and modernity, the literary texts under consideration in this study reveal that Ottoman Islamic traditions, Sufism, redemption, and grace not only appear in ostensibly “secular” Turkish literary modernity, they are formative forces of political critique. The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence establish that mystical thought can emerge from the most material things: from a novel’s black ink to a beloved’s discarded cigarette butt. I argue that the particular lament, or hüzün, that Pamuk describes in all his work, and specifically in his memoir on Istanbul, is a mystical melancholy, an affective response to the existential angst of national secular modernity. This emotion reveals a condition of being between the material and the mystical, between din and devlet, in a state of yearning (for the beloved, or in Pamuk’s world, for authorship). The Museum of Innocence demonstrates that everyday objects can be mystified through their assembly in a collection that is itself determined by the force of unrequited (Sufi) love. As such, Kemal, the protagonist, becomes the unwitting sage, or pir, of an idiosyncratic mystical sect. The concluding chapter, “The Blasphemies of ‘Turning Turk’,” reassesses the literary geography covered in this study through an early modern metaphor for conversion: “Turning Turk.” I rely on this operative idiom, which is a derogatory term for religious conversion used by authors since Shakespeare, as a way to examine the conflation of two varieties of conversion: to Islam as well as to secular modernity. “Turning Turk” can also signify conversions to Turkish secular modernity. It is pertinent to the present study because it describes a double blasphemy: the blasphemy of religious conversion in early modern contexts and the blasphemy of secular conversion in modern ones. Traditionally, “turning Turk” conveyed negative affect, betrayal, irrationality, immorality, and unethical behavior. If we consider “Turkishness” to be an iteration of both the religious and the secular, then “turning Turk” represents specific types of transgression between Turkish secular and sacred spaces; that is to say, it describes certain “secular blasphemies.” Tropes of turning Turk, then, can be read as forms of secular blasphemy that describe transgressions between the power relations of religion and secularism, Islam and Christianity, Europe and Turkey, tradition and modernity, and broadly, between din and devlet. These are some of the transgressions Pamuk’s novels perform, political transgressions that also function to deconstruct binary logics of nationalism, modernity and orientalism. Secular blasphemy, then, involves the liberation of homo secularis from discursive confinements of national secular modernity. That is to say, it involves its opposite: redemption. Read together, Pamuk’s novels reveal a hidden center, one that is both secular and sacred. He describes this center in mystical terms as follows: The center of a novel is a profound opinion or insight about life, a deeply embedded point of mystery, whether real or imagined. Novelists write in

14

Introduction order to investigate this locus, to discover its implications, and we are aware that novels are read in the same spirit. (Pamuk 2010)

In Pamuk’s work, and in much of Turkish literature, this center can be traced in myriad relations of din (including the Ottoman Islamic past, Istanbul history, Sufism, the mystical, etc.) and devlet (including secularism, state, coup, the material, etc.). These relations are excavated in Pamuk’s work, where they exist as secular-sacred tropes without closure or resolution, producing something of a literary sirr (the Sufi term for mystical insight, knowledge, or secret) in his oeuvre. Not least of all, the hidden center of secular Sufism is productive of literature. It allows Pamuk to construct the hybridity of “self” and “other” in The White Castle; to create the intertext of “Eastern” and “Western” genres in The Black Book; to recast textual (reading and writing) practices as being mystically transformative in The New Life; to introduce innovations in modern literary form through traditional Islamic art in My Name is Red; to mount literary critiques of political ideology in Snow; and even to emphasize the sacredness of material objects (what Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar calls the “exaltation of objects”) in The Museum of Innocence. Pamuk’s writing and representations of writing practices consequently acquire a quasi-mystical character that functions to re-enchant the secular narratives of the Republic and redeem characters marginalized by secular modernity.

The Death and Resurrection of the Author The polemics of the author raise a host of questions about the production of literature in Turkey that will be addressed in the following chapters. These polemics also conjure other theoretical issues about the role and function of the author. In a now classic debate begun by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, the “author” is dismissed from being a focus of textual analysis in the liberation of the text. The death-of-the-author thesis flourished in an era of poststructural and postmodern literary analysis. Yet more recent interpretations have acknowledged the return or resurrection of the deceased author (Burke 2010). In Pamuk’s work, struggles over the Turkish author’s agency are both dramatized in the plot and serve to establish the form of his novels. In most of his work, which celebrates the intertextual play between the Ottoman archive and Republican master narratives, Sufism and secularism, and Turkish and world literatures, textuality overwrites the writer’s authority. Paradoxically, the author emerges intact and unscathed at the end of the novel to announce the victory of a completed and published novel. It would seem that Pamuk’s constant literary returns to the modernizing writing-subject or “author-figure” contradict the deconstructive argument of his plots. Yet this paradox provides another engine for his novels. Whereas the epigraph by Barthes at the start of this introduction signifies how the removal of the

Introduction

15

author utterly transforms the modern (European) text, Pamuk’s work argues that the return of the author redeems the agency of the non-Western, in this case Turkish, subject in that text. Ironically, the author-figure, which appears at the end of almost all of Pamuk’s novels, is a product of the very secular modernity Pamuk critiques. It appears in stubborn defiance of a literarycritical establishment from Barthes to Derrida that has long celebrated the “death of the author.” In the Turkish context, this is not an anachronism or belatedness, it is a political, even dissident sign of resistance. Pamuk’s foundational revision of Turkish literary modernity, cultural logic, and political identity depends on the presence of such an author-figure: homo secularis redeemed by faith in the very texts that had once forsaken him. In the cultural logic of Turkish nationalism, Pamuk is considered to be a pariah. In the logic of world literature, he is taken to be a token “Turkish author” (Page 2011). In his Paris Review interview, Pamuk states: “Internationally, I am perceived to be more Turkish than I actually see myself. I am known as a Turkish author. … Once you get to be internationally known, your Turkishness is underlined internationally. … It is imposed by other people” (Gurria-Quintana 2005). In part, the critical silence surrounding Pamuk and his work is an outcome of this double bind of Turkishness: Displacement from a nation he is condemned to represent as a Turkish author. At times, this dilemma restricts Pamuk’s legibility as an author inside and outside of Turkey. Though a few edited volumes, essays, and articles have emerged, there are almost no studies that address Pamuk’s work critically in its entirety, including the untranslated work.20 The present study aims to contextualize Pamuk and the Turkish novel through comparisons, approaches, and interpretations that encourage further critical analysis.

Part I

Tropes of “Turkishness” from Sufism to State

1

Literary Revisions of the Secular Modern

I don’t want to be a mangy Turk. (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 131)1 A person who publicly denigrates Turkishness [Türklük], the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, shall be sentenced a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to three years. (Article 301–1 Turkish Penal Code 2004)2 The concept of the secular cannot do without the idea of religion. (Asad 2003: 200)

Insulting Turkishness In 2005 Orhan Pamuk was charged with “insulting Turkishness” under Article 301–1 of the Turkish penal code.3 Eighteen months later he was awarded the Nobel Prize. After decades of criticism for wielding a depoliticized pen, Pamuk was cast as a dissident through his persecution and trial, events that underscored his transformation from national litterateur to global author. But what had triggered this clash between state and author? What was meant by “Turkishness” exactly? The charges centered on Pamuk’s affirmation of the ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 and Turkish Kurds in the 1990s, charges that emerged out of a secular state tradition of enforcing national identity. Yet, contrary to the dominant notion that Pamuk had been an apolitical author, his novels, in both content and form, had been transgressing official versions of Turkish history and identity for decades. So what had changed suddenly to make Turkey’s best-selling novelist an object lesson for state determinations of “Turkishness”?4 Another cultural logic was at play. Turkey had been emerging as an increasingly influential power between Europe and the Middle East. In the same year as Pamuk’s trial, the EU officially opened accession talks with Turkey (on October 3, 2005); the start of Pamuk’s trial was scheduled to coincide with the EU summit in December. The author had become the target of a secular establishment that had been marginalized by the 2002

20

Tropes of “Turkishness” from Sufism to State

election of the Islamically oriented AK Party and its spearheading of the EUaccession process. In short, a secular Republican dream of European integration had been appropriated by political Islam. Pamuk’s trial, though later dismissed, assumed greater significance in the context of EU-accession, which some nationalists now deemed a threat to Turkey’s sovereignty. Though secular himself and an advocate of Turkey’s EU-accession, the cosmopolitan author became a symbol of everything the national-secularists despised. Nationalists hoped to undermine EU relations by making a cause célèbre out of Pamuk – and they partially succeeded. But this is somewhat misleading. I argue that the real story didn’t rest with Pamuk’s trial, but with his fiction, which had been destabilizing official narratives of nationalism for decades. It was Pamuk’s writing that exposed the ambivalence and indeterminacy of “Turkishness” in the face of secular modernity. The story of his success, in fine, is both literary and geopolitical. Scholars have long established that the novel in Turkish functioned as a vehicle of social modernization, in which secularism is centrally located (Evin 1983; Moran 1983; Finn 1984). I argue that the authoritarian history of Turkish modernization, in turn, politicized the novel as a social space, enabling it to be a fundamental forum for dissent. My argument emerges from the observation that in Turkey, the authority of literature has always contested the authoritarian tendencies of the state. The constant state-sanctioned exiles, imprisonments, and trials of authors from Namık Kemal in the nineteenth century to Orhan Pamuk in 2005 are a testament to the ongoing tensions between the dominant narratives of literary and secular modernity. These narratives could be synchronized to reflect the ideologies of early modernization, as they were in the secular masterplot of the Republican novel, which came to represent the nation, Turkishness, and the secularization thesis. However, Turkish modernity, predicated on the opposition between religion and secularism, did not manifest as a strict binary in the literary sphere. Innovations in form, technique, and content, or “literary modernity,” functioned to challenge narratives of the secular modern backed by state power. In Turkey, the literary sphere often contests the authoritarian tendencies of the secular state.5 This chapter traces confrontations between “literary modernity” and the “secular modern” as conveyed through Pamuk’s work and the Turkish novel. Such an analysis reveals that narratives of the nation-state (or devlet), bound to the secularization thesis, have always been contested by politicized tropes of tradition, Islam, and Sufism (signifying din).

Pamuk as Dissident Shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize, Pamuk accepted an invitation to serve for one day as editor-in-chief of the Turkish Istanbul daily Radikal. In this capacity of socially engaged journalism he ran a front-page piece in the January 7, 2007 edition about Turkish writers and artists who had been persecuted by the state, just as Pamuk had been before the Nobel award.

Literary Revisions of the Secular Modern

21

The headline, LET ‘EM SPIT IN HIS FACE, was taken from a 1951 article that originally ran in the staunchly secular-national newspaper Cumhuriyet (The Republic) about dissident poet Nâzım Hikmet. Though 56 years had passed, this time it referred to Pamuk as well who had also been labeled a vatan haini, a “traitor to the nation.” The group Pamuk assembled included dissident authors of socialist engagement, Nâzım Hikmet, Yas¸ar Kemal, and Sabahattin Ali. Pamuk also made room for singer Ahmet Kaya, who was prosecuted for a pro-Kurdish stance, and ran a piece on the Ottoman writer Ahmet Midhat Efendi, a forefather of the modern Turkish novel who happened to be traveling in Stockholm for the 1889 International Conference of Orientalists over one century before Pamuk received the prize in the same city.6 The starting point of this chapter is an instructive discrepancy. The dissident status of the author in the international arena, which was confirmed through his prosecution under Article 301–1 rose in direct contradiction to his authorial past. Pamuk’s new political positioning was ironic, for he’d spent the early part of his literary career as the lightning rod for criticism about his own social and political disengagement. He’d often been attacked as a representative of the depoliticized literature of the post-1980 military coup. An Istanbul author from a bourgeois background, he described how he’d sequestered himself in an ivory tower. In a 2004 New York Times interview, he insists: I was not a political person when I began writing 20 years ago. The previous generation of Turkish authors were too political, morally too much involved. They were essentially writing what Nabokov would call social commentary. I used to believe, and still believe, that that kind of politics only damages your art. Twenty years ago, 25 years ago, I had a radical belief only in what Henry James would call the grand art of the novel. (Star 2004, my emphasis) Given that Pamuk-as-editor later associates himself with the very generation of Turkish dissident authors he here disavows, how are we to interpret the statement “that kind of politics [engaged literature] only damages your art”? What should we make of the fact that since his Nobel award he has generally refused to explicitly comment on or engage in matters of politics? The group that Pamuk assembled in newsprint could be read as part of an authorial fantasy about solidarity with a socially engaged tradition of Turkish writing.7 Granted, his first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons, does bear the influences of the social realism that informed the Republican novel. But he quickly rejected and was soon excluded by the practitioners of this variety of Turkish literature. In Turkey, a country whose national identity has been constructed upon the unstable nexus of modernity, secularism, and Islam, the significance of aesthetic innovations in literature, or “literary modernity,” stems from its often-negative relationship to secular state power.8 In Turkey, “literary modernity” describes transformations in literature that often transgress Republican

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Tropes of “Turkishness” from Sufism to State

articulations of secular “Turkishness.” “Literary modernity” in the Turkish novel is not merely innovation in form and content, but a foundational means of critiquing of what cultural anthropologist Talal Asad terms the “formations of the secular” (Asad 2003). Thus, “literary modernity” describes a persistent conflict between literary authorship and the authority of the state and its modernization history, one that can be traced in Pamuk’s oeuvre and much of the Republican literary canon. In this study, this concept enables the Turkish novel to be read with or against narratives of the secular modern. Pamuk’s stated ambivalence toward the Turkish literary tradition is a clue that Pamuk-as-editor is doing much more than expressing belated solidarity with the literary left. Rather, he is attempting to reconcile his position in the Turkish national tradition with his international identity as a dissident author confirmed and validated by the Nobel Prize.9 In this sense, he demonstrates the type of mediation between national and world literatures that is a hallmark of his novels. But this is still only half the story. A critical examination of the discrepancy between Pamuk’s “disengagement” and “dissidence” provides a measure of his literary modernity. His work experiments with techniques from social realism to metafiction before settling into innovative forms of Istanbul cosmopolitanism that synthesize internal and external influences. These transformations in literature present “Turkishness” as being contingent on a multitude of cultural contexts beyond ethno-nationalism, including the Ottoman past, Sufism, Islam, and even orientalism. Pamuk uses the novel form, I am suggesting, to pose persistent political challenges to the state and the secularization thesis that informs Turkish modernity. In part, the politics of Pamuk’s novels emerge through innovations in literary form that interrogate the “secularization thesis” rather than from ideological disputes per se. It is not Pamuk’s resemblance to dissidents like Nâzım Hikmet, but his rejection of the literary forms of social realism as understood by a previous generation of writers that first made him anathema in Turkish leftist and nationalist circles. Novels that turned away from the projects of Anatolian socialism and nationalism to recoup the cosmopolitan cultural history of Istanbul’s Ottoman and Islamic past could only be read as incongruent with 1980s Turkey. In the wake of Pamuk’s work, however, novels of cultural and historical redefinition have become the norm. In transforming the Turkish literary field, his writing makes an often-overlooked political commentary on secularism. As such, the overriding tensions between Istanbul cosmopolitanism and Republican nationalism (focused on Anatolia) provide the background for Pamuk’s own intervention, one that pits city against nation. Understanding Pamuk’s literary modernity as a form of political engagement is vital to an informed understanding of how his novels think. A lack of international access to the Turkish cultural contexts of Pamuk’s work has led to half-formed interpretations, misconceptions, and misreadings by EuroAmerican commentators. Even worse, the general lack of Turkish cultural

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legibility has resulted in a critical silence surrounding his novels that reveals the de facto acceptance of Pamuk’s “dissidence” with a concomitant dismissal of his literary project. This study directly addresses this inversion in his reception, in which political concerns obliterate the nuances of cultural production. The first point to be made is that the “literary modernity” of Pamuk’s own fiction does not correspond to the dissident social realism with which he identifies as editor-in-chief. Pamuk does not hide his ambivalence and even animosity toward traditions of the Turkish novel, which nonetheless influence him.10 Thus, what is more likely being revealed in Pamuk’s edition of Radikal is a post-trial, post-Nobel fantasy of a return to origins after being labeled a national “traitor”; an attempt to resituate himself in the literary canon, as if to say “I am still one of you!”; or even something of an apology for his questioning and transformation of the dominant discourses of “Turkishness” and the forms of secular literature. Interestingly, this very transformation has placed the Turkish novel, to borrow Pascale Casanova’s phrase, into the “world republic of letters” (Casanova 2004). Meanwhile, Pamuk himself has been alienated from the space of Turkish Republican culture and is frequently misunderstood in international circles as a native informant or an exile. For a time, like his poet-protagonist Ka in Snow, Pamuk needed bodyguards and was forced to leave the country following death threats. This paradoxical displacement of the Turkish Nobel laureate and his perceived “inauthenticity,” in addition to the silence of his critical reception, serve as additional background contexts for my argument. Though Pamuk’s work belongs to the post-1980 “Third Republic,” characterized by Turkey’s gradual neo-liberal integration into global networks, he began writing in the early 1970s, during a period marked by social realism and political unrest known as the “Second Republic” (between the 1960 and 1980 military coups).11 Pamuk states: When I decided to become a writer … the dominant view was that serious writers worked collectively, and their work was valued for the way in which it contributed to a social utopia and reflected a shared vision (like modernism, socialism, Islamism, nationalism, or secular republicanism). There was little interest in literary circles in the problem of the individual creative writer who drew from history and tradition, or who tried to find the literary form that best accommodated his voice. Instead literature was allied to the future: its job was to work hand in hand with the state to build a happy and harmonious society, or even nation. Utopian modernism—be it secularist, republican, or socialist egalitarian—has had its eyes so firmly planted on the future that it has, I sometimes think, been blind to the heart and the soul of just about everything that has gone on in the streets and houses of Istanbul over the past century. (Pamuk 2008)

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Pamuk draws from history and tradition, experiments with form, eschews the state and its utopian modernism, and embraces the paradoxes of everyday Istanbul. His novels represent a catalog of genres and literary styles from the realism of Cevdet Bey and Sons to the multiperspectival modernism of The Silent House; from the Ottoman historical allegory of The White Castle to the urban intertext of Eastern and Western forms in The Black Book; from the mystical Sufi metafiction of The New Life to the historiographic postmodernism of My Name is Red; and from the literature of conspiracy in Snow to the unrequited love and Istanbul material culture of The Museum of Innocence. These eight novels published between 1982 and 2008 (in Turkish) redefine and rehistoricize dominant Turkish literary tropes. In the process, Pamuk places the Turkish novel into an international constellation.12

The Secular Masterplot of the Republican Novel Secularization is a coercive process and practices of secularism reproduce political subjects that embody the secularization thesis (Scott and Hirschkind 2006). The process relies on the legal powers of the state, the disciplinary powers of family and school, and the persuasive powers of government and the media, including literature. In Turkey, the legacy of the secularizing Kemalist cultural revolution persists into the present. Its origins can be traced back to the geopolitical context of the Allied occupations of Ottoman territories in 1918 and the subsequent establishment of the modern Middle East after World War I. In Istanbul and Anatolia, this definitive period of colonial encounter and insurgency led to the abolishment of the Ottoman Sultanate in 1922, marking the beginning of a secularizing cultural revolution that defined the ethos of the Republic of Turkey. The cultural revolution embodied all of the basic tenets of the European secularization thesis. The secularization thesis argued that modernity entails the separation of religion from politics and art; its relegation to the private sphere; and the declining social significance of religious belief.13 In keeping with this thesis, over the next 15 years a series of laws and decrees, based on European models, permanently reordered Turkish culture and politics. A revolt against Ottoman and Islamic tradition, the cultural revolution affected all aspects of public and private life, including language, law, politics, and dress. The dominance of this authoritarian “civilizing mission” lasted until 1950, which marked the end of the single-party period of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party. However, its presence as a discursive regime lasts into the present. In the Turkish literary sphere, its legacy is inescapable, not least of all due to linguistic corpus planning that included the alphabet reform, which introduced Latin letters to replace Ottoman script, and the language reform, which replaced Persian and Arabic vocabulary with neologisms. The literary sphere became a public space of contestation, susceptible to appropriation by dominant ideologies. In the early Republican era,

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the Turkish novel developed under the influence of official ideologies of Kemalism and Turkism. In addition to European secular modernity, the Kemalist cultural revolution was guided by the ideology of Turkism, which introduced new ethnographic notions of Turkish history and identity. Both the Turkish Historical Society (established in 1931) and the Turkish Language Society (1932) were state organizations focused on the dissemination of Turkism. One goal of the cultural revolution was to reintroduce the identity marker “Turk” in a positive, progressive way; that is to say, to appropriate the ambivalent ethnoreligious term used historically by outsiders to designate Muslims and nationalize it as an insider site of identification in the scope of a wholesale “conversion to modernity.” The cultural revolution also placed emphasis on Turkic peoples before the adoption of Islam; therefore, secularism was given an “Eastern” historical precedent, however spurious.14 Historical and literary narratives, often in combination, justified and promoted this wide-ranging social engineering project. Early Republican novels, for example, adopted an “Empire-to-Republic” historiographic framework. On one hand, the Republican novel accepted certain legacies of what I call the “discourse of the Turk” prevalent in European history and culture.15 Based in the epic Mediterranean encounter between Christianity and Islam, the “discourse of the Turk” functioned to explain and contain Muslims based on reductive essentializations. This variety of orientalism purported to know, describe, and explain “Turks” and Islam. In contexts of early modernity, the discourse of the Turk delegitimized Muslim power embodied in the Ottoman Empire. In the modern era, the process continued to delineate and construct Islam as being an anti-human, anti-modern object in need of colonial and national intervention. The discourse articulated such power that by the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, Turkish national identification could not acknowledge religious affiliation openly and still stake a legitimate claim to modernity. The modern Republican novel attempted to redefine Turkishness.16 Within this framework, the plots of these novels often advocated a secular teleology. This masterplot, in a literary and historiographic mode, became one of the dominant discourses for the construction of secular Republican Turkishness. Not surprisingly, it is also one of the narrative frames against which Pamuk constructs his novels (which I describe later as being “postsecular”). The functions of the masterplot included redefinition, re-education, and regeneration of national identity as Republican authors were forced by dint of historic circumstance to conceptualize a new society out of the trauma of late Ottoman partition. The secular masterplot encouraged Sunni Muslims, who overwhelmingly constituted the citizens of the new nation after decades of ethnic cleansing and population exchanges, to actively begin thinking of themselves as modern “Turks.” Furthermore, the secular masterplot encouraged a social construction of identity that challenged orientalized notions of Turkish tradition and “backwardness” defined by and current in Europe and Russia,

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where representations of Muslims and Turks were often racist and anti-Islamic. The science of Turkology and the threat of European colonization would both play formative roles in the construction of this new identity as the new “noble” and nationalized Turk appeared through engagement with, and in opposition to, stereotypical discourses about the “terrible,” “unspeakable,” and “lustful” Turk.17 The secular adoption of the ethnoreligious term “Turk” necessitated the finesse of redefinition by authors and historians alike. Traditionally, “Turk” was an ethnonym used pejoratively in the Ottoman Empire to refer to uncouth peasants. The new nationalized “Turk,” shedding the defeated Ottoman Islamic worldview, would speak the vernacular Turkish of Istanbul (purified of Arabic and Persian), be familiar with both Anatolian folk and European cultures, have Islamic scriptures, sermons, and preaching in pure Turkish/ Turkic (Öztürkçe), give women public visibility, and establish modern standards of law.18 The contradictory message of Republican state modernization was: “Be proud of being Turkish/Muslim … change everything about yourselves.” The textual emplotment of the secular masterplot began with literary adaptations of recent historical events, notably novels such as Halide Edib’s Ates¸ten Gömlek (The Shirt of Flame, 1921) and Yakup Kadri Karosmanog˘ lu’s Sodom ve Gomora (Sodom and Gomorrah, 1928). It was subsequently supported by new nationalist historiographies including Mustafa Kemal’s Soviet-style six-day Speech (Nutuk, 1927). In its broadest manifestation, as represented consistently in Republican historical and literary texts, the secular masterplot is predicated on a four-part emplotment that traced the stages of secular conversion: (1) Colonial Encounter, (2) Anatolian Turn, (3) Imagined Turkishness, and (4) Cultural Revolution.19 Specifically, “Colonial Encounter” refers to the Allied occupations of Ottoman territories beginning in 1918 and lasting until the formation of the modern Middle East. The last occupying armies left Istanbul in 1923. The “Anatolian Turn” delineated mostly rural Anatolia, its folk (or halk), and the new capital of Ankara as the true foundations of Turkish nationalism in opposition to the tainted cosmopolitanism of occupied Istanbul. “Imagined Turkishness” demanded the collective conceptualization of a bounded territory defined by one language, one people, and one nation. The “Cultural Revolution” internalized the orientalist gaze of Europe, advocating top-down social engineering through a combination of models such as European colonialism and Soviet socialism that targeted the visibility and influence of Islam as an impediment to modernization. Novelists during the cultural revolution and afterward were charged with bringing about this epistemological and ontological transformation through a historically realist “literary modernity” that functioned to discursively separate religion and secularism into oppositional spheres. In other words, the masterplot advocated a Republican secularization thesis, and the various tropes of the masterplot are present throughout Turkish literature.

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What emerged as the outcome of the ideology of Turkism in its Kemalist cast was the secular conversion to a “Turkishness” whose Muslim underpinnings had been repressed and elided. Republican modernization, in this conversion-to-secularism narrative, thus served to finally separate the authorial unity of religion and state, or din ü devlet, as a political script. In Ottoman Turkish history, this script provided order to a multiplicity of religions, ethnicities, professions/guilds, and social classes, enabling a variety of cosmopolitanism in urban centers. The rise of nationalism ruptured this order such that public space was secularized and religion was relegated to the private sphere. However, the traces of the excision persisted in the social and cultural spaces of literature. In his novels, for example, Pamuk both reproduces aspects of the secular masterplot while subverting it through an inscription of denigrated contexts of the Ottoman past and its legacy, mystical Islam (or Sufism), and Istanbul cosmopolitanism. Indeed, many of the cues for Pamuk’s literary revision of the secular modern are to be found in the Turkish literary canon.

Orthodoxies of Islam and State The Republic of Turkey was established as an ethno-religious nation-state in 1923, whose Turkish secular and Sunni Muslim identities presented something of a contradiction. It bears emphasis that in its creation the Republic of Turkey was established and recognized in international law as a Muslim state, as recognized even by socialist-secular historians such as Niyazi Berkes.20 For example, at that time in history, Turkey still housed the caliphate of Sunni Islam (though abolished in 1924), the constitution declared Islam to be the religion of state (until 1928), Muslim refugees were de facto accepted as citizens, and population exchanges (as stipulated in the Treaty of Lausanne) based on religion further established the Muslim purity of the nation. As such, the ethnogenesis of “Turkishness” cannot be separated from social and political constructions of Islam. This is a significant point for interpretive approaches that deny the interrelation between religion and secularism. As for the cultural revolution, it articulated a discursive separation between the two, one that often contradicted on-the-ground realities. In the official version of the Empire-to-Republic transition, national identity-construction necessitates the suppression of Muslim identification. Islam, however, had been a primary constitutive factor in determining “Turkishness” (as the litmus test of national belonging). The epistemic violence of the cultural revolution functioned to conceal the violence of recent wars, the loss of empire, and the traumas of civilian displacement, exile, and death. In Turkey, history reveals that Islam and state implicate each other and constitute a mutually implicating binary, or antinomy. In summarizing modern Turkish politics with respect to Islamic tradition and state secularism, historian Erik Zürcher states,

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Tropes of “Turkishness” from Sufism to State Both in political debates on the current state of affairs in Turkey and in the historiography of the country, the dichotomy of religion and secularism is without doubt the dominant paradigm within which analysis takes place. … Author Orhan Pamuk published his novel Benim Adım Kırmızı (“My Name is Red”) to such a degree of worldwide critical acclaim that he is now a Nobel laureate, but the debate on this and subsequent novels of the author in Turkey itself was more about his stance on Islam and Westernization than on the literary merits of his work. (Zürcher 2010: 271)

Indeed, in the popular Turkish imagination, Pamuk has come to signify a contestation of secular nationalism and even anti-Turkishness. Yet this attitude dismisses the historical processes, embedded in the cultural revolution and the secularization thesis, by which Islam and state have been politicized in modern Turkey. It is my contention that Pamuk’s “dissidence” is a symptom of the historical processes of secular modernity, the actual critique of which is located in the tropes, forms, and techniques of his novels. Pamuk’s “literary politics” is not simply the political stance of the author situated outside his fiction, but the political implications of the form of his novels in the cultural logic of Turkish secular modernity. As this study examines literary and political intersections, and treats novels as spaces of identity formation and the contestations of secularism, the recent work of scholars in various fields on the resurgent “secularism debate” is of significance. The debates argue for rethinking of the secular modern as a historical, political, and critical category of analysis. The debate began with contestations of the secularization thesis made by José Casanova and Charles Taylor and has been taken up as an overarching theoretical debate by scholars from political science to international relations and from religious studies to cultural anthropology (Scott and Hirschkind 2006; Warner et al. 2012). Subsequently, current works by Nilüfer Göle, Fuat Keyman, Taha Parla, and others have developed the debate, as framed by these earlier discussions, to foreground Turkish secularism as a primary case study (Jakobsen 2008; Cady and Hurd 2010). In Turkey, the emerging complexity of what was once treated as a straightforward trajectory from Muslim tradition to European modernity places renewed emphasis not just on social and historical phenomena, but, for the purposes of this study, on literary modernity. In short, novels are unexplored repositories, mini-archives for contestations of the secularization thesis. As a commentary on the secularism debate, the work of cultural anthropologist Talal Asad is revelatory for its insights into representations of religion and formations of the secular. Asad states: “The question of secularism has emerged as an object of academic argument and of practical dispute. If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable” (Asad 2003: 1). Asad argues that the category of “secularism” is implicated by “religion” and that they are mutually determining in projects of modernity:21

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The secular, I argue, is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor simply a break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred). I take the secular to be a concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life. To appreciate this it is not enough to show … that in certain respects “the secular” obviously overlaps with “the religious.” It is a matter of showing how contingencies relate to changes in the grammar of concepts … how the changes in concepts articulate changes in practices. … I take the view, as others have done, that the “religious” and the “secular” are not essentially fixed categories … [and] show how the sacred and the secular depend on each other. (Asad 2003: 25–6) For our purposes, the acknowledgment that these categories are fluid is significant, for it implies that “secularism” and “religion” cannot be so easily separated into distinct categories and relegated to “public” and “private” spheres. Furthermore, it questions the belief that modernity must be embedded in the secular. Turkish literary modernity has been making similar qualifications and claims since the establishment of the Republic. A brief look at modernism in the European novel is informative for the Turkish case. In his reading of the European modernist novelists James, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Kafka, Pericles Lewis argues that though these authors ostensibly espouse the secularization thesis, they are also bound to articulations of the sacred: Theories of the novel have tended to emphasize the process of secularization. The most common narrative describes the rejection of earlier, religious narrative forms. … The received view relies on a much broader historical narrative which I will call the “secularization thesis”; the secularization thesis characterizes the emergence of modernity as a result of increasingly rational modes of thought and a rejection of belief in the supernatural. … Thus at first glance the modernist novel seems to justify the expectations of the secularization thesis. Yet … a sense of the sacred exists even in the apparently godless modernist novel. … “Secularization,” I contend, is a misleading word for what happened to art’s relation to the sacred in the twentieth century. (Lewis 2010: 23–4) This approach allows Lewis to trace secular-sacred contexts in the work of modernist novelists – novelists that Pamuk identifies as direct influences. As stated above, scholars have long established that the novel in Turkey emerged and functioned as part of modernization. A corollary to the phenomenon Lewis describes is the entwining of secular and sacred contexts that can be traced in the Turkish novel. It is common to find tropes of Turkish Islam,

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Sufism, and Ottoman cultural history alongside a materialist and existential worldview in modern Republican novels. However, the legacy of the cultural revolution and the ideological force of the secularization thesis is such that the presence of sacred contexts in Turkish literature still remains unexamined. The readings of Turkish literature that appear in the following chapters trace a dynamic continuum of relations between Islam and secularism. If the categories of “Islam” and “state” are cultural constructs that carry narrative and political force in modern Turkey, representing them in literature evokes dominant “orthodoxies.” Literary scholar Jale Parla, in her now classic study of the epistemological basis of the first Ottoman Turkish novels in the nineteenth century, uses the metaphor of the “father” to refer to the orthodoxy of Islam (and by implication, the Ottoman state): Tanzimat-era thinking is not defined by efforts to do away with the father, but rather to revive the dying father. This study examines the dominant epistemology that informed the birth of the Turkish novel through the metaphor of fathers and sons. During the Tanzimat, the father–son relationship was not one of conflict, but of continuity. The sons in this conservative relationship constituted the first [Ottoman] novelists, and all of them were authoritative children who were forced to assume [patrimonial] custody in the search for a lost father. [And] the authority to which all of them were bound is the absolutism of the culture and epistemology of Islam. (Parla 1990: 20) The first Turkish novelists, she claims, are caught between two cultural logics: the absolute, a priori, deductive political authority of Islamic tradition and the positivist, empirical, and materialist worldview of European secularism (Parla 1990). This represents an opposition of Islam and state, or din and devlet. In the process of Ottoman-Turkish modernization, the novel appeared between 1870 and 1890. Parla traces the political, religious, and cultural position of the author using the metaphor of the “son,” who must maintain the lost authority of tradition while allowing for limited modernizing change and progress. Not only is this a struggle between tradition and modernity, it is moreover one between religion and secularism. According to Parla, it is in the tension between these two positions that the modern Turkish novel emerges as a space of moral critique, social guidance, and anxiety. The establishment of a new political authority, the secular state, ostensibly seems to resolve this opposition in favor of empirical positivism. Working from Parla’s argument, it is my contention that the development of Turkish literary modernity from the Ottoman to the Republican eras involves the mutual force of both secular and sacred epistemologies. Turkish literature reveals that occluded contexts of din in Republican novels, contexts that Parla describes in her study of late Ottoman novels, persist in an era of secular modernity defined by devlet. That is, the Tanzimat author maintains a position of authority-in-crisis in an

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attempt to delimit the encroachment of European colonial power. However, in the Republican era, the author’s goal is not to delimit “westernization” and preserve the paternal authority of Islam, it is rather to limit the authority of the secular state, which has usurped the colonial position. That is, the author is still bound to limiting the exercise of state power with this significant difference: now this power is vested in the Turkish secular state rather than with European colonial powers. Though an inversion in power relations has occurred, the author is still occupied with negotiating between Ottoman Islamic tradition and empirical positivism. The Republican novel reveals that the sacredness of Islam is replaced by the sacredness of secular national modernity. Discourses of Islam and state refer to opinions and judgments that are treated as truths and enforced as such. To better elucidate the point that literature mediates between the discursive power of religious tradition and secular modernity in Turkish cultural logic, I will cross disciplinary boundaries and introduce a well-known concept from Ottoman Turkish history into the literary field. As mentioned above, the concept of din ü devlet (the “religion” of Islam and the secular “state”), historically, describes the political authority that rests in the mutual dependency of Islam and the secular state tradition.22 In a contemporary variation, it might also be read as a metaphor to describe the presence or re-emergence of Islam into political, public, and cultural spheres. My contention is that the representational pairing of din and devlet not only describes an Ottoman political legacy in modern Turkey, but is also a major force of Turkish cultural and literary production. That is to say, din and devlet, by implicating each other in the historical framework of Turkish secular modernization, constitute major discursive forces not just of politics, but of culture.23 In Turkey, devlet is implicated by din and vice versa; likewise in Turkish literature, tropes of each implicate the other in spaces of the novel. In this reading, the dominant narrative of devlet is conveyed by the secularization thesis. The dominant narrative of din is conveyed by Islam, Sufism, the Ottoman past, and even experiences of grace and redemption. Such a reading forecasts the existence of unacknowledged secular-sacred tropes in Turkish literature. How should we conceive of such mutually opposed orthodoxies? If we bring together the recent debates that question the dominance of the secularization thesis with Parla’s account of the early Ottoman novel, a revelatory landscape emerges for the Turkish novel. This ostensibly secular and secularizing novel is still focused on maintaining the sacredness and morality of the earlier Tanzimat novel, one informed by epistemologies of Islam. (The author, in this case, also often maintains a mediating role.) In deepening this analysis of the intersection of Turkish politics and culture, I consider tropes of din and devlet to be an antinomy – in which one cultural logic and its contradiction coexist. I argue that this antinomy is culturally productive in determinations of Turkish literary modernity. In other words, it is possible to read Pamuk as an author who places various representations, symbols, and metonyms of the religious culture of din in productive tension with the secular formations of

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devlet. Historian Karen Barkey has referred to the mutual existence of paradoxical Ottoman worldviews and practices such as secularism and Islam, Sunni orthodoxy and Sufi heterodoxy, imperial law (or kanun) and Islamic law (or s¸eriat) and the multi-confessional millet system as constituting “lived dualities” (Barkey 2005, 2008). It is my contention that din and devlet represents a contemporary lived duality of the secular and the sacred that incessantly reappears in the Turkish novel. At times this may lead to such a conflation that, as early Republican literature establishes, the category of the secular assumes a quasi-mystical status (as in the work of Yakup Kadri Karaosmanog˘ lu, for example). At other times, the sacred is de-mystified in an assertion of the real, the material, and the existential (as in the novels of Yusuf Atılgan, for example). The point is that discourses of din and devlet coexist in the literary-cultural sphere in a fashion that is denied not only by official discourses of the state, but by the Republican critical-scholarly establishment. I argue that Pamuk’s literary innovations include a rearticulation predicated on bringing representations of din and devlet, segregated by the cultural revolution, the secularization thesis, and Republican secular modernization, into productive parity. Broadly speaking, this is what defines the secular blasphemies of his fiction. That is, Pamuk’s invocations of the Ottoman Islamic past and its legacies, including its material culture, traditional practices, and the themes of Sufism, assert mystical and religious forms and contexts against the figures and figurations of the Republican state, its national modernization, its secularization thesis, and its military coups. In doing so, Pamuk calls the reader’s attention to an opposition that occurs so frequently in the literary sphere, that arguably, the positive or negative relation of religion (or din) to the secularism of the Republican state (or devlet) has come to define Turkish literary modernity.24 As such, Pamuk’s novels work to correct the imbalance that favors devlet or the concerns of the secular state. His technique of coupling religious and secular contexts challenges modernist, nationalist, and orientalist binary logic by showing din and devlet to be mutually defining – and productive – cultural antinomies.25 By reading chronotopes of din and devlet in modern literary culture, I am in turn simply re-enacting in scholarship the kind of intertextual innovation Pamuk has been performing in the field of literature. My model of interpretation is based on one of Pamuk’s own techniques of updating literary modernity. As read through Pamuk’s novels, the Islam–state antinomy simultaneously identifies an engine of Turkish literary production while it revises the Turkish secular modern. That is, Pamuk reintroduces tropes of din into the secular novel form that have been repressed, devalorized, and abjected as a legacy of the Kemalist cultural revolution. Among other things, this reveals that the secularization process, which removed visible traces and symbols of Islam from the public sphere, did not do away with them entirely, but repressed or relegated them to the private sphere. The novel, in particular, harbored the traces of this social engineering while permitting the traces of din to persist as an unacknowledged presence. Until Pamuk began self-consciously

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revitalizing a textual relationship to din, the social realist cultural context of devlet largely determined what could be said and done in a Turkish novel without losing claim to the real. As might be expected, devlet nevertheless asserts its presence in Pamuk’s fiction through references to modernization history, revolution, Kemalism, and the military coup. However, beginning with Pamuk’s third novel, The White Castle (the first to be translated into English), the narrative force of devlet is broken by means of an allegorical frame narrative that moves synchronically through time from the Republican present to seventeenth-century Ottoman Istanbul to focus on an Ottoman protagonist, Abdullah Effendi, who is a hoja with an Islamic medrese education.26 By deconstructing the binary logic of oppositions such as East and West, tradition and modernity, and religion and secularism, Pamuk’s fiction revises discourses not only of the secular modern but of Turkish ethno-nationalism and European orientalism. Analyses of Pamuk’s work often stop at the level of the binary opposition, declaring that, for example, his writing illuminates an “East/West problematic.”27 I argue that Pamuk’s revision goes deeper, and is predicated on the emergence of an antinomial space, a postsecular literary chronotope of din and devlet. This new narrative space allows the novelist to imagine a historical present where contexts of religion and secularism are legible through their apparent contradictions. As a result, traditions of Islam, Sufism, Turkism, the Ottoman legacy, cultural revolution, and coup are able to coexist in the establishment of a cosmopolitan literary modernity centered in Istanbul. In short, the paradigmatic Pamuk novel dismisses the entrenched secularist teleology that with exposure to or emulation of Europe, a “Muslim” nation might develop into a “modern” one. Rather, literary articulations of din and devlet that establish parity between opposing components of Turkish-Islamic culture revise, redefine, and rehistoricize “Turkishness.”28 By challenging what are essentially colonial, orientalist, and anti-Islamic premises, Pamuk places himself within a literary-political field of intellectuals who, in other traditions, would be described as “postcolonial.” Even so, I would argue vehemently that this term is not appropriate for Pamuk or the Turkish novel. To read Pamuk as a postcolonial author would reconstitute the very opposition to Europe that his work overcomes and even critiques. Turkey was never formally colonized. Nevertheless, the official discourses of the Republic fabricated a clear distinction between the modern nation and the Ottoman Islamic past. The irony is that the Republic cast the Ottoman state, centered in Istanbul, as the colonizer of Anatolia and the Turks. This served to introduce the dilemma of the “divided self,” a figure of identification split between discourses of Turkish Islamic tradition and secular modernity. Through this negation of the Ottoman legacy, Republican modernity could be understood as anything that countered the Ottoman Islamic past – including the cultures of Istanbul, Sufism, and a cosmopolitan Muslim modernity. Ottoman modernity, lasting from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, did not confine a denigrated Muslim tradition to the negative side

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of the binary as did Republican modernity. That is, it did not orientalize Turkish Islam. In a persistent distortion backed by state power, the Republic of Turkey elevated devlet as the sole representative of national-cultural authority while repressing and denigrating din. These are some of the fundamental paradoxes of Turkish modernization that Pamuk’s novels rethink and rewrite.29 Indeed, what Pamuk terms the “secret center” of novels can be traced in his own work through the hidden symmetry of din and devlet.30

Mapping Pamuk’s Literary Modernities My argument begins with the observation that Pamuk’s fiction both embodies and revises the major tropes of the modern Turkish novel.31 These tropes repeatedly appear in a symbolic complex that maps Republican literary culture through an inscription of contexts of (1) devlet, such as cultural revolution, secular modernization, and military coup; (2) din, such as Islam, Sufism, and Ottoman cultural history; or (3) a combination of the two, including identity conversion, redemptive authorship, Muslim cosmopolitanism and other manifestations of the mystical-material and the secular-sacred. Pamuk constructs his fiction over this complex literary cartography to establish culturally productive relations between din and devlet.32 To convey the central components of the literary heritage through which Pamuk creates his work, I have selected six canonized texts to represent formative moments in Turkish literary modernity. Most of these novels are by writers whom Pamuk holds in high esteem. For example, as a young author, Pamuk claimed, “Bold [Turkish] novels do get written and are being written. The novels by Tanpınar, Og˘ uz Atay, Yusuf Atılgan, and Yas¸ar Kemal come to mind” (Pamuk 1999: 108). Pamuk periodically reiterates his debt to Turkish author-intellectuals of influence: “The basic dilemma for our genuine intellectuals who have earned my greatest respect – from Yahya Kemal to Tanpınar, from Og˘ uz Atay to Kemal Tâhir, and even at times Nâzım Hikmet – is the dilemma of the abandonment of past culture [Ottoman, Islamic, and Turkish]” (Pamuk 1999: 337). Texts by these authors begin to frame Turkish literature as a mystical-material and secular-sacred formation beyond the secularization thesis in ways that link Istanbul cosmopolitanism, the Ottoman legacy, social realism, political parody, and Sufism. The milestones of the Turkish literary canon to which I will refer include two novels of Istanbul cosmopolitan culture: The Clown and His Daughter (Sinekli Bakkal, 1935) by Halide Edib and A Mind at Peace (Huzur, 1949) by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar; two socialist texts focusing on Anatolia: Human Landscapes from My Country (Memleket. imden Insan Manzaraları, 1938–50) by Nâzım Hikmet and Iron Earth, Copper Sky (Yer Demir Gök Bakır, 1963) by Yas¸ar Kemal; and two existential novels of parody and social protest: Anayurt Oteli (Motherland Hotel, 1973) by Yusuf Atılgan and Tutunamayanlar (Misfits, 1972) by Og˘ uz Atay.33 Except for Tanpınar and Atay, these authors were either persecuted by the state or considered to be “traitors to the nation” (vatan haini).34 Except for Atılgan

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(who was Tanpınar’s student) and Atay, these authors have been widely translated and represent modern Turkish literature in the world literary system. Furthermore, each text develops tropes of the Turkish novel and of din and devlet in a way that opens literary spaces of political critique.35 To this constellation I will be adding Pamuk’s eight novels, both to contextualize his work and, through his work, to introduce and illuminate the poetics, politics, and pieties of Turkish literature.36 I will also be referring to the long-held tradition of Sufism (or tasavvuf ), that is, mystical Islam, in Middle Eastern and Islamic literatures to which Turkish authors, including Pamuk, are deeply indebted. Sufis formed a belief system distinct from orthodox Islam that encouraged a personal understanding of the divine. Sufism is significant to modern literature because it tolerates paradoxes, which in the twentieth century allowed both a “mystical materialism” and a “secular Sufism” to emerge as characteristics of Turkish literary modernity. (Allusions to the Mevlevî tarikat or “way,” whose spiritual leader is the thirteenth-century mystic poet Rumi, are common in Turkish literature.)37 As a discourse, Sufism envisions possibilities of non-duality and therefore is valuable to critiques of nationalism, orientalism, and secular modernity. Manifestations of Sufism enabled the re-enchantment, by means of various mystical intertextualities, of a literature disenchanted through the secular masterplot. Sufism therefore provides a useful counter-narrative to the dialectical logic of modernization history, and Pamuk makes innovative use of this tradition in constructing his novels. Additionally, I argue that in Pamuk’s revision of literary modernity, he relies on four modes of dissident writing, models for which exist in the abovementioned texts from the Turkish literary canon. These modes can be categorized as (1) historiographic, (2) archival, (3) parodic, and (4) secular-sacred. Though they are not mutually exclusive, these modes predominate in Pamuk’s novels as follows: historiographic (Cevdet Bey and Sons and The Silent House); archival (The White Castle and My Name is Red); parodic (The New Life and Snow); and secular-sacred (The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence). Pamuk’s use of these modes enables his transgressions of established Republican literary forms. These transgressions can be briefly summarized as follows: In terms of historiography, Pamuk’s novels move from diachronic to synchronic narratives; with respect to the archive, they reintroduce Ottoman material cultural as a counter-archive to secular modernity; they employ strategies of political parody to question and subvert sites of secular authority; and they articulate new spaces of secular-sacred literary modernity situated in Istanbul. I argue that Pamuk’s literary transgressions in each of these modes constitute “blasphemies” from the secular modern perspective of devlet. Novelizing the Secular Modern Pamuk’s first two novels are historically grounded in the Turkish literary tradition and follow an “Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman” and its secular

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teleology. Between the two, Pamuk began writing a novel of “bourgeois leftism” that remained incomplete because of publishing restrictions enacted after the 1980 military coup.38 Drawing on narratives of late Ottoman and Republican modernization, these novels are multi-generational treatments of social and political history written at a time when Pamuk openly described himself as a “leftist.” In them, Pamuk maintained his proximity to early iterations of secular modernity by relying on narratives of historical and social realism, which he increasingly began to modify and parody, giving form to new and transformative literary representations. Cevdet Bey and Sons is an iconic Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman. It tells a three-generation family story of Cevdet Is¸ıkçı, his children and grandchildren. Is¸ıkçı is an Ottoman Muslim business pioneer in a sector dominated by Levantines, Greeks, and Armenians. In describing three generations of his family, the novel summarizes twentieth-century Turkish social history according to an Empire-to-Republic narrative from 1905 to 1970 – and concludes just months before the 1971 military coup. The novel features scenes of Anatolia (Erzincan and Ankara) that address the dilemmas of modernization between elite Istanbul cosmopolitanism and regional culture.39 The tensions between cosmopolitan Istanbul and rural Anatolia were integral to understandings of Turkish revolutionary modernization, whereby the educated elite were charged with leading the country’s secular progress. Anatolia provided an important geographical setting for Istanbul intellectuals who aspired to write during the first Republican generation between 1923 and the end of the single-party rule of the Republican People’s Party in 1950. Early novelists such as Yakup Kadri Karaosmanog˘ lu, Halide Edib, Peyami Safa, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and others wrote novels set in often sequential periods of late Ottoman and early Republican history. In other words, historiography – in particular the construction of national or social history – was of paramount literary concern. These authors wrote under the assumption that, in an era of cultural revolution, literary narratives emerged from historical contexts represented through realism. This trend continued through the work of socialist authors such as Kemal Tâhir and Nâzım Hikmet. The precedent of what might be. called literary social history lasted into the 1980s, with authors such as Attila Ilhan still focusing on novels of the Empire-to-Republic transition.40 Dissident authors such as Nâzım Hikmet also foregrounded recent history in an ideologically informed literature of social engagement. Hikmet’s Human Landscapes, a novel in free verse, captures the multidimensionality of Anatolia as experienced on a train journey from Istanbul into the Anatolian heartland. The novel is organized around historical vignettes that plot the transition from Empire to Republic between 1908 and 1950, as it follows the main character, an intellectual, author, and political prisoner named Hilmi (a surrogate for Hikmet himself) through a struggle against impending blindness that is both literal and figurative.41 The 1980 military coup was a turning point in Turkish literature and Pamuk’s career that separated social realist influences from innovations that

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could broadly be termed metafictional and metahistorical. As stated, one of the dominant framings of the Republican secular masterplot is the historical trajectory describing the transformation from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey. This progressive and revolutionary narrative appears intact in Pamuk’s first novel, indicating his affinity to the forms of secular social realism that he later rejected. The Silent House introduces important innovations in form that begin to challenge the Republican secular masterplot. The novel makes use of a high modernist style of multiple first-person narrators and stream-of-consciousness narration. In The Silent House, three grandchildren make a week-long summer’s visit to their grandmother’s house near Istanbul, which proves to be the empty abode of the “imagined community.” The oldest, Faruk, is a history professor, while the middle sibling, Nilgün, studies sociology at the university, and the youngest, Metin, aspires to one day amass a fortune in the US. Fatma, the matron and grandmother, stews in bitter memories of her husband Selahattin, a European-educated modernizer and atheist who had aspired to write an encyclopedia that would close the gap between “East” and “West.” The Silent House irreversibly fragments the omniscient voice of Republican social history into multiple first-person narrators. (Thus, this first instance of Pamuk’s use of multiperspectivalism, variations of which appear in The White Castle and My Name is Red, has clear political import.) Techniques of multiperspectivalism coupled with interior monologue function to interrupt the national narrative of progress by making it contingent on individual points of view. The introduction of the satiric figure of the secular “historian,” Faruk Darvınog˘ lu (lit. “Truth-Seeker Son-of-Darwin”), is only the first indication of the derisive humor that will dominate Pamuk’s later novels.42 The Silent House ends just weeks before the 1980 military coup by displaying various states of individual alienation and community fragmentation. Of the three grandchildren, one is a lonely alcoholic (and a parody of the Republican intellectual), another dies after a politically motivated beating by ultranationalists, and the third still dreams of leaving Turkey in pursuit of the American Dream. Unmistakably, Pamuk’s second novel declares the bankruptcy of any unified vision of national or social modernity. As if to mimic this condition, the novel itself is fragmented, multi-layered, satiric, and open-ended, forecasting the rise of Turkish post-secularism. Pamuk’s subsequent work confirms this transformation in literary modernity, one that modifies conditions of the secular modern through a mysticism tied to textuality and authorship. During the second and third Republican generations, Anatolian writers began to “speak back” to cosmopolitan Istanbul authors who had “gone to the people” to fulfill utopian ideals. The voice of the people (halk) was heard through the pages of “village novels” that exposed Anatolia not as the landscape of social modernization but as testimony to its failure or incompleteness. Yas¸ar Kemal’s Iron Earth, Copper Sky is a novel that replaces the secular masterplot of modernization with regional myths, legends, and traditional cultural forms as guiding social scripts. In the novel, peasants in an

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isolated mountain village struggle for survival in the winter by using gossip and hearsay to elevate one of them to the status of a folk saint. This character, Tashbash, is in turn imprisoned by the secular state for engaging in “religious exploitation” as a healer. Here, the Turkish novel confronts Hikmet’s historical materialism with an alternative history constructed from local oral narratives and myth. Both works are informed by the vexed relationships between Istanbul cosmopolitanism, the Republican state, and Anatolian society. Broadly, the move from Istanbul (and Hikmet) to Anatolia (and Yas¸ar Kemal) is a move away from the nationalist and socialist narratives of Istanbul intellectuals to regional narratives about the everyday plight of Anatolian villagers. In sum, Pamuk’s early novels – the first in a realist and the second in a modernist style – can be grouped together as faithful appropriations of Empire-to-Republic historiography. They cannot be called “politically engaged” in any obvious way. But his modifications in form alone in The Silent House begin to mount sweeping arguments for the recuperation of elisions and repressions of secular modernization. Pamuk deepens his “argumentation through form” in subsequent novels. It is significant, then, that Pamuk has long regarded his first two novels as being unworthy of translation. His reticence to publish English translations until later in his career (after 2012) can only be read as another instance where he positions himself in relation to the literary tradition – here, though, in opposition to the very secular social literature with which he affiliates in Radikal. What emerges in Pamuk’s positioning is a double consciousness about literary modernity: one focused on the Turkish secular tradition of historical and social realism and the other on the post-secular present. Beginning with Pamuk’s third novel, The White Castle, he is able to balance, with everincreasing skill, a material and a mystical approach; that is, he begins to work simultaneously in a secular and a sacred idiom. It is through this pairing that he is first able to reach multiple international audiences through translation. For the first time, in The White Castle Pamuk succeeds in writing himself out of the Republican historiographic mode and transgresses its narrative conventions (not that he abandons secular Republican tropes, however). This novel with a Borgesian twist points to the constructed nature of identity and marks an end to Pamuk’s uncritical concern with social realism, the secular masterplot, and the Empire-to-Republic framework.43 From here on, Pamuk authors more complex and multilayered narratives that incorporate key transnational contexts of Ottoman Islamic culture, Sufism, and Istanbul cosmopolitanism. Novelizing Early Ottoman Modernity Ottoman historians have argued that the early modern Ottoman Empire is a neglected period that deserves more scholarly attention vis-à-vis early modern Europe (Goffman 2002; Faroqhi 2005; Aksan and Goffman 2007). Presciently,

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in literature, Pamuk’s novels have recuperated aspects of this early modern era as a vehicle for innovations in contemporary literary modernity. Scholars have furthermore termed the dilemmas of dealing with the Ottoman past and the loss of empire as the “Ottoman legacy” (Brown 1996). The place of this legacy in Republican historiography is fixed in a now problematized paradigm called the Ottoman “decline paradigm.” This is an analytical lens of historical periodization in which the Ottoman Empire is read to have had a swift rise from its origins in 1300 to the end of the reign of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent in 1566, to be followed by a slow three-and-a-half century decline to 1922 and the establishment of the modern Middle East (Sajdi 2008). With its source in the discipline of Turkology, the distortions of the decline paradigm were adopted wholesale by Turkish secular modernizers who found in it additional justification for the social engineering of the cultural revolution. In his fiction, Pamuk reassesses the denigration of the Ottoman legacy in more positive historical and social terms.44 Pamuk’s reintroduction of dismissed Ottoman material culture into Republican contexts is illustrated most prominently in The White Castle and his sixth novel, My Name is Red. Beginning with The White Castle, set during the seventeenth century, Pamuk no longer permits the Ottoman Islamic past to be read as the denigrated backdrop for the emergence of a secular modern state. These two works revalue dismissed objects such as Ottoman manuscripts and miniatures relegated to silence in archives and treasuries.45 Here, objects and things form the basis of narratives distinct from and at times in opposition to the secularization thesis. Specifically, by making traditional Turkish artifacts, relics, and everyday objects into the centerpieces and models of his fiction, Pamuk invests them with cultural capital in the present. This revaluation of values recuperates contexts of din and enables a revision of Turkish literary modernity based on actual historical and archival contingencies. As a literary gesture, Pamuk’s revision of the Ottoman past is not without its parodic flourishes, as the most insignificant material things – from a coin to a tree or a dog – become metonyms for alternative, denied, or forgotten cultural histories. Reimagining the Ottoman legacy enables Pamuk to re-enchant secularized narratives of the nation. The story of The White Castle emerges out of an Ottoman manuscript discovered in a forgotten archive by Faruk Darvınog˘ lu, the selfsame historian of The Silent House who has “lost his faith” in the secular discipline of history. The novel’s intertextuality involves bringing together the historical legacy of the 1980 military coup with a Renaissance-era captive’s tale and a mystical account of conversion. As such, the novel relies on Ottoman contexts to make a redemptive critique of the confinements of Republican secular modernity represented by the coup. As a framing device, Darvınog˘ lu’s translation and publication of the manuscript in the wake of the 1980 coup functions as a metaphor for the reintroduction of Ottoman cultural memory into the Republican present. Suddenly, the reader is transported into a seventeenthcentury captive’s tale. A master-and-slave relationship unfolds between an

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Tropes of “Turkishness” from Sufism to State

Ottoman captor (a hoja, that is, a scholar of Islam) and a Venetian captive who fakes being a physician. The Ottoman master’s desire to learn everything the Venetian knows about Renaissance Europe turns into a sadomasochistic obsession. The characters have ties to the Ottoman court and gain the patronage of the Sultan (Murad IV). Dependent on one another, they begin to experiment with gunpowder, fireworks, astrology, divination, military weapons, and autobiographical writing. Eventually, their increasing similarity in character (in addition to their close appearance) allows them to pass for each other. The master “Turk” in this story proves to have a narrative voice only in conjunction with his Venetian slave. Their joint narration consequently performs a critique of binary oppositions as well as the dialectical thought (of nationalism, modernity, and orientalism, for example) that requires and produces such oppositions. This layered allegory of the unstable boundaries of self/other (Muslim/Christian and Turk/European) demonstrates, among other things, that the archival Ottoman (ostensibly “pre-modern”) text can become the basis for a transformation in literary modernity in the present – a direct rebuke to the claims of an early Republican vision advocating the wholesale abandonment of Ottoman tradition. Importantly, the discovery of the Ottoman manuscript within the plot reveals a neglected Ottoman Istanbul cosmopolitanism, a setting wherein two distinct literary genres are able to merge: the captive’s tale and the first-person account of religious and cultural conversion. In terms of form, the novel is innovative for its techniques of intertextuality, metafiction, metahistory, and (concealed) multiperspectivalism that together function to alter Turkish literary, and by extension, secular modernity. The recuperation of Istanbul as an archive of Ottoman modernity can be traced to the influence of modernist author Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. Tanpınar succeeds in re-introducing traditional art, Sufi themes, and other “archival” cultural material into Republican literary modernity during a period of secular modernity. Granted, Tanpınar’s focus is on nineteenth-century late Ottoman modernity rather than on early Ottoman modernity. Nevertheless, it is evident that Pamuk struggles under an anxiety of influence established by Tanpınar in his uses of the past and of Istanbul. (Pamuk’s preoccupations go so far as to imagine where the two might have crossed paths – he a child and Tanpınar nearing his death – in his memoir Istanbul.46) Both authors treat the city of Istanbul itself as an archive and thus confront secular Turkism with Istanbul’s cosmopolitanism and Ottoman cultural legacy. Like other authors of the early Republic, Tanpınar uses Ottoman material culture and collective memory both to support and to criticize revolutionary modernization. In A Mind at Peace, a magnum opus of secular-sacred tropes, Tanpınar transforms the historical traumas that led to the establishment of the Republic into psychological and spiritual dilemmas that afflict Istanbul’s middle class. The protagonist Mümtaz is beset by personal and political . crises, including the illness of his intellectual cousin and surrogate father Ihsan, abandonment by his beloved Nuran, the stark Nietzschean nihilism of his nemesis Suad, and

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the impending World War II. The novel’s excavation of a century of cosmopolitan Ottoman modernity exposes the excesses and denials of national and social modernization. From Ottoman architecture to traditional Turkish music and the relics and ruins of an Istanbul neglected during the heyday of nationalism, Tanpınar argues that material culture and collective memory hold the secret to reimagining the Ottoman legacy in a transformative way. In this respect, the Istanbul cosmopolitanism of Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace provides Pamuk with a sacred literary text from which to fashion the tropes of his own fictions. Pamuk’s reassessment of official understandings of secular Turkishness begins in The White Castle and develops in My Name is Red, set in sixteenthcentury Istanbul, during the Ottoman classical age. Here, Pamuk resurrects the dismissed cultural history embedded in illuminated manuscripts of the Ottoman period. My Name is Red, through its revision of the Ottoman legacy, develops and intensifies the narrative strategies that Pamuk relied on in his five preceding novels: social and historical realism (Cevdet Bey and Sons), multiperspectival modernism (The Silent House), Ottoman historical allegory (The White Castle), Istanbul intertextuality (The Black Book), and secular-sacred metafiction (The New Life). As such, My Name is Red represents a culmination of Pamuk’s innovations in Turkish literary modernity. The Sultan (Murad III) commissions a secret manuscript to celebrate the glories of the empire in the first Islamic millennium, the one-thousandth anniversary of the Hegira (or the Prophet Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina). He orders the book’s images to be rendered in Renaissance styles of perspective and portraiture under the guidance of the art aficionado Enishte Effendi. Meanwhile, he maintains the secrecy of the book project because it threatens Islamic orthodoxy through potentially blasphemous figural representations. Although the book has the patronage of the Sultan himself, an orthodox cleric, Nusret Hoja, targets the book for destruction on the grounds of blasphemy. When one of the artists, a guilder, and then Enishte Effendi himself is murdered, the secret book triggers an investigation that breaks up the narrative into the multiple genres of a murder-mystery, a philosophical treatise on Islamic book arts, a romance, an autobiography, and an allegorical tale of politics and culture in modern Turkey. Expressing narrative point-of-view like characters, objects from a corpse to a tree, and from an Ottoman coin to the color red, all tell their confessional and intimate stories. Meanwhile, the search for the culprit continues in earnest through detective-work based on clues hidden in illuminated manuscripts. The characters (and objects) must negotiate the contradictions posed by two poles of authority – secular and religious – in order to discover the murderer’s identity and complete the production of the Sultan’s secret book – which remains unfinished in keeping with a favorite Pamuk leitmotif of the absent text. In a signature Pamuk gesture of cultural translation, My Name is Red adopts the flat, two-dimensionality of the Islamic miniature as its formal model, thereby foregrounding the local artistic tradition of Ottoman miniatures as an intertextual literary

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device. In the process, he updates the miniature as a template for Turkish literary modernity, teaching his readership about this once-dismissed Ottoman art form while adding another layer of cosmopolitan complexity to his resuscitation of Istanbul vis-à-vis the nation-state. It might be said that one of the subtle successes of My Name is Red is its manipulation of the discourses of cultural history and orientalism to redefine Turkish literary modernity.47 Pamuk’s literary modernity didn’t develop in a vacuum. Comparing and contrasting his work to key texts and movements in Turkish literature is revelatory with respect to the contingencies of Turkish modernity. At first glance, one of the comparisons made here will come as counter-intuitive. Early Republican modernity and Pamuk’s fiction might seem to be worlds apart. But there are actually literary affinities between the two. By accepting the basic frameworks of cultural Turkism, early Republican authors like Halide Edib acknowledged the importance of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ottoman modernism, and they sought to include cultural legacies of tradition and religion in their depictions of modernization. Written while she was in exile, Halide Edib’s The Clown and His Daughter is set in Istanbul during the late Ottoman reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II.48 It tells a three-generation story focusing on Rabia, an imam’s granddaughter and hafız (Qur’an-chanter) who supports herself through recitations of the Qur’an and Mevlit (the Prophet’s birth epic in Turkish). Along with treating aspects of religious culture and tradition during an era of modernization, the novel adopts the traditional Karagöz shadow play, and many of its stock Ottoman characters, as a model of form for Republican literary modernity. The novel’s storyline comes to a climax with the 1908 constitutional revolution, during which the abrogated 1876 Ottoman constitution was reinstated and parliament reopened, representing the heyday of late Ottoman modernism. Like Pamuk’s early novels, Halide Edib’s work accepts modernization history while qualifying it through reimagined aspects of the Ottoman legacy and Ottoman material culture. Her work is openly political, in this case, through a subtle yet scathing subtext that equates the progressive Kemalist era to the autocratic reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II. She furthermore introduces such themes as gender and the position of women, Islamic tradition, Sufism, conversion, political state ideology, and the traditional mahalle neighborhood, settings that one could find variously in Pamuk’s own work. Pamuk, however, is an author who is more concerned with deconstructing rather than constructing sites of national identification. Novelizing Conspiracy and Coup By the time Pamuk was 30 he had lived through three military coups – in 1960, 1971, and 1980 – that supported the authoritarian trajectory of secular modernity in Turkey. Additionally, in 1997 the military (with the mass media sounding alarm bells) forced the resignation of Prime Minister Erbakan of the Welfare Party in order to assuage public fears of a politically enfranchised

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Islam, an event openly decried by Pamuk (Pamuk 1999). (This so-called “postmodern coup” later inspired Pamuk’s novel Snow.) These historical events loom menacingly in Pamuk’s fiction through the literary trope of the coup d’état and the themes of political conspiracy and assassination.49 Just as the excesses of the Kemalist cultural revolution pushed early novelists to reassess the recent Ottoman past, the political dysfunction of Republican coups forced Pamuk to seek literary alternatives that interrogated secular modernity. Figurations of the coup appear in almost all of Pamuk’s novels. Cevdet Bey and Sons is structured around the 1908/9, 1922/3 and 1960 revolutionary upheavals and ends just before the 1971 coup. The plot of The Silent House is set during the 1970s social polarization between rightist and leftist political factions and ends just before the 1980 coup. The White Castle begins in its wake, as the coup in this instance is instrumental in instigating Pamuk’s search for a new historiographic and literary form. Where his first three novels reference coups earnestly in order to stress the social alienation they produce, his fourth and fifth novels – The Black Book and The New Life – begin to parody coups. In these novels, Pamuk recasts the logic of nationalism into a critique of political paranoia, conspiracy, and imminent coup. The next two novels maintain this trend: My Name is Red pits the Ottoman sultan against a conservative Islamic resurgence; and finally, in Snow the Turkish “coup” is exposed as a burlesque performance, a second-rate melodrama with dire, real-life consequences. The New Life describes shadowy networks surrounding a mysterious “book” of immense influence that draws readers under its sway. Functioning as an “absent text” within the novel, the “book” establishes a metafictional narrative structure that adds (interpretive) layers to the novel. The metafictional structure (which Pamuk relies on in all but his first two novels) allows the narrator to occupy both the position of subject and object or “author” and character in the story. This structure serves to create ambiguity about the identity of the narrator and his relationship to the other characters. Thus, the narrator is able to transgress and critique the ideological discourses that construct his identity. Pamuk relies on such a structure to free the “writing-subject” from the discursive confinements of secular modernity. In other words, he constructs a textual space that enables him to establish a position of triangulation with respect to the binary logic of nationalism, modernity, and secularism. This literary innovation allows Pamuk to escape the existential crises fostered by secularism through reflexivity about the constructed nature of historical and national narratives. Both the mysterious-mystical absent text in the plot and Pamuk’s novel are entitled “The New Life.” Pamuk’s version serves as a surrogate text of witness, testimony, and confession. Furthermore, the novel evokes the “New Life” of Turkish nationalism as espoused by the early Republican nationalizing “social engineer” Ziya Gökalp.50 The novel reveals the mysterious book to the characters while concealing it from the reader, putting the reader in a situation parallel to that of the main character,

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Osman, as he sets out in search of its secrets, a quest obstructed by the conservative Dr. Fine and his network of spies working against the “Great Conspiracy” of the book’s influence. By creating this milieu of conspiracy and counter-conspiracy, Pamuk makes the point that the seemingly tragicomic “new life” (or the national condition) has the potential to be mystical and redemptive as well as material and existential. In the modern Turkish novel, the existential “nausea” of the secular everyday is often depicted as leading to nihilism and suicide. Yusuf Atılgan’s Motherland Hotel is a minimalist portrayal of pathological alienation that traces the monotonous routine of an anti-hero, Zebercet, a hotel clerk in an Anatolian town. Zebercet, emptied of an emotional life, is defined by external factors such as his clothes, his job, his daily routine, and his bodily needs of food, sleep, shelter, and sex – for which he exploits the indentured village woman who cleans the hotel. This is a godless world reduced to material relations. The occupants of the hotel are similarly defined starkly by occupation: a military officer, a teacher, and cattle-dealers. The gaping absence in the edifice called “motherland” is human exchange and emotion. A night’s visit to the hotel by a young woman, with no apparent occupation, disrupts this scenario by filling Zebercet with obsessive fantasies that lead to his gradual breakdown, act of murder, and then suicide. In his novel, Atılgan portrays a national space reduced to its base materiality without any hope of grace or redemption. The only option left for Zebercet is self-sacrifice, which emerges as a trope in Turkish literature, signifying the distopic telos of the distopic cultural revolution.51 Atılgan’s stark dramatization of Turkish modernity sits in contrast to Pamuk’s own burlesque version. The Kafka-esque novel Snow follows the leftist journalist and poet “Ka” to the remote Anatolian town of Kars near the Armenian border, where, soon after his arrival, the performance of an early Republican play advocating the unveiling of women as a part of the cultural revolution erupts into a military coup in the present. Here, political violence is embedded in the theatrical representation. In Kars, Ka finds poetic . inspiration, the love of an acquaintance, Ipek, and gets mixed up in political intrigues that pit leftists, Islamicists, Kurds, and secular nationalists against one another. Under the constantly falling whiteness, his experiences approach the mystical as Ka is tempted by faith in God. In the quasi-surreal world of coup and conspiracy, characters comically misread the events depicted in theater, newspapers, and television as political reality. In Kars, Ka writes a collection of poems entitled Snow that the novel withholds from the reader in Pamuk’s characteristic technique of the “absent text” (used to create a metafictional structure that permits self-reflexivity and political critique). When arrested by coup leaders, Ka divulges the hideout of Blue, a leader of the Islamic resistance, and is forced to flee Kars and Turkey. Snow choreographs narrative strategies as an indictment of coups fueled by discourses of conspiracy. But the novel plays these parodic elements off the literary conventions of one of the oldest traditions of Eastern literature: the mystical romance of

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attempted reunion with a beloved – who also represents the divine. The result is Pamuk’s articulation of an idiom in Turkish fiction that marries the material and the mystical, the secular and the sacred – tropes that define his literary project. The mystical and redemptive aspects of Pamuk’s literary revision of secular modernity focus on the agency of writing. Literary modernity itself becomes a means for Pamuk’s juxtaposition of historical modernities from secularism to Ottomanism and from nationalism to orientalism. The spectrum of such modernities in literature is perhaps best conveyed by Og˘uz Atay. Og˘uz Atay’s Misfits was the first modern Turkish novel to display those features we now associate with “metafiction,” such as a plot in which a writer writes a text, a reader reads a text, or a novel that features itself as an object. What bears emphasis, I argue, is that such new formal literary techniques assume profound political import in the context of Turkish secular nationalism. Metafiction is often treated as a form of literary depoliticization from the leftleaning perspective of historical and social realism. I argue that in the Turkish case it is, on the contrary, a method of re-politicizing the novel, whose political standard was a moribund social realism. Misfits is a key text in the development of this literary-political technique, one that Pamuk adopts. The plot focuses on the engineer Turgut Özben, a character researching the suicide of his close friend Selim Is¸ık by gathering and reading various forms of writing he has left behind. (This suicide recalls the existential crises of Atılgan’s work, yet Atay introduces the possibility of redemption through writing, an approach that Pamuk also develops.) Özben’s efforts lead to reconstructing the life of a social “misfit” (much as the author-figure “Orhan” does for his friend Ka in Snow). In the process, as with many Pamuk protagonists, Özben becomes an author whose story becomes the novel we read. During his efforts, he begins to distance himself from his customary middle-class routines, family, and associations, accepting that he, too, is a national-cultural “misfit.” Özben also begins to assemble an Encyclopedia of Misfits, among whose pages he includes himself. Thus, the trope of the literary encyclopedia, a symbol of secular enlightenment ideals, finds its latest iteration as a selfreflexive parody. As for Pamuk, he situates himself in relation to both of these precursors by relying on Atay’s parodic mode to update Yusuf Atılgan’s fiction of existentialism, alienation, and nihilism. Novelizing the Secular-Sacred Broadly, “secular Sufism” describes literary intersections of the secular modern and mystical Islam. As a specific experience of sacredness in secular Turkish contexts, secular Sufism appears as an early trope in the Republican novel. The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, and Snow all experiment with the idea of mystical transcendence and redemption through writing and authorship. The tradition, as updated by Pamuk, often observes this scenario: A “beloved” is the object of the protagonist’s

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desire for reunion. Reunion with the “beloved” (the Venetian slave .in The White Castle, Rüya in The Black Book, Canan in The New Life, Ipek in Snow, and Füsun in The Museum of Innocence) fails on the level of plot, giving rise to a state of unrequited love. In place of the reunion, the mystical narrative and quest provides the seeker with what he needs rather than what he wants. For Pamuk, the surrogate object of desire is always textual. The quest leads to the emergence of a “writing-subject” or author and results in the production of a literary text. Secular Sufism materializes in the plot as authorial agency – the representational agency to transform Turkish literary modernity. (More often than not, Pamuk’s novels are accounts of novelwriting cloaked as mysteries, detective stories, and romances.) Furthermore, the material and the mystical are reunited in the quest through the effect of an absent beloved. In the process, the sacredness of the literary text is reaffirmed. Though buried under complex literary digressions, the core story of The Black Book is essentially Pamuk’s semi-autobiographical account of becoming an author. (A non-fiction version of which constitutes Pamuk’s memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City.) The Black Book is a multi-genre palimpsest that layers the detective story, editorial journalism, the Sufi quest, Sufi hagiography, mystical romance, existential angst, conspiracies, coup, and popular culture. The protagonist, a lawyer named Galip (representing the “disciple”), seeks out his missing wife Rüya (or “dream”), whom he suspects of hiding out with the renowned journalist Celâl (representing the “pir” or master) in the streets of Istanbul. The characters allude to the famous Mevlevi Sufis S¸eyh Galip and Celâleddin Rumi, conjuring a subtext of the mystical quest. Through the process of ghostwriting the absent Celal’s Borgesian newspaper columns, Galip experiences a spiritual reunion of sorts with both Celal and his beloved Rüya, establishing that writing is a form of redemption for one sunken in abandonment and depression in the conspiratorial context of an impending military coup.52 Scenes set in Istanbul, from the Bosphorus to whorehouses, from mannequin museums to editorial offices, supply digressions that create a novel out of the textual exhaustion of self and nation. What results is a contemporary Thousand and One Nights, where Galip writes stories to stay alive in the midst of political assassinations and military coups. A tour de force in Pamuk’s oeuvre, The Black Book is a hybrid novel of Eastern and Western forms emerging out of the loss of a beloved for which nothing but writing – and above all novel writing – can compensate. Pamuk’s eighth novel, The Museum of Innocence, again brings the mystical and the material together. The novel is set in the bourgeois circles of 1970s Istanbul and merges the objects of everyday material culture with mystical redemption in the creation of a novel that is a museum (and a museum that is a novel). The melodramatic story focuses on the narcissistic obsessions of a wealthy, spurned lover, Kemal. Kemal gradually drops out of Istanbul bourgeois society to create a museum with the everyday objects that are relics of his illicit romance with his poorer cousin, Füsun. The objects, from cigarette

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butts to the Chevrolet in which Füsun dies, are extremely personal yet evoke the social and political memories of family, society, and nation. The museum is contained in Füsun’s girlhood house, which Kemal has purchased. Furthermore, the “novel” is a metafiction written by the writing-subject “Orhan Pamuk,” who is hired by Kemal, and consequently takes the form of the museum catalogue that inventories used or discarded objects – an archive that Pamuk has actually reproduced in Istanbul and opened to the public in 2012. The museum allows Pamuk’s readers to see for themselves the objects listed in the novel and purchase mementoes from the museum store. This actual reproduction of a literary representation of a museum – an erstwhile storehouse of national-cultural memory – is ironic to say the least. While the museum offers a surrogate for obsessive (because unrequited) love, it also evokes the ghostly beloved as an absent object of desire. Thus, Pamuk’s “silent house” of memory and imagined community has, over the course of five novels, transformed into a “museum” that speaks through a repository of mystified objects, signifying both pathos and pathology. The museum/novel repeats the pattern of secular-sacredness and secular Sufism established in Pamuk’s earlier fiction. In this respect, however, Pamuk has inverted the logic of his earlier novels by offering material recuperation for spiritual loss.

Conclusion: Secular Blasphemies How should one reconcile what I have described as Pamuk’s adoration of Turkish cultural history with the fact that in interviews and essays he routinely dismisses the influence of the Turkish literary tradition on his work? He is indeed on record as referring to that tradition as the “piddling Turkish novel” (Pamuk 2007: 132).53 He is also obviously well versed in this literature, even something of a scholar, and, as I have shown, his novels work through the conventions of the Republican novel, forging new novelistic idioms and new understandings of Turkish literature as a secular-sacred cosmopolitan form emanating from Istanbul. Perhaps his determination to situate himself as the culmination of a tradition that he had to learn and study, to emulate and to surpass, generated something like a love–hate relationship.54 Begrudgingly, when pressed, Pamuk names only a few authors (who are largely untranslated and thus unknown outside of Turkey) who have influenced him: Tâhir, Atılgan, Atay, Tanpınar. But he is far more likely to be represented as a dissident victim of the state (the experience of many Turkish authors of his generation) or as a student and practitioner of an international canon, as in the edited and abridged 2007 English (not Turkish) version of the belles-lettres collection Other Colors (Öteki Renkler, 1999) or in his somewhat conventional meditations on the European novel in The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist. It is my contention that Pamuk’s novels tell a third story that relocates the source of his revision of Turkish secular modernity in the cosmopolitan literature of a reimagined and re-enchanted Istanbul characterized as both material and mystical, secular and sacred. In their challenges to the orthodoxies of devlet,

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Pamuk and his novels engage in repeated acts of transgression. Blasphemy, as the breaking of constraints, is as present in secular societies as it is in overtly theocratic ones. That is, secular modern polities are not free of the restrictions that a discourse of blasphemy imposes. As I explain in the chapters that follow, Pamuk’s fiction is a story of secular blasphemy against the conventions of the state and its traditions of modernity. Pamuk’s edition of Radikal contains another clue to his negotiation of the secular and the sacred. The columns chosen by Pamuk amount to an indictment of the state’s policy against its writers. In poetic justice of a sort, Pamuk’s edition of Radikal is evidence of the Turkish state’s insult to its own authors. However, in a metafictional twist, Pamuk’s edition of Radikal, which might fall under the theme of secular-social dissidence, includes a column by the famous journalist Celâl Salik written in 1980, the year of the last Cold War military coup that figures prominently in Pamuk’s work. Salik (lit. “one who is on a mystical path”) is a kös¸e yazarı, an editorial writer and critic of popular culture with a large, devoted readership, a writer who weighs in on all imaginable topics and is something of a universal professor as well as something of a conspiracy theorist. Fans know Salik well as one of Pamuk’s own creations, as the famous character from The Black Book. This novel, one of his most challenging, represents a pinnacle of Pamuk’s authorship as an Istanbul novelist. Some readers claim that he began writing simpler sentences and about sexier topics for outside audiences in subsequent novels. Salik, in his lost column (a fiction masquerading as non-fiction), speaks to us from beyond the grave 25 years after being assassinated by a secular nationalist reader in the conclusion to The Black Book. By including him in the edition of a paper focused on secular dissidence, Pamuk opens the same window of egress from discourses of national politics that his fiction opened decades earlier. Salik is the author-as-victim whose fate Pamuk has avoided, usurped, and transcended.55 As a literary symbol of Pamuk’s most devoted Turkish readership, Salik represents nostalgia for Pamuk as a Turkish author of the national tradition. In his column, Salik explains that the daily practice of reading a particular columnist (something Turks do religiously) is part of a process of ferreting out who among them is “guilty,” or who can serve as a scapegoat: In our newspaper reading habits, we harbor a persistent obsession for finding the ones to blame for what we lack in life, for our poverty, for our personal troubles, for our grief, for our helplessness, and for our political misery. But if I were alive today, this is what I’d want to tell my readers: We ourselves are to blame as well. … But the meaning of a good column doesn’t rest in uncovering the guilty party or the fault it finds; rather, it rests in the deliberation of the writer, in what the words reveal without simply pointing them out, and also, in the bridge of affection and familiarity between reader and writer. (Salik 2007)56

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Pamuk/Salik is talking about a number of things at once here: media polemics about him, his trial for insulting Turkishness, his transformation as an author (once national, now global), and the bond between a Turkish writer and his Turkish readers that he believes, perhaps naïvely, is a bridge of trust. In the column, Pamuk/Salik uses the pronoun “we,” evoking the imagined community of Turks. In a culturally appropriate idiom of indirectness, he chastises his readership, saying that they share in the “blame” – the offense, though unstated, is the destruction of the “bridge” between reader and writer that enables literary production and the transformation of literary modernity. Through his alter ego Salik, Pamuk blames his readership in part for the state of alienation and displacement in which he now finds himself. That is, he is both an insider and an outsider, a best-selling author who is loved and hated, a contested writer who is responsible for changing the Turkish novel and making “Turkishness” perplexingly contingent on a variety of recuperated contexts. The distortions of Pamuk’s self-association with authors of socialist engagement in his 2007 edition of Radikal can now be clarified. It’s not that Pamuk poses a threat to the state for straightforward ideological reasons, but that he denies secular authority and challenges definitions of “Turkishness” by authoring novels of cultural redefinition that rely on both din and devlet. The realist and material conditions of devlet, with their positivist focus on enlightenment and progress, thus meet with a rearticulated Islamic mysticism, Ottoman heritage, and literary enchantment that allows for the possibility of redemption from the condition of secular impasse. Contrary to the message of Pamuk’s edition of Radikal, his dissidence, as I have argued, rests not in his person or the polemics of the author, but in the “secular blasphemies” of his literature. Thus, it is by analyzing the dominant tropes of his novels that we can better understand how Pamuk’s interventions in literary modernity have forever altered the culture and politics of Turkey. His work not only redefines Turkish literary modernity, it narrates the transformation of homo secularis, a product of secular modernity, through various unacknowledged contexts of the sacred.

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The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God. (Lukács 1971 [1920]: 88)1 If only I could believe in Allah. (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 74–5)2 Thus we never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries. (Defoe 1866 [1719]: 141)

Pamuk’s first two novels have often been excluded from critical consideration of the author’s oeuvre. An English version of the first novel has yet to appear; the second only appeared in 2012, 30 years after being published in Turkish. Since both novels are still not widely available in translation, this chapter performs a mining operation that reveals Pamuk’s rather close historiographic affinity to Turkish secular modernity in his first novel (supported by its social realist form) and a parody of the very same historiography in the second (supported by high modernist techniques). Lack of access to these early novels contributes to misreadings and misunderstandings of Pamuk’s work by international literary critics. The historical realism that Pamuk relied on to create his early fiction developed from the secular socialist concerns of modernization represented in devlet. Republican literary modernity emerged from, and was prefigured by, the authority of modernization history.3 The discourses of the Republican state presented modernization as diachronic and dialectical progress from faith to reason. Under the “development of secularism” paradigm, historiography became a subgenre of the Republican novel as reflected in the sequential period novels of Halide Edib, Yakup Kadri . Karaosmanog˘ lu, Peyami Safa, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Kemal Tâhir, Attila Ilhan, and others, which narrated the transition from Empire to Republic as a fraught struggle for national self-determination and secular progress.4 Republican authors have variously supported or subverted this historical frame, at times within the same text.

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As discussed in the previous chapter, around the time of the abolishment of the Ottoman sultanate (1922) and the Islamic caliphate (1924), a literaryhistorical narrative about the transition from Empire to Republic began to be articulated, which encouraged new ways of conceptualizing Turkish history, society, and identity. This Empire-to-Republic historiography developed into a secular masterplot for state-sponsored “conversion to modernity” and had the didactic function of opening up new spaces of secular Turkish identification. Both historians and authors were engaged in disseminating the secular masterplot, and its presence in literary works can be traced from the 1920s to the present.5 Indeed, the presence of this discourse can be found in Pamuk’s work as well, particularly in his first two less known novels. In his third novel, however, Pamuk effectively altered the historiographic, social realist, and secular forms of the Republican novel. As a result, he fast became the political target of Turkey’s left-leaning literary-critical establishment. This chapter describes how Pamuk’s first two novels contain a progressive recapitulation of Turkish literary modernity from realism to modernism. These changes also anticipate metafictional and metahistorical innovations in form that begin to appear in Pamuk’s third novel, The White Castle. I argue that this tripartite progression in formal innovation functions to fragment the Empire-to-Republic historiographic narrative. As such, Pamuk subverts the secular masterplot, allowing for the recuperation of tropes and contexts of din. In other words, Pamuk’s innovations in novelistic form also target received and official understandings of secular “Turkishness.” One literary manifestation of the secular masterplot could be termed the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman: a genre of the Turkish novel that narrates the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic as an articulation of the secularization thesis. This reflects a political process that fosters the construction of the secular modern subject, or what I term homo secularis. The genre of the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman also functions discursively to separate contexts of din (religion, Sufism, Ottoman tradition, etc.) from those of devlet (state, secularism, cultural revolution, etc.) and set them in opposition, devalorizing the former as a cause of decline and elevating the latter as the sole vehicle of Turkish modernity. As stated earlier, the historiographic imperative of the Republican novel reinforces a secular teleology. Ironically, the genesis of secular “Turkishness” conceals the trauma of its own origins as a Sunni Muslim polity and erases the memory of its Ottoman Islamic past. The history of the Empire-to-Republic transition is reconstructed by Kemalist ideological discourse as one of national self-determination rather than of European colonial partition (it is arguably a combination of both). In sum, the epistemic violence of the Kemalist cultural revolution conceals the violence of Ottoman military defeat and territorial partition. In literature, the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman recapitulates this distortion. Though the novel form and the nation form do overlap, significantly, the novel harbors the traces of sublated counter-narratives.6

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The Republican literary canon reveals that the dominant socialist paradigm of Anatolian realism adopted by authors from Nâzım Hikmet to Yas¸ar Kemal focused on exposing the gap between modernization and the Anatolian people (or the “halk”). The solution rested in the possibility of social revolution to bring about a “conversion to modernity,” a possibility present in Pamuk’s first novel, though parodied or dismissed outright in his second novel and subsequent works. Cevdet Bey and Sons, a novel of social and historical realism, reflects the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman as a structural device that is supported by the authority of a third-person omniscient point-ofview. Twentieth-century historical events from the late Ottoman Hamidian era to the Second Republic constitute the scaffolding of the novel. The literary narrative serves as a dramatic complement to this history. In contrast to this tidy parallel of the literary and the historical as constitutive of Turkish literary modernity, The Silent House, set before the 1980 coup, dramatizes a “crisis of faith” in discourses of history. In The Silent House, the domain of literary authorship begins to supersede the authority (and discipline) of state history and the secularization thesis. This permits Pamuk to record two accomplishments as a yet emerging novelist: to rewrite the Empire-to-Republic narrative, in a sense liberating “story” (or in the usage of his historian-protagonist Faruk Darvınog˘ lu, “hikâye”) from history, and to redefine the novel as a site of literary-authorial agency rather than simply as an instrument of national historiography. Pamuk’s use of the term “hikâye” is significant here because this is also an early Ottoman Turkish descriptor for “fiction” and even the “novel” that refers to early forms of traditional narration (Boratav 2012 [1966]).7 The separation of “story” from “history,” self-consciously addressed in The Silent House, enables another significant transformation in the literary idiom: the return of contexts of din. Though Pamuk’s questioning of Republican historiographic authority begins with The Silent House, it does not lead to a substantial revision of Turkish literary modernity until his next novel, The White Castle. The climax of The White Castle witnesses the birth of the author-figure, a “writing-subject,” who is also represented in the narrative as a character of hybrid identification (both European and Turk, both Christian and Muslim, both “I” and “he”). This figure, able to express agency beyond the confines of national discourses, is a narrating presence whose liberating emergence is replayed in all of Pamuk’s subsequent novels as the victorious agency of literary modernity over Republican modernization history. Rather than depoliticizing literary modernity, as some critics have argued, I argue that Pamuk’s use of metafictional and metahistorical techniques in this and subsequent novels serves to politicize the novel form within the cultural logic of Turkish secular nationalism. Beginning with The White Castle, Pamuk recuperates narrative spaces of Ottoman Islam and Turkish Sufism to confront the Enlightenment worldview of rationality, positivism, and demystification that is also a characteristic of

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the Republican secular masterplot. These contexts of din function to re-enchant the realist and materialist focus of the Republican novel and to multiply its meanings. I contend that Pamuk’s novels, based on their innovations in form and content, are argumentative texts; that is, they contain reassessments of literary modernity that are often theoretically informed. For example, a recuperation of din through Ottoman contexts occurs in The White Castle, where Pamuk’s revision of historiography presents Ottoman Islam and Istanbul cosmopolitanism as a political critique of Republican Turkishness. Read as a trilogy, Pamuk’s first three novels problematize Republican literary modernity so that it loses its ideological function as an identityand nation-building discourse. Through the trajectory of these novels, Pamuk has turned the Republican concern of the social historian into the literary concern of the cosmopolitan (Istanbul) author. In this way, we get the first inkling that the “city” will eventually surpass the “nation” as the site of literary modernity under the influence of Pamuk’s work. By identifying a fictive component (or “hikâye”) as constitutive of the ostensibly objective and factual discipline of history, Pamuk’s writing subjugates secular historiography to literary authority.8 Additionally, in a political gesture of dissidence, his fiction alludes to the distorting presence of secular ideology in Republican history.9 If Cevdet Bey and Sons is a novel of historical realism prefigured by modernization history, The Silent House is a historiographic novel predicated on formal innovations that parody ideologies of secular modernity and Turkism. To emphasize this transformation, Pamuk personifies the dilemma through an ambivalent character: the historian-cum-author Faruk Darvınog˘ lu, a Republican intellectual in crisis who appears both in The Silent House and The White Castle.10 Pamuk’s transformation of literary modernity over his first three novels can be summarized through Darvınog˘ lu, a character who undergoes an uneasy conversion from a Republican historian to something of a novelist. Read together, Pamuk’s first three novels argue for the mutual legibility between tropes and contexts of din and devlet.

The Empire-to-Republic Bildungsroman: Cevdet Bey and Sons (1982) Cevdet Bey and Sons, or in its more symbolic original title, Darkness and Light, is a classic example of the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman, or, a novel of secular formation.11 This historical novel is divided into three parts that juxtapose three revolutionary eras in late Ottoman and Republican history between 1905 and 1970.12 In a dialectical history-of-progress framework, each part portrays a distinct social force of “light” (representing enlightenment) opposed to an “Eastern/oriental” backdrop of political “darkness” (representing Islamic tradition).13 A triptych of revolutions (the 1908 constitutional revolution, the Kemalist cultural revolution of the 1920s and 1930s, and the military coup of 1971) structures the novel, corresponding to

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three generations of the Is¸ıkçı (lit., “light-seller” or “proponent of light”) family.14 The setting moves among cosmopolitan Istanbul (as imperial Ottoman capital and later peripherialized Republican city), rural Anatolian Kemah, and the new “modern” capital of Ankara. Part One and Part Three, each recounting a single day, are entitled “Foreward” and “Afterward,” as narrative weight is given to Part Two, set during the cultural revolution.15 In its form and content the novel corresponds to a realist Lukácsian understanding of the historical novel.16 Redefining the historical novel as a vehicle for literary realism (as opposed to Romanticism or literary modernism), Lukács states: What matters therefore in the historical novel is not the retelling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events. … And it is a law of literary portrayal which first appears paradoxical, but then quite obvious, that in order to bring out these social and human motives of behaviour, the outwardly insignificant events, the smaller (from without) relationships are better suited than the great monumental dramas of world history. (Lukács 1962: 42) In keeping with this revolutionary understanding of literary realism, Pamuk constructs Cevdet Bey and Sons as a historical novel that focuses on everyday exchanges and the characters’ efforts to comprehend themselves at particular periods to elucidate the “great drama” of the Empire-to-Republic transition. Throughout the novel, Pamuk relies on a dramatic “oppositional dialogue” technique to reflect the dialectic from Empire of Faith to Republic of Reason. As I argue below, the thematic opposition of “darkness” and “light” reveals the influence of Republican state ideology which functions to recast the authorial and representational unity of din and devlet as a binary opposition. The 1908 “Young Turk” Revolution: Ottoman Modernity The “Young Turk” Revolution reinstated the Ottoman constitution of 1876 and initiated a period of liberalization and representative government after 30 years of conservative sultanic rule. It is the first of the historical revolutions and coups that defines the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman. Part One of Cevdet Bey and Sons describes a day in the life of Cevdet Bey during the late Ottoman era under the reign of Ottoman Sultan and Islamic Caliph Abdülhamid II just three years before the 1908 constitutional revolution.17 This “Foreward” foretells the early stirrings of a cosmopolitan Muslim bourgeoisie who will come to constitute the secular Republican elite by mid-century. Cevdet Bey, the pater familias of the Is¸ıkçı family, is a Muslim businessman at a time when economic life is dominated by Greeks, Armenians, and Levantines. He is a character who expresses the alienation and anxiety of

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being an outsider, one who literally and figuratively follows a different notion of time. Time (opposed as either “modern” or “Muslim”) functions as a leitmotif throughout the novel. In Part One it appears as “Muslim time” in the way that author Ahmet Has¸im (1894–1933) describes in his well-known vignette of that title written in 1921 during the Allied occupation of Istanbul just before the establishment of the Republic: The most clandestine and effective of the assaults that have transformed Istanbul and confounded its inhabitants has been the introduction of foreign time into our lives. … The beginning of the Muslim day is determined by the first light of dawn and its end by the light of dusk … [this time] constitutes the sacred time of memory. The foreigners [of the Allied occupation] who have arrived have reorganized time and our lives according to an unknown doctrine and have made it unfamiliar to our souls. … Now the clock in a Muslim home, as if keeping the hours of another realm, indicates nighttime in the colors of day and daytime in the colors of night. Like wayfarers who have lost their way in the desert, we are now a people lost in time. (Has¸im 1921 [1337 A.H.], my emphasis) A number of details in this passage are significant to Pamuk’s novel. Metaphorically, “foreign time” is also the time of the secularization thesis, and later, of the Kemalist cultural revolution, a social engineering project that effectively exchanged “Muslim” time with “foreign” European time.18 The binary logic of the passage is clear: time exists as either Muslim or European. For Has¸im, “Muslim time” represents sacred collective memory rather than tradition, backwardness, or lack. His passage signifies an inversion that valorizes the sacred over the secular as conveyed through metaphors of time. Generally, in Pamuk’s literary world, time exists as both Muslim and European. However, his first novel traces a developmental trajectory of Turkish modernization from Muslim to European time. This doesn’t prevent the emergence of a dual notion of time. Whether during foreign military occupation, the Kemalist cultural revolution, or afterward, time manifests as a confounding duality for Turkish authors. Has¸im’s notion of local Muslim Turks being “a people lost in time” alludes to the symptomatic effects of this duality and indicates the degree to which it is the basis for an epistemological and ontological crisis. This duality has lasting consequences in its oppositional manifestation throughout the Republican era. These two measures of time persistently affect Pamuk’s characters. I define them here as the Muslim time of din and the social revolutionary time of secular devlet. The Republican secular masterplot demands unidirectional development and progress from the former to the latter, which Pamuk codes as “darkness” and “light” in Cevdet Bey and Sons. Has¸im’s passage relies on

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an inversion of the same dialectic of “darkness” and “light.”19 For Has¸im, Muslim time is the “light” of a glorious Ottoman Islamic past and modern time is the “darkness” of colonial Europe.20 He anticipates the potential manifestation of an unacknowledged Muslim modernity.21 For Pamuk, whose historical understanding is informed by Republican (and by extension, European) historiography, the dialectic follows the secular masterplot. “Light” rests squarely with devlet and revolution, social engineering, and later, the leftist coup. Nevertheless, Pamuk updates Has¸im’s insights in subsequent novels that increasingly recognize and refuse to fully abandon the sacred time of din. Cevdet Bey and Sons begins with an anxiety dream-sequence. Cevdet, the “seller of lights,” wakes up agitated. He is late, literally and figuratively “belated.”22 To underscore this point, Cevdet Bey first looks out of the window to determine the time by the location of the sun. What is known as alaturka or “ezani” (related to the call to prayer) time, as Has¸im alludes to above, is based on a system whereby midnight is always at sundown. The day, divided into two segments of darkness and light, is ordered around the call to prayer, the first beginning at sunrise and the fifth at sunset (an orientation which determines the times of the five daily prayers). Next, annoyed at himself for using a traditional method of telling time, Cevdet looks at his wristwatch, a tool of modern synchronization, which tells him that it is “yarım” according to Muslim time (just after sunrise).23 This wristwatch represents the first symbol of what might be termed modernist Islam in Pamuk’s oeuvre. Nevertheless, throughout his day, Cevdet Bey continually tells time in the old fashion. He has yet to adopt the new “time” of revolutionary modernity represented by his Francophile older brother, Nusret.24 Nusret, a “Young Turk” and physician who has fallen ill and has recently returned to Istanbul from Paris, advocates revolutionary social change under the Enlightenment model of the French Revolution. He belittles Cevdet and is dismissive of his work and ambitions. For Nusret, Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire are sunken in the “darkness” of what is portrayed as Sultan Abdülhamid’s rule as an “oriental despot.”25 As stated above, Pamuk’s coding of Muslim time as “darkness” and revolutionary European modernity as “light” reflects the received ideology of the secular masterplot.26 The “La Marseillais”-singing Nusret offers a summary of this position as he fears that his son, Ziya (lit. “light”), will be negatively affected by his devout mother and her traditional Islamic family: If he [Ziya] stays with relatives in the Haseki neighborhood or in the village with his mother he’ll believe in Allah like they do, he’ll believe absurd lies are the truth, he’ll become numb like everyone else, and he won’t understand the world. … I want my son to believe in the light of reason and himself … the enlightenment of reason … I didn’t name him Ziya for nothing! … With us, no one is free, rational, and enterprising! Here, everyone’s a slave, everyone’s raised to bow down, to meld into

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society, and to fear. … Religion, fear, and cynicism have been memorized by rote. (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 74–5) According to the modernizer Nusret, Ziya is caught perilously between the “light” of reason and the “darkness” of faith and Allah, and he must be rescued. Later, in keeping with his father’s will, we learn that Ziya has grown to be a Republican military officer and a symbol of secular authoritarian modernization. Pamuk has Ziya reappear in Part Three, as a retired military officer who brings word of an impending military coup. The “light” of an Ottoman constitutional revolution in Part One (1905) has become the “light” of a possible leftist coup in Part Three (1971). The novel’s first section is dominated by a sense of belated modernity for Ottoman Muslims in cosmopolitan Istanbul as reflected in the economic and the political aspirations of Cevdet and Nusret, respectively.27 The cosmopolitan version of Ottoman Islam that Pamuk depicts here is set in contrast to the secular modern focus on Ankara and Anatolia conveyed in Part Two. In accordance with the secular masterplot, the novel separates contexts of din and devlet into a binary opposition. As Pamuk develops Turkish literary modernity in subsequent novels, he will return to contexts of “sacred” Muslim time with increasing frequency, a return that will allow him to recuperate the enchantments of story (“hikâye”) from the secular disenchantments and historical materialism of the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman. The Kemalist Cultural Revolution, 1922–50: Secular Modernity The cultural revolution is the second historical period that structures the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman. As a defining project of Turkish secular modernity, the cultural revolution is best understood through the scope of its epistemic violence against the status quo. For Turkish intellectuals and authors, modernity is nothing less than the experience and articulation of this violence in political and cultural spheres. For the sake of “secular conversion,” the cultural revolution abolished the Ottoman sultanate (1922); abandoned the cosmopolitan Ottoman capital, Istanbul, for rural Ankara (1923); abolished the Islamic Caliphate and religious courts (1924); outlawed Sufi orders and adopted European-style dress (1925); adopted the European calendar, criminal, civil, and commercial codes (1926); changed the alphabet from Ottoman script to Latin letters (1928); struck the declaration identifying Islam as the state religion from the constitution (1929); granted women the right to vote (1934); and enshrined secularism, revolution, and statism as constitutional principles (1937).28 The positivist social engineering produced by these changes relied on a number of outside models including ethno-national self-determination, Soviet socialism, and European (mostly Anglo-French) orientalism/colonialism. Progress occurred, Republican historiography argued, when Turks moved through revolutionary stages from the darkness of

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religion to the enlightenment of reason and secularism. In its formulation as a historical novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons supports this argument. Part Two of Cevdet Bey and Sons is set during a three-year period (1936–9) of the cultural revolution, yet constitutes the majority of a novel that covers 65 years of Turkish modernization history. (This three-year period is significant not least of all because it coincides with the Turkish military operation against Kurds in the Dersim region of southeastern Anatolia.) In Part Two of the novel, Pamuk focuses on the generation of Cevdet Bey’s sons, who represent the educated secular elite during the monoparty era of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party. As opposed to the cosmopolitan Ottoman businessmen and pashas that are depicted in the novel’s first section, the second section centers on Refik, Muhittin, and Ömer, three long-time friends who are literally engineers and figuratively “engineers of the nation.”29 These three characters meet in various contexts and reflect on their changing aspirations, their disappointments, successes, and failures set against the backdrop of high Kemalism.30 Kemalism encouraged urban elites, intellectuals, and teachers to take the revolution to the people of Anatolia, creating a symbiosis between the urban intelligentsia and Anatolian peasants. The crisis that arose in this interaction between the Republican enlightenment ideals of devlet and the religious traditions of din became a recurring trope in Republican novels such as Halide Edib’s Vurun Kahpeye (Strike the Whore, 1926), Res¸at Nuri Güntekin’s Yes¸il Gece (Green Night, 1928), Yakup Kadri’s Yaban (The Outsider, 1932), and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Sahnenin Dıs¸ındakiler (Outside the Scene, 1950). In Cevdet Bey and Sons, Pamuk develops the trope in scenes with his engineerprotagonists that are set in rural Kemah near Erzincan, implying, like these earlier authors, that the divide between modernity and the masses signals a crisis that the “revolution” has left unresolved. Tracing the logic of the secular masterplot in Cevdet Bey and Sons, Pamuk sets the Ottoman Muslim context of din (Part One) in contrast to the secular state, or devlet dominance of the cultural revolution (Part Two).31 Thus, the novel develops as a historical dramatization of the separation of din and devlet through a sustained period of political and social engineering. The novel depicts contexts of din that are subordinated and pushed into the private sphere while traces of its collective memory are repressed. For example, the scene where the secular engineer Refik must perform the ritual namaz prayer at his father Cevdet Bey’s funeral captures the social alienation of this secularized generation, for whom religion is a relic and a lifestyle fit for the poor and uneducated. Refik, a typical representation of homo secularis, must be prodded by his brother Osman (eponymous name of the founder of the Ottoman Empire) to participate in the prayer: “Namaz?” thought Refik. … He thought about how he would remove his shoes. … In the past, he’d come here with servants and also during Bairam holidays with his father. … “I should have performed my

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ablution first!” he thought, but it seemed Osman hadn’t either. … Refik turned to look behind him: the stocking feet of the gardeners and doormen standing in the back weren’t so peculiar. “This place [the mosque] becomes them!” he thought. … Refik thought, “my father’s dead,” and staring at the nape of the man before him, he imitated his movements. He thought that it wasn’t right that he was making these movements, bowing and rising, despite not believing. (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 213) The alienation, uncanniness, and displacement Refik senses in the setting of a mosque where he must pray is a striking indication of the broken unity of din and devlet. The “father” here might be read allegorically as the figure of the Muslim Ottoman. The Islamic rituals of his obsequies all belong to the realm of din. However, in the national context of the secular “Turkishness” of sublated Islam, the mosque becomes a liminal social space of din and devlet. Cultural ambiguity arises from the lack of legibility between the two cultural spheres as represented by the mass of praying Muslims and the cynical engineer Refik, respectively. The alienation effect of secular conversion is conveyed through Refik, who later states, “If only I could believe in Allah” (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 237). Though an imposed distinction between public (secular) and private (religious) has come to mark “modern” Republican spaces in the 1930s, these distinctions have been revealingly blurred in this mosque scene as depicted by Pamuk. Secular Refik has become nothing but a puppet in this public context of din defined by Islamic tradition. Furthermore, class disparity is emphasized, with Islam being associated with the lower classes and secularism with the enfranchised secular elite. An enforced temporality between din and devlet is also quite evident: din is coded as primitive past-time and devlet as the civilized present and future. This diachronic relation dominates the Kemalist zeitgeist. As such, the Muslim namaz prayer performed by the ritually impure Refik is nothing but a sacrilege, a secular blasphemy against the Islamic religious order. He mimics the movements of prayer during a ritual emptied of meaning. Refik, in an expression of the ideology of modernity, dramatizes the ambivalent worship of the void created by God’s absence. The act of worship is reduced to one of faded memory in the museum of a mosque during his reluctant commemoration of the death of the (Ottoman Islamic) father. Pamuk further maintains his depictions of the coercive force of secularization in the Turkish context by developing the theme of ideological conversion and emphasizing identity-construction under the force of (national) ideology. In addition to tracing the legacies of historic revolutions, Cevdet Bey and Sons presents conversion as the outcome of cultural revolution for both individual and nation. For example, Pamuk describes the transformation (“conversion”) of Refik’s friend Muhittin from an engineer with poetic aspirations to a Turkist, an ultranationalist convinced of Turkish racial superiority.32 Muhittin is an aspiring writer who vows to kill himself if he doesn’t become a

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successful poet by the age of 30.33 (Thus, he becomes another of the “failed authors” who populate Pamuk’s fiction.) When this aspiration appears to be unlikely, he makes a conscious decision to heed heart over mind and to “convert”: “What am I doing now? Now, I’m becoming another person!” […] “What’s happening to me? What kind of person am I becoming? I’m becoming a Turkist … !” he said growing excited. … He’d get used to listening to the voice of his heart, to losing himself in the people, to casting off this stale old reason and replacing it with rapture. […] On the table rested Rıza Nur’s History of the Turks [and] Ziya Gökalp’s books. … He wanted to master the debates Turkists had with each other and their adversaries; additionally, he was carefully examining various histories of the Turks. … Maybe one day he himself could write a better history. (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 317–20, my emphasis) To complete his conversion to Turkism, Muhittin must immerse himself in historical texts on “Turks” that have emerged out of the orientalist discipline of Turkology. That is, he must adopt a historiographic discourse that will reinforce his new identity, perhaps even by writing his own history (thus recouping the role of poet he has given up, this time as a historiographer). Ideological conversion, whether in the Kemalist or Turkist vein, is part of the telos of the secular masterplot. However, in subsequent novels, Pamuk reveals that it is a process that underscores the instability rather than the stability of “Turkishness” as a site of national identification. Pamuk emphasizes this instability through various contexts of imitation, mimicry, hybridity, doppelgangers, and passing.34 (The legacy of the fraught cultural conversion from “Muslim” to “modern” reappears notably in The New Life and Snow.35) Revolution and conversion are two related tropes of Turkishness that Pamuk develops in his early fiction. The project of conversion to modernity through cultural revolution also raises specters of orientalism. I will be referring to orientalism as both the exercise of political power through cultural representations of otherness and as a literary aesthetic (Said 1978, 1993). As a field of critique that addresses the intersection of cultural representation and political power, orientalism, among other things, examines the construction of identity as a symptom of the imposition of colonial or national ideologies. Once a site of identification (or self) is created at the expense of a constructed “other” and reinforced by ideological discourses, it is vulnerable to manipulation by sites of political power such as the state, which can instrumentalize that identity for its own ends. In the Turkish literary sphere, orientalism is a significant, yet understudied, discourse, not least of all due to the phenomenon of “internalized orientalism” in Turkish Republican

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culture. Internalized orientalism describes a condition whereby the Muslim “self” simultaneously acknowledges itself as an “other” in need of social and political tutelage.36 In other words, during the transition from Empire to Republic in Turkey, the colonial European “gaze” had been accepted as a local cultural authority. This, perhaps ironically, established a colonial relation between the “Muslim” and “modern” aspects of a now divided Turkish self during an era of national self-determination. For example, the Republican modernity prefigured through the cultural revolution is distilled and adopted directly from European colonial models of the “civilizing mission.” As such, both European and Turkish Republican modernity identify “Muslims” and “Turks” as objects in need of civilizational development.37 This internalized orientalist understanding, which gives rise to the dilemma of the “divided self,” is represented through the convergence of “insider” and “outsider” perspectives in Part Two of Cevdet Bey and Sons. Refik’s friend Ömer, an engineer who has recently returned from London to Turkey, is cynical about the entire project of Kemalist “enlightenment.” He is a selfdescribed “conqueror” and “Rastignac” of the East who confesses, “I don’t want to be a mangy Turk!” (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 131). An oppositional dialogue occurs between Refik and Ömer in the setting of state-sponsored railway construction in Anatolia. (As was officially declared, railroads were part of the Republican project to “knit the homeland together in an iron web” and symbolized national state power.)38 Ironically, Ömer’s opinions about the cultural revolution in Anatolia are nearly identical to what Nusret had maintained about the constitutional revolution in Part One. Thirty years of history have been conflated here to construct a spurious continuity between late Ottoman and Republican modernity that reveals the retrospective influence of the secularization thesis. Both characters see a gap between the revolution, Enlightenment ideals, and Turkish modernization. Ömer states: “Here, in Turkey, one isn’t able to believe in anything through reason.” Ömer gestured toward the workers’ barracks again. “You either believe in Allah like them or in nothing at all. Because everything is fake here. Everything is imitation! Everything is full of lies, hypocrisy, and deception. You go on about Rousseau. Who’s our Rousseau? Namık Kemal? Can you even bear to read him? When you read him does something awaken within you?”39 (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 332–3) Ömer’s internalized orientalism, cynicism, and self-hatred sit in contrast to Refik, who, in espousing the idealism of revolutionary progress, believes that the cultural revolution can develop Anatolia and modernize the nation. This perspective reaffirms the gap between modes of Muslim and modern time in the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman, which experiences of “revolution” and “conversion” fail to overcome. Ömer’s character demonstrates that the

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political and cultural division between din and devlet can also be internalized as a crisis of mentalities that haunts the Republican subject. Tellingly, Ömer’s (and earlier Nusret’s) beliefs are also close to those of the European engineer Herr Rudolph, who represents a German orientalist perspective on the “East/Orient” and Turkey. Herr Rudolph, a stock figure of European Enlightenment, has spent a decade in Turkey but looks forward to leaving its “darkness”: “I don’t like this East. I don’t like this atmosphere here, these foreign souls that do not in the least match my soul! How many times have I read this to you, I’ve translated it and written it out so you could read it … ” He excitedly recited from memory the Hölderlin that he’d had Refik read earlier. … “Just like a glorious Despot, the Orient, with its strength and eye-dazzling light forces people to prostrate to the ground before they even learn to walk and to pray before knowing how to talk!” […] “Just take a look and see,” sighed the German: “The light of reason doesn’t agree with the soul of the East” (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 279–80) In their essentializations of Turkey and Europe as constituting a binary of absolute differences, all three cultural perspectives – the French (through Nusret), the German (through Herr Rudolf), and, importantly, the Republican secular perspective (through Refik and Ömer) – are unmistakably orientalist in their outlooks.40 The discussions among Refik, Ömer, and Herr Rudolf revolve around the (colonial and national) burden of bringing reason and rationalism to the “Eastern” context of Anatolia. The question at issue is whether modernity is possible without an authoritarian state. These scenes outline a program of state violence, embodied in the cultural revolution, regarding projects of modernization that aim to bring the “light of progress” to the “East.” Eventually, in a scene set in Ankara, Refik and the parliamentarian Muhtar Bey confront the ethical dilemma regarding violence that rests at the core of the cultural revolution. Muhtar Bey argues for the Republican state’s use of authoritarian force, claiming that if the folk/halk are left to their own devices, they’ll remain stuck in backwardness: Muhtar said, “ … There you have it. You claimed that what was done in Dersim [state oppression of a Kurdish uprising] was wrong. But if they hadn’t been subdued by the stick, the revolution [inkılâp] would have been put at risk. With us, either you follow the state and the revolution, take up the stick, and bring about your desired reforms and progress, or you end up by yourself and maybe in prison for nothing! Take the closing of Sufi lodges. … The people need to be delivered from these absurd beliefs. But they have no intention of doing so themselves! What’s to be done?”

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[…] Refik said, “But enlightenment and progress just can’t be brought about by oppressing the people!” (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 385–6) Refik’s humanist critique of the Republican state’s use of force to promote progress reflects the ethical dilemma of the top-down cultural revolution as a colonial and quasi-orientalist project of modernization that mediates between the urban intelligentsia of Istanbul and rural Anatolia. Pamuk’s social realist orientation in Part Two contains an emerging political argument that Turkish modernity is a project of cultural and epistemic violence coded as revolution. His literary exposé of the cultural revolution involves a liberal critique of what we would today term human rights violations. (This liberal humanist critique is reasserted in other novels, particularly Snow, which addresses the legacy of Turkish military coups.) In Part Three, the trope of revolution is developed and revised in yet another iteration of Turkish modernity, this time as a socialist project for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. The 1971 Military Coup: Revolutionary Art The final trope of the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman is the military coup. Turkey witnessed four such coups in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997 (the so-called “postmodern coup”). In Pamuk’s work, the military coup is presented as a microcosm and legacy of the Kemalist cultural revolution. Part Three (the “Afterward”) of Cevdet Bey and Sons, set during the Second Republic, focuses on a day in the life of Cevdet Bey’s grandson, Ahmet, an aspiring artist and French-educated Galatasaray lycée graduate. Ahmet (lit. one of Prophet Muhammad’s names) is in the compromised position of being a revolutionary, bourgeois youth focused on his idiosyncratic artwork before an impending military coup, which he hopes will bring about a socialist revolution. (In actual Republican history, the hopes for a leftist coup are forestalled by a nationalist coup in 1971.) The debate that defines this section of the novel is the relevance of art to revolutionary political change. Like Ahmet, Pamuk aspired to be a painter in his early youth (Pamuk 2005a). The section marks the era of Pamuk’s own coming of age as a novelist, when Turkey, then a nationalistic “third world” country caught between socialism and capitalism during the Cold War, was torn by civil violence between political factions on the left and right.41 Much of the action takes place in Ahmet’s apartmentcum-studio, dramatized as if in a one-act play, where he is visited first by his older sister. Melek, next by the revolutionary youth Hasan, and finally by his girlfriend Ilknur (lit. “first light”) who is completing a doctorate in Ottoman . art history. Ilknur, a character with access to the now dismissed Ottoman language and past, gives us an indication of the direction Pamuk’s fiction will take after he has dismantled the dominance of the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman.

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As with the first two sections of Cevdet Bey and Sons, Part Three reveals anticipation and anxiety about the possibility of revolutionary change (“light”); in this case, about an impending leftist coup like “Torrez in Bolivia.”42 The main tension between art and revolution is revealed in this exchange between Ahmet and Hasan, a member of the communist Turkish Workers Party:43 Hasan gazed at Ahmet’s paintings for a moment. Then his cheerful face hardened as he returned from dreamy reverie to reality: “Look, you’ve depicted some cats here … and you’ve depicted some bourgeois, or whatever, you know these people here, now when I look at it I feel something!” He was on the verge of embarrassment: “I really do sense something but. … But, brother, you know as well as I do that you can’t spark a revolution with these things!” As if the onus of guilt were upon him, he grew timid. (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 564) Hasan’s comment forces Ahmet to struggle over the political legitimacy and dissidence of his work. Ahmet thinks, “How did I just swallow that slur?” and responds to Hasan angrily: “And, it’s arguable whether or not these [paintings] will influence the revolution!” (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 564). Both characters accept revolutionary potential as the measure of aesthetic representation. For Ahmet, social realism is in keeping with modern secular progress informed by a Marxist aesthetic that puts art in the service of socialism. In this section, Hasan makes an allusion to the dissident poet Nâzım Hikmet by repeating a memorized line of verse: “What you seek is not in your room but outside.” The reference is twice repeated (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 568, 587). The quote is from a strident Marxist-Leninist poem entitled “What You Seek” (“Aradıkların,” 1962) by the famous poet while he was in exile in Moscow. The poem ends with the line “What you seek is in you.”44 The poem, verging on agitprop, is not representative of Hikmet’s best work, but is an ideological “poem of duty” that calls both for transnational connection to revolutionary social engagement and for individual (in this scene, artistic) agency in social change. The “outside” might be any number of contexts, including what lies beyond the nation-state or the present time. In his poem, Hikmet foregrounds the role of the revolutionary artist, a role that finds its corollary in Pamuk’s later figuration of the author or the “writing-subject” as an agent of change. In the “Afterward,” the revolutionary force of history is thus sublimated through art, in this case, painting. But it is writing that becomes the metaphor (and vehicle) for social change and political critique in Pamuk’s world. An important mediator between the narrative present and the. Ottoman Islamic past in this section of Cevdet Bey and Sons is the character Ilknur, . one of Pamuk’s few fully developed female characters in the novel. Ilknur

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represents a means of returning to that past, and thus embodies a critique of . secular modernity and the possibility of its revision. Ilknur is able to read Ottoman Turkish script and is thus able to convey to Ahmet the contents of his grandfather Cevdet Bey’s memoirs and his father Refik’s journal. Though curious about these old notebooks, Ahmet, embarrassed, dismisses them because they reveal his bourgeois roots, concluding that they contain nothing of political value. The devalorization of the past, and specifically the Ottoman past, is in keeping with official Republican notions of progress. The “mediating historian” as Republican intellectual is an important figure in Pamuk’s work (who reappears in Pamuk’s subsequent two novels in the figure of Faruk Darvınog˘ lu) who has the training and education to access a cosmopolitan Ottoman Islamic past closed off to the secular citizens of the modern nationstate.. Whereas Ahmet is concerned with social change through revolutionary art, Ilknur is focused on reassessing manifestations and legacies of Islam through art history. Their concerns with aesthetic form center on the determining forces . of secularism and religion, respectively. Ilknur’s doctoral topic is “The Anxiety of Unity in Ottoman Architecture.” Indeed, the topic can be read metaphorically in terms of cultural spaces of din and devlet. In relation to Ahmet’s paintings, she explains how “Architectural structures have no difficulty in finding [social] purpose. Especially Ottoman structures. Probably no architect would doubt the necessity of a mosque” (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 598). Ottoman imperial mosques were part of a complex of secular and religious spaces (called a külliye) that included colleges, hospitals, public kitchens, and places of worship. In these structures, form and purpose were unified in mutually compatible spaces of din and. devlet. In this scene between lover and beloved, anxiety about “unity” in Ilknur’s project (and din) is contrasted to anxiety about the revolutionary import of Ahmet’s art (and devlet). In the understanding I have been . developing in this chapter, the oppositional dialogue between Ahmet and Ilknur is nothing more than the literary dramatization of a search for the lost relationality between din and devlet. In . the socialist revolutionary context of early 1970s Istanbul, Ahmet and Ilknur represent this antinomy of modernity as an opposition between Ottoman Islamic tradition and modern social progress as reflected in art (or architecture and painting). Here, Islam and secular socialism make another early intersection in Pamuk’s work, of the variety that will persist in subsequent novels. Ahmet confesses his doubts about his art because of its lack of revolutionary purpose. Somewhat guiltily, he argues for the centrality of the imagination and of the labor of the individual artist in a state of withdrawal from society. This Romantic concept conflicts with the dominant socialist revolu. tionary context. Ilknur, at first surprised by Ahmet’s selfishness, advises him to ignore his aesthetic doubts and “persist on through to the end.”45 Cevdet Bey and Sons recapitulates Turkish historical and ideological perspectives on modernity while acknowledging that art (including literature) is a potential medium for challenging dominant epistemologies. This aesthetic challenge, a

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political one, has not yet emerged, but the foundations for the questioning of the dominance of secular devlet through innovations in literary form have been established. The final chapter of Part Three is entitled “Praise for the Flow of Time.” It includes, as with the end of each of the three parts of the novel, a stream-ofconsciousness reverie. Ahmet naïvely thinks, “‘A coup is coming a coup! … A coup will come and everything will change!’” (Pamuk 1996a [1982]: 605). The section ends with the death of his grandmother (and Cevdet Bey’s devoted wife) Nigân Hanım and the renewal of Ahmet’s commitment to his art, to labor through his art to change dominant representations of history and identity. Ahmet, despite the death of his grandmother, immediately returns to his studio to work on his art, revealing a commitment to art as a force of change, though his commitment to revolutionary activism remains in doubt. This echoes aspects of the argument about the dissidence of Pamuk’s fiction made in Chapter 1. It’s not that Pamuk should be read as a dissident author, it’s that the aesthetic forms of his fiction perform acts of dissidence with respect to the Republican tradition. We learn from Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul that the labor of his art changed from painting to writing, with the same anxiety about the balance between aesthetic unity of purpose and revolutionary vision. This is a matter of literary form and literary modernity, one that challenges Pamuk to transform the historiographic imperative presented in Cevdet Bey and Sons into a new understanding of literary modernity in subsequent novels. It will take Pamuk two more novels to undergo a metamorphosis in artistic authority and to reach the outer limits (or horizon) of the Turkish Republican literary tradition.46 Once that limit is reached, I argue, a number of transformations occur: (1) the narrative form, rather than the historical content alone, of Pamuk’s work begins to change in redefining Turkish literary modernity; (2) historical and historiographic authority give way to literary authority; (3) contexts of din begin to become legible to and coexist with those of devlet; and (4) the Turkish novel, in transcending the secularization thesis, becomes legible as a form of world literature through tropes that can be read as both secular and sacred. These are the literary processes that begin to delineate what I have termed Pamuk’s secular blasphemies. In his early work, Pamuk seems to concur with scholars of Turkish literary history that the very history of modernization gave rise to the modern Ottoman and Turkish novel, and that the novel, as a mimetic form, is a symptom of that same modernization history. However, Pamuk’s second novel, The Silent House, performs a cynical re-examination of the secular masterplot. It is through narratives of first-person multiperspectivalism and stream-of-consciousness that Pamuk begins a fundamental revision of the social realist mode of Republican literary modernity so faithfully performed in Cevdet Bey and Sons.47 This mode of literature dominated Turkish literature well into the 1980s, and one of its well-known representatives was Nâzim Hikmet.

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Nâzım Hikmet’s “Revolution” in Literary Modernity: Human Landscapes (1965) Identifying revolution as a dominant trope of secular Turkishness enables us to situate Pamuk’s work with other cosmopolitan authors of the national literary canon.48 At first glance, Pamuk and Nâzım Hikmet are authors with opposing aesthetic understandings of Turkish literary modernity, with little in common. Thus, the comparison between them made in this chapter will come as counter-intuitive and somewhat unorthodox. Yet Pamuk’s high regard for Nâzım Hikmet is clear: In my father’s library there were also the first books published by Nâzım Hikmet—Turkey’s most important poet—in the 1930s, before he went to prison for his revolutionary ideas. As impressed as I was by these poems’ angry, hopeful tone, their utopian vision, and their formal innovations, inspired by Russian futurism, I was affected just as much by the suffering this poet endured, and his years behind bars, and by the accounts of prison life in the memoirs and letters of realist novelists like Orhan Kemal and Kemal Tâhir, who spent time in the same prisons. You could build a library just from the memoirs, novels, and stories by Turkish intellectuals and journalists who have ended up in prison. … This way of life, which I knew only from books, was not something I wanted for myself, but I found it romantic. (Pamuk 2008) Here, Pamuk romanticizes the prison life of the dissident author-intellectual. Nevertheless, both authors struggled under the incarcerating power of ideologies and discourses of Turkish national modernity. Pamuk makes direct and indirect allusions to Hikmet in three of his novels (Cevdet Bey and Sons, The White Castle, and My Name is Red).49 Based on these and other considerations, I make an unorthodox claim: From the perspective of Republican literary modernity and secular devlet, Pamuk in Cevdet Bey and Sons demonstrates an authorial affinity with Nâzım Hikmet, an author of political contexts of historical and social realism. Tropes of revolution, Empire-toRepublic historiography, authorship, and even mysticism appear in the works of both authors.50 Narratives of secular socialism, historical materialism, and national modernity, which are tied to devlet and the work of authors like Nâzım Hikmet, can be found in all of Pamuk’s novels. Furthermore, this affinity continues in Pamuk’s figuration of the “writing-subject”, a spectral presence that manifests gradually over the course of each of his novels, beginning with The White Castle. Pamuk’s “writing-subject” represents the birth of individual authorial agency that is implicated in ideological discourses including modernity, nationalism, orientalism, and socialism. This figure shares contradictory associations with the more traditional role of the Republican public intellectual, a leftist figure of secularist social mobilization.

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In fact, the genealogy of Pamuk’s “writing-subject” can be traced back to early Republican authors of Turkish modernization who lived through the Ottoman–Republic transition period. Rather than dispelling this figure, Pamuk invests it with agency, a phenomenon that contradicts the otherwise deconstructive plots of his later novels. This authorial presence is a symptom of the contingencies of the Turkish novel which developed at the nexus of secular modernity, Islamic tradition, and international literary trends. Nâzım Hikmet, whose work only began to be published without restriction in the late 1960s, is the iconic figure of the possibility of social change through revolution. In his poems, plays, novels, and non-fiction, Hikmet’s literary modernism focuses on mixing genres, formal innovation, and bringing overriding historical concerns into dialogue with the everyday realities of people from various classes.51 Both authors, Istanbulites from relatively wellto-do backgrounds, are intent on introducing new historiographic interpretations into literary form. The Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman frames Cevdet Bey and Sons as well as Hikmet’s magnum opus, an .epic novel in free verse, Human Landscapes from My Country (Memleketimden Insan Manzaraları, written 1939–50, published 1965). Human Landscapes is a canonized text of Turkish literature and an influential model of form for both poets and writers. The verse-novel is also important because it reveals the power of the vernacular voice from colloquialisms to the spoken language of the commoner. Among other things, this social realist reinterpretation of national historiography is an alternative account that sutures individual oral histories and eyewitness accounts into the dominant historical framework.52 As such, Human Landscapes mounts a socialist political critique of Turkish Republican nationalism. The work, as published in 1965, depicts periods in late Ottoman and Republican history from 1908 to 1950, covering much of the same transition period Pamuk does in Cevdet Bey and Sons. Not least of all, Human Landscapes, like Cevdet Bey and Sons, is a semi-autobiographical meditation on the ambivalent position of the Republican intellectual-author debilitated by recurring crises of modernity. When Pamuk began writing in the 1970s, socialist, realist, and historical concerns were paramount to Turkish authors. The Empire-to-Republic trajectory had by now been established as a master narrative of the secularization thesis. Hikmet’s Human Landscapes is an example of political literature that reveals spaces of contestation between other ideologies and historiographies within this dominant trajectory. Hikmet (like Pamuk in Cevdet Bey and Sons) portrays the cultural revolution as an incomplete project of modernity and thus of little consequence to those living outside of towns and cities. It depicts Anatolia through the plot of a train journey from Istanbul into the Anatolian heartland. The phrase “human landscapes” conveys the cinematic depiction of local characters and their personal histories. Hikmet’s focus moves from the dispossessed to the wealthy, from prostitutes and criminals to industrialists and bankers, as he develops an argument for a transnational social revolution that supersedes the Kemalist cultural revolution. The

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traces of such a socialist argument can be found in Cevdet Bey and Sons as well, where Pamuk similarly relies on dialectical historical portrayal that forecasts revolutionary social change in an anticipated leftist coup. Like Hikmet, Pamuk recognizes that Turkish historiography artificially delineates the social and political borders between national “insiders” and non-national “outsiders,” and, like Hikmet, he imagines the violation and transgression of these borders in a vision of international humanism. The epic, relying on techniques of montage in parts, follows the main character, a political prisoner named Hilmi (a Hikmet author-figure). Book One describes the villagers, workers, officials, gendarmes, convicts, unemployed, and homeless embarking on a train that is leaving Haydarpas¸a railway station in Istanbul. Book Two recounts politicians, journalists, entrepreneurs, and veterans of the War of Independence embarking on an express train leaving the same station, most of whom are traveling in couchettes. Book Three reveals the predicaments of the author-intellectual Hilmi, who is on the first train, and has been convicted for being a communist, in various prisons and hospitals where he is seeking treatment for a worsening eye condition that threatens to leave him blind. Book Four breaks through the Republican national horizon and addresses World War II as a global fight between fascism and socialism, describing aggressors, resistance movements, patriots, compradors, feudal landlords, and peasants. Book Five returns to the poet Hilmi, focusing on his suffering, desires, and the letters he receives from his wife while he remains incarcerated. Anatolia appears in this work through vignettes that describe around 300 different people; together they constitute an indictment of nation-states whose exploited people are suffering from a variety of injustices while a select minority live lives of privilege. In addition to its other political aspects, Human Landscapes addresses a recurring theme in Turkish letters: the “prison narrative.” In Pamuk’s hands, spaces of incarceration also exist in nuanced iterations that describe the limits of nationalism and its authoritarian discourses. Such spaces of confinement, first delineated in literature by Hikmet, are developed by Pamuk, who includes surrogate spaces of confinement like the house (Cevdet Bey and Sons and The Silent House), the archive (The White Castle), the apartment filled with personal papers (The Black Book, The New Life and Snow), the treasury (My Name is Red), and the museum (The Museum of Innocence). These very spaces of incarceration also become spaces of redemption as they enable the production of literature. The types of “incarceration” encountered in Human Landscapes move from the literal to the metaphorical. Hikmet wrote a majority of Human Landscapes during prison terms amounting to 12 years: a work of testimony by the incarcerated intellectual languishing in a Turkish prison.53 Embedded in the longer socialist poem are references and extensive quotes from a shorter nationalist epic of Hikmet’s entitled A People’s Resistance (Kuvayi Milliye, written 1939–41, published 1968), about the local insurgencies against the

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Allied occupations after World War I and the comprador Ottoman government (Hikmet 1968). This valorization of the struggle for “national selfdetermination” is a long free-verse narrative of about 80 pages that mingles historical events, official history, and poetic vignettes describing the heroism of villagers-turned-soldiers who represent the efforts of common men and women in bringing about an “anti-imperial” and “anti-colonial” victory against European occupation. A People’s Resistance was written while Hikmet was in three different prisons between 1939 and 1941 (Göksu and Timms 1999). To give a sense of its paradoxical place in Hikmet’s oeuvre, it is worth noting that earlier sections were published as intermezzi along with the 1938 edition of Atatürk’s nationalist six-day Speech. That the literary work of a dissident communist poet can intersect with a foundational text of Kemalist nationalism reveals the contradictory cultural logic of Turkishness. The events of the Empire-toRepublic transition represented in both texts are part of a contested historiography. Hikmet later includes sections of this shorter epic in Human Landscapes, but embeds it in another drama. Kitchen staffers in the dining car are reading the poem to each other between shifts. Whereas the original version of A People’s Resistance ends with a victory of national self-determination as a villager/soldier looks out over the Mediterranean from Izmir in 1922, the second version in Human Landscapes ends with the death of that villager on the battlefield of the “war of independence” and then brings us back to the train and the on-going geopolitical context of World War II. The significance of the “war of independence” in this second version is indeterminate and open-ended, without real conclusion; the battle against imperialism and fascism continues undecided. By juxtaposing historiographies of nationalist and socialist epics, Hikmet allows us to reread distinct ideological and historical discourses together, thus transforming the Empire-to-Republic trajectory into a broader social and political critique of “third world” nationalism. Conflated in these scenes are the transport of prisoners, the high-speed journey through Anatolia in the confines of a train wagon, the recitation of the national epic, the conditions of labor, and the promise of social liberation. In short, physical confinements accompanied by individual or collective narratives, which actually describe confinements in narrative, paramount among them, the Republican secular masterplot. Suddenly, another story emerges, one that tries to link the on-going political conditions of an emerging “third world” country to other related international contexts of socialist struggle. The inversion Hikmet brings about by first, seeing the national epic from the inside as self-determination, and second, seeing it from the outside as a story of sacrifice and colonial exploitation, allows the reader to access two divergent points of view, to pass through “walls,” to escape, as it were, the narrative confinements of the secular national masterplot. Hikmet’s depiction of Turkish revolution is not just the representation of a historical revolution, but he performs a textual revolution of multiperspectivalism and literary form – a revolution in literary modernity.

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Pamuk similarly identifies a horizon of national discourse in his first three novels, which he then transgresses through innovations in literary form. If there is a didactic function in Hikmet’s work, it rests in attaining the consciousness of another vantage or point of view on social and cultural revolution. Thus, the prison narrative here describes resistance to the imposition of identity through discourses of state power. The incarceration, whether discursive or real, is a shadow space of the cultural revolution reserved for those who do not fully “convert” in the state’s inquisition of modernity.54 In Turkish literary history, this is the traditional space that is reserved for poets and novelists. Hikmet, labeled a “traitor to the nation,” suffers the contradictory fate of being both included and excluded from the nation. He occupies an ambivalent place as insider and outsider. His work similarly articulates a literary modernity that is at odds with the emplotment of Turkish secular modernity. When Hikmet escaped the country for the Soviet Union in 1950, he was stripped of his Turkish citizenship – which was only restored in 2009. He lived in exile, primarily in Moscow, until his death in 1963. A dedicated communist and humanist, over 25 volumes of his work exist in Turkish, only a small fraction of which is available in English translation. The revolutionary public intellectual, so prominent in Human Landscapes, is transfigured in Pamuk’s work into a “writing-subject.” Pamuk’s novels obsessively re-enact authorial becomings. The emergence of the cosmopolitan author (as a narrative performance) is revealing of Pamuk’s qualification of the collective identifications of secular modernity. Pamuk’s first parody of the Republican intellectual occurs through the character of the historian Faruk Darvınog˘ lu, as is revealed in The Silent House. In this novel, the intellectual becomes the figure of a crisis in history and identity, somebody who has lost faith in his role as the representative interpreter of the modernity of devlet. One of the only options left to Darvınog˘ lu is to turn from historical and historiographic authority to the greater possibilities of liberation that rest in the exercise of literary authority.

The Silence of the Secular Modern: The Silent House (1983) The 1980 military coup was a turning point in Turkish literature and Pamuk’s career that separated social realist influences from new innovations in literature. These transformations can be traced in Pamuk’s first three novels, which were written before, during, and after this coup. The story of the Is¸ıkçıs (Cevdet Bey and Sons) and the Darvınog˘ lus (The Silent House) is a story in contrasts. When the novels, forming something of a narrative cycle, are read together, a revised picture of the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman emerges. Cevdet Bey and Sons is a diachronic historical novel narrated from the vantange of a perpetual secular present, which is its teleological focus. In contrast, The Silent House synchronically collapses the boundary between an official secular present and the experienced and recollected pasts of the

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characters, which constitute alternative histories. The present, in this conflation, is relegated to silence before the evidence of personal and archival histories. A realist and objective Republican history does not exist in The Silent House, as all events are mediated through individual voices and memory. We only have the subjective interior monologues of five characters. As such, Pamuk qualifies the literary realism of his first novel with techniques of literary modernism in the second. The transformations that modern fiction brought to the European novel included changes in form and content that broadened the scope of what constituted fiction. In a well-known vignette, Virginia Woolf summarizes this modernist reorientation as follows: “The proper stuff of fiction” does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured. (Woolf 1925: 154) When Pamuk began writing, the “proper stuff of fiction” was social and historical realism. With The Silent House he introduces modernist reorientations that “break and bully” the secular realism of Cevdet Bey and Sons, a novel which could be said to “honour and love” the literary representation of Turkish modernity. The Silent House does not establish any overarching unity or teleology, but dramatizes the dissipation of dominant narratives and emplotments. In short, it heralds the end of secular modernity as an authoritarian nation-building project: the “silent house” represents the very silence of literary secularism and historical realism. Pamuk’s second novel begins a dissident revision of the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman and the secularization thesis. Social and historical realism, omniscient third-person narration, and the dialectic of oppositional dialogue have all been replaced by high modernist literary strategies such as multiple first-person narrators (multiperspectivalism), limited stream-ofconsciousness narration, and subjective time. The Empire-to-Republic historical framework of Cevdet Bey and Sons, now fragmented and mediated by the characters’ memories, is internalized and appropriated as a narrative construct. This construct is subject to manipulation through fictional technique in a way that mounts a political critique against ideologically informed discourses of Turkish history and identity. In The Silent House, the novel form has begun to qualify the nation form. In other words, Pamuk’s second novel demonstrates a heightened awareness about the role of political ideology in constructing narrative identity and in disseminating secular power. This sets him on a path of literary innovation and experimentation that questions the nationalizing and orientalizing forces of the state.

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Pamuk’s literary innovations in his second novel alter point of view, structure, narrative time, and character. Here, modernist form supersedes the literary dramatization of secular modernity. Form itself becomes a theme in The Silent House, as one of the main characters, Faruk Darvınog˘ lu, is obsessed with establishing a narrative form that will faithfully reflect the fragmentary and multiperspectival events that he believes constitute history. His search ends in failure, but not before he develops a self-reflexive concept of “story” which reveals its own constructedness, thus establishing a “meta-level” perspective. Throughout the plot, authorial consciousness vacillates between the historical and the literary, establishing one of the dominant tensions in the novel. Darvınog˘ lu’s contemplations about the deconstruction, demystification, and demythologizing of historical narrative ultimately reveals the possibility of formal innovation not in history writing, but in literature. Darvınog˘ lu’s meditations on (Ottoman) historiography in The Silent House reflect Pamuk’s own experimentations in Turkish literary modernity. Furthermore, Pamuk’s narrative experimentation leads to political outcomes as his gradual fragmentation of realist forms also subverts ideologies of Republican secular modernity. In contrast to the successful rise of the Is¸ıkçı family as part of an Empireto-Republic historical saga, Pamuk’s second novel portrays the dysfunctions of the Darvınog˘ lus, often in a mode of black humor and parody. The three main time periods in Cevdet Bey and Sons (late Ottoman, early Republican, and 1970s Istanbul) are again represented in The Silent House, this time extended to just months before the 1980 coup. The Silent House is constructed out of discrete versions of personal memory rather than an overarching dialectical tension of opposites (“darkness” and “light”) as in Cevdet Bey and Sons. Instead of providing the dominant scaffolding for the novel, the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman in The Silent House is appropriated and fragmented, leading to various accounts of secular deformation rather than formation. The novel’s week-long narrative present opens to 70 years of late Ottoman and Republican history that gives prominence to subjective notions of time.55 The memories of five antiheroes structure The Silent House, persisting forcefully as an indictment of the cultural revolution. The narrators are Recep, an illegitimate and “dwarfed” child of the fanatic modernizer Selahittin Darvınog˘ lu; Fatma, Selahittin’s bitter wife and martyr of the Darvınog˘ lu family; Hasan, a young, ideological convert to ultranationalist Turkism who harbors ill-fated love for Nilgün, a young intellectual socialist; Faruk, a Republican intellectual and history professor at the state university; and Metin, a young entrepreneur who wants to leave Turkey to live out the American Dream. To varying degrees, all of them suffer from social alienation and are involved in relationships of unequal affection or unrequited love, a theme that Pamuk will later develop into the quasi-mystical lover/beloved trope. As a novel that intertwines the legacy of revolutions and coups with articulations of cultural memory, The Silent House focuses on the third

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Republican generation in particular, represented by Selahattin’s grandchildren, Metin, Nilgün, and Faruk, and an “illegitimate” fourth grandchild, Hasan.56 Allegorically, they each represent major Turkish political ideologies: neo-liberalism, socialism, secular Republicanism, and ultranationalism, respectively. Furthermore they all represent various incarnations of homo secularis. In The Silent House, Pamuk abandons his earnest portrayal of modernity as the dialectic of social progress. Instead, he initiates changes in the form of the novel itself, critiquing the secular modern through innovations in literary modernity. Since Republican literary forms of secular socialist representation are ideologically determined, by extension, Pamuk’s formal innovations are politicized. Represented by three generations, revolutionary modernity in The Silent House is parodied through Selahattin’s obsessive mania for progress, diminished through an absent. second generation represented by Dog˘ an and his illegitimate half-brothers (Ismail and Recep), and figuratively “killed off” in the death of the leftist student Nilgün. This characterization is a reflection of larger formal changes in Pamuk’s aesthetics of the novel, developments that begin to push the boundaries of accepted understandings of Republican literature and modernity in the wake of the 1980 coup. Here, no longer does Pamuk allow the novel to be the dramatized social corollary of dominant historical contexts. He has begun a multifaceted literary challenge to the discourses of secular modernity. Allah is Dead In contrast to Cevdet Bey and Sons, The Silent House presents the positivism of the cultural revolution and its present-day legacy in modes of the tragicomic and the grotesque. The first generation of late Ottoman revolutionary enlightenment is parodied through Selahattin Darvınog˘ lu, a medical doctor (born in 1881, the same year as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk).57 He is a character through which Pamuk establishes the devalorization of din and parodies the internalized orientalism of secular modernization. Around 1912, Selahattin is exiled from Istanbul by Talat Pasha of the “Young Turk” Union and Progress Party for his involvement in politics. He settles with his wife Fatma in nearby Gebze. The temporary exile becomes permanent as Selahattin grows increasingly obsessed with authoring an encyclopedia that will prove “Allah is dead,” and bring the ideals of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment to Turkey, enabling it to “catch up to Europe.” He spends 30 years writing the encyclopedia but is unable to complete it, in part, he complains, due to the 1928 law that changed the alphabet from Ottoman script to Latin letters (known as the harf devrimi, or “revolution in letters”). In Pamuk’s parody, the linguistic transfomation is thus part of a modernizing project that interferes with and impedes its own goals of progress. Republican modernity here manifests as a kind of epistemic violence against the self. The “encyclopedia” symbolizes the positivist knowledge of the European Enlightenment and is a

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trope in Turkish literature, where it often functions as a textual space for the intersection of historical and literary or objective and subjective knowledge.58 However, its incompleteness here signifies Republican modernity as a halfformed incarnation, part self-colonization and part national self-determination. Pamuk alludes to the “encyclopedia” as a quasi-literary form in The Silent House and The White Castle, whereas his fourth novel, The Black Book, is itself a literary encyclopedia of Istanbul that brings iterations of mystical din and material devlet together. Fatma is tormented and then haunted by her atheist, modernizer husband, a symbol of authoritarian positivism. Selahattin, something of a secularizing inquisitor figure, attempts to force the ideological conversion of those around him, in particular, his wife to a perspective of devlet. She resists his arguments and logic, later claiming that she has succeeded in avoiding the brave new world of his professed “Atheist State” or “Dinsiz Devlet” (Pamuk 1995b [1983]: 24). Through her interior monologue, which becomes a confessional testimony, Fatma ridicules him as being an obsessed alcoholic. Meanwhile, Selahattin claims that Fatma is frigid, postulates the nonexistence of Allah, fathers two illegitimate children with the maidservant, and determines that the fear of death (“nothingness”) is the vital element that separates the modernity of the “West” from the fatalism of the “East.” In a night of retaliation for her husband’s transgressions, Fatma severely beats . both of his illegitimate children, leaving one (Ismail) crippled and the other (Recep) stunted. Pamuk’s portrayal of this secular perspective diagnoses a cultural pathology, one that bears out what an author of the previous generation, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, claims in another novel focused on Turkish modernity: that by killing off Allah, one is still condemned to bear His corpse. (Tanpınar 2011 [1949]). Dwarfing the Cultural Revolution A majority of Cevdet Bey and Sons is focused on the era of the Kemalist cultural revolution; however, this period only manifests in The Silent House through the afflictions of the main characters. Dog˘ an Darvınog˘ lu and his two . illegitimate half-brothers, Recep and Ismail, represent the generation of the cultural revolution. Dog˘ an retires from his position as district governor (or kaymakam) in Kemah and returns to Gebze, falling into a family pattern of alcoholism and idiosyncratic projects of social utopia and idealism. Recep . and Ismail are the children of Selahattin and the maidservant. They represent parodic figures of the Republican principle of folk modernization: enlightenment ideals introduced to “modernize” the Anatolian people or halk (known as halkçılık). These three characters sit in striking contrast to the three secular elite engineers (Ömer, Refik, and Muhittin) in Cevdet Bey and Sons, who represented the modernizing ideals of the same generation. Recep is . literally and figuratively a “dwarfed” outcome of the cultural revolution. Ismail is a state lottery ticket vendor whose occupation carries metaphorical

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commentary on secular devlet as a societal gamble with benefits for only a small minority. The entire revolutionary generation has been parodied and peripheralized. Speak Memory Memory, as a form of witness and confession, is conveyed in personal and archival contexts through the stream-of-consciousness narrations of Fatma and her grandson, Faruk. Whereas Fatma is the passive victim of her secular modernizing husband, Faruk is a Republican historian drawn to the “Ottoman archive” who is confounded by the discipline of history and its representational distortions of reality. Memory – its disregard for chronological time, its free associations, its resurrections of the dead, and its reconstructions of history – overtakes these characters, and indeed, all of the narrators of the novel. The past is unleashed into the present such that memory becomes the vehicle for Pamuk’s revision of the Republican modern temporality of a perpetual secular present. The memories of the five narrators constitutes a narrative force that is itself creative, continually interpreting, selecting, and transforming the past to forge a literary modernity that transcends the secular modern. The sujectivities that memory constructs, as a result, conflict with imposed identities of Turkish secularization. Fatma Hanım’s powerful, overriding memory for the past in The Silent House sits in contrast to Nigân Hanım’s dementia and amnesia in Cevdet Bey and Sons. The former despises her failed husband’s patrimonial legacy and the latter adores that of her husband’s bourgeois success. Cevdet Bey leaves a prosperous family living in a Nisantas¸ı apartment in his wake, whereas Selahattin Bey leaves only a dilapidated, empty, and silent house. The two novels present divergent commentaries on the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman and the secularization thesis. This discrepancy is revelatory in terms of understanding Pamuk’s engagement with Republican literary modernity. By using memory as a vehicle to return from the future-oriented time of devlet to the retrospective time of memory, Pamuk is preparing the reader for a reinscription of contexts of din that offer the possibility of speaking back to state power. This possibility also enables a form of individual and collective redemption. If the reforms of the cultural revolution targeted the collective memory of the nation, including Ottoman Islam and Istanbul cosmopolitism, Pamuk’s novels begin an excavation and interrogation of that process. Thus, Pamuk’s transformations in narrative form are both literary techniques and political gestures directed toward changing dominant Republican epistemologies. The Ottoman Archive Pamuk’s increasing challenge to devlet and state-mindedness relies on individual memories of witness as well as the collective historical memory

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concealed in the Ottoman archive. In Archive Stories, a collection of essays that examines the significance of the archive to narrative constructions of identity, historian Antoinette Burton summarizes the significance of the archive in contesting dominant regimes of truth: [The archive] often pits conventional forms of knowledge about the past (History) against the claims of groups who have typically been disenfranchised by dominant regimes of truth but who are also seeking political rights – in ways that endanger the status and livelihoods of some, traumatize others, and make visible the extent to which national identities are founded on archival elisions, distortions, and secrets. (Burton 2005: 2) The function of “archival elisions, distortions, and secrets” relates directly to Darvınog˘ lu’s crisis in The Silent House and to the contested relationship between national identity (or secular Turkishness) and the Ottoman archive that is a recurring concern of Pamuk’s fiction. Ironically, the “disenfranchised” group represented by Darvınog˘ lu and Pamuk is none other than the Republican intelligentsia, the very vanguard of the revolution that has been mired in crises stemming from the predicaments and paradoxes of revolutionary Turkish modernity. As such, the role of the Ottoman archive as a means of contesting secular modernity increasingly becomes central to Pamuk’s novels, beginning with The Silent House and continuing through The White Castle and My Name is Red. To encourage the reassessment of discourses of devlet, Pamuk relies on the archive itself as a space of dissidence. In this sense, the archive functions variously as a transformative repository of elided memory, models of form, intertextuality, and even intertemporality.59 His “archival” fiction mounts a sustained critique of Republican ideology through textual objects and their historical memories. In The Silent House and The White Castle, the “unknown” Ottoman archive, a space that is located “underground” is described as follows: For me, it’s more pleasurable to work in a place that experts in the field are convinced doesn’t exist rather than with my jealous cohorts in the State Ministerial Archives. … Smelling the pages, I pore pleasurably over moldy, wrinkled, and crumpled pieces of paper with yellow stains. As I read, I can almost conjure the people who wrote the pages, had them written, and whose lives in some capacity were bound to them. Maybe … it’s for the sake of this very pleasure that I’ve come to the archive. … As I read through the pale heaps of paper, they gradually begin to part. Just like the end of a long sea voyage, when the fog, which has filled you with despair over the trip, lifts and land appears suddenly, its every tree, rock, and bird, leaving you awestricken; similarly, as I read, documents part and millions of entwined lives and stories appear suddenly in my mind’s eye. Then I become overjoyed and conclude that

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More than disciplinary research per se, this passage describes a rather romantic and enchanting experience of being transported by one’s imagination through the pleasure of texts. The passage alludes to a journey taken in the discovery of a “new world” through the medium of the archive. It signifies the birth of a new literary imagination, one that had been circumscribed by the parochial discipline of Republican history. In the space of a forgotten archive in Gebze, a town that used to be the seat of an Ottoman kadiship, Darvınog˘ lu confronts the crisis of history and the historian. This archıval space represents something of a cell and Darvınog˘ lu is figuratively incarcerated (as Hikmet was described above) as he contemplates the possibility of new historical forms and new authorial possibilities. In The Silent House, Pamuk transports the reader from a traditional understanding of secular Turkish history into a theoretical understanding of historiographic form. Darvınog˘ lu’s meditations on history and narrative are significant to revealing Pamuk’s own transformations in literary modernity. Darvınog˘ lu admits early on in the novel that he is “afraid of losing his faith in that thing called ‘history’” as an accurate representation of events (Pamuk 1995b [1983]: 41). This is a dilemma of ideology, historiography and authorship that unfolds throughout Darvınog˘ lu’s experiences in the archive. In effect, the archive, a space where documents and manuscript pages reside side-by-side in an uncatalogued fragmentary state, functions as an intertextual and synchronic model of form for Pamuk’s later work. Like many theorists of historiography, Darvınog˘ lu believes that history is distorted by the stories used to link disparate events in a causal chain.60 He is preoccupied by questions of form, by confounding versions of history, and by representing history as it “truly” exists in ruins and fragments. Conceptually, he is slowly gaining consciousness of another textual perspective of history focused on narrative, one that is, to use Hayden White’s term, “metahistorical” (White 1973, 1987). This is also an authorial perspective that enables the development of Turkish literary modernity through the transcendence of the telos of Republican modernization history. Darvınog˘ lu discovers that he cannot avoid the temptation of story (that is, metanarrative) as a medium for causality and emplotment: “You see, my stubborn intellect, returning to its old habit, again demands the same thing of me now: It’s as if I have to come up with a short story that summarizes all the facts, I have to concoct a convincing fable!” (Pamuk 1995b [1983]: 161). This gives rise to an epistemological problem that he resolves through (literary) experimentation in narrative form. “Ah … this obsession to hear a story fools us all, dragging us into an imaginary world. Meanwhile, we all live in a real world of flesh and blood” (Pamuk 1995b [1983]: 161). Importantly, Darvınog˘ lu’s crisis reveals the ambivalence between a materialist, realist

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perspective and a romantic, literary one. He implies that the archive itself can be a model for such a new history of non-causal “endless description.” This meditation on narrative form applies to a revision of literary modernity as well, one based on a model of intertextuality that moves away from the realist dialectic of social history that was dominant in Turkey between 1960 and 1980. Darvınog˘ lu becomes convinced that the work of a historian is “that of a storyteller” (Pamuk 1995b [1983]: 165) and that “history is story [hikâye]” (Pamuk 1995b [1983]: 168). Later, he thinks that “breaking the chain of causality” will enable him to “escape the moral imperative of the status quo,” which will allow him to attain freedom and potential in his work (Pamuk 1995b [1983]: 234). It is possible to read this historical debate as one about the liberation from confinements of secular Republican discursive space. The dilemma, predicated on narrative, is historical and literary both. Darvınog˘ lu thus embodies the crisis of the Republican intellectual who has reached the limits of secular modern historiography as homo secularis. Ultimately, he will attempt to resolve the crisis by resorting to literary strategies. Through Darvınog˘ lu, Pamuk exposes the potential for a new aesthetics of literary modernity.61 As a potential model of form, site of inspiration, and source of new literary modernity, the archive enables Pamuk to transcend the national secular imperative. In The Silent House, the Ottoman archive, the Republic’s wildly signifying collective unconscious, provides a laboratory for narrative experimentation that leads to historiographic, literary, and finally, identity-based transformations of a political scope. Clues in the novel reveal that Pamuk’s new narrative aesthetic will be fragmentary, multiperspectival, intertextual, metahistorical, and open to various interpretations. Darvınog˘ lu’s meditation approaches a treatise on the theory of the novel that emerges from the heteroglossia of countless archive stories. To be sure, the innovations in literary modernity that Pamuk produces in his next novel, The White Castle, are a direct reflection of the “historian’s dilemmas” of the historian-cum-author Darvınog˘ lu. As stated above, Darvınog˘ lu’s concern with historical form is also a literary one. Finally, he settles on a “deck of cards” metaphor. In this understanding, historical events are the cards, and among them are, like “jokers,” a number of “story” (or “hikâye”) cards that meaningfully assemble and organize those events.62 It is through such a process of deconstructing history that Pamuk, by means of Darvınog˘ lu, begins to mount a challenge to Republican historical and social realism as well as to secularist ideology. This political critique, Darvınog˘ lu/Pamuk reveals, is predicated on story rather than history – on manipulating literary techniques and forms. Furthermore, if, as White claims, the fictive aspects of historical narrative harbor ideology (White 1978), the manipulation of “story” also functions to target discourses of ideological power. Darvınog˘ lu’s suspicions about “story” are thus recuperated by Pamuk’s literary modernity, which limits the totalizing effect of secular

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modernity through a novelistic form that is increasingly metafictional and metahistorical. The Literary Influence of Evliya Çelebi Throughout The Silent House Darvınog˘ lu spends his time sifting through primary source documents in the Gebze archive. Additionally, he is reading a canonized source of Ottoman letters: the work of seventeenth-century Istanbulite and traveler Evliya Çelebi.63 Evliya was an Ottoman Muslim whose iconic ten-volume Seyahatname (Book of Travels) is a compendium of facts and fictions, of short histories, and anecdotes. Evliya unproblematically lives through what we would today consider various paradoxes. He has an Islamic medresse education and is a dervish on the mystical path. He has ties to the Ottoman palace and sultan, is a muezzin and hafiz, goes out on military campaigns, gets involved in various misadventures, and all the while surveys and documents people and cities for his compendium (Dankoff 2006). Arguably, the Book of Travels could be considered to be an early example of historical literature focused on Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire, and Pamuk indicates that this multi-genre work is an important influence in his reconceptualization of Turkish literary modernity. In its mixing of genres such as autobiography, travelogue, anecdote, and history, the Book of Travels is an early modern model of indigenous literary form.64 Not only does it serve as an obvious alternate form to modern social realism, it is an alternate literary form with respect to the European novel. Darvınog˘ lu (and Pamuk) are openly inspired by Evliya’s text: So my history, like Evliya’s Book of Travels, will be nothing but an endless description of things. Because I realize this, I will stop like him once in a while, and recalling that there are other things in the world, I’ll write “hikâye” at the top of a page, to inform the reader that my accounts have been purified of those pleasant, amusing fictions meant to flatter human passion and excitement. If someone were to read my texts, which will far outweigh Evliya Çelebi’s 6000 pages, he’ll be able to see the nebulous mass of history that fills my head just as it exists. … There you have it, my young reader, history and life, read them as you will. All of it simply exists, everything is in these [deck of cards], but there is no story [hikâye] that ties them all together. If you want, you go ahead and make up that story. (Pamuk 1995b [1983]: 231–3) The original manuscript of the Book of Travels is divided by section headings, often indented, written in large letters or in red ink; these include evsaf (or description), sitayis¸ (or praise), hikâye (or story), and others (Dankoff 2009). Both Darvınog˘ lu’s “deck of cards” model and his reading of Evliya’s historical text enable him to approach a new style of narration. Of course, as we

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learn in The White Castle, Darvınog˘ lu’s archival research will not produce a new historical form at all, but rather an updated literary form: a captive’s tale that is an allegorical account of his existence as homo secularis. The White Castle reveals that Darvınog˘ lu himself is the captive (like Hikmet and Pamuk), incarcerated in the ideological spaces of secular nationalist discourse. Thus, Pamuk takes Evliya as the basis for a model of Turkish literary modernity that reclaims and redefines “story” as being Ottoman, self-reflexive, multi-genre, and intertextual. (As a historical figure, Evliya is alluded to again at the end of The White Castle.) Robert Dankoff describes Evliya’s genre-crossing literary style as follows: Since he [Evliya] aimed as much to entertain as to inform, he had no compunction about inflating numbers and spicing his otherwise sober travel account with exaggerations, humorous anecdotes, tall tales, and other fictions or embroidered truths. Some of these are highly polished narratives, indicative of literary sensitivity and ambition, and appealing to a sophisticated Ottoman audience. (Dankoff 2009: 250) Dankoff concludes that the Book of Travels is an “Ottoman geographical encyclopedia structured as a travel account and personal memoir” (Dankoff 2009: 248). In its mixing of nonfictional and fictional genres, autobiography, Sufism, travelogue, and cultural geography, Evliya’s text is also an early example of Ottoman literary modernity, one which is an influence on Pamuk in his attempt to break out of the molds of social realism and secular modernity in redefining the Turkish novel. The First Three Novels: Frames of History vs. Forms of Literature The White Castle is a novel that records and dramatizes Pamuk’s transgression of Turkish literary secularism. This novel brings Istanbul, Ottoman history, multiple genres, and metafiction together in the incarnation of a new variety of literary modernity that transcends the realism and modernism of its predecessors. Though the “house” of Republican secular history has fallen silent for Pamuk (as indicated in The Silent House), the “castle” of the Ottoman past re-emerges here as a blank space waiting to be interpreted and overwritten with new literary possibilities. If The Silent House argues that Republican secular modernism is incomplete and indeterminate, The White Castle presents the possibility of new forms of literary modernity by articulating contexts of cosmopolitan din alongside those of secular devlet. In short, the Empire-to-Republic framework of Cevdet Bey and Sons has been dismantled by the formal literary innovations and parody of The Silent House, which in turn allude to the new narrative aesthetics of The White Castle: one of the first examples of a postsecular Turkish novel. As such,

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Pamuk’s first three novels mount a challenge to Turkish secular modernity and its nationalist, anti-cosmopolitan foundations.65 As a character that combines the authority of the Ottoman historian, the subversive archivist, and the translator-author, Darvınog˘ lu mediates between the secular history of devlet and the redemptive story of din, eventually targeting the former through the discourses, tropes, and contexts of the latter. Whereas The Silent House only alludes to the possibility of redemption through narrative practices, The White Castle actually demonstrates redemption through the construction of a mystical and cosmopolitan “writing-subject” that transcends the confinements of any single monolithic national or religious identity. Pamuk’s first three novels gradually move from a focus on secular history (Cevdet Bey and Sons) to historiography (The Silent House) and then to metahistory (The White Castle). In the process, the reader is taken through a recapitulation of realist, modernist, and postmodernist modes of literary modernity that grow increasingly more layered, complex, cosmopolitan, and intertextual. In these three novels, Pamuk’s literary authority first abides by, next challenges, and finally subverts secular social realism as a dominant mode of representation. Rather than depoliticizing literature, I argue that Pamuk’s argumentation through literary form is responsible for politicizing Turkish literary modernity as a space for the contestation of secular ideologies. In Pamuk’s novels the figure of the “historian-in-crisis” will gradually be replaced by the figure of the “author-in-crisis.” Archival texts will appear along with missing or absent texts – indeterminate narrative spaces that prefigure a number of political transformations in Turkish literary modernity including the return of Sufism (outlawed during the cultural revolution). Pamuk’s narratives will overwrite these lacks and lacunae represented in the trope of the absent text, paramount among them the absence of Europeanstyle modernity itself (the modernity of European Enlightenment being a stated goal of Kemalism). For Pamuk, voices and memories that constitute an alternative to Empireto-Republic modernization challenge the political foundations of Republican secular modernity and Turkishness. Voices of memory, with their distortions and excesses, present a strong challenge to narratives of realism. Voices of memory also appear as a formal technique in Yas¸ar Kemal’s representations of village myth and legend. For Yas¸ar Kemal, the voice of memory is collective, expressed by a narrative perspective of the social context of the village. Though at first glance they are unlikely candidates for comparison, both Pamuk and Yas¸ar Kemal point to the possibilities of a literary modernity beyond Republican realism and its secular historiography. At the end of The Silent House, the ultranationalist Hasan, fleeing the authorities after Nilgün’s death, tosses Darvınog˘ lu’s “historian’s notebook” of notes taken in the Gebze archive into the trash. Pamuk seems to be saying that history, compromised as it is in the form of national historiography, can no longer be an authoritative source of literary modernity. No longer will the representation of historical events alone dominate Pamuk’s fictional world. Rather, the

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possibilities of a new type of hikâye (what Darvınog˘ lu describes as the “joker card”) will take precedence: a cosmopolitan Istanbul narrative no longer bound by time or revolution but shaped by memory, archive, and the redemptive act of writing itself.

Yas¸ar Kemal’s Mystification of Social Realism: Iron Earth, Copper Sky (1963) Authors of social realism during the Second Republic begin to reflect a growing awareness of new possibilities in literary modernity. Hikmet’s grand treatment of revolution and Empire-to-Republic history as constitutive of literary modernity might be contrasted to another novelist of socialist engagement, Yas¸ar Kemal. Yas¸ar Kemal, championed by the leftist Turkish intelligentsia, is the only other contemporary author whose name has been mentioned in conjunction with the Nobel Prize. Pamuk and Yas¸ar Kemal are often opposed to each other in the national and international press (Hoffman 2010; Cos¸kun 2006). Nevertheless, Pamuk explains his affinity to Yas¸ar Kemal as follows: I come from a Westernized, Istanbul family that has reaped the benefits of the Republic. Whereas Yas¸ar Kemal comes from Southern Anatolia which the state has treated harshly and which has been battered by ag˘ as [feudal landowners] and nature. … What brings us together, as much as my admiration of his books and life, are the conditions of being an author in Turkey: a state that’s made it a habit of inflicting violence on writers and culture, a profound and irrational political nationalism, and a small literary world that tries to stay alive between the constraints of religion and politics. (Pamuk 1999: 186) Pamuk goes on to state that political engagement against the state is another thing that brings the two authors of successive generations together. Politically engaged journalism is an aspect of Yas¸ar Kemal’s writing that has earned him a legitimate position of dissidence, especially in Kurdish politics (Kemal 2012). Pamuk’s dissident persona is more compromised from the perspective of the left (see Chapter 1). Yas¸ar Kemal’s novels, reflecting life in the agrarian Çukorova region, announce the end of the dialectical march of Republican history-as-progress. In the novel Iron Earth, Copper Sky, collective memories, myths, and legends supplant history in a way that establishes an important political subtext. Anatolian social realism focused on dialects, oral narrative traditions, and the everyday lives of people (halk) in various regions of Anatolia.66 In the work of Yas¸ar Kemal, local oral narratives including epic tales, folk literature, and âs¸ık minstrel accounts are not only incorporated into plots, but also become the basis of an indigenous novelistic form that writes back to Istanbul. Authors writing from Anatolia often questioned the viewpoint of

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intellectuals from Istanbul. The novels of Yas¸ar Kemal, who is part Kurdish, are based on the lives and struggles of peasants in southeastern Anatolia. Unlike the first generation of practitioners of Anatolian themes, Yas¸ar Kemal is a regional writer. In his variety of village novels, as well as his populism and focus on the peasant class, we can easily place him in the Cold War context that divided Turkish society between right and left. Nevertheless, Yas¸ar Kemal’s innovative incorporation of traditional narratives establishes a political subtext in the novel. This is something Pamuk does as well, when he takes up such traditional but urban Islamic narrative forms as Evliya’s Seyahatname, Rumi’s mesnevi, the Qur’anic parable, or the Sufi quest or romance tale. Yas¸ar Kemal’s Iron Earth, Copper Sky is a novel set in an isolated mountain village in winter that documents how folk legends and fables exercise the discursive power to create and impose identities. This makes the individual vulnerable to control and even sacrifice by the community. Pamuk’s novels also suggest that narrative has the epistemological agency to create and control people and to become an ontological force. Iron Earth, Copper Sky examines the phenomenon of a community, a mountainous village in southeastern Turkey. The protagonist, the village itself, imbues one of its inhabitants, Tashbash, through a loom of gossip and hearsay, with supernatural powers such that he is powerless to deny or resist the existence of the power, but must act in accordance with the expectations it brings. Others dream about him and have visions of him, or suture him into well-known legends and myths. Through a process of establishing folk sainthood, the village first raises up one in their midst as a source of insight who can access invisible, occult forces in periods of difficulty. However, the same process inadvertently marks Tashbash for sacrifice when the authorities and the state (devlet) fear that religion and faith are being exploited for other means. The community does this for selfish reasons, imposing a kind of divinity upon one of them as help during the plight of winter that inadvertently leads to his exile. The opening of a sacred space, in this iteration, quickly turns to sacrifice for the one who is converted by the community and the force of its folk orality. The fear of faith, in a neurotic and cyclical way, has been ingrained into the secular state, in a way that gives insight into larger fears of theocracy and Islamic revolution, the shadow cultural revolution. So, if what is being advocated through cultural revolution is one conversion to modernity – as with Cevdet Bey and Sons and Hikmet – in contrast, with The Silent House and Kemal, we have literary indictments of failed modernity, testimonials to those who remain outside, living lives as they have always lived them in the persistence of tradition and custom. As for Pamuk, he inverts the opposition between the historically grounded narratives of the Republic and the myths of Anatolia through the repeated inclusion of political conspiracy in his novels. Pamuk demonstrates that conspiracy is a form of urban myth; and furthermore, that national ideology can be a mode of narrative as “naif” as the village legend.

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In the novel, the image of the beaks of roosters and hens that have been sacrificed in homage to the reluctant saint, Tashbash, and stuck into his door by dispossessed villagers with no other options for seeking help, as he himself is led away in handcuffs, dramatizes two points: (1) authority, and state authority, disciplines those who cling to an Other persona, a second self, whether through memory, history, religion, or ideology; and (2) the individual singled out by the community or the state as an exception has a shimmering Janus-face, and will suffer some punishment as a result, some exile, incarceration, or martyrdom for living through articulations of din as well as devlet. Kemal’s political subtext is predicated on the power of the collective memory of oral narratives to redefine and revise the predicaments of village life beyond the cultural revolution that mediates between the Republican intellectual and the village halk. For his characters, as for Pamuk, this implies a revision of narrative time and causality (through conversion and memory) that leads to a realignment of the conceptual grammar of revolution under the force of an undocumented and uncatalogued archive (whether oral or textual).

Conclusion: Making Din Legible to Devlet The transformation in the novel from Hikmet’s social realism to Yas¸ar Kemal’s regionalism is one that is partially echoed in Pamuk’s first two novels. These two authors of socialist engagement trace the literary transformation from the dominance of an epic of Empire-to-Republic history (Human Landscapes) to a regional account of the Anatolian village (Iron Earth, Copper Sky). In a parallel development, Cevdet Bey and Sons recapitulates the function of the secular masterplot of the Republican novel by separating contexts of din from devlet. This leads to a crisis of cultural authority. The Silent House qualifies the dominance of the masterplot by recognizing the historical force of local story (a conveyor of din). The Silent House begins to address the division through articulations of memory and archive that make din legible to devlet. In The Silent House and Iron Earth, Copper Sky, the state plays a dominant role in determining the fate of the characters Darvınog˘ lu (dismissed from work by the 1980 coup) and Tashbash (arrested and imprisoned by state authorities), respectively. That is, devlet, cultural revolution, and ideological conversion are dominant forces in these works. Nevertheless, those forces are countered by memory, archive, myth, and legend. Tashbash is elevated – against his will – to the level of a saint with the power to heal. Darvınog˘ lu finds, translates, and publishes a manuscript about an Ottoman Islamic hoja (in The White Castle). For Pamuk, in these early novels, a literary “story” is struggling to emerge from Republican history. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Pamuk states: In my darkest days, I felt like Faruk, the hero of my second novel, The Silent House, who’d studied documents dating back many centuries

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Tropes of “Turkishness” from Sufism to State in the Ottoman archives, and carried them around in his head, never forgetting the facts they contained, but failing to connect with a single one of them: I would wonder about the “importance” of having successfully preserved details of an entire history, an entire culture, an entire language. (Pamuk 2008)

Pamuk here identifies with the historian-in-crisis reduced to the status of homo secularis, whose empirical attachment to national facts and history loses its importance without a meaningful “connection.” This connection exists in the emotional tenor, the enchantment, and even redemption of literature and its forms. Faruk makes this connection, as we will see, through translation. In turn, this represents the stirrings of a revision of the place of din in Republican literary modernity. The re-introduction of din in these and other accounts can be traced through the predominance of tropes of memory (and archive) to counterbalance tropes of revolution (and coup and secular conversion). The reinscription of din enables the Republican novel to assume a redemptive quality that transcends the secular modernity of devlet. Whereas Cevdet Bey and Sons performs the ideological theater of Republican modernity, The Silent House spells the end of the dialectic of “light” and “dark” forces of history. In The Silent House, nothing more clearly conveys the limits of Republican secular ideology than Selahittin’s positivist mania, Faruk’s self-doubt and alcoholism, and the ideological violence between left and right that results in a Cold War coup and military rule. Indeed, Fatma’s reverie at the conclusion of The Silent House takes us back to the late Ottoman context of Part One of Cevdet Bey and Sons and reunites us with Cevdet Bey’s then fiancée Nigân. The reader is returned full-circle to the context of preRepublican Ottoman Istanbul. The Silent House reveals that Fatma had been friends with Nigân, later Cevdet Bey’s wife, when they were girls. During this friendship, Nigân and her sisters first read aloud and then presented her with a copy of the Turkish translation of Robinson Crusoe. Not only does this intertextual allusion conjure a master–slave relationship that will be developed later in The White Castle, but Defoe’s novel was one of the first to be translated into Ottoman Turkish in the 1860s and would later foster the development of the local Ottoman novel. One of the epigraphs that starts this chapter is from Robinson Crusoe and describes the phenomenon of seeing and understanding one’s present condition through the vantage of its contrary. Pamuk relies on this principle as a narrative method of sorts, one that informs his first two novels. These novels, I argue, are cast in various oppositions of realism and modernism, secular historiography and its critique, drama and parody, and din and devlet. Among Fatma’s infrequent positive memories are those of her girlhood outings with the daughters of S¸ükrü Pasha. In her stream-of-consciousness reverie – which conjures Faulkner’s Addie Bundren and Joyce’s Molly Bloom – Fatma focuses on the ability of literary narrative

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to hold time and memory in abeyance: “if you have a book in hand, however confusing and baffling, once it’s finished, you can always go back to the beginning if you want and reread it to better understand complex things or characters” (Pamuk 1995b [1983]: 337). Thus, the text itself becomes a device, not for the realistic representation of history, but for understanding the complexities that structure experience and narrative. Clearly, Pamuk’s excavation of memory and archive is a dissident commentary on devlet. In contrast, narratives of redemption, which recall din, are not often seen in Turkish social and historical realism. However, Pamuk will begin to experiment with redemption as a textual experience, thus introducing contexts of din into a tradition of devlet, and giving rise to a permanent transformation in Turkish literary modernity. As I’ve indicated, it is possible to read Pamuk’s early novels through a genealogy of recurring tropes that record the formal changes in his literary modernity. Time, diachronic in the first novel, has become a synchronic narrative device that includes the “sacred time of memory” in the second novel. Furthermore, the Turkish novel, in Pamuk’s recapitulation, has moved from being a textual representation in the service of revolution and social change to one that is a narrative force independent of discourses of Republican history and ideology. Portrayals of ideological conversion ironize rituals of indoctrination, including nationalism. Memory provides retrospective counterforce to revolutionary history. The archive opens up the cultural spaces of Ottoman history as an instrumental means of liberating story from Republican national historiography. All these literary innovations function in an economy of cultural translation that Pamuk will develop and deepen in his later work as he re-introduces din to devlet while reinscribing cosmopolitan Istanbul, and its Ottoman Islamic past, as a site of literary production. The fact that, as of this writing, Pamuk has delayed the translation of his first two novels (into English and other major languages) is revelatory, for these are the novels that squarely place him in the Turkish Republican literary tradition. By preventing their translation, he is editing his position in the canon and dehistoricizing his literary genealogy. This enables him to foreground cosmopolitanism and world literature as the sole contexts of his literary production. The contrast between the Turkish (1998) and English (2007) versions of his collection of belles lettres, Other Colors, confirms this anxiety of literary positioning. The post-Nobel English version emphasizes a canon of world literature, and the individual sections on the influence of modern Turkish authors Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Kemal Tâhir, Orhan Kemal, Aziz Nesin, Yas¸ar Kemal, and Og˘uz Atay have all been deleted from the volume. These are literary influences that are formative to Pamuk’s mature fiction and vital to an informed understanding of the function and development of his novels.

Part II

The Archive of Ottoman Istanbul

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A Voice from the Ottoman Archive

This is our greatest dilemma: Where and in what way are we to connect to the past? We’re all the children of a crisis of consciousness and self. (Tanpınar 1946: 103) I pore pleasurably over moldy, wrinkled, and crumpled pieces of paper with yellow stains. As I read, I can almost conjure the people who wrote the pages, had them written, and whose lives in some capacity were bound to them. Maybe … it’s for the sake of this very pleasure that I’ve come to the archive. (Pamuk 1995b [1983]: 83)1 I then retired to my humble abode, applied myself to the study of history, and began a description of my birth-place, Islámbúl, that envy of kings, that celestial heaven. (Çelebi 1834: 4–5) And so, what could my sterile and ill-cultivated genius beget but the story of a lean, shriveled, whimsical child [a novel], full of varied fancies that no one else has ever imagined – much like one engendered in prison. (Cervantes 1950 [1604–14]: 25)

Imagine a character, a Turkish historian and a Republican intellectual, a professor at a state university in Istanbul. This professor finds himself returning to an Ottoman archive whose very existence his colleagues doubt. The small room, a cell, has uncatalogued documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Kadi court case summaries, tax registers, deeds, and imperial orders that are all written in Ottoman script (a language which combines aspects of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish) and which, as a general rule, modern citizens of the Republic cannot read. This character, whom we know from The Silent House, finds himself in a state of crisis. We learn that he has lost his job due to the 1980 military coup that has purged left-leaning professors from universities. We know that his wife has left him and that he’s taken to drinking. He confesses that he’s “lost faith in his discipline.” His discipline, history, combines events with stories, stories which he states are like “joker cards” – that is, they introduce

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contingencies that alter the meaning of historical events. Historiography, he muses, distorts the possibility of truth in history. So, as he does his research, he is preoccupied by the limits of history and the possibility of a new narrative form, one that accounts for what Hayden White would call “the fictions of factual representation” (White 1978). Faruk Darvınog˘ lu’s search for historical form ends in his discovery of a seventeenth-century Ottoman manuscript. This turns out to be an autobiographical captive’s tale about a Venetian held in Istanbul by an Ottoman hoja. The story so preoccupies Darvınog˘ lu that he forgets about his research and decides to translate it into modern, standard Turkish. But he doesn’t translate his captive’s tale with attention to detail like a scholar or a historian. Rather, he makes a kind of loose “inspired translation” working between two desks. The voice from the Ottoman archive that Pamuk’s novel amplifies, as represented by Darvınog˘ lu and his translation, is the voice of resistance, change, protest, and politics. This scene, to which we will return, is described in the mock “Preface” to The White Castle, the first Pamuk novel to be translated into English (in 1990). It is his first Ottoman novel and the first to fully transgress the limits of Turkish literary modernity that had been focused on social and historical realism. Faruk Darvınog˘ lu, the wavering secular intellectual who I contend represents the figure of homo secularis, haunts the entire novel. Variations of this figure, the constructed subject of secular modernity, appear in all of Pamuk’s work through incarnations from Refik in Cevdet Bey and Sons to Ka in Snow. Darvınog˘ lu’s presence in the Ottoman archive represents not only a limit of Republican discursive space, but also the possibility of an intervention against secular state power. This scene serves as a preface not only to one novel, nor to Pamuk’s work as a whole, but in many respects to the tradition of the Republican novel and to the dilemmas of its cultural production. We would have to know some context – not much – to understand that a Republican historian in an Ottoman archive involved in a loose translation is a symbolic complex that represents a greater crisis of Republican modernity. Furthermore, it points to a crisis of, in the shorthand I’ll be using, “Turkishness” itself, that ineffable national essence whose secularity has been constructed as sacred through the Republican cultural revolution. As alluded to in the previous chapter, reading Pamuk’s first three novels (which are also linked by plot associations) as a narrative cycle reveals his qualifications of the master narrative of Turkish secular nationalism through experimentation in literary form. Such a reading demonstrates that Pamuk’s revisions of literary modernity become politicized interventions against the excesses of Turkish secularism. Importantly, this politicization is also evident in his reassessment of Ottoman history, which broadly contains any number of secular national “taboos,” including the legacies of multi-ethnicity, religious diversity, cosmopolitanism, Sufism, and Islam. Pamuk’s destabilization of fixed identities and decentering of the secular telos of the Turkish novel has been characteristic of his work since The White Castle. This novel, not least of

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all, forecasts the beginning of postsecular trends in Turkish literature and the possibility of a cosmopolitan transnational literature situated in Istanbul. Pamuk’s transformation of Turkish literary modernity over the course of his first three novels serves to problematize and politicize Republican understandings of the Ottoman past in a sustained challenge to official historiography. Read together, these novels recapitulate a literary history of the novel form with concerns specific to the politics of secular modernity. This analysis is predicated on the understanding that the Republican novel form mimics the nation form in its constructed historical determinism, linearity, and teleology of secularism. At the same time, the novel often transgresses the limits of the nation form and of devlet authority. Beginning with The White Castle, Pamuk not only questions the metanarrative of Turkist secular nationalism (Turkism) in its various manifestations, he is thoroughly engaged in the work of interrogating the possibility of transformations in literary modernity by reconnecting to an Ottoman cosmopolitan past. Pamuk is not interested in history with a capital “H”; he is rather in the writerly pursuit of new imaginative spaces, and new literary forms whose politics are not overt, but emerge through fiction that defines “Turkishness” through literary modernity rather than secular state power. “Turkishness,” in this sense, marks a secular national horizon that is defined by the unreconciled trauma of the partition (not just “loss” or “collapse”) of the Ottoman Empire, leading to the suppression of din. In time, as Pamuk demonstrates, contexts of din re-emerge to constitute new sites of alterity for Turkish subject formation.2 Pamuk’s fiction reveals characters, like the author himself, who are both orientalized and nationalized subjects as a symptom of the cultural revolution, with an inclination to question their imposed identities through transgressive acts of writing. To accomplish such a task, Pamuk’s novels must grapple with two dominant aspects of Turkish secularization: the epistemic violence of the cultural revolution and the internalized orientalism of Kemalism and Turkism. Such interrogation leads his protagonists to try (by writing or painting, for example) other textual sites of identification and subject formation. These attempts fail within the confines of the novel’s plot itself – where texts are incomplete, lost, hidden, or absent – but are redeemed by a writing process that transcends Republican suppressions. Pamuk turns the novel, ostensibly a vehicle of secular modernity (or devlet), into a vehicle of narrative redemption that confronts secularism with elided contexts of sacredness (or din). Beginning with The White Castle, every Pamuk book is a doubled account: a major story of loss and failure (usually unrequited love or failed authorship) is balanced by the quiet birth of a novel of hybrid authority, one that is secular and sacred both.3

The Ottoman Legacy In the early Turkish Republican context, “Ottoman” and “modern” were articulated as a binary opposition that denigrated the Ottoman past and

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Islam. Pamuk’s literary problematization of Turkish history and historiography focuses on four major areas: the transition from Empire to Republic (as in Cevdet Bey and Sons and The Silent House); Ottoman history and its engagement with Europe (as in The White Castle and My Name is Red); the Kemalist cultural revolution and military coups (as in The New Life and Snow); and Istanbul cosmopolitanism (as in The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence). The contemporary legacies of these historical contexts are dealt with in almost all of his novels.4 Scholars gather these Ottoman historical concerns and their related problematics under a catch-all term known as the “Ottoman legacy.” The Ottoman legacy is the fraught dilemma of assessing the economic, political, social, and cultural influences of the Ottoman state (which all but specialists still often incorrectly describe as “Turkey” ruled by “Turks”) in the former territories of its rule, notably in the Republic of Turkey.5 Historian Carl Brown’s edited collection on the dilemmas of the Ottoman legacy argues for a revision of traditional understandings of the Ottoman past as a signifier for decline: [The] undeniable reality of European pressure on the Ottoman world has often pushed scholars to envisage the principle dynamic variable of the modern period as being the exogenous European West, not the indigenous Ottoman East. If one is inclined to follow this line of thought then “Ottoman” is best defined narrowly … excluding the cultural hybridization that seemingly set in once the neighboring European state system dominated the Ottoman lands. … We have chosen the inclusive approach. … Ottoman is used to cover developments religious and secular, public and private. … Applying the “usable” history approach to the study of the Ottoman period and thereafter as a tool for tracing surviving Ottoman legacies in the post-Ottoman period opens up important and at times contradictory vistas. (Brown 1996: 8–9) It is precisely the revisionary potential enabled by the “cultural hybridization” of the Ottoman past that appeals to an author like Pamuk. The “contradictory vistas” that emerge out of the Ottoman legacy are valuable to developments in literary modernity because they check the authority of secular modernization. The literary and cultural effects of the Ottoman legacy on the Republic were severe, as can be gauged by the initial Republican response to it in the form of a concerted cultural revolution to diminish and erase traditional forms of class, religion, identity, and cultural practice. For the purposes of this study, I define the cultural revolution, among other factors, as the epistemic violence of secular modernization. This project of modernity targeted the political and cultural Muslim status quo. As an analysis of the secular masterplot of the Republican novel indicates, the Ottoman legacy and the cultural revolution are linked in a causal relationship. We can approach the

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former by extrapolating from the specific aims and targets of the latter. One aspect of this state project was to cast the Ottoman past as colonial and colonizing. This is similar to the negative treatment of the Ottoman legacy in the Balkans (summarized by the term tourkokratia, for example).6 In this orientalist understanding, the Ottoman past was nothing more than a Dark Ages that prevented progress and the establishment of modernity. The proof for this was in the circular reasoning of the now debunked Ottoman “decline paradigm,” which defined the Ottoman Empire as a dysfunctional, declining polity from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century and reductively equated Islamic rule to oriental despotism (Kafadar 1997–8; Abou-El-Haj 2005; Sajdi 2008). The only solution, it was believed, rested in authoritarian secular modernization. In both European imperial and Turkish nationalist perspectives, the political and cultural target of modernity was Ottoman and Islamic tradition. Paradoxically, Republican Turks, boastful at having never been colonized, fabricated a colonial past for themselves. This is a legacy of perception that actually divided the “self” in the creation of the nation. (The “divided self” is a trope that appears repeatedly in Pamuk’s work through the double and the doppelgänger.) The project of secular modernization could thus unfold against an Ottoman Islamic backdrop cast as the Other of the secular modern Self. As a result of the cultural revolution, the legibility of the Ottoman Islamic past was literally and figuratively lost. Thus, by resurrecting voices from the Ottoman archive in his fiction, Pamuk makes an intervention into the politics of secular Republican historiography. Pamuk’s two Ottoman novels, The White Castle and My Name is Red, argue for a reassessment of the Ottoman legacy. These novels contain not just historical revisions, but literary ones as well. The narrative transformations in literary modernity represented by these works are accurately conveyed by Linda Hutcheon’s theorization of “historiographic metafiction”: Historiographic metafiction incorporates all three of these domains [literature, history, and theory]: that is, its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past. … The inherent contradictoriness of historiographic metafiction [is that] … it always works within conventions in order to subvert them. (Hutcheon 1988: 5) Hutcheon argues that rather than just representing the past, historiographic metafiction self-consciously explores the function of narrative as an ideological construct shaping history and identity. That is, it introduces a critical political orientation to the novel form. Pamuk’s Ottoman novels demonstrate this very phenomenon in the context of Turkish secular authority. The White Castle and My Name is Red, set in seventeenth- and sixteenth-century

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Ottoman Istanbul, respectively, reimagine the Ottoman legacy in relation to Republican discourses of secular modernity.7 The novels are significant to Pamuk’s reorientation of Turkish literary modernity in that they take local narrative and artistic forms as the basis for a dissident literature that re-centers the Republican tradition in an Ottoman Islamic cosmopolitan context. Working through history in order to subvert the ideological force of Republican historiography, both novels, furthermore, question the secularization thesis that dominates Turkish literature and literary histories.8

Early Modern Ottoman Istanbul: The White Castle (1985) The White Castle contains a metafictional reimagination of the Ottoman legacy based on textual and material culture that emerges from the “archive” of early modern Ottoman Istanbul. Pamuk’s revision of literary modernity involves a temporal turn away from the history-of-progress narrative and the secularization thesis. As such, the novel represents a transformation in both form and content for Pamuk. Not coincidentally, The White Castle was the first of Pamuk’s novels to be translated widely, for it mediated between the Ottoman past, the Republican present, and an international canon reflected in transnational elements: a master–slave allegory, imperio-national historiography, the interrogation of identity, the “clash of civilizations,” cosmopolitanism, and even Sufism. Needless to say, this watershed novel functions differently in its cultural context than his first two novels. The White Castle transcends the social realism of the Turkish national tradition, establishes Pamuk as an “intellectual” of cultural and political critique, and provides the first indication of his stature as an author of world literature.9 The self-conscious juxtaposition of the post-1980 coup and a seventeenth-century story set in Ottoman Istanbul during a period that saw the final unsuccessful Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683) reveals clues about Pamuk’s revision of the Ottoman legacy. These two distinct historical temporalities (Republican/Ottoman) are sutured through Pamuk’s metafictional narrative structure in a way that establishes a political argument through form.10 In The White Castle, Pamuk uses Ottoman history as a means to interrogate national self and society. Though the novel is set in the seventeenth century, it relies on the slippage between multiple narrators and narratives to establish meta-historical themes and plot.11 Recent scholarship in Ottoman history has argued for reassessing the Ottoman past through the framework of an alternative periodization that includes the “early modern” (Quataert 2000; Goffman 2002; Aksan and Goffman 2007). This new framing serves to question the decline paradigm by tracing aspects of indigenous Ottoman modernity. By extension, this approach, adopted by Pamuk, begins to qualify the central place of the secularization thesis in Turkish modernity. I argue that The White Castle begins the important work of redefining the Ottoman legacy as a related crisis of literary modernity. He traces the limits of the secularization thesis through the opening scene of Darvınog˘ lu in the

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archive before surpassing it by describing an act of translation. The circumstances in which the historian finds himself reinforce the representation of the national-secular as a discursive limit. In its intertextuality and intertemporality – uncatalogued manuscripts heaped together – the archive functions as a subversive space beyond the control of disciplinary discourses of the Republican state apparatus. The Ottoman archive is, in fact, a “counter archive” to Republican secular modernity. It is through the archive, an embodiment of the Ottoman legacy, that Pamuk makes an intervention into the tradition of the Turkish novel. The model for Pamuk’s new literary form, set in contrast to historiography proper, is the Ottoman archive itself.12 The archive, the space of the Ottoman legacy, is also a liminal space for the narrative reimagining of Turkish literary modernity. In terms of historiography, the legacy of an Ottoman state, as a polity that manifests the political and cultural script of din and devlet, is an open contestation to Republican modernization. The modernity to which the Republican elite ascribed bound and peripheralized the Ottoman past as antimodern. In short, the Ottoman past, including a century or more of modernization that witnessed two constitutional periods, was orientalized as the Other of Republican modernity. Though ostensibly the Republican project was to de-orientalize or de-Ottomanize society, the secular modernity espoused by Republican elites actually involved new orientalizing practices. The Kemalist revolution targeted appearance, religion, language, and culture as the material objects of revolutionary transformation.13 The White Castle, in particular, intervenes in historical discourses of secularism through its display of metafictional innovations in literary modernity. In her classic study of the topic, Patricia Waugh defines the transformations in literary form fostered by metafiction as follows: Contemporary metafictional writing is both a response and a contribution to an even more thoroughgoing sense that reality or history are provisional: no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures. The materialist, positivist and empiricist world-view on which realistic fiction is premised no longer exists. … More and more novelists have come to question and reject the forms that correspond to this ordered reality (the well-made plot, chronological sequence, the authoritative omniscient author, the rational connection between what characters “do” and what they “are,” the causal connection between “surface” details and the “deep,” “scientific laws” of existence). (Waugh 1984, p. 7) Waugh also demonstrates how metafiction can be traced back to “premodern” literary texts, and as such has no exclusive association with the postmodern. Pamuk’s allusion to medieval and early modern writing underscores the multivalences enabled through a synchronic approach to literary history. In the Turkish context, the formal changes of metafiction also pose political

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challenges to state power, whose authority is predicated on a “materialist, positivist and empiricist world-view” reflected in literary realism. In terms of form, Pamuk’s first three novels increasingly “question and reject” correspondence to diachronic history and secular national modernity. Moreover, I argue that the use of metafiction by Pamuk in The White Castle is political in the context of Turkish literary modernity. The reason is that metafiction, by identifying the constructed nature of history and identity, functions to question the authority of master narratives such as nationalism, secularism, and modernity. Such innovations in literary form allow for Pamuk’s introduction of a non-teleological, non-linear reading of Turkish history, and by extension, of identity-formation. In other words, Pamuk’s fiction argues that “Turkishness,” or the condition of ethno-religious identification, does not correspond to external realities, but is constructed by sites of political authority and power, including the state. The focus of Turkish literary modernity on a relative position between tradition and secular modernity is thus abandoned with the introduction of metafictional techniques. In one sense this represents liberation from the authority of national modernization; to its secular critics, however, it amounts to the relinquishing of modernity and Turkishness for a premodern state of Islamic “backwardness.” This dilemma gives rise to heated ideological contestations over Pamuk and his work. The Crisis of the Republican Intellectual Pamuk’s concern with Republican dilemmas of Turkish history is never more apparent than in his representation of the Republican intellectual, Ottoman historian, and professor Faruk Darvınog˘ lu. As mentioned, Darvınog˘ lu has been purged from his job in the wake of the 1980 military coup, and has relegated himself to the forgotten Gebze archive where he does his research. It is the third coup of his life. A man of leftist, secular bent, he has been divorced, is an alcoholic, has lost his faith in the discipline of history, and is infertile (as Pamuk notes underhandedly in The Silent House). Darvınog˘ lu is literally confined in the archive of Ottoman history, and figuratively, in the discursive space of Republican secular ideology represented by the coup. All he has left is the “archive,” once the seat of a kadılık (the administrative district of an Islamic judge), which offers him the possibility of a peculiar variety of textual and discursive resistance. In his reassessment of the Ottoman past, Pamuk, through Darvınog˘ lu, begins to directly engage a number of repressed crises of Republican modernity that redefine the horizon of that modernity in literature. The scene of “Darvınog˘ lu in the archive” dramatizes the limit of the Republican national horizon as well as its transgression. Darvınog˘ lu’s laboratory for addressing the crisis at the heart of Republican subjectivity is the archive, where documents are in the Ottoman language and require transliteration and translation, something out of the purview of Turkish citizens educated in modern standard Latin letters. The archive permits Darvınog˘ lu to respond to his

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disciplinary (read national) crisis in a number of ways: through the recourse to Ottoman historical documents and by the “inspired translation” of one of those documents into modern Turkish. Pamuk himself enacts a transfer of the sacredness of Republican history as a national discipline, through the medium of archival texts, to literature by treating the archive not as a repository of historical source texts, but rather as an intertextual model of literary form. The manifestation of such an experimental form is evident in the historical fiction that constitutes The White Castle itself. The final text to emerge out of the Ottoman “archive” is the novel, which traces the gradual development of textual acts of authorial agency from translation (Darvınog˘ lu) to experimental writing (master/slave) to literary authorship (narrator/Pamuk). The same progression sacralizes secular writing, recasting it as the secular-sacred act of redemption that Pamuk returns to again and again. The False Preface and the Translation The “preface” or “prologue” was cultivated as a literary convention in Renaissance Europe and authors used it to establish the tone and technique of the early modern novel. Pamuk uses the literary device of a false “Preface” in The White Castle as something of a translator’s foreword.14 The novel is structured around Darvınog˘ lu’s act of “translating” an Ottoman archival manuscript. He states that the manuscript immediately drew his attention at the bottom of a dusty chest because it “shone brightly among the faded state [devlet] documents” (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 7). The fact that the manuscript is described in contradistinction to “devlet documents” is significant to this study, foreshadowing that the manuscript will convey an account of enchantment, mysticism, and even redemption. Stating that his distrust in history is still strong, Darvınog˘ lu also dismisses a number of disciplinary frames to understanding the manuscript: “I wanted to occupy myself with the story for its own sake, rather than on the manuscript’s scientific, cultural, anthropological, or ‘historical’ value” (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 8). That is, part of the text’s appeal is that it contains a component beyond disciplinary control, one that is literary. Furthermore, the manuscript, apparently a historical one, presents “some events that bear little resemblance to fact,” making it something of a mock-historical text (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 8). Darvınog˘ lu’s methods of translation are telling: “after reading a couple of sentences from the handwritten manuscript I kept on one table, I’d go to another table in the other room where I kept my papers and try to convey in today’s idiom the meaning of what remained in my mind” (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 10). Having to shuttle between two desks in two separate rooms and record in the Turkish Latin alphabet only what is retained of the Ottoman script is an apt metaphor to describe the unstable position of the disciplined national subject among historical texts whose decoding might qualify the very construction of that secular self. In short, the act of translation here is political, a first foray over a national horizon-line policed by the military and the

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state. Darvınog˘ lu, in rendering his “inspired translation,” is engaging in what might be called textual resistance. Pamuk, for his part, through Darvınog˘ lu, is beginning a foundational revision of Turkish literary modernity. But what is the significance of a novel framed by a translation from Ottoman to Turkish? As the “Preface” reveals, it is out of the archive that Darvınog˘ lu produces, not a history, but a story.15 This particular story is significant in how it functions to redefine narrative as being mystical and sacred in opposition to the disciplinary contexts of secularization. Through his contact with the archive, Darvınog˘ lu has undergone something of a “conversion” from historian to translator in a way that foreshadows the development of Pamuk’s own “writing-subject.” The publication’s epigraph is a passage about the spark of emotion and sense of mystery between “lover” and “beloved,” which references the bond between the master and slave in the story. In Pamuk’s fiction, the birth of the author-figure in the plot often occurs in the wake of a failed romance or of unrequited love. The passion of love gets sublimated into a passion for and pleasure of the text. The epigraph reads: To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery, to believe that we will begin to live only through the love of that person—what else is this but the birth of great passion? (Pamuk 1990)16 Lover/beloved is not only one of the dominant tropes of Pamuk’s fiction, it is a major trope in Sufi literature. Darvınog˘ lu comments on the epigraph as follows: “Readers who have noticed the epigraph will perhaps wonder whether this has any special meaning” (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 10). He goes on to state: “To see all things as being inter-related, I believe, is the epidemic of our day. I publish this story because I, too, have succumbed to this affliction” (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 10). The triangle of “lover,” “beloved,” and “text” that emerges here is repeated in all of Pamuk’s subsequent work. Among other things, its meaning is bound up in the re-enchantment and mystification of the secular novel form that Pamuk undertakes in The White Castle. Tellingly, the epigraph is of a 1942 (mis)translation of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (“Swann’s Way”) by the well-known cosmopolitan Turkish novelist Yakup Kadri Karaosmanog˘ lu. There is every indication that “(mis) translation,” as an authorial method, is also the means by which Darvınog˘ lu makes his Ottoman manuscript relevant in the present (as part of an intertext). In Pamuk’s hands, the epigraph brings modernism together with the symbol of another tradition of mystical literature, and recalls Sufi, rather than Romantic, love. In the face of a “loss of mystery” through the secularization process, Pamuk rediscovers new dimensions of enchantment and the sacred through various textual mystifications or narrative secrets. In Sufism, the term “sirr” is used to describe the secret or mystery of divine

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grace and a space of communion between man and divine (Amir-Moezzi 2012).17 Darvınog˘ lu, thus, not only manifests the story as a “joker card” (which means its meaning is contingent, for example, on the Republican present or a secular-Sufi context), he also makes the story redemptive – an instrument of faith.18 Furthermore, Darvınog˘ lu’s act of “inspired translation” connotes the horizon of nationalism as manifested in the alphabet reform of 1928/9 and the state-controlled language reforms of the twentieth century. The “gap” between “texts” is, in a sense, the elisions and erasures of the cultural revolution. The subtext is the messy, uncatalogued archive of the seventeenthcentury Ottoman Empire, a kind of wildly signifying unconscious.19 Darvınog˘ lu reminds us that the geographies that are crossed through translation are not just linguistic, but political and social, psychological and historical. They involve navigating the incarcerating discourses of orientalism and nationalism that have been inscribed by the cultural revolution and secular modernity. As a historian, Darvınog˘ lu’s knowledge of the Ottoman language dispels the myth of national unity represented by language alone. Texts written in Ottoman problematize Republican history and culture based in the mono. lingualism of the state. Like Ilknur in Cevdet Bey and Sons, Darvınog˘ lu’s knowledge of the idioms of the Ottoman past is potentially subversive. In this respect, the new alphabet and language are vehicles of cultural amnesia. Before he decides to have his translation published, Darvınog˘ lu relates how texts written in Ottoman script are either “mistaken for Qur’ans by residents who reverently place them on the highest cabinet in the house or are torn apart leaf by leaf to light stoves” (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 10). This small detail conveys how inversions of the secular and the sacred can be predicated on language and its (il)legibility. Such inversions and pole switching become characteristic of Pamuk’s later fiction. Pamuk’s implied juxtaposition of polyglot Ottoman and monoglot Turkish reveals a crisis that stands in for the ahistorical cultural background of modern Turkish subjectivity in which an anachronistic pre-Islamic (secular) “Turk” stands in for the Ottoman Islamic past marred by defeat and occupation. From the Republican perspective, the Ottoman Islamic past is one of unreconciled trauma that must be repressed. The very nature of a core Turkish identity is challenged and transformed by Darvınog˘ lu’s knowledge of languages, which in the archive becomes an intervention against the coup, itself a legacy of the cultural revolution. Set against the effects of Republican alphabet and language reforms that made the Ottoman script illegible to modern Turks and purged the language of Persian and Arabic vocabulary, Darvınog˘ lu’s work in the archive becomes subversive in a number of ways: it is a critical commentary on the excesses of the cultural revolution, it makes the Ottoman context legible again, and it unearths a buried Ottoman Islamic cosmopolitan culture centered in Istanbul (wherein the figure of the Ottoman is again “master” vis-à-vis a European “slave”).

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Master and Slave: From Captive’s Tale to Sufi Conversion The manuscript that Darvınog˘ lu discovers in the archive and which becomes the body of the novel focuses on two characters, a Venetian slave and an Ottoman master (a hoja) named Abdullah.20 The name “Abdullah” (or “slave of god”) was a common name taken by converts to Islam.21 Like two aspiring Renaissance men, over decades, they perform experiments, make inventions, and write a series of tracts and treatises to gain patronage and influence from first a pasha and then the sultan. In the process, they partially invent and share each other’s personal history. The interaction between master and slave begins with firework displays, moves to cosmographical models, astronomy and astrology, books on animals (to entertain the then child sultan), turns to a focus on confessional writing and memoir, traces the patterns of plague death to monitor the contagion, and in a final experiment, results in the creation of a siege engine, a war machine, which is shrouded in mystery. The weapon fails on a campaign in Poland before the walls of the Doppio (or “double”) Castle, which is the “white castle” of the novel’s title. In much of the novel, master and slave work together on varieties of writing.22 This includes texts on science (astronomy), animals (imaginary and real), the plague, autobiographical confession, dreams, and apocalyptic treatises. These texts are used to various manipulative effects: for entertainment, prophecy, scientific explanation, or to instill fear.23 In a sense, all of these “genres” of writing constitute rough drafts for one final manuscript, the manuscript entitled “The Quiltmaker’s Stepson” that Darvınog˘ lu discovers centuries later.24 As stated above, Darvınog˘ lu’s act of resistance is a textual one, of translation. This translation is politically subversive in the context of the authoritarian secular modernity reasserted through the 1980 military coup. Darvınog˘ lu’s act involves transliterating a manuscript – an autobiographical captive’s tale – from the Ottoman script to modern standard Turkish.25 This translation introduces the (early modern) Ottoman cosmopolitan past into the present, challenging a Republican historiography of sui generis modernity. In this sense, The White Castle is a synchronic novel of disparate Republican and Ottoman historical worldviews. I argue, furthermore, that this novel is Pamuk’s revision of the trope of the captive’s tale in a way that “writes back” to both European and Turkish national metropoles from the site of peripherialized Istanbul. As an example of this genre, we could point to three sources that Pamuk acknowledges: “The Captive’s Tale” of Cervantes’ Don Quixote; the late sixteenth-century accounts of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw; and the Spanish narrative known as Pedro’s Forced Travels in Istanbul: Memoirs of a Spaniard Captive to the Turks in the Sixteenth Century Age of Süleyman the Magnificent (Wratislaw 1862 [1599]; Saavedra 1950 [1604–14]; Villalón 1996). All three describe captivity and escape under Muslim rule and denigrate their captors in pithy arguments that essentialize and otherize Islam.

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Pamuk adds some twists to the genre of the captive’s tale. First, he sets up an allegorical framework between Republican and Ottoman eras, revealing Darvınog˘ lu’s position as a modern-day “captive” of the Republic’s national secularism. Second, he reveals that the captive, rather than having his core identity strengthened and reified through the process of captivity and escape as in the traditional orientalist genre, to the contrary, experiences a transgression of boundaries, which in turn transforms religious, ethnic, and national identity into something approaching cosmopolitan subjectivity. Among other things, The White Castle is a critique of binary logic and the modernity, nationalism, and orientalism that depend upon it. By deconstructing this logic, Pamuk opens new vistas of literary modernity. The captive’s tale, however, isn’t simply an orientalizing historical genre that scripts “Turks” (read Muslims) as villains. It is also a seminal narrative in the establishment of the modern novel. This is particularly true in the way it is reflected in Don Quixote, which is accepted as one of the first early modern novels of world literature. Considered from this perspective, the role and scripting of “Turks” is central to the emergence of the form, predicated on the experience of intercultural encounter and exchange in the Mediterranean.26 Not only is an account of captivity and conversion given in Don Quixote, Cervantes himself was wounded in the famous sixteenth-century Battle of Lepanto, which pitted Christian Europe against the Ottoman Empire, and he was taken captive in its wake.27 Cervantes spent five years in the prisons of Algiers. Scholars have long established the central role of Cervantes’ experience of captivity and its representation in his work as being constitutive of the novel form (Garcés 2002). In her study of Cervantes, Garcés states the central role played by the experience of captivity in Cervantes’ literary production: From the first plays and narratives written after his release from captivity … the story of his traumatic experience continuously speaks through Cervantes’ fictions. His oeuvre is haunted by images of captivity: cages of all sizes, Christian captives, galley slaves, and female prisoners, some used as translators, others confined to special prisons. … Even Don Quijote returns home as a prisoner in Don Quijote, Part I. … Figurative incarcerations abound in Cervantes’s fictions, such as that suffered by Don Quijote, a prisoner of his delirium, and by the deranged scholar Vidriera, a captive of his glass-body – that is, of his madness. (Garcés 2002: 1) The notion of writing as emerging from the trauma of incarceration, whether literal, figurative, or both, is germane to understanding Pamuk’s novel. In The White Castle, the slave’s captivity mimics the master’s sense of captivity in his own society, and by extension, Darvınog˘ lu’s confinement in the archive, and finally even, Pamuk’s sense of restriction by discourses of Turkishness. By evoking Cervantes in the Preface and the last chapter, Pamuk reveals that he

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is engaging the “discourse of the Turk” as an orientalist narrative in his revision of Turkish literary modernity. He is also evoking the “discourse of the Turk” as a nationalist narrative through Darvınog˘ lu’s condition as homo secularis in the wake of the 1980 coup. The multi-layered narrative then becomes Pamuk’s way of writing himself out of the impositions and confinements of a Turkishness that is orientalist and nationalist (not to mention secular and sacred). It could be argued that The White Castle, in its most general outlines, rewrites the “captive’s tale” as originally articulated by Cervantes and others – a rewriting that leads to the transformation of literary modernity. Whereas the Cervantine version reifies Ibero-Christian ethnonational identity against the otherness of “Turks,” Pamuk’s version blurs the boundaries of this binary logic. In both cases, acts of conversion are central to the texts. In the “Captive’s Tale,” Zoraida’s conversion from Islam to Christianity serves to liberate the enslaved captain while enabling the love between them. In The White Castle, the indeterminate switching between Venetian and “Turk” enables the liberation of both characters from ethnoreligious confines of self (indicated by the inclusive referent “Him” used by Pamuk in the last chapter). For Cervantes and Pamuk both, the “beloved” is an object and agent of conversion as well as the figure of mystical transformation and redemption. In The White Castle, this points to the emergence of a narrative of mystical din in what is otherwise a post-coup context of devlet – where the agency for change has been monopolized by the secular state. Pamuk’s literary revisions serve to return transformative agency to contexts of din that appear in the captive’s tale, based as it is on religious subjectivity. In other words, “conversion” enables the redemption of the characters and the creation of a new narrative genre that is predicated on that redemption. Whereas the conversion described by Cervantes is fixed in a binary opposition, Pamuk’s account of “conversion” is intentionally indeterminate. In rewriting the captive’s tale, Pamuk dramatizes the binary logic of orientalism and its undoing in a synchronic tale that transforms Turkish literary modernity and in the process critiques secular state power. In Pamuk’s hands, the traditional captive’s tale has become a story of mutual conversion rather than othering. This conversion turns one who is enslaved (Darvınog˘ lu or the Venetian) into a figure of agency. In the final twist, Pamuk refuses to reveal with any certainty the identity of the manuscript’s author: master or slave. He is both and neither, indeterminate, without body or name, representing the possibility of a new iteration of self and narrative. By rewriting the cliché of the captive’s tale, Pamuk updates Turkish literary modernity, destabilizes identity, and clears the space of an absent text.28 This results in an instructive indeterminacy, an absence at the center of the novel. This absence reappears as a formal element in subsequent Pamuk novels. The absence is one that is mystical in nature, imbuing the narrative with a secret, or in Sufi terms, a sirr. The White Castle is haunted by “Him,” the presence

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of an absence that mimics aspects of the (denied and denigrated) Ottoman legacy itself. The “Him” might be the master and/or the slave. “He” represents the absent beloved as well as the mystical or the divine. As such, Pamuk has turned the captive’s tale into a Sufi parable. The conversion at the center of The White Castle is one that leads to the discovery of a new authorial agency that is secular and sacred. Evliya Çelebi’s Ottoman Cosmopolitanism Pamuk first mentions the Ottoman writer Evliya Çelebi in The Silent House. While doing archival research and ruminating on reconciling historical fact with narrative, Darvınog˘ lu is also reading Evliya Çelebi’s Book of Travels. This is a seventeenth-century, ten-volume work, a compendium of social and urban facts, anecdotes, fables, and bawdy tales that moves from descriptions of cities and sites to scenes with historical figures such as Sultan Murad IV, who reveals to Evliya the secret that he is a devotee on a mystical path by drinking wine in his presence (Dankoff 2006; Dankoff and Kim 2011). In Robert Dankoff’s study of Evliya, An Ottoman Mentality, he describes Evliya’s multiple personas in a cosmopolitan way. Dankoff describes him, among other things, as a man of Istanbul, a man of the world, the servitor of the sultan, a gentleman (çelebi), a dervish, a traveler (seyyah), a Falstaff, a reporter, and an entertainer (Dankoff 2006). Darvınog˘ lu, for his part, admires Evliya because he is always only himself, a man whom he senses has “one soul,” an authentic person in contrast to his own divided self, a man of “two souls” (Pamuk 1995b [1983]: 237–8). Evliya demonstrates a number of paradoxes and lived dualities that need no resolution. He easily moves from Sufi (he is an initiate of the Güls¸eni tarikat) to orthodox Islamic contexts (he is a muezzin) and presents an Ottoman identity and mentality that unites the seemingly contradictory cultural contexts of din and devlet. As a man of Istanbul, Evliya fills the first volume of his Book of Travels with a detailed account of the city. This devotion of the writer to his city, as represented in one of the epigraphs of this chapter, appeals to Pamuk as well, who has spent his career writing about Istanbul and reinscribing it as the site of Turkish literary modernity. Evliya appears as a historical character in the last chapter of The White Castle, in a scene where he visits “Hoja.” Evliya requests that Hoja tell him stories of Italy previously told to him by his Venetian slave so he can include them in his Book of Travels. With this narrative gesture, Pamuk’s “narrator” is portrayed as actually helping contribute passages on Italy to Evliya’s Book of Travels. Then he tells Evliya his own story: the story of the doubles in “The Quiltmaker’s Stepson.” Evliya takes exception to the tale: He [Evliya] said we should seek what’s strange and peculiar outside in the world, not within ourselves! Seeking what’s inside us and thinking about oneself to such an extent would trigger melancholy. This was the fate that

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At this point in the narrative the ambiguous narrator, who might be the Venetian slave or the Ottoman Hoja, or even a creation of Darvınog˘ lu himself, writes down his story. This gesture is in keeping with a theme Pamuk returns to again and again, that of the act of writing, in particular, dissident writing that transcends discursive and identity-based confinements. The spirits of Cervantes and Evliya Çelebi, as another meeting of “self” and “other,” begin to possess the early modern “novel” that is being written. Doubles and Mimicry The White Castle is not just the story of characters that are doubles, it is the account of doubled texts: Darvınog˘ lu’s archival translation of “The Quiltmaker’s Stepson” is also Pamuk’s historical novel, The White Castle. Similarly, the captive’s tale is also the story of its opposite, one of conversion. In the novel, the castle represents a liminal space, an outermost limit and an unassailable vantage. As an external projection of the doubled narrator (or “Him”) who is both “self” and “other,” the castle symbolizes, among other things, secular-sacred narrative authority. On one hand, The White Castle introduces metafictional techniques into the Turkish novel; on the other, it recuperates the authenticity of textual forms of writing based in early modern Ottoman Istanbul. A number of discrete models of literary form are brought together in the novel: metafiction, the captive’s tale, and the Sufi account of the beloved. As such, The White Castle is Pamuk’s first multiperspectival and multi-genre novel, which sets the precedent for his subsequent work. The experiments and treatises of Hoja and slave bring matters of Islam, science, history, and identity together in a new form that expands the horizons of the Turkish novel. The switching of master and slave in the plot amounts to a “conversion” that signifies liberation for each. Before they are able to “convert,” the two main characters in the primary story of The White Castle, tellingly, act as cultural translators who convey the cultural memory of two disparate (European and Turkish) cosmopolitanisms to each other. The

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Venetian slave translates his culture to his Ottoman master and vice versa. As a metaphor for this cultural exchange, the two characters mirror-gaze: “Come here, let us look into the mirror together.” I looked, and under the raw light of the lamp saw once again how much we looked alike. … The two of us were one! Now, this appeared to me to be an obvious truth. … Then he said he had captured my soul … Now, whatever I was thinking, he said he knew about, and whatever I knew, he was thinking of. (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 90–1) In fact, they are so adept at mimicry that they translate themselves out of fixed sites of identity. In this way, Pamuk’s novel imagines the potential of a more complex subjectivity that fundamentally questions distinct notions of “master” and “slave,” “self” and “other,” or even the “sacred” and the “secular.”29 Not until The White Castle, with its seventeenth-century Ottoman context, does din and devlet (metaphorically speaking) achieve parity as a modern literary antinomy. Such relationality, rediscovered through literature, might also be read as a rediscovered Ottoman legacy of sorts that signifies the reintroduction of new forms of sacredness into texts of secularism.30 Here, the past, intervening and interrupting, is an on-going commentary on the secular modern present and the resulting separation of contexts of din and devlet. Both Pamuk’s work in particular, and the Turkish novel in general, maintain traces and sublations of such alterity, remainders in a Republican dialectic of secular progress. As an allegorical novel that shuttles between the Republican present and the Ottoman past, The White Castle can be read from more than one perspective. For example, in the following passage, the seventeenth-century narrative point of view conjures the twentieth-century cultural revolution (in the alternative cast of trauma rather than national victory). This “prophetic” passage forecasts the secularizing cultural revolution (which, of course, has already happened). The narrator states “with hüzün” (melancholy): Did we [master and slave] understand ruin to be the loss of the nations under the [Ottoman] empire one-by-one? … Or did ruin mean the transformation of people and beliefs without their knowledge? We’d imagine how all Istanbulites might rise from their cozy beds one morning as different people without knowing how to wear their clothes or without remembering what minarets were good for. Maybe ruin meant witnessing the superiority of others and then trying to mimic them. … We filled a book with what spouted from our visions of defeat and destruction: the poor with heads hung low, muddy roads, half-finished buildings, dark and eerie streets, people who recited prayers they didn’t understand so everything might persist as old, anxious mothers and woebegone fathers,

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The “scenes of ruin” that master and slave conjure constitute the final book that they author together.31 The book is filled with visions of “melancholy and hopeless enthusiasm” which when presented to the sultan, enable the creation of their final doomed project, a monstrous siege engine. The siege engine does not prevent defeat in the ensuing military campaign, but it does enable the characters to actualize what they’ve been rehearsing for the entire novel by switching places. Conversion, or “Turning Turk” “Turning Turk” connotes both an engagement with otherness and a loss of self in some measure, but more importantly, the conflation of the two – as in Pamuk’s referent, “Him.” The context conjured by religious conversion is din, which marks a boundary of this study. The adoption of modernity is another concept that is described in terms of conversion (van der Veer 1996). In the era of nationalization, “turning Turk” refers to another kind of conversion: to Turkification, Turkism, and the state projects to establish secular national identity. The Turkist cultural revolution is about turning Turk as well, about becoming a “Turk” of social revolutions led by the state. In this iteration, turning Turk conjures the Turkish state formation, whose cultural conversions evoke devlet, and mark the second boundary of this study. Thus, in a synchronic understanding, “turning Turk” – the perpetual movement and slippage between the authorial iteration of din and devlet – refers at once to Islamic as well as secular states of being that appear in the literary field through novels. This sits in direct contrast to the dominance of secular devlet and programs of social engineering in the public sphere. The White Castle pertains to the task of the Republican novelist: interrogating the elisions of secular power. The true captive, of course, is Darvınog˘ lu himself, confined by the discourse of Republican nationalism. His “freedom” is earned, like many slaves in Ottoman captivity, through an act of “conversion.” This is not a religious conversion, but one from the historical imperative of devlet to the redemptive mysticism of din.32 The din that re-emerges in the narrative of The White Castle is, furthermore, Sufic in nature, as a mystical space of inclusion and mutual belonging is opened up in narrative through the indeterminate and dependent relationship between “master” and “slave,” who by the end of the novel have been transformed into semblances of “lover” and “beloved.”33 At the novel’s close, the narrator

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pines for “Him,” both beloved companion and God. This account, as translated by Darvınog˘ lu, also represents his discursive escape from the captivity of Republican discourses of history (devlet) enforced by the coup and the (national-colonial) power of state modernization.34 Him (O): The Secret of the Secular-Sacred Pamuk relies on the Ottoman archive to foster innovations in the form of the Turkish novel. The White Castle could be understood as a fiction in three parts: (1) the Preface; (2) the main story told between Chapters 1–10; and (3) Chapter 11, which is something of an epilogue. Each of these parts has a different first-person narrator. Additionally, there is an “afterword,” which arguably constitutes a fourth part with a fourth narrator. What sets the final chapter (Chapter 11) apart is a “switch” in narration that mimics the switching of the characters in the shadow of the white castle (the symbol of secular-sacred authority). Writing provides the medium between master and slave for the construction of a self that is neither, but a voice of mediation, an indeterminate narrator delineated by the use of the capitalized pronoun “Him”. The “Him” furthermore points to a doubled first-person point of view, which in the scope of this captive’s tale bears mystical nuances because it transforms that historical first-person account into a timeless Sufi parable. This is the narrative perspective represented by the “white castle,” a fortress of authorial agency that signifies doubleness as a state of conversion, one of the dominant tropes in Pamuk’s fiction. The indefinite narrator who emerges in the final chapter is perhaps better understood as representing the first instance of Pamuk’s “writing-subject.” This is a figure that appears as an aspiring author or author in Pamuk’s novels and who is often the cameo appearance of Orhan Pamuk himself. Though this might be a self-referential metafictional technique, it is presented in a way that unselfconsciously describes the figure of an author. In a sense, this author succeeds in completing a book where the writer manqués in the plot have failed. This is a figure, furthermore, that metafiction aims to deconstruct in the liberation of the text (in line with the now classic “death of the author” thesis). Its presence, here and in other Pamuk novels, is something of an anomaly that recalls the intellectual-authors represented in Republican social realist literature. In Pamuk’s work, the writing-subject represents the return of the modernizing Republican intellectual as author. This is a figure that anachronistically appears in all of Pamuk’s subsequent work (except for The New Life, which is focused on a “reading-subject” instead), a legacy, as it were, of the secular modern self in new postsecular contexts. Pamuk’s capitalization of the “H” in the pronoun “Him” (O in Turkish) in the final chapter indicates that the referent is new. This new referent, I argue, is defined by its sacredness. Pamuk’s designation in the text sacralizes the relationship between the two main characters. This relationship is preserved

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in writing, which is also sacred in that it functions as a revelation. The revelation contained in the Ottoman archival manuscript sits in direct contrast to the secular limit of Darvınog˘ lu’s dead-end as homo secularis in the prison of the archive. The capital “O” is the equivalent to the Arabic third-person singular pronoun Hû, the referent for the absence of Allah, whose remembrance is invoked by chanting the word in Sufism. Thus, in Pamuk’s novel, the referent “O” represents a nexus of meanings: an absent presence, the beloved, master/ slave, memory of the divine (zikir), and even, ironically, Atatürk, who is often referred to in this manner by nationalists as a longed-for secular absence. In Sufism, “O” also signifies an essence beyond duality, Oneness whose emptiness is also a sacred whiteness. Pamuk combines this whiteness with the materiality of the fortress in the symbol of the unassailable “white castle” in the novel. Indeed, “O” figures as a pictographic symbol for the castle, writ small. The novel ends with a visitor from Italy who inquires of the “master” about the captivity of his former “slave” whom he has met. In response to misinformed questions and erroneous details, the “master” gives the visitor a copy of his manuscript. The novel’s conclusion depicts this “reader,” who has completed the manuscript, gazing out of a window (in Turkey) that frames the manuscript’s narrator/author (the “I” of the text). The view is identical to one presented earlier in the novel, except for the presence of the “narrator.” In the first instance, the “window” depicts a view from the slave’s home in Empoli, Italy, signifying the nostalgia for home and the possibility of escape.35 The second scene, on the novel’s last page, depicts the same view; however, this time we learn it is actually in Gebze, near Istanbul. In the earlier scene, the narrator is “concealed” as the character of the slave in keeping with the conventions of the realist historical novel form. By framing the “narrator,” the second scene reveals the agency of the “writing-subject” as a political agent who can resist discursive impositions (such as those the “reader” from Italy has conveyed about the “Turk”). Reading both scenes together uncovers the metafictional symmetry of Pamuk’s novel. In other words, the self-referential plot of The White Castle traces the development of the figure of the narrator out of a dialectic of “self” and “other.” This narrator is a synthesis of opposites, an embodiment of what Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar would call terkip. We, as readers, mimic this “discovery” in the plot, thereby witnessing and recognizing the birth of authorial agency. In other words, Pamuk represents our experience as readers in the plot of his novel: Later, as I expected, he [the reader] saw and understood: Now he was looking at the view out the window. … As I expected, he began furiously turning back the pages of my book, he was searching, and I was pleasurably waiting for him to find what he sought; finally, he found it and read. Then, he again looked at the view from the window onto my backyard. I, of course, know quite well what he saw: … I was sitting there. (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 180)

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This scene is a depiction of the reader recognizing the narrator and comprehending the story as well as its literary innovations. This is an account that transcends binary logic and forces the (European) reader to question his received knowledge. The novel’s conclusion reveals the syncretic space of reunion, redemption, and mystical din represented figuratively by the white castle and Him. When the narrator confesses, “I loved Him,” he alludes to this space where “self” might become “other” or to refer to the mystic Rumi, where the line “So I am you!” is immanent. The potential for this inversion, a dilemma of conversion, is integral to understanding Pamuk’s revision of Turkish literary modernity as a repeated “turning” through the antinomy of din and devlet. The White Castle is a novel of such turns: through Ottoman and Republican contexts, Christianity and Islam, Europe and Turkey, as well as history and literature. “Afterword”: The Author-Figure Orhan Pamuk A ten-page afterword, entitled “On The White Castle,” was added to Turkish versions of the novel in July 1986 (about a year after the first edition) and has been included in all subsequent Turkish editions. It has never appeared as part of English translations of the novel. The afterword is significant for what it reveals about Pamuk’s process of writing the novel, but more so because it cleverly treats the novel’s metafictional illusions as if they were real, including Darvınog˘ lu’s methods of authorship and the ambiguity of narration between Venetian and “Turk.” With this afterword, Pamuk blurs the line between reality and fictional representation, a dominant theme he returns to again and again, particularly in The New Life, Snow, and The Museum of Innocence. Indeed, much like the “false” preface, this appended section reads in many respects as a “false” afterword to the novel. The “afterword” earnestly describes Darvınog˘ lu’s work in the archive as being literary rather than historical, as if Pamuk himself didn’t have authorial control over the text: “And just like Cervantes, Faruk will likely have added some things from other books to the hand-written [Ottoman] manuscript as he rendered it into the language of his compatriots [modern Turkish]” (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 189). This explanation, while constructing Pamuk’s authorial absence, supports the notion that Darvınog˘ lu is far from being faithful to an original Ottoman manuscript discovered in an archive, but is rather writing an account that he believes will be more relevant to his contemporary Turkish audience, with supplemental material from other sources (including perhaps his own imagination). The same “afterword” constructs Pamuk’s authorial presence when Pamuk identifies a few textual insertions of his own, ones that he playfully states “indicate that the manuscript simply could not have been written by just one member of our twinned pair [master and slave]” (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 191). Pamuk’s metafictional denial of literary authority is supported by another statement in the same “afterword”:

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“I myself don’t know whether the Italian slave or the Ottoman Hoja wrote the manuscript of The White Castle” (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 189). This confession of indeterminacy is intended and necessary.36 The novel’s indeterminacy is part of its epistemological argument against the coercions of orientalism and secular modernity. Not least of all The White Castle is Pamuk’s first articulation of a literary idiom of postsecularism and postorientalism. The indeterminate narrator of The White Castle also reveals something about the Ottoman legacy. It is only through a reassessment of concealed “archives” that the absent text of Istanbul cosmopolitanism can emerge to deconstruct Turkish secular modernity. In Pamuk’s fiction, Istanbul, representing eclipsed Muslim cosmopolitanism during an era of secular nationalism, emerges as the site of and vehicle for his critique of devlet. The neglect of Istanbul during and after the cultural revolution is lamented by Pamuk in his memoir of the city, Istanbul: Memories and the City. In this memoir, he refers to the influence of the modernist author, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. Tellingly, Pamuk at once praises and dismisses Tanpınar and his work. Decades before Pamuk, Tanpınar documented the neglected city in his fiction and nonfiction as a dismissed archive and site of literary production and modernity. Though Pamuk accuses him of being conflicted between allegiances to nationalism and literature, of being apolitical in the face of state power, of anachronistically using forms of realism in modernist literature, these are all critiques that could be leveled at Pamuk himself (Pamuk 1995a, 2005a). Pamuk’s love–hate relationship with Tanpınar appears not least in his mentor’s literary influences, which inform all of Pamuk’s novels. We can identify the greatest of these influences by pointing to Tanpınar’s treatment of the city of Istanbul as a cosmopolitan archive of the secular-sacred.

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Poetics of Paradox: A Mind at Peace (1949) In assessing the Ottoman legacy, historians often debate the degree to which continuity and rupture determines the relationship between the Ottoman state and the Republic of Turkey. The perspective of the Kemalist cultural revolution is decidedly one of “rupture.” Tanpınar, however, asks his readers to reconsider the stakes of such a rupture on cultural history and memory. Furthermore, he is one of the first authors to treat crises in Turkish secular modernity as productive paradoxes of literary modernity. Generally, these are paradoxes of religion and of secularism vis-à-vis Turkishness that appear to varying degrees in all of the texts under consideration in this study. Tanpınar makes these paradoxes the hidden center of his fictions; in turn, politicizing Turkish literary modernity through form in a way that becomes a model for Pamuk’s own interventions. Pamuk acknowledges his debt to Tanpınar’s work: In my opinion, the greatest Turkish writer of the twentieth century is Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. Aside from his greatness is the fact that he’s

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significant to me. Tanpınar both knew Western culture, French poetry and novels – for example he admired Valéry and Gide – and he’d cultivated a deep relationship with traditional [Ottoman Turkish] poetry and music. The anguish that sustains all of his work arises from the disappearance of traditional artistry and lifestyles. … By situating his own guilt and silent hüzün between East and West, Tanpınar imbued his work with an extraordinary sense of real [circumstances]. Because his novels are fed by both worlds and because they embrace each in kind, they are profound, and that’s the reason his protagonists are so conflicted. (Pamuk 1999: 166) Both the East–West intertextuality and the affect of lament that appears in Pamuk’s work are direct results of Tanpınar’s influence. Pamuk adds considerable innovation to Tanpınar’s foundational texts of Turkish literary modernity. For example, Pamuk represents modernity itself as an “absent text” in his plots, one that is integral to the way his novels function to overwrite the absence. It is the absence of modernity, as a crisis of Republican secularism, that serves to paradoxically foster literary developments in Pamuk’s world. He is able to harness this lack as a literary asset by historicizing and recording the synchronic account of its lopsided emergence. This also doubles as the paradoxical story of the rise of Pamuk’s writing-subject, which eventually replaces the prior dominance of what Jale Parla has termed the “writer manqué” in Turkish literature (Parla 2007, 2011). If the writer manqué is an impotent version of homo secularis (represented variously by Darvınog˘ lu, Black, and Ka, for example) who is unable to produce a written text, Pamuk’s writing-subject redeems the failures of such characters. To accomplish this literary feat, Pamuk complicates Tanpınar’s literary modernity through an emphasis on metafiction and early modern periods of Ottoman history that would be considered “premodern” from a secularist perspective. With the introduction of techniques of metafiction into Turkish literature beginning with Og˘ uz Atay in the 1970s, the one-time dominant figure of the failed Turkish author is increasingly presented and represented in plots as being capable of writing, completing, and even publishing books. This rising authorial agency is always contrasted to and contested by the authority of the state. Techniques of metafiction in the Turkish context also establish an interpretive and hermeneutic distance from the secular narratives of the nation; to such a degree that the foundational story of all of Pamuk’s fiction persists as the story of an individual overcoming ideological obstacles of Islam and state to author novels of hybrid authority. This story of authorship – once destructive, now redemptive – ties Pamuk to a tradition of Turkish literature that goes back to the emergence of the Ottoman Turkish novel in the nineteenth century (Parla 1990, 2011). From the perspective of the secularization thesis, Tanpınar’s novel, A Mind at Peace (Huzur, 1949), could be described as a Republican national anti-epic.37 It is a bildungsroman that leads neither to secular modernity nor maturity and

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the wisdom of experience, but to a spectrum of individual and collective vulnerabilities. Like his protégé Pamuk, Tanpınar’s novels expose, parody, and rewrite the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman. Among other things, A Mind at Peace is an ambivalent portrayal of commitment to cultural revolution and secular modernity. Instead of advocating a secular teleology, the novel explores the remnants of continuity with Ottoman modernization from a destitute, interwar Istanbul on the margins of the nation-state. These remnants of continuity consist of an entire history of Ottoman modernization and cultural history (including music, architecture, and literature) stretching back to the early nineteenth-century reigns of Sultan Selim III and Sultan Mahmud II, who are considered to be the first modernizing sultans under the influence of the French Revolution. Tanpınar develops his novels as representations of both city and psyche; it is from the position of dismissed cosmopolitanism that he mounts his critique of secular national modernity, an approach later appropriated by Pamuk. Terkip: Synthesis in the City Both authors describe and develop hüzün, or Istanbul’s collective melancholy, as a state of lament that is a symptom of both Ottoman imperial loss and anxiety about future-oriented national secularism. Familial attachments, cultural loss, and memory weigh heavy in this world. It is by accepting and facing such trauma that Tanpınar foresees a means of transcending the impasses of revolutionary modernity. Tanpınar’s notion of cultural synthesis or terkip might best be summarized through the seminal question he asks in his nonfiction account, Five Cities: “Where and in what way are we to connect to the past?” (Tanpınar 1946: 103). The five cities that Tanpınar examines are Istanbul, Bursa, Konya, Erzurum, and Ankara, cities that excavate a cosmopolitan legacy during an era of nationalism. In light of this framing, Tanpınar’s question could be further clarified as opposing the “city” to the “nation” for the sake of tapping an alternative Muslim cosmopolitan history. Four of the cities are capitals that have a long-standing Islamic legacy. Istanbul and Bursa are former Ottoman capitals, discussion of which begins the book. Konya was the capital of the Seljuk Empire, a “city” Tanpınar uses to take us back to the thirteenth century and the context of mystic Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, who gave rise to Mevlevi Sufism. The last capital Tanpınar discusses is the new secular capital of the Republic, Ankara, which is the book’s shortest section and is included as something of an afterthought. Tanpınar’s overarching question is further complicated by the fact that secularists completely deny the modernity of the late Ottoman Islamic past. Needless to say, Istanbul dominates the collection. In bringing the city and the concept of terkip together, Tanpınar writes: Old Istanbul was one grand terkip. This terkip materialized out of the intermingling of elements that were small and large, significant and

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insignificant, traditional and modern, domestic and foreign, beautiful and ugly – even what today would be called vulgar. Forging this terkip were the institutions of Islam and the [Ottoman] empire, two axes whose gears of necessity were turned by a complete economic machinery. (Tanpınar 1946: 22) Tanpınar’s reinscription of the city as the overriding site of terkip is vital for his own reassessment of Turkish literary modernity as including an Ottoman Islamic archive that far outweighs the import of the secularization thesis. In turn, Pamuk, in a mode of literary pastiche, seems to pose a related question to his readers: “Where and in what way are we to connect to Istanbul?” Tanpınar is a writer who reminds us that the historical rupture between Empire and Republic also divides the self.38 In his article “Identity and the Exchange of Civilizations,” the author describes a pervasive duality extant in Ottoman/Turkish culture since the Tanzimat: “The reason for this crisis [of mind] is the duality brought about by moving from one civilization to another. … This duality first began in public life, then it split our society in two in terms of mentality, and in the end, deepening and changing its progress, it settled within us as individuals” (Tanpınar 1996: 34). As the “duality” affects the individual, it gives rise to the phenomenon of the “divided self,” that is to say, a consciousness divided between mutual allegiances to “old” and “new” or “Ottoman Islam” and “Turkish secularism.” Tanpınar asks us to contemplate this paradox, which defines his crisis as an intellectual: How shall I live in a nation that doesn’t acknowledge its own cultural history and collective memory? Tanpınar’s “answer” is a grand synthesis, the terkip that will resolve this pervasive crisis. (Tanpınar’s fiction also reveals that this terkip is an unattainable ideal, not unlike Pamuk’s hybrid ideal of the referent “Him” in The White Castle.) In an attempt to overcome the malformations created by historical and cultural “rupture,” Tanpınar advocates tapping a “third source” between binaries such as “old” and “new” or “tradition” and “modernity” in order to attain the “reality of the nation.” He writes: We can only consider the East [old] or the West [new] as two separate sources. Both exist for us, and quite extensively; that is to say, they are part of our reality. However, their presence alone can’t be of any value, and remaining [separate] that way, they are an invitation to create a vast and comprehensive synthesis [terkip], a life meant for us and particular to us. For the encounter and fusion to be fruitful, it must give birth to this life, to this synthesis. And this is possible by attaining the vital third source, which is the reality of the nation. (Tanpınar 1996: 42–3) Caught between two models of modernity, Tanpınar tries to transcend ambivalence through the mechanisms of a terkip that his characters can

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imagine, but never truly attain. Tanpınar himself opened a new literary horizon by establishing the Turkish novel through entwining both European and Ottoman Islamic traditions as an Eastern and Western intertext – and like all transformative literature, as a medium of local culture and international transculture at once. Mingling and merging in A Mind at Peace are traces of . Verlaine and S¸eyh Galip, Baudelaire and Yahya Kemal, Beethoven and Ismail Dede Efendi, miniatures and Renoir, philosophy and history, as well as Islamic mystic romance and unrequited love. In other words, Tanpınar’s terkip, which Pamuk adopts as a mainstay of his own fiction, functions on more than one axis. Whereas Tanpınar presents the concept intellectually as a problematic; aesthetically, it becomes an engine of literary production for his fiction. For both authors, terkip argues for continuity between past and present as well as “East” and “West.” But that is not all. In the scope of this study, terkip is clearly an attempt to bring together realist narratives of secularism, existentialism, and materialism with modernist and metatextual narratives of redemption, grace, and mystical enchantment. Terkip, in my reading, is less the synthesis of narratives of din and devlet, than it is the antinomy that arises between them. As such, terkip describes the material and spiritual tensions between secular fragmentation and mystical wholeness. One of the best examples of this antinomy in literary form is Tanpınar’s masterwork of Istanbul modernism, A Mind at Peace. A Mind at Peace, in which the prose itself is something of the author’s own terkip between Ottoman and modern Turkish, opens spaces of ambivalence rather than national identification. Tanpınar’s characters are paralyzed by the modern condition in which cultural history and tradition persist in a clench hold with secular formations. One example of his use of tradition is his presentation of a strong Mevlevi Sufi theme that is reinforced by the frame story of lover and beloved. This strain of mysticism in the modern novel, however, offers little redemption for Tanpınar’s characters, who are nevertheless also bound to abide by discourses of devlet. Another example of Tanpınar’s ambivalence toward secular cultural revolution is his almost impressionistic reliance on Perso-Arabic vocabulary and Ottomanesque density of prose. His stylized prose alone serves to critique language and alphabet reforms based in Turkism. (A legacy of the cultural revolution, Turkish language planning lasted into the 1980s.) Pamuk’s literary style, also influenced by Tanpınar, is similarly dense and opaque, especially in The Black Book and My Name is Red. For both authors, their choice of words and style alone serve to politicize literary modernity. Readers of A Mind at Peace will immediately be struck by the language, which might be described as a palimpsest in mixed registers of contemporary Turkish and “pre-revolutionary” Ottoman Turkish. Both a legacy of the Ottoman cultural past and a modernist symbol of that past, Tanpınar’s language is at once a fragmented, lexical “ruin” and a polysemous “rune.” Tanpınar’s prose mimics the antimonies of Ottoman and Turkish modernity by being at times very realistic and representational and at other times

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impressionistic and abstract. In short, he moves from representational to figurative to non-representational language that signifies nothing but its own materiality – raising what Jale Parla has termed a “wounded tongue” to the level of a literary symbol and aesthetic (Parla 2008). The effect on the reader is two-fold: Tanpınar’s writing creates an alienation effect due to the density of prose as well as providing access to a world dismissed by secular revolution. A Mind at Peace succeeds because it effectively mediates between an oneiric, mystical past and a secular, material present. It teaches its audience how to “read” a lost language and comprehend a world of Ottoman modernity, one that, in an ironic inversion, updates the secular present that has denied it. For lest it be forgotten, Tanpınar’s Turkish audience contains a readership estranged from its own immanent cultural heritage and history. Literary Alchemy A constellation of literary-philosophical concepts and symbolist figures structure A Mind at Peace. These concepts establish a symbolic complex and cartography of mysticism that is nonetheless linked to the constraints of secular modernity. Tanpınar’s secular-sacred aesthetic is the first attempt at a systematic redefinition of “Turkishness” through literary modernity. Tanpınar’s redefinition includes not only concepts like synthesis and antinomy (or terkip), but the mystical dream (or rüya), the aura and season (or iklim), the mask and persona (or çehre), orders of time (or zamanın nizamı), the ethics of death (or ölümün terbiyesi), and the melodic progression of the musical makam. Tanpınar’s fictive world is constituted by possibility (or imkân) and rejection (or inkâr) for characters facing the coincidence (or tesadüf) and fate (or kader) of life under Turkish secular modernity.39 His characters vacillate between states of melancholy (or hüzün) and elusive states of peaceful repose (or huzur). As such, Tanpınar’s operative literary technique relies on a symbolic complex of tropes that depend on Istanbul’s cosmopolitan legacy. These concepts and figures appear repeatedly in different contexts, accumulating multiple meanings, and thus fossilizing in the sedimentary flow of his layered symbolist prose. The word or phrase in question, like those listed above, is no longer a signifier, it has become a thing, reified as an object that insists on its materiality and manifestation over its lexical meaning per se. Even abstractions ossify and become substantiated as objects. The intangible becomes tangible. Words do not evaporate off the page in Tanpınar’s world; rather they take on mass and gravity as aggregates and ore. As such, they can be excavated and exhibited, displayed in the novel that is a museum. This process is integral to Tanpınar’s prose. He turns what he calls unrefined ore (or cevher) into precious stones (or mücevher), continually confronting the reader with the arcane art of this literary alchemy. A Mind at Peace is a literary homage to Istanbul. Set in that city on the eve of World War II (1939), the novel captures the anxieties of an extended cosmopolitan family challenged by the crises of the early Republic founded on

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the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. In its broadest outlines, it is another example of the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman, in this case framed from the nineteenth century to World War II. As mentioned earlier, Turkey’s secularizing and “westernizing” cultural revolution attempted to distance society as much as possible from its Ottoman Islamic past by transforming everything from the alphabet to the legal system, from education to the clothes people wore. Writers like Tanpınar lived through this transition from Empire to Republic and knew how to read and write in both the “old” Ottoman script (that is, Islamic) and the “new” Latin Turkish (that is, secular); in short, they were familiar with two mentalities that often contradicted one another. The tension between the two worldviews, as reflected in the novels of Tanpınar and Pamuk, establishes a clear genealogical link between them. In A Mind at Peace, Tanpınar writes through a number of themes and tropes that pose a challenge to the uninitiated. The novel weaves together an intricate tapestry of autobiography, the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman, the mystical romance of lover and beloved, aesthetics of Ottoman Turkish music, and the Istanbul travelogue. Writing back to both Turkish secular modern and European (mostly French) orientalist traditions, Tanpınar’s experimental literary techniques include impressionism, symbolism, and synesthesia. His themes focus on the trope of the divided self, Ottoman and Republican modernity, the Sufi theme (or tasavvuf), Ottoman and Republican material culture (objects and their memories), registers of literary language, collective memory, and the city. Entering a vast mystical and symbolist world (of light and illumination, season and clime, lover and beloved, alchemy and transfiguration, and Istanbul and the Bosphorus), we are never made to forget that we are accessing a city through the perspective of a voyeur, a flâneur, an ironist, a tourist of one’s native city, an aesthete, and one who has learned to see life and society from the outside; in short, through a self-orientalizing gaze. In Tanpınar’s ironic inversion, the utopian promise of secular modernization gives way to anxiety, hüzün, and loss (Bayramog˘ lu 2007). The novel is orchestrated into four parts named for the four main characters, respectively: . Ihsan (meaning “guided in faith and deed”); Nuran (or “mystical light”); Suad (or “happiness”); and Mümtaz (or the “chosen”). All of them suffer from specific afflictions or psychological conditions. The fifth character is the city of Istanbul itself, described as being. afflicted by neglect and poverty and personified as having “leprosy of sorts.” Ihsan (Part I) and Mümtaz (Part IV) frame the novel and represent a tense and melancholy 24-hour period that culminates in the Nazi aggression that begins World War II. The opening and concluding sections (and characters) are separated, literally and figuratively, by Nuran (Part II) and Suad (Part III); these two sections narrate the events of the preceding year. Part II delves into the halcyon relationship between lover and beloved, Mümtaz and Nuran, through interwoven descriptions of Turkish classical music, Anatolian folk songs, Mevlevi rites, Istanbul streets, monuments, Ottoman imperial architectural sites and the mystical beauty of

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the Bosphorus flowing between Europe and Asia. Part III is brooding in tone as it relates the dampening mood and growing sorrow over mounting obstacles to this idyllic romance represented by Suad’s devious interference. Part IV takes up the themes of the East/West “problematic” and the indeterminacy of Turkishness, focusing on Mümtaz’s mental and emotional collapse. In sum, A Mind at Peace is a novel about its opposite, distress and anxiety, and the challenges posed by symptoms of secular modernity from nationalism and war to suicide. In a doubled narrative movement, the novel unfolds on both psychological and historical levels that embody debates about continuity and rupture with the Ottoman past. The four main characters furthermore represent an alle. gory for the transition from Empire to Republic. Ihsan, bedridden with pneumonia, is the late Ottoman and early Republican mentor and teacher, an intellectual proselytizer on the possibility of national progress and “Turkishness” based on an absent and elusive historiography (over which he toils with Mümtaz). Nuran, a divorced single mother, represents the elite, cosmopolitan beloved, and the potential for Mümtaz’s cosmopolitan future in an era of nationalism. Suad, a philanderer hobbled by tuberculosis, is the stark, nihilist revolutionary and a caricature of Kemalism.40 Mümtaz, an orphaned and introspective dreamer, is a misfit in the first generation of the cultural revolution, a young Republican intellectual, poet, and author challenged with navigating a daunting cultural geography that won’t let him discover himself and his own language. The meanings of the characters’ names are furthermore significant because they introduce the possibility of a mystical and quasi-religious subtext into otherwise secular modernist circles. This sacred subtext of grace and redemption is quashed by Tanpınar’s clever use of dramatic irony. Mümtaz, the point-of-view character, can neither follow an ailing . Ihsan’s guidance nor attain the elusive Nuran’s mystical light. He is condemned to a material world of suffering without redemption that unites him with his nemesis Suad, who is content only in his existentialist and revolutionary self-destruction. In short, Mümtaz is not “chosen” for redemption as might be expected, but rather, for sacrifice. . Mümtaz is drawn to two strong emotional magnets: Ihsan, his older cousin, mentor, and former teacher, and his beloved Nuran, the woman with whom he lives an intense, doomed love affair. The former relationship represents the intellectual potential of continuity in the project of Republican secular modernity. The latter represents the imaginative, romantic, and aesthetic possibi. lity for grace and redemption. As Ihsan is bedridden and Nuran eventually leaves Mümtaz to reunite with her ex-husband, both possibilities are denied to Mümtaz. The potential terkip between subtexts of din and devlet fails on the level of plot, yet is manifested nonetheless in Tanpınar’s own literary aesthetic. . Attempting to help Ihsan regain his health, Mümtaz is beset with obsessive memories of Nuran. A Mind at Peace develops through the irreconcilable tension between Mümtaz’s fixation on his beloved (which assumes a mystical

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quality) and his pressing duty to Republican history and literature (represented by his incomplete writing projects, a “History of the Turks” and a historical novel on Ottoman modernity, Sultan Selim III, and the Mevlevi S¸eyh Galip). Mümtaz is thus a “writer manqué” in keeping with that dominant trope in Turkish literature. Complicating the subplots of beloved and authorship is the nihilistic presence of Suad. His perspective is crystallized in . an exchange with Ihsan, which demonstrates Suad’s atheism and his ironic sacralization of the revolution: [Suad:] “For me Allah is dead. I’m savoring my freedom. I’ve killed Allah within myself.” [ .… ] [Ihsan:] “The Allah that you’ve killed still exists within you. You’re no longer living your own life. In this state, you’re only a tomb, something like a coffin. You house a horrific, cruel death. What freedom could you possibly have? … Honestly, what you perceive as a new dawn is but a conflagration. … No, by toying with notions of Allah, you won’t be able to escape Him. … But do you know, Suad, what a great theologian you would have made? Because what you’re advocating is nothing but a theology in reverse.” (Tanpınar 2011 [1949]: 337) The “death of Allah” theme appears in Pamuk’s The Silent House as a straightforward argument for atheism. In the above passage, however, Tanpınar’s character claims that secularism can constitute its own sacred space and religiosity. This is significant to defining the relationship between din and devlet, in that it redeems rather than overwrites secular modernity, recasting it as a type of secular religion.41 A Secular Jesus The climax of the novel focuses on Suad’s suicide, which is a symbolic manifestation of the epistemic violence of revolutionary secularism. The suicide, a trope that recurs in Republican literature, ends Mümtaz’s relationship with Nuran, and figuratively, the possibility of connecting with the Ottoman past. Suad embodies the perspective of historical “rupture.” His suicide forecasts an existentialist trope in Turkish literature that can be read as the self-destructive outcome of secular materialism (see Chapter 5). Suad’s death, however, does not remove him from the plot. He persists as a spectral character, with whom Mümtaz continues to grapple. At the end of the novel, Mümtaz seeks the .help of a doctor (a representative figure of secular positivism) to attend to Ihsan after he takes a turn for the worse. His introduction to the doctor is conflated with hearing a concerto by Beethoven, to which Suad had listened before his suicide. The concerto once again serves to associate Suad’s death with the possibility of its opposite:

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a European aesthetic modernity that enables terkip with local forms rather than obliterating them. Here, as Pamuk does later, Tanpınar confronts the political authority of secular modernity with the aesthetic authority of literary modernity. . Mümtaz is asked by the doctor to run one final errand for Ihsan, which fills him with the twin emotions of resentment and guilt. He must go to the pharmacy for medicine. It is approaching daylight. Mümtaz knows that Nuran will be leaving to reunite with . her husband that same morning. At this juncture, Nuran’s abandonment, Ihsan’s incapacitating illness, Suad’s “resurrection,” and news of the Nazi invasion of Poland all intersect to foster Mümtaz’s nervous breakdown. Tanpınar symbolizes this breakdown through the Christian religious imagery of stigmata and crucifixion.42 On his return to the house with the medicine in hand, Mümtaz encounters Suad, who has transformed into a mystical Jesus-like figure. Suad ridicules Mümtaz and his romantic personality, tempting him to follow him in death. Mümtaz, who has dreamed of Suad’s crucifixon “like some sort of Jesus,” is awed by Suad in his exalted and resurrected state as a sacred figure of the secular: [Mümtaz] “How beautiful you’ve become! Exceptionally beautiful! This sorrow suits you. Do you want to know what you resemble? The angels of Botticelli … you know, the ones that give Jesus three nails during the Passion–” […] Suad again laughed expansively. “Very well, in that case, come with me and let me be your salvation.” (Tanpınar 2011 [1949]: 442, 444) Mümtaz, however, refuses to touch Suad, the prophet of revolutionary secularism, and follow him in the culmination of his existential self-destruction. In short, he wants to believe in the possibility of redemption beyond the stark secularism represented by Suad. Even in death, Suad, in Mümtaz’s delusion, attempts to establish a religion of the secular. Tanpınar’s open critique of Kemalism is predicated on defining it through a cultish mystification that resonates within the context of the rise of Nazism. Suad then strikes Mümtaz, who falls to the ground. In turn, Suad’s sacrifice is symbolically transferred to Mümtaz, who experiences a quasi-sacrificial scene of his own when the medicine bottles (representing scientific positivism) break in his hands, causing him to receive a stigmata of sorts. In short, Suad’s self-sacrifice is partially experienced by Mümtaz. In the final lines of the novel, the rise of fascism represented by Hitler’s invasion of Poland is layered with the doctor’s proclamation to a wounded Mümtaz: “You’re mine, all mine!” With this ending, Tanpınar’s argument for the possibility of terkip beyond the secular religion of Kemalism and devlet dominance is forestalled as the doctor’s voice of secularism merges with the voice announcing the aggression of the fascist state of Nazi Germany.

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Reflecting the unattainable ideal of terkip, Mümtaz is caught between what is secular and what is sacred. His palms bloodied in the stigmata scene he has reached a point of existential crisis that is a trope in Republican literature; one which also echoes the status of the historian Darvınog˘ lu at the beginning of The White Castle. If the existential crisis is a symptom of the secular modernity of the state, Tanpınar presents the reader with a syncretic literary modernity that begins to resolve that crisis in the face of the authority of devlet. Pamuk follows his mentor in grappling with the same overarching problematic: How does an author establish an aesthetic of literary modernity that has been prefigured and restricted by the authority of secular modernity? Pamuk further redefines the relationship between literary and secular modernities by reconfiguring narratives of din and devlet. For example, The White Castle functions to update Tanpınar’s literary modernity through metafiction that constructs a counter-narrative to the secular. This novel represents a terkip that is displaced in a historical space and time (to seventeenth-century Istanbul) far from the dominant historiography of the secular masterplot in the Republican present. Thus Pamuk relocates the cosmopolitanism of Istanbul to an early modern past secure from the authorizing discourses of secular national modernity. Tanpınar had a simple answer to the opposition between narratives of din and devlet: Use both in a syncretic way. His novels are early attempts at acknowledging and synchronizing these narratives. Not surprisingly, Tanpınar, from whom Pamuk appropriates the idea of hüzün and terkip, is the Istanbul author who has most influenced his work. Pamuk has further developed techniques of mixing genres, casting unrequited love as mystical romance, adopting Ottoman cultural forms, creating novels out of the memory of objects, writing aesthetic histories, recuperating the writer manqué, and inscribing Istanbul as a site of literary production. If Tanpınar’s novels open spaces of ambivalence toward secularism, Pamuk’s work opens spaces of secular absence, which then can be overwritten in the revision of literary modernity.

The Counter-Archive of Istanbul If the first dissident mode of Pamuk’s literary modernity is historiographic and steeped in devlet, the second mode is archival, and signifies a literary revision of secular modernity through a rejection of the authority of Republican historiography. In this understanding, the space of the Ottoman archive is in effect a subversive “counter-archive” to official Republican discourse. The change in Pamuk’s work beginning with The White Castle is reflected in its form, a form that becomes increasingly more intertextual, multiperspectival, metafictional, metahistorical, and satiric. Pamuk puts the Turkish literary text itself into the Ottoman “archive.” In turn, the archive becomes a new model of fictional form. As stated above, the historian is traditionally imbued with authorial power in Republican narratives. Pamuk’s fiction argues and demonstrates that secular control of the historical narrative

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is lost in the disorienting cultural space of the archive. Darvınog˘ lu states in his “Preface” that he has translated a historical text for his present-day, post1980 coup readership. However, he has long since given up the archival work of a historian, which he describes as his “crisis of faith” in the discipline. He has turned away from history proper and is instead translating/writing a quasi-mystical tract with overtones of din. This text, emerging from the Ottoman archive, qualifies the secularization thesis backed by state power and enforced most recently by the 1980 coup that has relegated Darvınog˘ lu to an archive, which is also something of a prison. As Cervantes states in the epigraph that begins this chapter, as an author, he feels like the stepfather of a “child” (or novel) that was engendered in prison. The title of the manuscript, “The Quiltmaker’s Stepson,” can now be clarified. Pamuk’s figurative emphasis is on the text (or “stepson”) rather than the author (or “stepfather”). Figuratively, the “quiltmaker” thus signifies a “writer of texts” who relies on pastiche and juxtaposition. By extension, Darvınog˘ lu is something of a modern-day Cervantes, engendering his stepson in the confines of an archive. Pamuk’s reimagining of the Ottoman legacy, his return to Islamic cosmopolitanism, Sufism, and the archive, results in a transformation of Turkish literary modernity. The political aspect of this “deformation” of the secular historiographic tradition should now be clear. Documents like Darvınog˘ lu’s story (which we are told are often confused as Qur’ans, or sacred texts) that emerge from the archive are a threat to discourses of national-secular identity. It is not coincidental that the Ottoman archives were in fact closed to scholars for decades, as they were spaces of potential subversions of national identity and insults to Turkishness. Against the backdrop of secular modernization, Pamuk inscribes an alternative modernity, subversive for what it exposes and certain to cast him as a traitor against received narrations of the nation. The White Castle is a parable about textual creation and authorship beyond the nation. Additionally, the form of The White Castle, with an absent and sacred text at its center, will become a formal innovation that Pamuk relies upon again and again.43 In this case, the absence in Pamuk’s fiction serves to introduce tropes of sacredness. It is not just an Ottoman manuscript that emerges from the archive, it is also an absent text, one that becomes sacralized in the recuperation of the ellisions of the cultural revolution. This absence opens the possibility for a new terkip, a literary modernity that reintroduces the din of the Sufi tale of conversion to the secular authority of devlet. Such a reintroduction gives expression to what might be termed “secular Sufism.” Secular Sufism is a literary theme that has been in latent evidence since the beginning of the Republican era (see Chapter 6), one that establishes a dominant relation between din and devlet. Pamuk’s novelistic argument, a political one of dissent, is clearly observable in the tropes of archive, conversion, and absent/sacred text that appear in The White Castle. Ottoman material culture, in the form of the archival manuscript, begins to reshape the Republican novel itself in The White Castle and continues to

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stand in as a medieval model of form in My Name is Red. We have traced how the early modern Ottoman text can be the template for the modern novel. At the end of The White Castle, we are presented with an indeterminate signifier: “Him.” The narrative and cultural space – the absent text – that this pronoun opens is provocative. It is the space of an indeterminate Other (either master or slave) and it is also given a mystified, mystical or sacred meaning. The emptiness here is the absent presence of a variety of din: an interventional and political force of literature that inflects the secular modern and offers the possibility of redemption denied to Republican characters of Turkish literary modernity such as Darvınog˘ lu, Suad, Selim Is¸ık (in Og˘uz Atay’s Misfits), Zebercet (in Yusuf Atılgan’s Motherland Hotel), Aysel (in Adalet Ag˘ aog˘ lu’s Lying Down to Die), and others faced with self-destruction or suicide. What Pamuk forecasts in his novel is nothing more than the bankruptcy of the secularizing project and the beginning of an era of postsecular literature.

Conclusion: Postsecularism Reading Pamuk together with his literary mentor, Tanpınar, reveals a number of insights germane to this study. The novels under consideration in this chapter are set in historical moments that witness a rise in secular state authority: the Kemalist monoparty era in A Mind at Peace and the 1980 coup in The White Castle, respectively. Both authors contrast the nationalism represented in these historical periods with a subversive articulation of Istanbul cosmopolitanism. Tanpınar himself identifies the city as a protagonist, something Pamuk will do later in The Black Book. Istanbul functions as an archive in A Mind at Peace, a city that is personified in the novel as being neglected and afflicted. Nevertheless, it dramatizes an immediate connection to the past and is the site of a mystical romance nurtured by the history, myth, and sites of the former Ottoman capital. In A Mind at Peace, Tanpınar begins a redefinintion of “Turkishness” that transcends the confines of revolutionary secularism. For Pamuk in The White Castle, the imperial city is accessed through a similarly neglected archive, one that is, however, textual. His Istanbul re-emerges as a seventeenth-century historical artifact that reorients the city in the modern national imaginary. Pamuk’s Istanbul is the site of a homoerotic mystical romance between a “European” and a “Turk.” For both authors, Istanbul represents the possibility of a transnational literary modernity beyond Turkish secularism. Pamuk’s revision is more thoroughgoing as it identifies the legitimation crisis of late Kemalism and foresees the end of secular dominance. In this understanding, both novels can be better understood as contributing to the construction of a new postsecular literary modernity. In the Turkish context, for obvious reasons, postsecular fiction is a politicized aesthetic form. In Partial Faiths, John McClure describes postsecular fiction as exhibiting definable attributes including what he terms “partial conversion”:

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Certain features are constant across the field of postsecular texts. The partial conversions of postsecular fiction do not deliver those who experience them from worldliness into well-ordered systems of religious belief. Instead, they tend to strand those who experience them in the ideologically mixed and confusing middle zones of the conventional conversion narrative. … And yet the postsecular characters deposited in these zones do not seem particularly uncomfortable there nor particularly impatient to move on to some more fully elaborated form of belief and practice. … Postsecular narratives affirm the urgent need for a turn toward the religious even as they reject … the familiar dream of full return to an authoritative faith. … Instead, they lead into zones where characters must learn to reconcile important secular and religious intuitions. (McClure 2007: 4, 6) Though McClure focuses on the literature of writers like Pynchon, DeLillo, Morrison, and Ondaatje, postsecular fiction and the trope of “partial conversion” applies squarely to the novels of Tanpınar and Pamuk. Both Mümtaz and the master/slave are tempted by conversion into monolithic communities from the secular nation to Islam respectively. However, their experiences remain incomplete and partial. Mümtaz cannot fully adopt secular national modernity at the expense of Istanbul cosmopolitanism, and the narrator of The White Castle cannot adopt a singular “self” to the exclusion of a denigrated “other.” These are characters that occupy an indeterminate, ambivalent, and mystified narrative point of view. As the Turkish context reveals, the significance of the partial conversions of postsecularism rest in the fact that they are secular and sacred both. Tanpınar is a modernist author whose novels refuse to abandon Istanbul cosmopolitanism in a nationalizing era of anti-cosmopolitanism. Pamuk is a postmodernist author whose novels refuse to do the same. The theme of city vs. nation constitutes one of the major conflicts of both of their postsecularist fictions. If Republican historiography constitutes an epistemological archive of secular modernity, Istanbul harbors a counter-archive of Muslim cosmopolitanism. For both authors, Istanbul is a vital literary and cultural source and a counter-archive of the Ottoman Islamic past. In this conceptualization, the city becomes an unequivocal space of postsecularism in an era of secular modernity.44 Whereas Tanpınar tries, with open ambivalence, to assimilate Istanbul into the national master narrative, Pamuk’s historical novels treat Istanbul as a space of alterity with respect to the Republican secular masterplot. In their novelizations of the city and use of Ottomanesque prose, both authors make an open political statement against internalized orientalist Republican discourses of nationalization. Thus, Darvınog˘ lu, as a representative of Republican secularism, challenges the Republican orientalization of Istanbul as a pre-modern, backward, and Islamic city that (after the military defeat and

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territorial occupations and partitions in the wake of World War I) can no longer represent the nation. He engages in an act of de-orientalizing Ottoman Istanbul by translating and publishing the manuscript he finds in the archive. Pamuk, in this early novel, forecasts the return of Istanbul cosmopolitanism to the cultural stage – a return we witness in full force decades later and which vindicates his early literary reimagining of the Ottoman legacy. After The White Castle, Pamuk develops as a litterateur in two directions at once: as an experimental technician of narrative form and as a psychohistorical anthropologist of national culture and subjectivity. It is in no small part his narrative interrogation of din and devlet that ensures his on-going translatability. His next two novels, The Black Book and The New Life, respectively, make use of doubles, figurations of authors and readers, national historiography, neo-Sufi themes, conspiracy, and “Eastern” and “Western” traditions in revising Turkish literary modernity. Not until Pamuk’s second Ottoman novel, My Name is Red, however, does he introduce yet another innovation: text/image border crossings between forms of the novel and Ottoman Islamic art found in illuminated manuscripts.

4

Reimagining the Ottoman Legacy

Nûn [‫–]ﻥ‬By the pen and what they write. (Koran “The Pen” (Al-Qalam) Sura 68:1)

Türkiye devletinin dini, din-i I_slamdır. (“The religion of the Turkish state is the religion of Islam.”) (Republic of Turkey Constitution 1924: Article 2) Everything rested in the story [“hikâye”] that no one understood. (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 93)1

In both of Pamuk’s Ottoman novels, archival manuscripts become the basis for innovation in the modern Turkish novel. Similar to the function of the Ottoman archive in The White Castle, the Ottoman artists’ workshop and miniaturists’ studios in My Name is Red become the setting for the development of Pamuk’s recurring theme of textual production and authorship. Such intertextual and intertemporal spaces enable Pamuk’s innovations in Turkish literary modernity. Through the focus on a dissident “archival mode” of writing in The White Castle and My Name is Red, Pamuk develops sites of literary authority based in Islamic tradition and Ottoman history that supersede the limits of Republican state authority.

Orientalizing the Ottoman Legacy An Ottoman archive construed as “pre-modern” by Republican historiography provides the context from which Pamuk’s fiction overcomes the orientalist legacy of Turkish modernity. The White Castle is among other things a political subversion of the captive’s tale, a genre that reifies the “self” and “other” binary, constructing the figure of an orientalized “Turk” meant to denigrate Islam. The novel subtly argues that the inverse of this process is at work in Republican secular modernity, which constructs the figure of a nationalized “Turk” meant to civilize Muslims. The attempt to construct national authenticity is complicit with the orientalist thought that instrumentalizes

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“Turkishness.” The result is the establishment of an orientalist-national paradigm based on the same underlying binary power relations. By conflating these two dominant images of the “terrible” and the “terrific” Turk, Pamuk identifies constructions of “Turkishness” as being contingent on contexts of din, devlet, or both. His novels, striving to transcend both poles, represent a dissident literary modernity freed from its early modern (Islamic) and modernist (secular) confines; that is, one that is no longer a symptom of orientalism or nationalism. As such, Pamuk’s Ottoman novels are complicit in engaging orientalist tropes; however, they do not qualify as examples of orientalism per se due to the fact that they deconstruct its binary logic. In other words, his fiction works within the structures that they ultimately subvert. This paradox is central to his work. By representing Ottoman Islam, he reifies orientalist categories in the process of de-orientalizing representations of Islam, Istanbul, and the Ottoman legacy denigrated by official state discourse. Because Pamuk reintroduces urban Ottoman Islamic forms into the Republican novel, his work is sometimes misread as being retrograde, regressive, or even orientalist by critics in Turkey. Pamuk’s texts are dependent on the Turkish novel tradition yet undermine their own “Turkishness” by displacing it from essentialized contexts of din and devlet. Further examining Pamuk’s transgressions shows that the introduction of Ottoman material culture becomes subversive in the Republican present. By conjuring an alternative Ottoman Islamic past to inflect the discourses of secularism, Pamuk politicizes Turkish literary modernity in a sustained challenge to Republican nationalism. This process revises the received binary opposition of Ottoman tradition and Republican modernity, in which the former is orientalized and denigrated to allow for the emergence of the secular modern. It is through this process that we can begin to trace Pamuk’s fixation with the Ottoman legacy. His novels argue that achieving an aesthetic of postorientalism demands both an engagement with orientalism and de-orientalizing transgressions. It is, in short, a literary position of dissent and compromise. The Ottoman Decline Paradigm In an attempt to counter the negativity of the Ottoman legacy as decline and despotism, historians in the field of Ottoman Studies have been engaged in various revisions.2 This has led to a modification of what has come to be known as the problematic “decline paradigm.” The decline paradigm is an orientalist-nationalist historical perspective that constructs a steady and unwavering three-century imperial decline from the end of Süleyman’s reign (1566) to the establishment of the Republic (1923). Both Islamic autocratic rule and secular modernization are implicated in the paradigm, which broadly supports the argument that decline necessitates either authoritarian implementation of the Islamic state or the secularization thesis.3 As stated earlier, Pamuk’s references to the historiographic framing of the “decline

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paradigm” are indicative of a modern secular authorial position, one which emphasizes the Ottoman past as an icon of Islamic decline. By asserting the existence of an early modern Ottoman era, scholars have questioned decline as the dominant historiographic framing for understanding the empire (Kafadar 1997–8; Quataert 2003; Faroqhi 2005; Sajdi 2008). Pamuk, in his own way, provides a literary revision of dominant Empire-toRepublic historiography. However, he does not completely abandon the Ottoman decline paradigm, which reveals his adherence to a legacy of Republican modernity. Both of Pamuk’s Ottoman novels accept the decline paradigm. This conflicts with his otherwise intense intertextual revision of the Republic’s outright dismissal of the Ottoman past and its Muslim cosmopolitanism. As stated above, this constitutes another instance where Pamuk maintains a tie to secular modernization while inscribing challenges to that same ideological perspective. A comparison of two passages in The White Castle and My Name is Red will serve as an example. (The first was analyzed briefly in the last chapter.) Toward the end of The White Castle, the narrator of the captive’s tale states: Did we [master and slave] understand ruin to be the loss of the nations under the [Ottoman] empire one-by-one? … Or did ruin mean the transformation of people and beliefs without their knowledge? … Maybe ruin meant witnessing the superiority of others and then trying to mimic them. … [Maybe it was] war after war that ended in nothing but defeat. (Pamuk 1995c [1985]: 122) The consciousness of decline expressed in this quote is anachronistic for the seventeenth-century which witnessed the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. It is part of an orientalist-nationalist historiographic vision that has been projected back into time by the author. The anachronistic consciousness of decline is also woven into the narrative of My Name is Red through the metaphor of the changing sensibilities of an Islamic art form that is finally abandoned completely. Master Osman’s lament at the end of the novel, the anxiety and lament of obscurity, echoes a well-known Ottoman legacy of decline: Hundreds of years hence, men looking at our world through the illustrations we’ve made won’t understand anything. Desiring to take a closer look, yet lacking the patience, they might feel the embarrassment, the joy, the deep pain and pleasure of observation I now feel as I examine pictures in this freezing Treasury – but they’ll never truly know. (Pamuk 2002: 315) These depictions of decline enable the possibility of two authoritarian reactions: the imposition of more orthodox Islamic rule (which happens at the end of My Name is Red, when Ahmed I takes the throne) or the forced

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implementation of secular modernity (which The White Castle alludes to). In the face of these political obstacles, Pamuk develops characters that champion painting in the first novel and forms of writing in the second, art forms that excavate traditions of din. A subtext of the novels is thus the critique of the authority of din or devlet from the perspective of artistic freedom. Generally, Pamuk argues for the possibility of redefinitions of literary modernity in the face of authoritarian impositions. Nevertheless, the restriction of those freedoms and the lament and melancholy (hüzün) of Ottoman cultural loss and illegibility permeate both novels. Pamuk’s approach to new formal innovations in literature begins with the historian’s dilemma of the Ottoman legacy and reimagines it to conceive of, excavate, and describe an alternative modernity in Republican historiography and literature. In The White Castle Pamuk’s vehicle for the transformation of Republican literary modernity brings together tropes of the Ottoman archive and conversion to re-sacralize Turkish writing. In My Name is Red an early modern cosmopolitan Istanbul inflects the impoverished narratives of the secularization thesis with tropes of din.

The Writer Manqué and the Writing-Subject The White Castle and My Name is Red focus on dilemmas of textual production and authorship as agency. The White Castle begins with a Republican historian in a “forgotten” Ottoman archive. Though he is a historian by discipline, Darvınog˘ lu is also the figure of a writer manqué, a dominant Turkish trope (Parla 2011). The White Castle is a novel of repeated scenes of writing and rewriting that leads to treatises and textual production. Indeed, the novel traces the painstaking birth of a narrator, or “writing-subject” (a presence indicated passively through the referent “Him”), whose authority transgresses and merges the identities of the two main characters. Pamuk’s novel is thus a recapitulation of a dominant trope in Turkish literary modernity as well as a revision of that trope. The narrator succeeds in writing a complete text, thus replacing the writer manqué with the writing-subject (though the text remains unpublished for two centuries). Pamuk’s fiction performs repeated exorcisms of the spirit of the writer manqué. The author-figure “Orhan” makes passing cameo appearances in the first two novels as an aspiring novelist. Afterward, his novels trace the emergence first of an unnamed dissident voice, or narrator (as in The White Castle), and then, over the course of four novels, of an authorial figure of dissident agency (as in Snow). In The Black Book, the writing-subject appears tentatively as an unnamed surrogate, ghost writer for a journalist. (The New Life focuses on the reader “converted” by a book rather than on the author.) In My Name is Red, this figure, now explicitly named “Orhan,” is represented as a child (who grows up to write the novel). In Snow, “Orhan” is incarnated as a famous author. In The Museum of Innocence, the writing-subject “Orhan Pamuk” is a famous author who is commissioned by the protagonist to write

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his novel. In tracing the rise of the writing-subject, Pamuk is also recording a political change in power relations between author and state; in other words, his eight novels chronicle an ironically modernist epic of the incarnation of the dissident author liberated from confinements of orientalism, nationalism, and modernity. This is nothing if not an account of redemption and a political story of deliverance. In both of Pamuk’s Ottoman novels, it is the writers’ dependency on the state (in the form of the sultan’s patronage) that either enables or denies the possibility of authorship. Each time Hoja and slave are able to convince the sultan of the worthiness of a project, they are able to continue their intellectual pursuits. They mostly end in failure and defeat. However, it is only the character that returns to Venice who is able to become a published author of some renown for books such as A Turk of My Acquaintance. The one who stays behind secretly becomes an author, who remains unpublished. Likewise, in My Name is Red, Enishte Effendi is able to pursue his book through the sultan’s patronage. It is the state that determines the possibility of these books. Black (the writer manqué) fails to complete the book. It is only little Orhan who later does so. The author, in Pamuk’s world, stifled and frustrated in secular modern contexts (they include an impressive genealogy of full or partial writer manqués including Cevdet Bey, Refik, Muhittin, Darvınog˘ lu, Galip, and Ka) finds the possibility of his birth in Ottoman contexts as revealed by the narrator of The White Castle and “Orhan” in My Name is Red. He then reappears in secular modern contexts as a famous author: the “Orhan Pamuk” of Snow and The Museum of Innocence. Despite Pamuk’s metafictional techniques, the reification of the author is an ironic development that recuperates aspects of a deconstructed Republican modernity. Pamuk’s author-figures are secular subjects who are compromised, and even suspect, in their simultaneous critique and construction of secular modernity. Pamuk pairs representations of the writing-subject with themes of manuscript production. These themes are repeated and further developed in My Name is Red through a focus on the art of the book, which conflates the aesthetics of text and illumination. In the classical Ottoman book-arts workshop, artists produced books of various genres devoted to theology, science, literature, and history (Atıl 1980).4 In his development of the novel from The White Castle to My Name is Red, Pamuk expands contexts of draft, writing, and rewriting by incorporating a visual realm of illustration and illumination. In The White Castle, the focus is on a first-person manuscript (“The Quilter’s Stepson”), the details of which constitute the novel’s plot; here, the writingsubject emerges as an ambiguous, doubled, and even mystical/Sufi, figure. In My Name is Red, one final incomplete manuscript is the focus, the account of whose production is told by the author-figure, “Orhan.” This symbolic “secret book” is meant to commemorate the first Islamic millennium and to represent the power of the House of Ottoman to Venice in a European pictorial idiom. The book fails, a metonym for an Ottoman legacy of decline, and

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functions as an absent text that the writing-subject overwrites in Pamuk’s reconstruction of Turkish literary modernity.

The Art of the Book as Blasphemy: My Name Is Red (1998) Pamuk’s Ottoman novels fundamentally reorient Turkish literary modernity by reimagining the Ottoman legacy. The White Castle is a novel concerned with textual production based in an early modern context peripheral to the Enlightenment. In the novel, the scientific experiments and treatises that preoccupy master and slave are alluded to as being blasphemous from the perspective of Orthodox Islam. My Name is Red, set in an early modern context peripheral to the Renaissance, is concerned with image and textual production that is deemed blasphemous from the same Islamic perspective. (These perspectives are inversions of the secular authority that dominates in the Republican present.) In this novel, both the thrill of artistic transgression and the potential consequences of blasphemy through artistic representation drive the plot. The White Castle and My Name is Red each allude to the cultural influence of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance on Ottoman Islam, respectively. These early modern Ottoman contexts, denied by Republican modernity, serve to question and qualify the dominance of the secularization thesis. The theme of blasphemy in Pamuk’s Ottoman novels parallels his own literary transgressions of the sacredness of the secular modern. Pamuk’s blasphemies, in recuperating narratives based in Ottoman material culture, target the authorizing discourses of secularism. My Name is Red captures the texture of a medieval compendium that crosses multiple genres from autobiography to murder-mystery and from love story to historical novel. With the English publication of My Name is Red in 2001, Pamuk’s name began to be mentioned in print in conjunction with the Nobel Prize for the first time.5 The importance of the novel to Pamuk’s oeuvre and his place in world literature is attested to by its winning of the International IMPAC Dublin literary award in 2003, and more recently, its selection as part of the Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics series in 2010.6 For the first time, Pamuk was being read widely as a global author whose international readership exceeded his Turkish national audience. Professor of Comparative Literature Azade Seyhan states: My Name is Red is arguably the novel that made Pamuk a household name among literature professors and literary critics in the United States. Shortly after its release in English translation, it received rave reviews. In addition, it began appearing on the syllabi of college courses and among the recommended-books lists of prominent writers. (Seyhan 2008: 185) My Name is Red is the first Pamuk novel to incorporate all of the narrative strategies used in previous novels, such as multiperspectivalism, doubles,

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synchronic narration, the absent text, intertextuality, metafiction, metahistory, multiple genres, and Sufi and Ottoman themes. Structurally, it is his most complex novel and the first to incorporate all four of Pamuk’s dissident modes of writing: historiographic, archival, parodic, and secular-sacred. In terms of form, My Name is Red recapitulates Pamuk’s development of literary modernity. It includes the historical aspect and autobiographical familial descriptions of Cevdet Bey and Sons, reintroduces the multiple first-person narrator structure of The Silent House, maintains the Ottoman/Republican allegory of identity in The White Castle, incorporates the detective story framing and Istanbul cultural history of The Black Book, and revises the Sufi quest of unrequited love in The New Life in favor of reunion. It is the first of Pamuk’s novels to consciously evoke the Ottoman past and Qur’anic tradition together, and appeared a week before the attacks of 9/11, after which texts that addressed Islam became valuable as insights into what was portrayed as an inscrutable religion and culture.7 My Name is Red not only redefined the Turkish novel; at the same time it became a milestone of world literature. Artists and the Islamosecular State At the height of the Ottoman classical age, political power was expressed in the formula din ü devlet. The dual formula had its corollary in law, where secular law (kanun) and religious law (s¸eriat) coexisted. Politically and legally, the empire was what might be termed an Islamosecular state. In My Name is Red, a guild of miniaturists must grapple with the strictures of religious and secular authority. The Ottoman Sultan (Murad III) commissions a secret manuscript to celebrate the glories of the Empire in the first Islamic millennium, the one-thousandth anniversary of the Hegira. The Sultan maintains the secrecy of the book project because it threatens Islamic orthodoxy through potentially sacrilegious figural representations. He orders the book’s images to be rendered in Renaissance styles of perspective and portraiture under the guidance of art aficionado, Enishte Effendi. Although the book has the patronage of the Sultan himself, an orthodox cleric, Imam Nusret Hoja, targets the book for destruction on the grounds of blasphemy. This blasphemy is described through the following details: In [the book’s last] picture, objects weren’t depicted according to their importance in Allah’s mind, but as they appeared to the naked eye – the way the Franks painted. This was the first transgression. The second was depicting Our Sultan, the Caliph of Islam, the same size as a dog. The third transgression also involved rendering Satan the same size, and in an endearing light. But what surpassed them all … was drawing Our Sultan’s picture as large as life and his face in all its detail! Just like the idolators do. … Or just like the “portraits” that Christians, who couldn’t

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When first one of the artists, a guilder, and then Enishte Effendi himself is murdered, the book triggers an investigation that fragments the narrative into the multiple genres of a murder-mystery, a philosophical treatise on Islamic book arts, a romance, an autobiography, and an allegorical tale of modern Turkey. Meanwhile, the search for the culprit continues in earnest through detective-work based on clues hidden in illuminations that requires the expertise of Master Osman and access to the imperial Ottoman treasury. The characters must negotiate the contradictions posed by two poles of authority – secular devlet and religious din – in order to discover the murderer’s identity and complete the production of the book – which remains unfinished. As with The White Castle, one of the subtle narrative innovations of My Name is Red is that it manipulates the discourses of European and internalized Republican orientalism to explode the limits of Turkish secular modernity. Orders of Time and Intertemporality Pamuk’s literary reimagining of the Ottoman legacy is based on novels set in early modern cosmopolitan Istanbul contexts that address the process of textual production. Forms of cultural history, emerging out of the Ottoman “archive,” become a commentary on, and the basis for, reconfiguring literary modernity and critiquing the secular modern. In My Name is Red, Pamuk’s novelization of miniature illumination transforms this pictorial medium into an intertextual model of literary form. This new form is constructed from mixed genres including autobiography, mystic romance, Qur’anic-style parables, philosophy of Islamic text and image, murder-mystery, and allegories of the modern Middle Eastern nation-state. The conflation of text and image runs throughout the novel. Themes such as “style,” “signature,” and “time” recur as the representational perspective vacillates between the profane first-person everyday and the sacred omniscience of the divine. The tension between the sacred and the profane is reflected in the allusion to two texts that are described as being “beyond depiction” (Pamuk 2002: 7); namely, the sacred word of the Qur’an and the secular text of Pamuk’s novel. The literary text is thus conflated with a sacred one. To reinforce the innovative aspect of this secular-sacred form, Pamuk delineates an absent text (the “secret book”) in the plot that in turn becomes the vehicle for formal experimentation. My Name is Red entwines pre-modern and modern, secular and sacred, and image and text. As such, Pamuk conceives of the absent text as a narrative space of potential transformation in literary modernity that is both a plot element and a structural aspect of the novel itself.

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Pamuk questions the Republican conviction that “Ottoman” is simply a signifier for the pre-modern by revising the denigrated Ottoman cultural context as being an early modern cosmopolitan one.8 In My Name is Red, the Ottoman cultural archive is a source of literary reimagination that becomes a commentary on the modern present. To emphasize this synchronic aspect of My Name is Red, Pamuk uses two narrative devices: (1) he makes his sixteenth-century characters conscious of the present-day reader or observer; and (2) he situates contemporary autobiographical elements into the Ottoman historical novel. Take, for example, the self-description of Shekure (Pamuk’s own mother’s name) early in the novel: “with one eye on the life within the book and one eye on the life outside, I, too, long to speak with you who are observing me from who knows which distant time and place” (Pamuk 2002: 43).9 The novel is told by multiple first-person narrators who are conscious of themselves as well as the reader/observer. The literary inversion of premodern and modern periods produces a synchronic (and ironic) effect that argues for a revaluation of secular values. The narration of the miniaturist-turned-murderer reinforces the same dual relation of orders of time: One side of the warriors, lovers, princes and legendary heroes that I’ve illustrated tens of thousands of times faces whatever is depicted there, in that mythical time – the enemies they’re battling for example, or the dragons they’re slaying, or the beautiful maidens over whom they weep. But another aspect, and another side of their bodies, faces the book-lover who happens to be gazing at the magnificent painting. (Pamuk 2002: 98) Here, the past (whether mythic or historic) is described as perpetually intersecting with the time of the reader to produce a synchronic effect. In other chapters, the reader is addressed directly (particularly in the “I am Esther” and “I Will be Called a Murderer” chapters), foregrounding Pamuk’s focus on the reader’s integral role in constructing his fiction.10 The depictions in the plot, like the miniatures themselves, mediate between the Ottoman past and the modern present. Such mediation becomes the basis for Pamuk’s literary reimagining of the Ottoman legacy and of the Republican state project that delimited and dismissed its influence. In establishing this intertemporal relation, I argue that Pamuk revises the Empire-to-Republic historiographic mode analyzed in Chapter 2 in favor of a layered and synchronic (archival or intertextual), rather than linear and diachronic, narrative structure. When combined with his dissident writing, Pamuk’s technique of using cultural history (in this case, book arts) in the reformulation of modern literature defines a politics of form. As a result, My Name is Red writes against the dominant secular discourse of the Ottoman legacy as pre-modern and “backward.”11 Instead, Pamuk attempts to recoup an early modern Ottoman cosmopolitanism. From the Republican perspective, the Ottoman legacy is cast as a blank space by the obfuscating policies of the cultural revolution, over which

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formations of the secular modern are inscribed. Pamuk’s reformulation of narrative through the “Ottoman archive” thus becomes the basis for a transformation in literary modernity and a political critique of secular modernity. In My Name is Red, characters are on the threshold of two worlds represented by two distinct historical periods: their own Ottoman Islamic era and the reader’s modernity. Each character is furthermore depicted as being part of an ordered world represented in art by the perspective of the divine (Allah’s perspective and memory), but is also a first-person voice in a manuscript “beyond depiction” (the novel we read). Pamuk melds the omniscient divine perspective (conveyed by discussions on image and perspectivalism) with the profane everyday of individual characters (represented by first-person narration). The disruption of the traditional representational hierarchy, between what is known as the “two pens” of sacred calligraphy (because it conveys the word of God) and profane illumination (because it competes with divine creation), occurs through the unfinished “secret book.” The secret book is blasphemous because of its form, in which, for the first time profane illustration supersedes the sacredness of the text. The failed attempt at the representation of Ottoman material worldly power and authority echoes the Decline Paradigm and foreshadows the eventual encroachment of secular modernity; however, Pamuk overwrites the privileged position of the secular modern.12 He tells the story of a half-born and forestalled textual “modernization,” in the process producing a literary text constituted by both secular and sacred elements.13 In short, I argue that the intertemporality in My Name is Red updates understandings of Ottoman Islamic tradition rather than dismissing them as being pre-modern. Pamuk, in effect, inverts the secular Empire-to-Republic trope, perpetually reintroducing Ottoman cultural history and Islam to the reader and into the Republican present. In My Name is Red, obviously, tradition is represented by manuscript illumination and production. Like Enishte Effendi, whose blasphemous “secret book” questions accepted Islamic cosmography by separating the image from the text and allowing the illustration to stand on its own, Pamuk also performs his own transgressions by (re)textualizing, or novelizing, the image and making this traditional (archival) form the model for the modern novel. These narrative transgressions are blasphemous with respect to forms of secular modernity. Reconfigurations of the established hierarchy of text and image result in challenges to religious, traditional, or Ottoman state authority. This transgression is reflected in the violence of the plot, where the motive for murder is in fact changes to traditional orders of time represented by the “secret book” – changes that stand for epistemic violence toward Ottoman Islamic cosmography.14 The Theory of the Two Pens: Image/Text Intertextuality The Encyclopedia of Islam states, “According to the traditions quoted by al-t.abarı(Tafsı-r, Bu-la-k. 1323–30, xxix, 107) the k.alam [pen] was the first thing created

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by God so that He could write down events to come” (Huart 2012). Another way to conceptualize the vacillation, as I have been arguing, between contexts of din and devlet in My Name is Red, is through reference to the so-called “theory of the two pens” or qalams (Porter 2000). The first “pen,” the more sacred of the two and closer to din, is text-based writing or calligraphy. Qalam signifies the “reed pen” and calligraphers were esteemed artists for they wrote the sacred words of the Qur’an. Illuminators, however, were not looked upon so positively since they could depict and thus create human figures, challenging the creative authority of Allah as Al-Ha-liq, the Creator. This negative perception ˘ was countered by describing the painter’s brush as a second qalam, on a par with that of the calligrapher’s pen. The second “pen” is the brush of illumination. The two qalams (or text and image) worked together in the bookmaking workshops of classical Ottoman Istanbul where calligraphers and painters collaborated to produce a treasury of illustrated manuscripts. In the theory of the two qalams, the pen had a dual force in that it could inscribe texts (specifically the holy word) as well as represent images through illumination (Porter 2000). With respect to Pamuk, and in the perspective of contemporary fiction, it bears emphasis that such image/text hybridity is a literary device common to contemporary metafiction (Hutcheon 1990). Pamuk makes innovative literary use of both “pens” as they correlate to sacred and secular contexts.15 In My Name is Red, Pamuk first posits an inversion of the established hierarchy of the two pens (through the “secret book”). He cleverly appropriates both and establishes a new hierarchy between them through the authority of his own novelization. Pamuk’s writing arguably constitutes a “third pen.” In other words, the “third pen” represented by Pamuk’s writingsubject (the author-figure “Orhan”) is prefigured by the other two. Pamuk’s third pen is one of personal and political redemption before the authority of Republican secular modernity. As such, the third pen maintains the sacred essence first attributed to the qalam in Islam. The epigraph from the Al-Qalam surah that begins this chapter alludes to this sacredness. The sacredness of the pen, as it conveys the word of God, is transferred to Pamuk’s own secular novel writing. If the divinity of the word is conveyed by the pen, Pamuk both sacralizes the secular act of writing (by relating it to a divine origin) as well as demystifies the divinity of the word (by revealing its materiality based in paper, ink, and scribe). What emerges is a double blasphemy: one against the orthodoxies of secularism and devlet and the other against the orthodoxies of sacredness and din. Writing, as Pamuk’s author-figure in The Black Book avows, is the “sole consolation” because of its secular-sacred authority. Writing affords a means of secular resistance (or blasphemy) that is ironically redemptive in the godless worldview of the state. This is a clue to understanding Pamuk’s overall project: to establish an intersection of secular and sacred tropes through acts of transgressive or dissident writing. What emerges in My Name is Red is the intertextuality of text and image as the foundation for innovations in literary modernity.

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My Name is Red is the only Pamuk novel to begin with epitaphs (three) from the Qur’an. As a literary device, Qur’anic allusions in the novel articulate a discursive field characterized by injunctions of Orthodox Islam. Against this backdrop, he introduces the process of Ottoman aesthetic production through the art of the book. Not only is the art of the Ottoman book revealed as an artifact of cultural history forgotten in the “archive” and elided by European and Republican modernity, it also serves as a metaphor for novel writing, a parallel, but no less important, literary art of the book. Through this doubled thematic structure, Pamuk is able to engage overarching matters of textual production and the possibility of redemptive authorship – two dominant tropes in his work. From the first chapter, My Name is Red places the reader in a framework of Islamic cosmography and eschatology. The novel’s opening scene establishes the circumscription of the representative force of illustration and the plot-driving tension between the two pens (sacred text and profane image). Furthermore, the murderer is an illustrator, and his victim, a guilder, calligrapher, and artisan of traditional forms of decorative arts. The first-person narrator, Elegant Effendi, representing an orthodox “first pen,” speaks from the afterlife, warning of a threat to the Muslim faith by way of changes in representation contained in a “secret book” meant to celebrate the first Islamic millennium.16 The secret book manifests the blasphemous inversion of the two pens and is meant to contain the sacrilegious portrait of the Ottoman Sultan, the shadow of God on Earth, as part of its central two-page image.17 The book is intended to convey the worldly power of the Ottoman Islamic state to Europe. Enishte Effendi explains: I wanted the things I depicted to represent Our Sultan’s entire world. … But unlike the Venetians, my work would not merely depict material objects, but naturally the inner riches, the joys and fears of the realm of which Our Sultan rules. … It was Our Sultan who ought to be thus portrayed! Our Sultan ought to be rendered along with everything He owned, with the things that represented and constituted his realm. … A manuscript could be illustrated according to this idea. (Pamuk 2002: 25–7) The innovative book project, which focuses on objects, figures, and portraits removed from and independent of a narrative, must remain secret due to its sacrilegious challenge to the traditions of the book, the hierarchy of the two pens, and Islam. In keeping with Pamuk’s trope and structural device of the absent text, the project remains incomplete and the scribe, Black, fails to write the book’s text. The absence and failure in authorship is overwritten by the “writing-subject,” an author-figure who appears in the novel (in this case “Orhan”). As a figure of redemption, the author-figure represents the possibility of literary agency and is a symbol of literary modernity that is present in all of Pamuk’s mature novels. The fixed identity, and persistence, of this

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realist and modernizing writing subject sits in direct contrast to Pamuk’s postmodern literary techniques, which by elevating text, intertext, and metatext, challenge that very authorial agency.18 This is a central unresolved conflict in Pamuk’s work. It is also the central tension between Republican secular modern and postmodern approaches to fiction. (In consideration of the contingencies of Turkish literature, I argue that this tension represents an aesthetic of “postorientalism.”) While Pamuk challenges the internalized orientalism of much of the Turkish secular modern worldview, he clings to the representation of the male author-intellectual as a figure of transformation and redemption – and as a legacy of the secular masterplot of the Turkish novel. The Republican intellectual-historian Darvınog˘ lu, whose main preoccupation is a dilemma of textual representation, disappears at the start of Pamuk’s third novel; however, his shadow or specter reappears as the narrator-author in the last chapter. Subsequently, the “author” reappears at the end of all other Pamuk novels, in effect replacing the writer manqué of his plots. Black (representing the scribal pen) is the “writer manqué” charged with writing the secret book, which he never does. This absence opens the possibility for narrative revisions in the retelling. As with other novels, Pamuk effectively overwrites the absent text of the plot with literary formations that are secular and sacred, and thus embody a double-blasphemy against the authority of din (in the Ottoman plot) and of devlet (in the Republican present). My Name is Red recuperates the theory of the two pens by containing both in the modern form of the novel. Furthermore, the novel revalues the subordinate role of the profane image, challenging its “dependence” on the sacred text of calligraphy. Pamuk inverts the traditional opposition of the “pens” by making (early modern Ottoman Islamic) images prefigure (Republican) textual narration and literary modernity such that literary modernity is guided by an ostensibly pre-modern aesthetic of illustration.19 Two fables in particular, related early in the novel, allude to the two pens and the inversion of the accepted hierarchy between them. These legitimize figural representation by linking illustration to divine contexts. The first fable, told by master miniaturist Stork, refers to the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 and Ibn Shakir, a calligrapher who undergoes a “conversion” to illustrator after witnessing the end of the Islamic caliphate: He thought about how all those volumes he’d transcribed in beautiful script … hadn’t in the least served to stop this horrifying massacre and devastation, and in turn, he swore never to write again. Furthermore, he was struck with the desire to express his pain and the disaster he’d witnessed through painting, which until that day he’d belittled and deemed an affront to Allah. … We owe the happy miracle of the three-hundredyear renaissance in Islamic illustration following the Mongol invasion to … the truly agonizing depiction of the world from an elevated Godlike perspective. … [Thus] the notion of timeless time that had rested in the

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Believing that violence and desecration could not be prevented by the written word, Ibn Shakir begins to represent the world visually, from the elevated Godlike perspective afforded by a minaret. This inversion of the two pens (echoed by the accounts of the storyteller, or meddah, which are based on giving voice to things) sets the foundation for the emergence of Pamuk’s own literary revision. This revision unites image and text in the manifestation of an authorial “third pen” of novel writing that reintroduces contexts of din while nevertheless profaning them. The second fable, told by Olive, describes illustration as a means of attaining the divine perspective of Allah. The old miniaturist in the fable states: Allah created this earthly realm so that, above all, it might be seen. Afterward, He provided us with words so we might share and discuss with one another what we’ve seen. We mistakenly assumed that these stories arose out of words and that illustrations were painted in service of these stories. Quite to the contrary, painting is the act of seeking out Allah’s memories and seeing the world as He sees the world. (Pamuk 2002: 79) Both fables invert the traditional hierarchy between the two pens. As an author, however, Pamuk all the while valorizes narrative and text as the preferred medium of his secular-sacred themes, tropes, and literary formations. Pamuk relies on both image and text to sacralize a novel form that is both pre-modern and modern. The resulting literary modernity appropriates contexts of Ottoman cultural history – such as miniatures – that redefine narrative form and disrupt the diachronic temporal logic of the secular modern. Other examples of the literary text overwriting image and thus rewriting traditional stories are reflected in the plot through Pamuk’s process of novelizing miniature depictions of traditional literary scenes. The opening chapters of My Name is Red are expositions linked to well-known Islamic miniatures from traditional stories that Pamuk overwrites in the plot. The illuminator’s murder of Elegant Effendi is described through the context of Shiruye’s murder of Hüsrev (from Nizami’s Hüsrev and Shirin). The context of Black seeing Shekure is described through Hüsrev visiting Shirin’s palace in the same account. Black’s declaration of love is echoed in the image of Shirin falling in love with Hüsrev after seeing his picture (with Black and Shekure in the place of lover and beloved).20 Pamuk revises these scenes by removing them from their traditional contexts and rewriting them in a process of image/ text intertextuality. This process occurs repeatedly in My Name is Red, as conquering rulers and sultans have themselves edited into the books of literature and history that filled the libraries of a defeated rival.21 Though

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depicted in the plot, the incorporation and revision of traditional aesthetic forms becomes a template for Pamuk’s literary innovation. The Meddah: Prefiguring Parody The storytelling meddah’s accounts, punctuating the novel’s plot, maintain the thematic inversion of the two “pens” of text and image while manifesting an innovative third perspective, that of parodic narration. Rather than constituting part of an existing story, the vignettes by the meddah are narrated from the perspective of objects, animals, and stock figures. Turkish literature scholar Talat Halman describes the traditional vocation of the meddah as follows: Using secular topics and tales, the Meddahs, became storytellers with their repertoire concentrating on heroic deeds, daily life of their regions and communities, gnomic tales, and exhortations. Gradually satire started to form the core of their programs: humorous anecdotes about human foibles, impersonations of stock types as well as familiar individuals, mockery of social mores, and guarded or open stabs at people in high office, including sometimes the sultan. (Halman 2007: 110) In My Name is Red, the storyteller functions as an authorial figure who relies on parody as a mode of dissent. First, he consistently satirizes the figure of Orthodox Islamic authority, Nusret Hoja. Here, Pamuk situates the satiric mode of his fiction, which first appears in The Silent House and The Black Book, in the Ottoman figure of the meddah. Second, the meddah gives narrative voice to the images of stand-alone objects and figures. Pamuk identifies the character of the meddah as a type of author of oral literature who is integral to narrative production, and the tradition of the modern Turkish novel (as does Halide Edib, below). Literary critic Berna Moran, among others, identifies meddah stories as the local basis of the modern Turkish novel in the nineteenth century (Moran 1983). The fate of the meddah in My Name is Red is telling: He is the victim of an Islamist “Erzurumi” mob lynching and murder, before which he is ritually “silenced” by having his tongue cut out. Though the site of punitive authority is Islamic in the Ottoman context of the plot, in Pamuk’s fiction it is always an allegory for secular state authority (this is also the case in Halide Edib’s novel set during the reign of Abdülhamid II, discussed below). In light of the allegorical framing, it is evident that Pamuk is critiquing din and devlet as actual sites of authority (from a historical perspective) as well as excavating them as figurative sites of narratives and tropes (from a literary perspective). The storyteller is also responsible for giving voice to the memory of things. He speaks for the objects and figures intended for the secret book: voicing their memories through improvised stories. In A Sense of Things, Bill Brown states, “Taken literally, the belief that there are ideas in things amounts to

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granting them an interiority and, thus, something like the structure of subjectivity” (Brown 2003: 8–9). Brown’s work, which is concerned with the ways inanimate objects enable human subjects to form, construct, reform, and reconstruct themselves, provides new insights into Pamuk’s fiction. Pamuk’s foregrounding of material culture in My Name is Red is significant for the way it imbues the objects of the Ottoman past with an alterity that is parodic and political in the face of the discourses of Republican secularism. Object Lessons: Things that Speak Pamuk’s writing overwhelms us with objects and things, at times in exhausting lists. These things are found in archives, in treasuries, in rooms and workshops, and most of all, in the streets of Istanbul itself. Pamuk’s naming of these things is also a literary excavation and archaeology that he adopts from the work of Tanpınar, who first expressed the possibility of a “novel of material objects and discarded life fragments” in A Mind at Peace (Tanpınar 2011 [1949]). The things accumulate, and in the process of accumulation, assume the character of a “material unconscious.”22 Bill Brown states: [The material unconscious] grants material objects (toys, cash registers, amusement rides) and material practices (amateur photography, cinematography, football games) a good deal of explanatory power when it comes both to understanding literary texts and to reading those texts as a way of writing history. (Brown 1997: 247) Such an understanding is revealing of Pamuk’s aims in My Name is Red, especially in consideration of the fact that objects both are given voice in the narration and have itineraries whose changing contexts give them various meanings. Narration in these scenes is predicated on the itinerary of the object in relation to various human subjects. In My Name is Red, Pamuk delineates an Ottoman material unconscious focused on the tools of illumination and book production: a sea-shell used to burnish paper, reed pens, gold leaf, black and colored inks, sized paper, binding glue, and ink-wells. Furthermore, he meticulously describes material practices related to the art of the book; of note, the three short chapters that detail how master miniaturists Olive, Stork, and Butterfly each produce the image of a horse – a symbol of military power in the Turco-Mongol imperial tradition. The Mongol Inkpot and the Color Red Some book-arts objects become the focus of important scenes in the novel. The heavy Mongolian inkpot reserved for the color red is a gift from Black to Enishe Effendi and is an embodiment of tradition. It is an object whose meaning is inflected by two historical and literary narratives. In one, it is the

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symbol of a Mongol tradition of painting and illumination passed down to the Ottomans; in another, it becomes a murder weapon that symbolically takes vengeance on Enishte Effendi, the would-be Renaissance-influenced innovator of Islamic book-arts illumination. Furthermore, this object becomes a metonym for the violence spread by the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, which ended the Islamic caliphate and changed the course of regional history. The red ink it carries merges with and becomes the blood of its victim, the dilettante illustrator and bibliophile Enishte Effendi: What I thought was my blood was red ink; what I thought was ink on his [the murderer’s] hands was my flowing blood. … He struck my head once more. His face and his entire body had become bright red from the ink splattering out of the inkpot, and I suppose, from the blood splattering out of me. (Pamuk 2002: 173–4) The murderer is marked (for retribution, for sacrifice) by a red that is a combination of the sacrificial blood of his victim and the vibrant red ink of illumination. Later in My Name is Red, this sacred and profane red ink, treated as another “thing,” itself speaks in an omniscient, quasi-divine voice: I am everywhere. Life begins with and returns to me. … As I bring my color to the page, it’s as if I command the world to “Be!” Yes, those who cannot see would deny it, but the truth is I can be found everywhere. (Pamuk 2002: 186, 188) The base materiality of the color, which is made out of insects, is conflated with its life-giving, spiritual force. The voice of such things in Pamuk’s novel is the voice of alterity. “Red” is a color whose existence begins humbly with the Kermes beetle and extends to the divinity of artistic expression and the divine itself (for example, as Enishe Effendi approaches God, everything is suffused in red). Red represents the material spirituality of spilt blood and lifeblood – it giveth and it taketh away. The Persian Plume Needle The account of the plume needle also reveals aspects of a material unconscious that contains an alternative historiography. The plume needle was sent as a peace offering to Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim along with other gifts by Shah Tahmasp, including a copy of the Book of Kings. Discovered in the imperial treasury, the plume needle, meant to affix plumes of status and honor onto royal turbans, was also used for an entirely different purpose. In this case, it was used by the exalted Persian master Bihzad to blind himself. The needle, as an instrument of blinding, bestows the status of “master” upon

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the artist. The blinded artist can only “see” through memory, a refined and exalted memory that approaches the sacred memory of Allah. In My Name is Red, Master Osman, in a ritual blinding, repeats Bihzad’s act. Shortly afterward, he states: “Men like us have no choice but to try to see the world the way God does and to resign ourselves to His justice,” he said. “And here, among these pictures and possessions [in the treasury], I have the strong sensation that these two things are beginning to converge: As we approach God’s vision of the world, His justice approaches us. See here, the needle with which Master Bihzad blinded himself.” (Pamuk 2002: 325) The act of blinding thus becomes a subtle intersection of the secular and the sacred; that is, an act in which the two meet as loss of sight leads to divine vision. Later, as punishment, the other master miniaturists use the same needle to mete out their own justice: they blind the confessed murderer in their midst, who will soon himself be killed, to prevent him from ever illustrating again (echoing the death of the meddah after being silenced). The material unconscious conveyed by these two objects is aesthetic and historical, transnational and transgressive. Both objects have a primary and secondary (concealed) purpose. The Mongol inkpot and the Persian plume needle together tell a story of artistry, status, and violence. They reveal how objects of tradition and the past can function to inflict epistemic and ontological violence. It is this very function of the object that Pamuk relies on to politicize and historicize his novel, not least of all that of the illuminated manuscript itself. The Illuminated Manuscript The irony of the Sultan’s “secret book” rests in the mundane things and figures meant to portray secular-sacred Ottoman power: a dog, a tree, a gold coin, Death, the color red, a horse, Satan, two dervishes, and a woman. The parody of both state power and religious injunction is never more evident than in the storyteller’s bawdy narration. The objects and figures, their “voices” and their “memories” rage against various targets of ridicule. The dog “speaks” against Islamic orthodoxy; the tree against the traditional hierarchy of text over image; the coin against envy; the horse against the incongruence of representation and reality; Death against fear; dervishes against the distortion of orientalist representations; Red of synesthesia and the divine; Satan of fallen grace and pity; and the woman of sustenance and love. All of them, everyday images from “archival” representations to be found in miniatures, are presented in a narrative sweep that moves from the mundane and profane to the divine and sacred. As such, the storyteller – the narrator of the memory of things and pictures – moves the novel’s plot beyond the dualism of

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the two pens and prefigures a third pen that unites oral narrative tradition and textual narrative innovation. By connecting the Ottoman past with the modern present through storytelling predicated on objects and memory, Pamuk’s authorship supersedes the two pens in a way that makes a political statement. The resulting new “form” of literary modernity emerges out of an early modern aesthetic model of miniatures and a revised theory of the two pens that enables the possibility of “painting with words” in the conflation of the profane and the sacred. The Third Pen An example of the personification of the two pens occurs in the novel’s climactic imperial treasury scene that centers on Black, the scribe and writer manqué, and Master Osman, the head illuminator who senses that “everything is coming to an end.” Aside from the far-flung accumulation of plunder from borderlands ranging from Central Europe to Central Asia, the treasury contains a concealed history of Islamic book-arts in rare historical and literary manuscripts. Black (representing the scribal first pen) and Master Osman (the illuminating second pen) pore over books and illustrations in the novel’s main archive-scene set in the Ottoman Imperial Treasury. The traditional sacredness of the word is symbolically muted because Black cannot write. (However, the text is re-sacralized through the writing-subject, “Orhan,” representing a kind of “third pen.”) In this scene, the narrative “I,” switching between the two characters, is an embodiment of the two pens (text and image). Often, in one continuous scene, broken by chapters, the narrative voice moves from one character to another, so “I” becomes “He” and vice versa. This technique could be described as a literary reverse-angle shot (Çiçekog˘ lu 2003). The first-person point of view is given over to each character in turn as the “I” both “sees” and narrates. Master Osman’s act of blinding himself (of doing away with the eye/“I”) enables the revelation of a divine perspective; the blackness of Allah’s memory which in Pamuk’s world is also the blackness of ink, text, and writing (the redemptive “sole consolation”). In My Name is Red, the narrative perspective is doubled and fragmentary, as each character is represented repeatedly through first- and thirdperson points of view.23 Pamuk’s vacillation between first- and third-person perspectives runs throughout his work. In The White Castle, the same technique is used. However, it is complicated by the emergence of a third narrative perspective. If the “I/he” represents a material, secular, or worldly perspective, the “He/Him” that emerges in the last chapter stands for one that is mystical or divine. As in The White Castle, the narration of My Name is Red also mediates between the secular and the sacred. Developing this literary technique, Pamuk structures My Name is Red so it occupies two narrative positions: the “profane” limited first-person and the “sacred omniscient” perspective. (We learn retrospectively that the writing-subject “Orhan” is the author of the scene and novel.) The

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narrative is thus fragmented in a way that delineates a kind of secular-sacred “first-person omniscience.” This point of view, vacillating between a limited and an omniscient “I,” first appears with the narrator in Chapter 11 of The White Castle (see Chapter 3). At the conclusion of My Name is Red, text and image are once again brought together in a secular-sacred revision of literary modernity that signifies the manifestation of a “third pen.” The third pen is a narrative iteration that reintroduces the archival cultural forms of the preRepublican past (Ottoman Islamic image and text) into the present. This is none other than the secular-sacred pen of Pamuk’s literary authority. In other words, the third pen signifies a dissident mode of secular-sacred writing in My Name is Red. Pamuk’s Terkip Borrowing from Tanpınar’s notion of terkip, or cultural “synthesis,” Pamuk merges the two pens in his articulation of a third. In My Name is Red, the third pen represents the synthesis of image and text in a novelization that redefines literary modernity through innovative “style” (üslup). Enishte Effendi’s remarks on the third space that emerges to foster innovation in illumination also apply to literature: “In the realm of book arts, whenever a masterpiece is made … I can be certain of the following: Two styles heretofore never brought together have come together to create something new and wondrous” (Pamuk 2002: 160). For Pamuk, these two styles are an extension of the two pens – image and text – or Ottoman illumination and manuscript writing. Pamuk’s literary terkip is bringing together the supposed pre-modern Ottoman past and the secular modern to redefine the Turkish novel as a complex transnational form that is both postsecular and postorientalist. The multifaceted process of book production described in the plot is also a reference to Pamuk’s process of formal innovation. Rewriting and revision are emphasized in the way texts are reused (disassembled and reassembled) and in the way images and ideas travel to inhabit different books throughout the novel. The novel emerges as the reconstitution of narrative and visual traditions that, in turn, reformulate literary modernity. In the process, the literary text, disenchanted by Republican secularization, becomes re-enchanted by tradition and religious history. The scene describing Enishte’s ascension, or Mir’aj, is a symbol of such cultural re-enchantment. Secular Mir’aj The Mir’aj, the Prophet’s ascension to heaven, is a common topic of miniature illumination (Schrieke et al. 2012). Pamuk, however, makes a secular revision of the scene by describing the ascension of the murdered Enishte Effendi: I opened my mouth [to release my soul] and abruptly all was color just as in the pictures of Our Prophet’s Mir’aj journey, during which he visited

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Heaven. Everything was flooded in exquisite brightness as if generously painted with gold wash. … Events I’d once endured briskly and sequentially were now spread over infinite space and existed simultaneously. As in one of those large double-leaf paintings wherein a witty miniaturist has painted a number of unrelated things in each corner – many things were happening all at once. (Pamuk 2002: 176–7) As the passage indicates, the experience and perspective of the Mir’aj involves a transformation in notions of time, memory, and point of view. The realism of the first-person present is qualified by the omniscience and omnipresence of a divine perspective, represented by “He.” As discussed, the expansion in scope of the first-person perspective to an omniscient one is a technique with which Pamuk first experimented in The White Castle. This scalar variation is constantly at play in My Name is Red, represented by the distinction between first-person limited narration and the omniscient “memory of Allah” and is conveyed by debates the miniaturists have about the ideology of visual perspective. Representations of synchronic rather than diachronic time and memory inform the formal innovations in Pamuk’s work. Enishe Effendi, in the Mir’aj scene, represents this secular-sacred perspective by narrating from the in-between state (and perspective) of berzah. Narrating Berzah In Islamic eschatology, berzah (or barzakh) is an intermediate state of waiting for judgment and redemption (Lange 2012; Carra de Vaux 2012 [1959]). Enishte Effendi narrates a chapter of My Name is Red from the vantage of this realm, where souls reside after death. From a literary perspective, qualities of berzah such as the synchronicity of historical events and space-asmemory are presented as transformations in narrative point of view. Enishte Effendi states: I beheld Creation with awe and surprise as if for the first time, but also as if it had somehow emerged from my memory. What I called “memory” contained an entire world: With time spread out infinitely before me in both directions, I understood how the world as I first experienced it could persist afterward as memory. … I’d been liberated from a straightjacket. From now on nothing was restricted. … I knew I was close to Him. … Looking down from the height of a minaret, the whole world resembled a magnificent book whose pages I was examining one by one. … From the intermediate state of Berzah, past and present time appear at once, and as long as the soul remains within its memories, limitations of place do not obtain. … I begged of Exalted Allah to grant us souls-without-bodies in Heaven and bodies-without-souls in life. (Pamuk 2002: 229–31)

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This intermediate perspective is consonant in terms of point of view with the first-person “omniscient” narration Pamuk establishes in The White Castle. Enishte Effendi’s brief “exchange” with Allah reveals that the perspective of Enishte Effendi in berzah is also the secular-sacred perspective of a character examining the world like a text from a vantage between the material (body) and the spiritual (soul) as well as between the worldly and the divine. Narrating berzah relates to an important theme in My Name is Red: the tension between a two-dimensional image (the miniature, the page), and a third dimension of narrative self-reflexivity (looking at the self/object from the outside). Conceptually, it reflects the notion of the three pens discussed above. The third, triangulating, dimension is interpretive or hermeneutic. In Pamuk’s work it is often a metahistorical or metafictional perspective. Ottoman historian Cemal Kafadar describes the sixteenth-century diary of a dervish as being part of a tradition of Ottoman arts and letters that did not develop a third dimensional, self-reflexive perspective, but rather was “characterized by a miniaturist’s flat depiction of neatly contoured figures that are not quite distinguishable from each other except in their social functions” (Kafadar 1989: 147). Elsewhere, referring to this important third dimension of interpretation, he states: “There is no third dimension in any of these narratives, no obvious distance between the narrator and the narrated self” (Kafadar 1989: 138). In his work, Pamuk introduces this very distance to sixteenth-century cultural history, updating it as an innovation in literary modernity. The horizon of identification implied in Kafadar’s analysis is group, social, or corporate identification. If “first-person” individuality emerges at all, it is only a partial, half-born emergence. Pamuk introduces a full-fledged firstperson formulation in My Name is Red that reimagines the Ottoman legacy as an archive of literary reformulation. By structuring his novel with this aesthetic guide, Pamuk returns to the overarching problematic of the individual artist and the restrictions of the religious or secular state (whether Ottoman or Republican).24 The author-figure, occulted in the pages of Pamuk’s novels, repeatedly emerges by the end as the agent of transformation in narrative. Turkish scholars have claimed that Pamuk’s work, and much of Turkish literature, is situated between broader movements of modernity and postmodernity (Ecevit 2004; Seyhan 2008). The authorial emergence at the end of Pamuk’s novels is evidence in support of such a claim. In short, Pamuk reimagines the Ottoman legacy to achieve a triangulating perspective on Republican literary modernity. By so doing, he is playing with orientalist expectations about Islam and redirecting them toward an unlikely target: Republican secularism (an embodiment of Enlightenment values). What is ultimately revealed in My Name is Red is not an exotic world but a lesson in how to “read” and understand a cultural history elided by the twin forces of orientalism and Republican nationalism. “Reading” miniatures, which Pamuk himself has stated on first glance seem “off” because they lack a familiar perspective and context, is a metaphor for this new interpretive reading of Istanbul cosmopolitanism and its Ottoman Islamic culture.

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Though sixteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul provides the setting, the dilemmas experienced by the characters, including issues of style, ideological affront (whether to Islam or the nation), breaking with aesthetic tradition, money and fame, family, love, authority, belonging, jealousy, rage, all relate to present-day Turkey, and specifically, Pamuk’s own cosmopolitan world of the Istanbul author. More than love story, detective story, philosophy of art, or historical fiction, My Name is Red is a narrative of transnational literary modernity that liberates the author from constraints of secular modern time, geography, history, and ideology. This allows him to do what he does best, that is, pen Sufi-inspired elegies on the separation of lover and beloved, lament the loss of cosmopolitan cultural histories, interrogate identity, and valorize Istanbul as the site of narrative production; and in the process, redefine what the novel can be. Not least of all, My Name is Red is an innovative novel because it engages issues of gender and the roles of women for the first time in Pamuk’s oeuvre. Characters such as Shekure and Esther reveal the everyday lives and concerns of urban Istanbul women. They are powerful figures that exercise significant agency in patriarchal domains. In the case of Shekure, Pamuk also reveals aspects of her sexual life in a way that connects to the worldly and sacred aspects of the two pens. One scene links the sacred symbol of the reed pen and the ink-well (harkening to the Qur’anic epigraph that begins this chapter) to Shekure performing fellatio on Black. The character nun (‫ )ﻥ‬looks like and represents the ink-well. The pen represents alif (‫)ﺍ‬, which is also a mystical symbol for Allah. The sacred foundation of calligraphy is based upon the Qur’anic symbol of the ink-well and the pen, of nun and qalam, providing a key to the spiritual significance of Islamic calligraphy. In moving from this sacred interpretation to one that is profane, Shekure innocently muses, “I can’t say I completely understood why Persian poets, who for centuries had likened that male tool to a reed pen, also compared the mouths of us women to inkwells” (Pamuk 2002: 408). Thus, even Pamuk’s depiction of oral sex becomes a profane-sacred metaphor in which ink-well and pen signify mouth and penis as well as divinity. My Name is Red is Pamuk’s first novel to designate central roles of agency to women, linking the novel to the work of other Istanbul authors with feminist concerns. Like Pamuk, Halide Edib is an author who is known for addressing various framings of the East/West problematic, a dominant trope in Turkish literature. Through her fiction, she was the first author to inflect that problematic by introducing foundational debates of feminism and women’s roles into nationalism and modernity. In distinction to Pamuk, she was a bilingual author who wrote eight of her books in English. Like Pamuk, she was an international author, having lived outside of Turkey for over a decade in places like England, France, the United States, and India. Many of her English works strive to make the political and cultural contexts of Turkey legible to an outside audience. Like Pamuk, her negotiations between national and international cultural logics are reflected in her fiction. Furthermore, her

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iconic novel The Clown and His Daughter performs a complex negotiation of din and devlet that revises the Ottoman legacy and critiques Republican state secularism 60 years before the publication of My Name is Red. The parallels between the two authors and their relationship to state secularism are too strong to be overlooked.

Halide Edib’s Gendering of Ottoman Modernity: The Clown and His Daughter (1935) At first glance, a comparison between Pamuk, an author who established his literary reputation in the late twentieth century, and Halide Edib, an author of the early twentieth century, might seem counter-intuitive. These are authors of distinct periods, styles, and approaches to literature. Yet, reading for the deep structures and tropes of the Turkish novel reveals unexpected symmetries rather than discrepancies. Both authors were persecuted by the state. Halide Edib was threatened by officially state-sanctioned death threats in 1909 (during the late Ottoman period) and in 1920 (during the Allied occupation of Istanbul). . In .1926 she went into exile only to return upon the invitation/pardon of Ismet Inönü after 1939.25 Both authors are concerned with specific literary-political themes that establish continuity in their work: the Ottoman legacy as a vehicle of alternative modernity; Sufism and orthodoxy; the critique of the secular modern state; and the use of traditional aesthetic forms as literary models. Halide Edib adds the additional concern of the agency of women. Clearly, as Istanbul authors, major aspects of their novels are in dialogue with each other. Such an unorthodox, distant comparison will be instructive for establishing the literary parameters of Turkishness and the cosmopolitan trajectory of Republican literary modernity from the early to the late twentieth century. By doing so, we see that Pamuk’s fiction performs a profound continuation of Republican literary traditions, rather than a sui generis reworking of the Turkish novel. It is this textual continuity and commiseration that is revelatory for understanding tropes of din and devlet in the Turkish novel. A cosmopolitan feminist, parliamentarian, and author, Halide Edib continues to be a figure of controversy in modern Turkish culture.26 She lived through the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic, is considered a symbol of national self-determination and is a prominent figure in the Turkish literary canon, yet her criticisms of secular patriarchy represented by Kemalism led to her exile from Turkey during the heyday of the cultural revolution.27 An intellectual of the “bilingual elite,” she was personally maligned by Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk, or “father Turk”) as a “woman who wanted an American mandate” in his famous six-day Speech (Atatürk 1989/ 1927). When her bust was erected in Sultan Ahmet Square in 1973, to commemorate . a famous speech she had made there in protest of the Greek invasion of Izmir/Smyrna, it was blown up three days later, never to be replaced (Sönmez 1973).

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Halide Edib, who received an American missionary education at the American College for Girls in Arnavutköy, Istanbul, recognized the importance of writing in English as well as Turkish.28 Her novels engage issues of gender, subjectivity, and politics. She was seen as an early nationalist and a model for other women to emulate, as well as being maligned as a traitor to the nation who had advocated for an American mandate after World War I. Though eight of her books appeared in English, many of these were shortened and edited significantly in their later Turkish versions (or “self-censored” as the scholarship ironically states). Her work in English, oriented toward an international audience, reveals the fault-lines of patriarchal nationalism as well as the betrayals against women by the nationalist state. Her exile, however, glossed over in most literary histories as being “selfimposed,” did not prevent her from being appropriated into the Turkish national canon. Like Pamuk, Halide Edib’s work broadly focuses on the tensions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Her novels describe the conflicted position of women in the scope of modernity, Turkism, and Kemalism. Like her contemporary Tanpınar she advocated continuity over rupture. She believed that modernity should be part of a progressive outgrowth of Ottoman Islamic traditions rather than authoritarian revolutionary change. After the 1908 constitutional revolution, her novels – which had focused on family, romance, and women’s social positions – assumed a more explicitly political dimension.29 As such, her novels might be read as part of a broader movement of social reform and reconciliation between European modernity and Muslim tradition (“modernist Islam”) stretching from Central Asia to North Africa.30 Though the viability of movements of modernist Islam was curtailed by the Kemalist cultural revolution, their repressed legacy can be traced in the Republican novel. Once the Republic was established, Halide Edib objected to the strictures of secular Turkism for the denial of on-the-ground realities and to Kemalism for its dictatorial leanings (Adıvar 1930, 1935b). Under the threat of imprisonment or worse, she and her husband lived in exile until 1939, the year after Atatürk’s death.31 I argue that both of these canonized Turkish authors disseminate cultural remainders of din in the face of authoritarian impositions of devlet. On one hand, reading Pamuk and Halide Edib together demonstrates that the tropes of the modern Turkish novel are consistent in their inscriptions of devlet: state, cultural revolution, coup, exile, and incarceration; on the other hand, it demonstrates that the Turkish novel is open to articulations of din: the Ottoman legacy, Islamic cosmopolitanism, Sufism, and Islam. Between the two (tropical) poles exist spaces and metaphors of secular or religious “conversion” in various forms. Furthermore, in the scope of Halide Edib’s fiction, this transitional space is defined by gender and the transgression of traditional male– female boundaries. Like Pamuk, Halide Edib’s novels establish spaces that enable intersections of din and devlet. The presence and frequency of these spaces peripherializes European (colonial) agency in Middle Eastern social

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change. This revises the reductive orientalist clichés of Turkishness and its literature and culture as simply receiving or reacting to European modernization. In fact, these spaces identify din – whether a presence or an absence – as a formative force in the establishment of Turkish literary modernity. It was during her exile that Halide Edib wrote one of her mainstay novels, The Clown and His Daughter, a canonical text that is required reading in many Turkish high schools.32 (Like the rest of Halide Edib’s books that have appeared in Turkish and English, the two versions are different in significant ways.) The novel lends itself to comparison with My Name is Red for a number of reasons. Both are historical novels and are set in Ottoman Istanbul; both take an Ottoman aesthetic form as a structural model; both give prominence to the figure of the meddah and to women; both take in a full sweep of Turkish society from the mahalle to the Sultan; both focus on a central lover/beloved story; both represent Orthodox Islam, Sufism, and the power of the Ottoman state through representative characters; and both contain an allegorical critique of Republican state and Islamic religious authority. History, identity, love, and politics dominate in these novels. Though The Clown and His Daughter is squarely a modernist novel of Istanbul and My Name is Red is a postmodernist one, both novels question the secular authority of that modernism. Both authors structure their novels so that they contain a political argument through form. As in My Name is Red, the content and form of The Clown and His Daughter is political in scope. The novel, set during the late nineteenth-century reign of Abdülhamid II, establishes a critique of the Kemalist monoparty era, in which the leader of the Republic and the Sultan become conflated authoritarian figures. Juxtaposing The Clown and His Daughter and My Name is Red in a comparative reading does reveal what Pamuk elsewhere terms a “hidden center” (Pamuk 2010). This center establishes the continuities of a literary politics that is mindful of the Ottoman past, focused on Istanbul cosmopolitanism, and critical of secular modernity. Sufism and Orthodoxy The dominant literary continuities that can be traced through the work of Halide Edib and Pamuk include the articulation of Sufism by both authors (particularly Mevlevi references, which also dominate in the work of Tanpınar). Both authors rely on Sufism as a dominant trope to establish continuity with the past, to manage cultural paradoxes, and to reconcile the tensions between din and devlet. By contrast, both authors also caricature and malign figures of Orthodox Islam as being despotic. For Halide Edib, this restriction is described as directly limiting agency in women’s lives. For Pamuk, orthodoxy is presented negatively through injunctions against figurative artistic representation. In this regard, Halide Edib demonstrates a position that is in line with schools of modernist Islam, whereas Pamuk, a product of secular modern culture, relies on the Ottoman past to recoup the

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excesses of that authoritarian modernity. Both novelists present political critiques of the nation based on literary depictions of a lived Ottoman past. The Clown and His Daughter is a bildungsroman that centers on the upbringing of a Muslim girl, Rabia, in late Ottoman (Hamidian) Istanbul. Rabia is named for the historical figure Rabi’a al-Basri (CE 717–801), a female Muslim saint and one of the first woman Sufi mystics.33 She was a poet and ascetic who advocated divine love beyond opposites of good and evil. The novel’s Sufi-inspired epitaph by Sufi Shaykh ‘Abdu’r Rahman Jami (1414–92) also foregrounds a mystical theme that encourages a secular-sacred reading. The epigraph reads, “All being is a Shadow, an Illusion, a Reflection cast on a Mirror,” a Sufi understanding that Halide Edib merges with the structure of the traditional Turkish shadow play to establish an organizing principal for the novel. Rabia, the veiled heroine of The Clown and His Daughter, earns a living on her own by running a grocery and chanting the Qur’an and the Mevlit (birth-epic of the Prophet). Rabia, who regularly performs ritual prayers, is a dissonant, and even dissident, figure to be representing Turkish modernity in the 1930s, when the novel was published. Though set in the preRepublican Hamidian era, the novel is an obvious critique of the excesses of Kemalist secular devlet. The novel’s revolutionary climax is set in 1908, but alludes to the establishment of the Republic a generation later. Rabia’s story can be read as an allegory of the transition from empire to nation, though it diverges from the Republican secularization thesis in significant ways: the setting stays focused on Istanbul and does not include Anatolia, the plot does not espouse secular conversion, and the tolerance of Sufism is depicted as being integral to modern transformation in Muslim society. Indeed, the critiques of the “oriental despotism” of Sultan Abdülhamid II in The Clown and His Daughter stand in for thinly disguised critiques of the dictatorial authority of Atatürk. Rabia grows up in humble circumstances and is musically gifted. Her strict grandfather, an imam, educates her as a Qur’an chanter and Mevlit performer. Her father Tevfik is a meddah and performer who is exiled from Istanbul for performances that represent private lives and are critical of the government of Abdülhamid II. Upon Tevfik’s return to the city, Rabia leaves her grandfather to live with him and help him run the local neighborhood store. Vehbi Effendi is a Mevlevi Sufi shaykh who guides Rabia in his mystical philosophy of “oneness” and in traditional Turkish music. She is introduced to palace circles through Sabiha Hanım and Selim Pasha, who undertake to further her training in music. The Pasha’s son Hilmi, and his friends Shevkii and Galip are advocates of revolutionary change and followers of the “Young Turk” resistance. Through them, she is introduced to Peregrini, a former Catholic monk and musician who lives as an expatriate in Istanbul. One central focus of the novel is their love story, which represents a metaphoric union of “East” and “West.” The novel’s historical focus is on revolutionary change and the decline of sultanic rule in favor of representational government. The story concludes with Tevfik returning from yet another exile at the time of the 1908 constitutional

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revolution (the “Young Turk” revolution). The revolution coincides with the birth of their daughter – a representation of political change, if not a symbol of outright modernity and nationalism. The Clown and His Daughter is a significant novel for the themes it brings together through a literary form that relies on the traditional Turkish shadow play: feminism, political critique, Istanbul cosmopolitanism, and Turkish Muslimhood. By introducing political commentaries on secular modernity, both Pamuk and Halide Edib infuse their novels with a critique of state power that casts their fiction in a resistant mode of literary politics. The Exchange and Agency of Women Experiences of the “exchange of women” dominate Halide Edib’s work. The exchange of women, a theoretical concept in feminist anthropology, broadly identifies social relations as being predicated on the patriarchal treatment of women as property to be used as objects of exchange (Levi-Strauss 1969 [1949]; Irigaray 1985).34 The “exchange of the woman” becomes a literary trope in Halide Edib’s work, notably in Yeni Turan (“New Turan,” 1912), The Shirt of Flame (1921), and Vurun Kahpeye (Strike the Whore, 1923). Often, the symptom of the exchange is violence suffered by women. For example, in New Turan, the heroine Kaya agrees to marry the leader of an opposition political party if the leader of her own party is freed from political imprisonment. The exchange occurs for the sake of national-political self-determination. Less an outright exchange than an instance of martyrdom and sacrifice, the drama of Ays¸e in The Shirt of Flame leads to her sacrifice on the battlefield during the Battle of Sakarya in the War of Independence such that she becomes an abstract, rallying symbol for Turkish national self-determination. In Strike the Whore, a victim of patriarchal violence, Aliye is the target of the machinations of the imam and merchants in a small town and is beaten to death for supposed “dalliances” with the invading Greek army when she was actually working to help the Turkish resistance. Only with The Clown and His Daughter does the trope change such that the heroine (Rabia) determines the conditions of union and marriage, in this case by requiring that Peregrini convert to Islam and take the name “Osman.” Nevertheless, Edib’s depiction of female Muslim subjectivity through Rabia does not escape representations of the exchange of women. In the novel, Rabia moves from one patriarchal context to another, beginning with one that is Islamic (as the granddaugher of the imam who keeps her earnings) to the labor of the grocery store (as the keeper of the shop and servant of her father, Tevfik) to one that is Western (as the wife of Peregrini/Osman, whose feet she washes). A strong and independent character, Rabia still cannot escape the strictures of private and public patriarchy that confine her to the role of “mother” in what is otherwise a historical process of liberation and modernization. The “exchange of the woman” trope appears in Pamuk’s My Name is Red as well. Here the piety and tradition represented by Rabia is maintained in a

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similar manner through another strong female character, Shekure. Shekure also moves from one patriarchal context to another, tracing an itinerary that begins with her husband’s house, then moves to her father-in-law’s house (where her brother-in-law Hasan lives), then to her father Enishte Effendi’s house, back to Hasan’s house, and finally to live with Black as his wife. Shekure has the interests of her children in mind, one of which is the authorfigure Orhan. At the end of the novel she is depicted as being literally and figuratively in the iconic role of the “mother,” as she imagines a mother-andchild portrait of her and Orhan, as he nurses at her breast. In this image, she is not the mother of the nation (as Rabia is often described), but the mother of the author-figure and of Turkish literary transformation (and the wife of the writer manqué, Black). The performance that Halide Edib exhibits in The Clown and His Daughter is one of the coming of age of a traditional Muslim girl from an Istanbul neighborhood (mahalle), who is able to avoid traditional modes of the patriarchal control of religion and family. This negotiation with patriarchy is almost identical for Shekure in Pamuk’s Ottoman novel. If Halide Edib’s version of the “exchange of women” enables the inscription of national modernity based in cultural continuity (rather than rupture), Pamuk’s version enables the production of literary modernity based in the continuity between early modern Ottoman and Republican contexts. Read together, Halide Edib and Pamuk trace gendered contexts of sixteenth-century early modern and nineteenth-century modernist Istanbul in which women have some agency but not full rights. While the gendered perspective on Ottoman modernities contained in both novels allows for a political critique of orientalism and nationalism, it cannot dismantle the patriarchal structures of Islam and state. The historical depictions of the gendered perspective of compromised agency contained in both novels are denied by Kemalist secular modernity, which presents itself as the liberator of women. The Meddah and Turkish Literary Modernity In terms of form, continuity between the two authors is evident in their novelization of traditional Turkish art forms that also become structural elements in the novel. The figure of the meddah in both My Name is Red and The Clown and His Daughter is given a place of central importance. The meddah represents an aesthetic of traditional oral narration that enables the development of Turkish literary modernity, and modern novelists owed much to the narrative style of the meddah (Boratav 2012 [1984]). Halide Edib relies on the Karagöz shadow theater as an extended metaphor and model of form in The Clown and His Daughter, much as Pamuk relies on miniature art and meddah narration in My Name is Red. (The “clown” of Halide Edib’s title is a meddah.) Talat Halman describes the meddah and the Karagöz shadow theater as two of the three main traditional Ottoman Turkish theatrical art forms (the third being orta oyunu, or theater in the round commedia dell’arte). He states:

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The Archive of Ottoman Istanbul The Karagöz “puppeteer” presents a one-man act in which he manipulates all the characters and impersonates the voice of all of them. … The protagonists are always Karagöz and Hacivat, who, like the “Odd Couple,” are good friends frequently entangled in bickering and physical fight. The shadow play opens by proclaiming itself to be a faithful mirror of the world, implying also that life, being transitory and devoid of value, is a mere shadow, a fleeting image, yet, in a mystical context, a reflection of godliness. (Halman 2007: 112–13)

Just as the meddah serves as a reflection of the modern narrator, so too does the Karagöz puppeteer. Much as many of the characters of My Name is Red are determined by the miniature as a literary model of form, in The Clown and His Daughter, the characters are determined by the shadow play, which is also a satirical form: Karagöz is peopled with dozens of characters, including Bey, the often inept gentleman; Çingene, the gypsy; Frenk, a Frenchman or European in general; Zenne, a woman, sometimes presented with bare breasts; Türk, a bumbling Anatolian Turkish peasant; Tiryaki, the addict or chain-smoker; Beberuhi, the dwarf; Yahudi, the wily Jew; Çelebi, the dandy; Acem, an Iranian, an Arab, or a black man; Arnavut, an Albanian; and Mirasyedi, literally, an inheritance-eater, or playboy. (Halman 2007: 113) Many of these figures are appropriated directly into Halide Edib’s novel. The plot of The Clown and His Daughter is structured through the characters of the Karagöz theater. Each of the characters emerges from the stock characters of this traditional form: Recep represents Beberuhi, Pembe the gypsy, Peregrini the Frenk, Hilmi the Çelebi, etc. Halide Edib offers an update of the traditional theatrical form by adding new characters and novelizing it in a manifestation of Turkish literary modernity. This parallels the way Pamuk novelizes the Ottoman miniature, relying on traditional scenes and characters to tell his story, in the process redefining the novel as a vehicle for revising and resituating Turkish modernity. In both novels, furthermore, the meddah serves as a traditional character that prefigures narration in the modern novel. The meddah is the politicized voice of artistic expression that represents the local origin of what will become more complex textual narration in the rise of the Ottoman Turkish novel. As with My Name is Red, the meddah in The Clown and His Daughter (nicknamed “Girly Tevfik”) becomes a bawdy, parodic voice of popular opinion or resistance and suffers “silencing” as a result – this time through exile rather than murder. Tevfik is given his nickname because of public impersonations depicting the private life of his wife. As a result of such social transgressions, he becomes a victim of the state. This is similar to Pamuk’s meddah, who, in

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his last performance, imitates a woman before being killed by Islamist “Erzurumis.” Conversion: A Metaphor for Modernity The theme of “turning Turk” (religious and/or secular conversion) that permeates The Clown and His Daughter can be read as a commentary on the cultural logic of din and devlet. In tracing out manifestations of din in the context of national modernization, The Clown and His Daughter performs various betrayals and transgressions of secular Turkism. Like Pamuk, Edib’s literary politics reside in her creation of a form that does not trace the dominant trajectory of Empire-to-Republic modernization, but rather argues for a revision of Kemalist modernity based on the integration of Ottoman Islamic traditions rather than on the reification of binary opposites that enable the articulation of internalized orientalism in the modular form of secular modern nationalism. One of the important subplots in The Clown and His Daughter centers on an act of conversion that is revelatory to understanding Halide Edib’s literary politics. The character Peregrini, an Italian musician, falls in love with the heroine, Rabia, a Qur’an-chanter. Through the intervention of a Mevlevi Sufi shaykh (Vehbi Effendi), the lovers are allowed to marry only after Peregrini converts to Islam and is renamed “Osman.” Peregrini, something of an orientalist in his learning, represents European modernity, whereas Rabia represents the authenticity of Istanbul mahalle culture. This conversion and marriage is obviously a metaphor for a cosmopolitan Muslim modernity, one that is discrepant with regard to Kemalism. The union of Osman (literally the name of the founder of the “Ottoman” state) and Rabia leads to the birth of their child around the same time of the 1908 constitutional revolution (which marked a division between autocratic rule and parliamentary government). Both the conversion and the child represent the synthesis of binary opposites: Christianity and Islam, Europe and Turkey, tradition and modernity. These events are inscribed onto, yet mask, another conversion, the national conversion represented in the Kemalist cultural revolution, which was on-going in 1935, at the time of the novel’s publication. The secularizing “cultural revolution” – a reorientation in language, the legal system, dress, and politics – shimmers between modernization and dictatorship; between the promise of Muslims who can become modern by devalorizing, or even converting out of Islam and the persistence of real or imagined “oriental despotism,” or nationalism, represented through the authority of the state. In short, the conversion (represented by Peregrini/Osman as well as the social conversion of the cultural revolution) is multivalent. It signifies a simultaneous conversion to the faiths of Islam and secularism. Here emerges the secular-sacred space of political critique that we have been tracing in Pamuk’s work. Who, or what, is “turning Turk,” in this case? In the scope of the novel a former monk becomes Muslim, but lives as a crypto-Christian. There is a

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sense of religious accommodation here – or to refer to a dominant discourse in Ottoman Studies, “toleration” (Barkey 2008; Karpat and Yıldırım 2012). Meanwhile, the novelist herself, in the scope of a state-sponsored secular conversion, is branded a traitor and forced to live abroad in exile. As an “apostate,” she is divided in terms of language, gender, and loyalties. Part of her is appropriated by the inside (as a nationalist by the secular state) and part by the outside (as a Muslim feminist and native informant for international audiences). The Clown and His Daughter brings together two tropes of Turkishness; namely, cultural revolution and conversion. Read synchronically, the events in the novel, which reach their climax with the 1908 constitutional revolution, are conflated with the Kemalist cultural revolution, when the novel first appeared. In the novel, the conversion to Islam is a prerequisite for participating in modern Muslim family life in Istanbul. Meanwhile, the broader context of the cultural revolution signifies that the Turkish or Muslim “other” can be reformulated as the modern “self” only through an ideological conversion. But this is also a conversion with a hidden trajectory: one of political exile. In the case of authors such as Halide Edib, the establishment of the national horizon divides the self between din and devlet. In the process of secular modernization, the former is elided, repressed, or exiled, whereas the latter is elevated to a symbol of national self-determination. Here, the secular nation and Islamic tradition, both symbolized by the figure of the “woman” in Halide Edib’s novels, are shorn apart yet held in a state of relational indeterminacy. How else could Halide Edib occupy both a space in the Turkish national canon and also bear the brand of being a traitor to the nation? Pamuk suffers the same contradictory fate generations later, again with the Republican state as arbiter. Through her work, Halide Edib emerges as an advocate for what could be termed an alternative Turkish modernity (Durakbas¸a 2000). As such, she shares the convert’s fate of inclusion and exclusion. As a woman, she might symbolize the role of “Mother of the Nation” (as Ays¸e in the novella Shirt of Flame).35 As a woman, she might also be exiled by the forces of national patriarchy. She exists in a space where her English texts struggle against muted Turkish contexts. As an author, she is divided into self and other, condemned to be misread as either an insider or outsider; that is, as being only partially legible. Her two volume memoirs, written in English, to this day, have never appeared in full Turkish translations. In alluding to the possibility of a postnational, and by extension, a postorientalist, political imaginary, theorist Partha Chatterjee describes what in the case of Halide Edib seems to be particularly true of women who are betrayed by or “left out” of nationalist discursive space: The story of nationalist emancipation is necessarily a story of betrayal. Because it could confer freedom only by imposing at the same time a

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whole set of new controls, it could define a cultural identity for the nation only by excluding many from its fold; and it could grant the dignity of citizenship to some only because the others always needed to be represented and could not be allowed to speak for themselves. (Chatterjee 1993: 154) In other words, as Halide Edib demonstrates in her work, “the promise of national emancipation was fulfilled, if not fraudulently, then certainly by the forcible marginalization of many who were supposed to have shared in the fruits of liberation” (Chatterjee 1993: 156). As a “new” Turkish woman, she symbolizes all the qualities of “emancipation,” yet she is displaced by the patriarchal will of the nation. Meanwhile, her own feminist subjectivity is revealed as being far more diverse and expansive, encompassing an intertextual mix of orientalist (Allied/missionary), Ottoman (Islamic/cosmopolitan), and national (Turkist/Anatolian) experiences. In other words, the transition from Empire to Republic, which we might reread as a conversion to secular modernity, is recast by authors such as Halide Edib and Pamuk as only one type of political modernization. By recouping the cultural history of Ottoman Islamic cosmopolitanism, both authors are redefining representations of the Turkish modern by inscribing dissident secular-sacred spaces of literary modernity. Through their novels, both authors target dominant discourses of modernity and nationalism as well as secularism and orientalism in their sustained literary revisions of Turkishness.

Conclusion: Postorientalism Though they are authors of distinct periods of Republican history and of disparate literary styles, both Pamuk and Halide Edib are nevertheless Istanbul authors whose Ottoman historical fiction critically engages with and writes back to orientalizing discourses of secular modernity. Orientalism in Turkish literature, as represented through the “discourse of the Turk,” exerts dual ideological power through anti-Islamic as well as secular-national “Turkishness.” In this orientalist–nationalist paradox, cultural formations of Islam are denigrated in the process of national self-determination. The two perspectives are in a sense unreconciled, though the “insider” perspective is often a response to and overwrites the “outsider” attitudes upon which it is dependent. In other words, authenticity is ironically complicit with orientalist formations. Pamuk and Halide Edib’s revisions of the Ottoman legacy target secular nationalism, which, by extension, relies on an internalized vision of orientalist modernity. Both write against the political control mechanisms of narratives of devlet. Their literary interventions into established positions of secularism, in terms of content and form, can be characterized more instructively as postorientalist writing.36 Postorientalism can be defined as a critique of the historical function of orientalism (and nationalism) in the construction of identities. A postorientalist literary understanding, which involves critical

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responses to the secular state (whether colonizing, nationalizing, or both), encourages the reassessment of Turkish modernity. Postorientalism has been advocated by critics with postcolonial concerns such as Gyan Prakash (Subaltern Studies), Aijaz Ahmad (in a critical Marxist vein), as well as more recently by representatives of national literary traditions such as Hamid Dabashi (Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature).37 As such, it is a theoretical intervention situated at the intersection of the colonial, the secular social, and the national modern. It also characterizes many of the ambiguities of Turkish modernity. Conceptualizations of postorientalism have been used by these scholars to open sites of resistance in national historiography and culture and would likewise bring new insights to literature in nationalized, secularized, and modernized Muslim societies such as Turkey. Postorientalism accommodates varieties of national and transnational resistance, as represented by Pamuk and Halide Edib, respectively. The interrogation of historiography that Prakash describes involves the examination of the nation as a first, though compromised, attempt at postorientalism. The nation, Prakash writes, accepts orientalist essentializations, but makes them active rather than passive. In this sense, then, the early narratives of Republican literature by Ömer Seyfeddin, Halide Edib, Yakup Kadri, Peyami Safa, and others are something of an attempt at postorientalist practices of “writing back” in a nationalist vein. However, they are also based on a simple discursive inversion of the terms of power relations. In this scenario, the orientalist “Terrible Turk” has become a kind of noble savage, a nationalist “Terrific Turk.” Taking the debate beyond the nation-form, in a way that resonates with Chatterjee’s argument in The Nation and its Fragments, Prakash states, “[Postorientalist scholarship] posits that we can proliferate histories, cultures and identities arrested by previous essentializations” (Prakash 1990: 406). Though he is speaking about history writing, his conclusions, reminiscent of Darvınog˘ lu’s search for historical form, would also hold for literature and literary modernity. The postorientalism that is prefigured in the comparison made in this chapter is also transnational and “proliferates” new representations. Halide Edib, writing in exile, cleverly circumvents the cultural revolution by retrospectively situating her novel in late Ottoman Hamidian Istanbul. Pamuk sets My Name is Red in sixteenthcentury Istanbul such that national boundaries give way to vast transregional networks based on other affiliations. Respectively, their novels re-situate early modern and late modern Ottoman cosmopolitanism into secular Turkish cultural logic. The Ottoman legacy – as a space of negotiation, transgression, and dissidence – is a contested space of politics and literature, of Islam and modernity, and of din and devlet, that allows Pamuk and Halide Edib to develop the Turkish novel in a critical vein. In the Turkish context, postorientalism arguably functions (1) to recognize yet interrogate the Kemalist cultural revolution as a sustained engagement with, rather than an overturning of, European and Ottoman imperial power

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and modernity; (2) to support the epistemological continuity between Turkish secular modernity and varieties of orientalist thought; (3) to acknowledge that an internalized orientalism divides the Turkish self and creates an on-going crisis of modernity in the intellectual, the author, and society; (4) to belie the political fantasy of a Turkishness based on mutually exclusive narratives of din or of devlet; and (5) to serve as a process of emancipation from the discursive confines and impositions of Turkishness that prevent the full representation and legibility of subjects with agency. A postorientalist approach foregrounds political and cultural representations that are not delimited by dominant discourses of orientalism and nationalism alone. As the late Ottoman state fell into the position of being semi-colonized, the legacy of this semi-colonization, or colonial encounter with Europe, informed the breadth, scope, and severity of the Kemalist cultural revolution that gave shape to the Republic of Turkey. Though it is commonplace to hear modern Turks declare that “Turkey” – often meaning both the Ottoman state and the Republic – was never colonized, history presents us with quite a different account, one of a local authoritarian modernization that usurps the place of a colonial civilizing mission. It is by subverting the dominant legibility of the orientalist–national binary through new practices of narration that Pamuk and authors like Halide Edib establish a “postorientalist aesthetic.” As authors critical of the state, they represent voices of dissent vital to the creation of Turkish literary modernity. The Ottoman legacy and its Sufism, material culture, and cosmopolitanism afford Pamuk and Halide Edib a triangulating perspective on the secular denigrations of din and the control mechanisms of devlet. My Name is Red presents classical sixteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul as a site of cultural production vying against secular and religious authority. The novel is both a depiction of Ottoman everyday life and an allegory for late Republican era tensions between artist/author and state. Similarly, The Clown and His Daughter presents late nineteenth-century Hamidian Istanbul as a site of Islamic and Sufi (Mevlevi) cultural traditions. It is also a historical novel of the late Ottoman everyday as well as an allegory for Kemalist tensions between artist and state. Both novels offer frank and revealing depictions of Turkish Muslim family life, with strong urban women at their centers (Shekure and Rabia). Both novels, thus, consciously reimagine dominant orientalist tropes of the Ottoman legacy, including women (as enslaved), Islam (as anti-modern), the Ottoman Empire (as backward), and the Muslim city (as anti-cosmopolitan). What is ultimately depicted in Pamuk’s classical, and Halide Edib’s late Ottoman, novel is not a backward, exotic, orientalized world but scenes of literary witness that “de-orientalize” Ottoman Turkishness. This process is predicated on the material culture of the Istanbul archive. Reinscriptions of Istanbul cosmopolitanism, by targeting secular modernity, subvert dominant orientalist and nationalist binaries. In other words, their novels do not simply critique secular modernity, they also perform related critiques of the operations of orientalism as it is situated into projects of secular modernity.

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Nevertheless Pamuk’s postorientalist fiction does not entirely abandon the ideal of modernization, or Republican literary modernity. It aims to liberate this modernity from a dependency on modular European forms that ignore local contingencies. In short, Pamuk’s fiction is neither neo-conservatively nostalgic nor radically revolutionary. As I have argued, it is unavoidably compromised by sites of authority as well as compromising of them. Pamuk, though questioning official metanarratives and discourses, maintains a secular modernist position in his fiction in two regards: (1) the emergence of the author-figure at the end of his novels; and (2) in the Ottoman Decline Paradigm. As I have argued over the last two chapters, Pamuk’s Ottoman novels work to de-orientalize the Republican approach to the Ottoman legacy by revising attitudes toward Istanbul cosmopolitanism and Turkish Islam; that is, toward the archive of Ottoman Islamic material culture and cultural history. By providing his local and international readers with access to this occulted archive, Pamuk’s novels constitute a politicized counter-archive to Turkish modernity and a postorientalist site of resistance. This is evident in his reimagining of Ottoman Islamic legacy of din, which broadly contains any number of secular national “taboos.” It is not only through dissident modes of historiographic and archival writing that Pamuk critiques the state, but also through techniques of political parody. The following chapter examines Pamuk’s parodic approach to manifestations of secular modern devlet in the form of military coups and the literature of conspiracy that underwrites them.

Part III

The Literary Politics of the Secular-Sacred

5

Political Parody from Coups to Conspiracies

For as long as I can recall paranoia has been a dominant mode of existence and reasoning in my country. It comes in a variety of forms in all manner of scope and scale. (Pamuk 1999: 79) Nothing. Existed. (Sartre 2007 [1959])1 I am killing myself to prove my independence and my new terrible freedom. (Dostoevsky 1936: 533)2 But if I dwell any longer on military coups and political Islam … I risk destroying the hidden symmetry of this book. (Pamuk 2005a: 183)

The coup is a dominant trope in Turkish literature. Not only is it a literary representation of recent Turkish history which witnessed military interventions into civilian politics in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997, the coup casts a shadow across all of Pamuk’s novels. It is variously treated as being revolutionary, apocalyptic, or both. Fed by conspiracy and ideological discourse, it is described and parodied in the plot by characters who must deal with it as a latent and manifest force of Turkish politics. As protagonists react to this exercise of state power, the coup leads to an unexpected outcome: acts of literary production. In Pamuk’s world, protagonists write against the coup to escape the confines that it imposes on self and society. Thus, writing becomes an act of redemption in the face of authoritarian rule. Parody is a dominant mode in which Pamuk treats the coup. Writing political parody allows Pamuk to transcend the existentialist nihilism wrought by the coup as it manifests as a symptom of secular modernity. The nihilist impasse is represented by suicide in the works of Yusuf Atılgan and Og˘ uz Atay. Homo secularis is the term I have been articulating to describe the subject produced by regimes of secular nationalism and confined by its discourses. Homo secularis, continually faced with nihilism, must decide between the fate of a broken life, suicide, adopting

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secularism as a faith, converting, or finding redemption through creative acts such as writing. For Pamuk, the fate of the writer manqué, a condition of homo secularis, is repeatedly overcome through the agency of the writing-subject. This chapter returns to the context of devlet and the conflicted relationship between state and author with which this study began, focusing on a third mode of Pamuk’s dissident writing after the “historiographic” and the “archival”: political parody.3 By the time his first novel was published, Pamuk had experienced three military coups that purported to maintain a modern secular Turkey. Just as the excesses of Turkism and the Kemalist cultural revolution pushed early novelists to reassess the Ottoman past, so the political dysfunction of Republican coups forced Pamuk to seek literary alternatives that redefined “Turkishness.” Tropes of coup and conspiracy shape all of his novels. Pamuk’s first three novels are punctuated by military coups that are nevertheless excluded from explicit description in the plot. Cevdet Bey and Sons is set over a period marked by the Young Turk constitutional revolution (1908/9), the Bab-ı Âli Coup (1913), the abolishment of the Ottoman sultanate and establishment of the Republic (1922/3), and the first two Republican Cold War coups (1960 and 1971). The Silent House is set during polarization between right and left in the 1970s and ends just before the 1980 coup; likewise, The Black Book unfolds under the conspiracies of this impending coup. The White Castle begins in its wake. The New Life develops through the logic of Turkish conspiracy and counter-conspiracy. My Name is Red pits the Ottoman sultan against a conservative Islamic resurgence, and Snow, inspired by the 1997 coup, treats the Turkish “coup” as a melodrama all of its own. A total of seven times between 1908 and 1997, an average of once every 15 years, the military (whether late Ottoman or Turkish) intervened in the political process. Often, the rationale for intervention was construed as a leftist or an Islamic conspiracy against the political order.4 As a literary trope evoking devlet, the “coup” came to represent a paranoid re-enactment of the establishment of the nation-state and a metonym for cultural revolution.5 Pamuk repeatedly incorporates this trope in his fiction. In Pamuk’s world, the coup marks changes not only in political history, but also in literary modernity. For example, the 1980 military coup occurs between The Silent House and The White Castle. The faux “Preface” of The White Castle reveals that Darvınog˘ lu has lost his job at the state university after leftist purges in the wake of the coup. It is due to the explicit effects of this coup that he returns to the Ottoman archive. The imposition of devlet authority through the coup causes Darvınog˘ lu lose interest in history as a discipline (in both senses) and focus instead on the parable of an archival story he has unexpectedly discovered. He is able to respond to the reassertion of national secular authority through the coup textually, by translating and publishing a manuscript of hybrid and cosmopolitan authority: a narrative perspective shared mutually by an Ottoman Muslim and a Venetian Christian (see Chapter 3). Whereas Pamuk’s first three novels reference coups in order to stress the social alienation they produce, his fourth and fifth novels –The Black Book and The New

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Life – turn coups into subjects of parody, recasting the logic of nationalism into forms of collective paranoia. This trope is further developed in Snow, where the coup becomes a farcical, second-rate performance with dire consequences. The New Life and Snow in particular are novels that develop the themes of political conspiracy and military coup, respectively. Pamuk’s novels describe conditions of intense alienation, much as Yusuf Atılgan’s An Idle Man and Motherland Hotel do. These are novels that stress the alienation effect of modern secularism. Atılgan’s Motherland Hotel is one of existentialism and suicide. Og˘uz Atay’s Misfits sees the same situation parodically, offering the possibility of redemption through writing. Atılgan’s Motherland Hotel is a bleak, minimalist portrayal of pathological alienation that traces the routine of an anti-hero, Zebercet, who represents homo secularis. Zebercet is a hotel clerk in an Anatolian town. A night’s visit to the hotel by a mysterious woman fills him with obsessive fantasies. This leads to his act of murder and suicide. In contrast, Atay’s Misfits parodies the attempts of Republican intellectuals to belong to a socially engineered society fraught with coups and the ideological confinements of Turkism. Influenced by the generation of 1968 and the worldwide social protests that occurred in that year, Atay and his novel are testimonies to the need for social change, protest movements, and humanism in the face of state power. Though Atay could be associated with the anti-establishment New Left, Misfits was among the first Turkish novels to display features we now associate with metafiction. The plot focuses on Turgut Özben, a character who researches the suicide of his friend Selim Is¸ık. As he does so, he begins to distance himself from his customary routine and associations, accepting that he, too, is a “misfit” to the ironic degree that his marginalized voice provides an indictment of Turkish modernity. Pamuk situates himself in relation to these authors by using Atay’s parodic mode to update Yusuf Atılgan’s fiction of existentialism. Pamuk’s development of two main tropes of devlet – coup and conspiracy – demonstrates that they can be transformative vehicles of literary innovation.

The Literature of Conspiracy Beginning in earnest with The Black Book, Pamuk repeatedly describes and parodies a popular mode of thought in Turkey and the Middle East, which could be termed the “discourse of conspiracy.” Conspiracy seeks to understand events and political developments beyond the distortions of sites of authority such as the state. It seeks a deeper, secret story in the superficial objects and signs that surround us.6 Often the details, people, texts, and dates of conspiratorial narratives are verifiable facts. What establishes their skewed logic is their emplotment in narrative, which usually implicates some named or unnamed totalizing force. In Pamuk’s novels, this process of “constructing” totalizing narratives is exposed and parodied, to the degree that ideology itself, and even national ideology, is revealed as being nourished by conspiratorial thought.

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The rhetoric of conspiracy is prominent in Pamuk’s novels where it (1) represents and parodies a “truth-function” in the face of authorizing discourses of din and devlet, (2) describes the “paranoid style” of thought that predominates in cases of extreme nationalism such as Turkism, (3) provides a measure of agency to disenfranchised individuals and groups, (4) gives rise to a skewed logic of ideology, and (5) serves as a politicized discourse that can be a source of literary production. In the case of modern Turkish literature, conspiracy is arguably a literary sub-genre. Pamuk, who has extensive personal experience grappling with the logic of conspiracy (see the Introduction), states: There is a literature of paranoia in our day that takes Dostoyevsky and Borges as its source and that writers like Thomas Pynchon and Umberto Eco savor with a high sense of wit; one that I, too, see myself a part of. … But I’m different from them and more privileged as the citizen of a country that has appropriated paranoia as a form of existence. I’m able to create this literature using my own self [and experience] as a starting point. (Pamuk 1999: 79) Implicating self and nation in the construction of a literature of conspiracy, Pamuk goes on to discuss the legitimacy of conspiratorial thought as a political problem: I mock the naïve, primitive, vulgar and uncultured paranoia that is widespread in our society because I don’t find it insightful. How? You see, in my novels; I wrote about it in The Silent House; in The New Life there were characters like this. The old leftists in The Black Book were this way. You know, paranoia along the line of “Clinton and Yeltsin have come to agreement, and together with the Pope and the Italian prime minister they’re going to divide Turkey. … ” In the past, I’d mention this in my novels for the sake of satire, but now our newspaper editorials talk about this stuff in all seriousness. … In our country, the culture of paranoia is extremely rich. (Pamuk 1999: 80–1) This chapter takes a closer look at this culture of paranoia, or conspiracy, not just as a theme, but as a plot element that determines the form of Pamuk’s novels.

Conspiratorial Logic: The New Life (1994) Pamuk’s fifth novel, The New Life, describes shadowy networks surrounding a mysterious “book” of immense influence.7 The novel evokes both the “New Life” of Turkish modernization as espoused by the social engineering of Ziya

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Gökalp as well as the new life produced by coups, conversions, or rites of initiation, whether socialist, nationalist, secularist, or Islamic.8 The New Life is a novel that brings together dominant narrative strategies in Pamuk’s literature: (1) political parody, (2) objects and material culture, (3) the absent text, and (4) the Sufi quest. The plot begins with the protagonist Osman (eponymous with the founder of the Ottoman Empire), a 22-year-old civil engineering university student in Istanbul who becomes obsessed with a “book” that alienates him from his family and surroundings, infecting him with the need to search for the mysterious, utopian “world,” or “new life,” described within its pages. The mysterious and banned ‘book’ is described as having “light shining from its pages,” the kind of light within which, as the narrator Osman states, “I could create myself anew” (Pamuk 1994: 7). In actualizing his parodic mode, Pamuk positions the book as both the object of a Great Conspiracy and a Great Counter-Conspiracy. Soon, Osman moves from being a “reader” who has repeatedly read the book to being a “writer” of sorts when he begins to copy the book into a notebook. Osman studies at the Istanbul Technical University; as such, he, and the other main characters Mehmet and Canan, represent aspiring “engineers,” “doctors,” “architects,” and other professionals who serve to “construct” the Republican nation-state as educated figures of secular modernity. Osman, however, has lost this focus on devlet, and is a questioning figure, like most of Pamuk’s progatonists, who is experiencing a crisis of identity as reader and devotee of the (blasphemous) book. These are figures that have either rejected or have been rejected from secular mainstream society and are an echo of Atay’s rejected characters in Misfits. The novel conceals the mysterious book from the reader, putting that reader in a situation parallel to that of Osman, as he sets out in search of its secrets and his beloved Canan, in whose hands he first saw the book. As such, the book, conflated with Osman’s beloved, the “angel” figure that appears constantly, and God, becomes sacralized.9 The book represents mystical contexts of din. Osman’s rival is Canan’s boyfriend, Mehmet (lit. Muhammad). “Osman” can be read as a representative of the Ottoman Turkish tradition of state building or devlet (not to mention conjuring the third Caliph). Mehmet represents devotion to the mystical book, a signature Pamuk “absent text.” The novel assumes the quality of a Sufi quest or mystic romance in which the hero must overcome obstacles to unite with his beloved, who is also a representative of Allah. Osman travels from cosmopolitan Istanbul to the Anatolian town of Güdül, northwest of Ankara, almost as if through time. Out of the wreckage of a bus accident, through which Osman and Canan are reunited, the couple head for the “broken-hearted merchants convention.” This is a convention that brings together merchants devoted to the consumer goods and objects once produced in Turkey, but now threatened with oblivion due to competition from more powerful transnational corporations. It is, allegorically, a

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quasi-nationalistic gathering. There, Osman meets Dr. Narin, Mehmet’s father. Mehmet’s given name is “Nahit” and he later also adopts the name “Osman” after a faked death in a bus accident. Mehmet earns a living as something of a scribe, by making and selling copies of the “book.” Osman’s material and mystical quest is obstructed by the conservative Dr. Narin (lit. “frail”) and his network of spies working to maintain local authenticity against the book’s “colonizing” influence. Here, Osman undergoes something of a conversion-of-convenience to win Dr. Narin’s trust and gain information about Mehmet. By creating this milieu of conspiracy and counter-conspiracy, Pamuk makes the point that the “new life” (i.e., the national condition) is predicated on conspiratorial logic itself. In this novel, Pamuk’s focus turns from authorship to the situation of the reader, in keeping with his establishment of a metafictional structure. Osman (temporarily) becomes a member of the Great Counter-Conspiracy by murdering Dr. Narin’s son, Mehmet, a proponent of the “book”. Thus, he clears the way for a reunion with Canan. Yet he never again sees her. Before his final bus trip, Osman has married, has had a child, and has settled into a mundane middle-class life. Only after thinking that he might learn more about the “New Life” does he set out on the road again. The New Life itself is a double bind: the uncertain promise of another life that destroys the one he currently lives. This situation describes the crisis of a divided life that Osman cannot resolve. In Pamuk’s metafictional framing, the epiphany of personal insight traditionally reserved for the protagonist is transferred to the reader. Finally, like a modern-day Ahab, Osman becomes a martyr to his obsession, suffering a bus accident during his futile search for the New Life, which by the end of the novel has been satirically reduced to the everyday object of New Life caramels. The elusive and mysterious absent text that drives the plot is demystified, partially. Pamuk’s own The New Life serves to usurp the place of the absent text as a powerful secular-sacred and material-mystical text that itself exerts a mysterious pull on its readers. When it was published, The New Life became the fastest selling book in Turkish history. The Material and Mystical Book In The New Life, Pamuk again returns to the subject of the “book” as a central object of Turkish literary (and secular) modernity as well as a confounding absence. The place of the “book” is intentionally paradoxical and indeterminate. It is an “absent presence” that structures the novel as a metafiction. The plot centers around the effect of the book on readers. (This echoes the effect of Pamuk’s novel on his own Turkish readers.) The mystical effects of the book on Osman are described as follows: One day I read a book and my whole life changed. … The book affected not only my soul but everything that constituted me. … I thought light was emanating from the pages of the book: A light that both blinded my

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reason and illuminated me. This was the kind of light in which I could remake myself; I had the suspicion that this light could also derail me. … I turned the pages, and as my whole life changed, I read new words and pages. … As if to protect myself from the power emanating from the pages, instinctively, I turned away. That’s when I realized fearfully that the world around me had transformed completely, and I was overcome by a feeling of alienation that I’d never felt before. It was as if I’d been suddenly abandoned in a nation whose language, customs, and geography I knew nothing about. … The book would reveal what to do in this new land, what I should believe, what I could observe, and my life’s path. … This book that would so transform my life was actually an everyday object. … I saw light seeping over the threshold [es¸ik] of another life. … There was a journey, always, everything was a journey. (Pamuk 1994: 7–9) Pamuk structures the novel around this absent text, which functions as an empty signifier for the discursive power of religion, state, modernity, nationalism, or even conspiracy. In contrast to the mystical qualities of the book, it is also a material object that describes everyday events: “murders, accidents, death, and missing signs” (Pamuk 2007: 6). After having completed the book, Osman’s life is forever changed: I didn’t yet want to face the entire transformation of a familiar world now changed from top to bottom, but I was well aware that my room was no longer the same old room, nor the streets the same streets, my friends the same friends, my mother the same mother. … I felt guilty about having read a book that had estranged me from her [secular, Republican] world. (Pamuk 2007: 7–8) The transformative power of the book also signifies its subversive quality. The story of the book, as an object of material culture, is revealing. We are given clues that are both material and mystical. Ironically, a state railway worker (a devlet figure), Rıfkı Hat (lit. “path of goodness”), turns out to be the author of the roughly 300-page book. Rıfkı Hat, a co-worker of Osman’s father, wrote “The New Life” as an adult version of his nationalistic children’s comic books in which Turks travel to places like America and prove constructive in historical events. We learn that Hat relied on 33 books of an international canon from Ibn Arabi to Dante and Rilke to Jules Verne when writing his version of The New Life. It seems to be a didactic text of secular national modernity, but not entirely, because the book is not only transformative for the reader but, itself, transforms through subsequent interpretive readings. Rıfkı Hat and his book become the target of state censure when its influence is deemed harmful and suspect. Here, we are again returned to the opposition of author and state. In court, Hat agrees not to republish the work ever again.

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Yet devotees of the work reappear to complicate matters. One of them, Mehmet, spends his days copying the book and selling it. Thus, the book begins to take on the mystical quality of din. The book is a typical example of Pamuk’s absent text trope. The relationships between author and reader, lover and beloved, and text and state power intersect in the “book,” which is a metaphor for Pamuk’s own secular-sacred laboratory of literary modernity. We learn that the book, as if sacred, describes the presence of a guiding angel and the possibility of a new life, and as if mystical, emits the light (of gnosis). It seems to be prophetic. In contrast, it also depicts existential and material scenes of chaos, accident, and even apocalypse. Echoing the Islamic tradition and Qur’an, Pamuk’s “book” raises the problem of the written (revealed) word as a sacred incarnation. The material and mystical book is, of course, a text of literary modernity that has the ability to accommodate both Rıfkı Hat’s The New Life and Pamuk’s The New Life. As if to emphasize the power of such a finite and infinite text, the novel dramatizes the “death of the author” as a political assassination, part of Dr. Narin’s ultimately doomed Great Counter-Conspiracy.10 Nevertheless, in the novel, the author-figure both addresses the mystical angel as well as the secular modern reader, as if to bring them together as interlocutors. These events are incorporated into Pamuk’s novel as if to argue for the mediating possibilities of the text and its secular-sacredness between din and devlet. The Mystical Allegory of Turkish Secularism The main characters of The New Life can be read allegorically. As an engineer, Osman, represents the secular nation or state; Canan is the beloved of sufism; and Mehmet, the Turkish version of Muhammad, is something of a secular prophet and a medium between secular and sacred realms. Osman and Mehmet, as reader and scribe/writer, are facets of each other. Their doubleness is emphasized by the fact that they assume each other’s identities in the plot (harkening back to a tactic Pamuk first used in The White Castle). When Osman (the “reader”) assassinates Mehmet (the “scribe”), who is also a rival for Canan’s affections, the “death of the author” trope is once again dramatized in the plot (as it is in The Black Book and Snow). Osman represents the positivist enlightenment worldview of homo secularis, as do Mehmet (medical school student) and Canan (architecture student). However, in keeping with a theme of individual protest introduced by Atay in Misfits, they all drop out of Istanbul secular society. They lose themselves in the landscapes of Anatolia. Osman eventually returns to finish his studies and to lead the secular modern life expected of him as an engineer. He gets married and has a little girl. But the book haunts him and pulls him back into its mystical orbit. The search for information about it only leads him to a satiric object of Republican modernity: New Life caramels (which are no longer made) and their handful of simple ingredients. While returning to Istanbul on an old-style bus, Osman believes he sees the beloved “angel” in

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the form of an intense light. This light merges with the actual headlights of oncoming trucks, leading to an accident and Osman’s likely death (which is also his macabre reunion with the beloved). Yet for the reader, it leads to critical insight into Turkish national cultural logic. At the end of the novel, we have usurped Osman’s place in the text as a reader caught between two worlds: the material and the mystical, the existential and the redemptive, and the secular and the sacred. Osman is a character who has also lived through the transition of Turkey from an inward third-world country to a globalizing transnational state. His experiences can be read as an allegory for the dissolution of the social state in an era of neo-liberalism. This geopolitical transformation informs the events in the novel, as it points to the reactionary conspiracy theories that result in the minds of many of the characters Osman encounters. According to these theories, an invisible and totalizing force (i.e., the “West”) is responsible for these changes. The collapse of the state economy is mostly presented in the plot through the disappearance of products once produced in Turkey. This includes New Life caramels, the sweet candy symbolizing a fleeting national utopia that dissolves on the tongue. It is only the image of the angel on the wrapper that stands in for the potential for some elusive redemption. The protagonist (Osman/state) is destroyed in the process. Pamuk’s novel is a quiet testimony to this metaphoric destruction as reflected in literary modernity. Turkey’s transformation from being a nation that produces its own products to one that is the market for international goods is conveyed as a subtext in The New Life. This occurs with a parallel diminishment of the state-run economy, the collapse of national development policy, and wholesale privatization that occurred in Turkey beginning in the 1990s (Keyder 1993; Finkel 2012). Pamuk is tracing, in other words, the dismantling of the secular social state. Turkey’s integration into global networks occurred with a simultaneous rise in conservative alternatives to secular modernity that have been described broadly as “political Islam.” Many of the figures in the novel are doubled. Most prominently, Mehmet and Osman symbolize a personification of din and devlet that is variously an oppostion or a unity (as each character adopts both personas). Both the “book” and Canan are conflated as being sources of mystical light; one is a material and the other is a spiritual beloved. The image of the angel that repeatedly appears throughout the novel gives Osman’s journey a mystical quality that is also illusory; for example, when the “redemptive” angel appears as the incarnation of a sideshow whore. Finally, the “reader” is also an “author.” The vacillation between the poles of the material and the mystical occurs throughout the plot. The “book” itself, revealed to the reader piecemeal, indeterminately describes either the material chaos of an apocalypse or the celestial realm of a promised land. From the beginning, Pamuk establishes a symbolic and allegorical realm in his novel, one that dominates in traditional Islamic mystical literature. Pamuk, borrowing from this traditional literary framing, describes characters

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who are drawn away from a secular world (of education, family, and nation) into the life of the quest which offers either mystical transformation or crude death. Pamuk, borrowing from Tanpınar, describes the quest (being “neither here nor there”) as a threshold (es¸ik). In the novel, Pamuk represents this threshold materially through the accident (kaza), which also has religious meanings. In Islam, kaza (Arabic, k.ad.a-’) has various contextual meanings from “doomsday,” “revelation of the truth,” and “predestination,” to “divine decree” and “sudden death” (Káldy-Nagy 2012 [1974]). In Pamuk’s symbolic literary world, the kaza is the twist of fate that offers the possibility of both material change and mystical redemption. It is through repeated bus accidents, for example, that Osman is able to reunite with Canan, his beloved; assume the identity of Ali Kara; and see the angel. Into this symbolic and literary world Pamuk introduces political conspiracy and parody. In the process, homo secularis, whether as Osman or Ka, is marked for sacrifice. A Great Conspiracy and a Great Counter-Conspiracy The description and parody of conspiratorial logic runs throughout Pamuk’s work. His politicization of the conspiracy narrative emerges through connections to Turkish and Middle East nationalisms. One subplot of The New Life is a Great Conspiracy related to the “book” (a vehicle of faith or reason), which forever alters the lives of those who read it. The Republican secularist Dr. Narin has lost his son Mehmet to the “book.”11 (Dr. Narin is not a doctor, but actually a retired lawyer.) A figure of parody, Dr. Narin’s position verges on paranoia. The character of the “book” (the text of Turkishness) is always held in a state of indeterminacy, at times assuming the quality of a sacred text, and at other times of one that is secular and profane. Dr. Narin has set up a network of resistance. The resistance includes spies and assassins whose goal is to wipe out the influence of the book in Turkey and as far away as Tehran, Damascus, and the Balkans. Dr. Narin’s Great Counter-Conspiracy (of national self-determination), as one advocate explains, centers around the doctor’s “struggle against the book, against foreign cultures that annihilate us, against the newfangled stuff that comes from the West, and his all-out battle against printed matter” (Pamuk 2007: 83). One of his goals is to found a new state (Pamuk 2007: 139). This position describes, and more importantly parodies, a devlet position of national authenticity and self-determination. Unspoken-for, heartsick people (the “nation”) have flocked around Dr. Narin in central Anatolia to try to mount a resistance. Such resistance, among other things, parodies Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk’s) resistance to the Allied powers after World War I. In The New Life, a convention (a congress?) is held in Güdül by broken-hearted merchants whose products have been outstripped by those produced by foreign firms. This echoes a farcical re-enactment of early Republican history. Atatürk, too, began an anti-colonial, anti-imperial movement of resistance in Anatolia that led to the Turkish war

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of independence and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in what could be called a “coup” against the Ottoman government in Istanbul, which was cooperating with the occupying Allied powers. Osman and Canan (under the aliases of “Ali” and “Efsun Kara”) arrive at the “broken-hearted” merchants convention, which gathers together the failed castoffs of a defunct national economy. These are producers of a litany of objects that have been out-sold by competition from multinational companies opening for business in Turkey. The “material unconscious” represented by the convention is telling: it demonstrates the collapse of the national vision, first articulated by Turkist ideologue Ziya Gökalp as the “new life.” The convention itself is being held in the Kenan Evren High School. General Kenan Evren was the leader of the 1980 military coup (popularly referred to as the “second Atatürk”). The linking of the establishment of the Republic with the history of Cold War military coups is important to understanding Pamuk’s literary politics. The argument is that the three main military coups were extensions of the military-led establishment of the Republic. Parodying the modernizing union of secularism and Islam, Osman states: There, in the exhibits set up in the cafeteria of the Kenan Evren High School, we saw … the first Turkish-made gizmo that detects pork in any given product … a windup clock that provides the answer to the problem of the call to prayer, that is, whether it should be broadcast by loudspeakers or by a muezzin calling from the minaret by the powers of [his] own lungs. This clock automatically settled the Westernization-versusIslamization question through a modern device: Instead of the usual cuckoo bird, two other figures had been employed, a tiny imam who appeared on the lower balcony at the proper time for prayer to announce three times that “God is Great!” and a minute toy gentleman wearing a tie but no mustache who showed up in the upper balcony on the hour, asserting that “Happiness is being a Turk, a Turk, a Turk!” (Pamuk 2007: 87–8) The satiric object described here succinctly embodies various themes and tropes that signify a synthesis of din and devlet coordinated through notions of time. The “clock,” a symbol of modernization, both determines the call to prayer as well as the hour, bringing together traditional ezani and secular modern “Western” time.12 Conspiratorial thought is parodied throught the novel. At the broken-hearted merchants convention, a character announces, One of the pawns of the Great Conspiracy was a man named Gutenberg, known to be a printer and emulated by many, who reproduced words in a manner that outstripped the production of the industrious hand, the patient finger, the fastidious pen; and words, words, words broke loose

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The disassociation of words (and text) from the objects they represent signifies a postmodern linguistic turn that spells the end of material projects of modernity such as Kemalism. The association with infestation is revealing of an afflicted world that needs to be restored to its former authentic and authoritarian nationalist state. Using similar skewed logic, Dr. Narin explains the significance of time and secular and/or religious modernity: We pray five times a day; then in Ramadan, we have the time for iftar, the breaking of fast at sundown, and the time for sahur, the meal taken just before sunup. Our timetables and timepieces are vehicles to reach Allah, not the means of rushing to keep up with the world as they are in the West. … For us there are two avenues that lead to God. Armaments are the vehicles of Jihad; timepieces are the vehicles for prayer. They have managed to silence our guns. Now they have hatched these trains so that our [Muslim] time will also be silenced. Everyone knows that the greatest enemy of the timetable for prayers is the timetable for trains. (Pamuk 2007: 159) Here, the secular-modern symbol of the train and the railway is absurdly opposed to the five daily prayers, reifying the assumption that tradition alone would suffice to establish an authentic Muslim life in the modern era. The conspiracy of national self-determination as a form of colonialism is parodied in the following passage: And perhaps, as it happens when great empires collapse, each assassin had declared himself the sovereign of his own autonomous fiefdom. That was the reason why the magnificent terrain which through a clever tactic of the colonialist genius had been dubbed the “Middle East” was swarming with inept colonial prince-assassins who had declared their independence. He [Süreyya] aimed his cigarette not at me but at the empty chair next to me, emphasizing the colonialist paradox he pointed out: we had now come to the end of the autonomous history of these lands. (Pamuk 2007: 282) This conspiratorial logic – here represented by the blind Süreyya, one-time owner of the New Life caramel company – dominates The New Life. The legitimacy of such perspectives is high in the Middle East and Turkey. Conspiracy attempts to explain local current events through the invisible hand of

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global actors. Pamuk both presents the perspective (as it absolves locals of responsibility) and offers it up as an object of parody at the same time. The Great Counter-Conspiracy is a futile attempt to hold on to socialist secular modernization. National self-determination is presented in Pamuk’s world through the parodic lens of conspiracy theory, and not just in Turkey, but throughout former Ottoman lands in the Balkans and the Middle East. Serkisof, one of the spies named after clock-makers and hired by Dr. Narin to trace the influence of the book, explains: “After all, his investigations had revealed that the whole of Anatolia, not to mention the Middle East and the Balkans, was seething with enraged young people who had read books of this sort” (Pamuk 2007: 152). Such conspiratorial books, implies Pamuk, are furthermore being misread and misinterpreted in the confusion of textual representation, fantasy, and reality. The goal of conspiracy, ultimately, is to bring redemptive meaning (however spurious) to a people and a nation that has suffered great defeat and economic hardship. The same context is parodied in Pamuk’s second novel of conspiracy, Snow. By the end of the novel, Osman’s first-person narration gradually begins to reveal Pamuk’s author-figure. The author-figure fades into Osman’s firstperson narrative perspective, revealing that he is writing the novel we are reading, in keeping with the trope of authorship.13 The author-figure’s narrative alienation in the translational space of the novel is reflected in the following passage, which occurs at the end of the novel: Reader. … Anyway, this modern gadget known as the “novel,” Western culture’s greatest discovery, is not our [Turkish] affair. That the reader hears the crudeness of my voice in these pages is not because I narrate from a realm littered with books and defiled by lofty thoughts, it’s because I still haven’t figured out how to navigate this foreign gadget. (Pamuk 1994: 227) Here, the figure of “reader” (Osman) and “author” (Orhan) are doubled. While speaking as Osman, the author-figure suddenly addresses us, the contemporary reader, without warning. Interestingly, the novel is described as being a foreign discovery, placing the self-deprecating author-figure in the same dilemma of authenticity that has been parodied throughout The New Life. Gökalp’s Nationalist “New Life” and Pamuk’s Parodic New Life Sociologist and proponent of Turkism Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) was a critic of the cultural duality created by Ottoman modernization from the Tanzimat to the Hamidian era.14 He advocated a holistic program of integration based on his slogan, “Turkification, Islamicization, and Westernization” (Parla 1985). Gökalp is a revealing figure with which to approach twentieth-century Republican culture, the tensions between cultures of din and devlet, and The

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New Life. Niyazi Berkes maintains that Gökalp “remains as the best intellectual formulator of the main trends of the Turkish Republic: Westernism, democracy, political and economic national independence, and secularism … his style of thinking … has intellectually dominated the modern reforms in Turkey” (Gökalp 1959 [1911]: 14). In his didactic writings published in the 1910s and early 1920s, Gökalp makes repeated reference to what he terms the “New Life.” He even wrote a collection of poems entitled The New Life in 1918. The New Life was Gökalp’s socio-cultural program to save Ottoman Muslims (“Turks”) from almost certain colonization and to help ensure the transition from Empire to Republic. According to Gökalp: What does social revolution mean? It means simply the creation of a New Life by discarding an older one. … A New Life means, obviously, a new form of economy, a new form of family-life, new aesthetic standards, a new morality, a new conception of law, and a new political system. … The New Life will be created, not copied. … We, as I have explained, should create a new synthesis. (Gökalp 1959 [1911]: 56–9) Broadly, he called for a synthesis between Turkish folk culture, Islam, and Western civilization. To this ideological synthesis he gave the name “Türkçülük” or Turkism (Gökalp 1959 [1923]). His Ottoman Turkism influenced the Republican Turkism that followed. His ideas, in a modified form, were incorporated into the Kemalist cultural revolution. Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) went further than Gökalp in the program of secularization by suppressing Islam in the public sphere through decrees like the abolishment of the Caliphate, the closing of dervish orders and lodges, and the alphabet and language reforms. Gökalp believed civilization was culturally neutral, and he encouraged the educated and intellectual elite of Istanbul to go to Anatolia to learn the indigenous Turkish culture while bringing to that culture the civilization of Europe. This very program was implemented by early Republican authorintellectuals including Halide Edib, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanog˘ lu, and, in part, Nâzım Hikmet. It was this cooperation between rural and urban Muslim Turks that would foster the New Life. In many ways Pamuk’s novel is a parodic engagement with Gökalp’s New Life. The idealism of Gökalp’s New Life vanishes to reveal Pamuk’s version of violence and uncertainty. Pamuk’s New Life is one of depression, obsession, unrequited love, and deception: a postmodern parody of Gökalp’s modernist nationalism. Osman (the “state-builder”) meets his demise in pursuit of what he believes will be his salvation. There is no redemption in the self-determination of the New Life in Pamuk’s world. There is only the redemption offered by the confessional text of the novel that supplants the absent text of modernity. Out of the failures of Republican modernity, Pamuk manages to foster

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innovation in literary modernity. The secular Republican masterplot ushered in a New Life for Turks, a life whose discursive power, backed by state ideology, now demands reflexive and critical reassessment. In short, the mystical draw of the secular “faith” of devlet demands revision. It is through parody that Pamuk’s novel argues for yet another new life beyond the national tradition of coups and conspiracy. Between Existential Crisis and Literary Redemption Immediately before the accident in which Osman dies, he thinks: I remembered the anticipation of peace following the accidents I had lived through years ago … the feeling of transition after an accident which seemed filmed in slow motion. I remembered the passengers who were neither here nor there stirring blissfully, as if sharing together time that had come out of paradise … on the threshold between the two worlds, as if discovering the endless horseplay that was possible in a space without gravity. (Pamuk 2007: 295) Pamuk brings together two contexts in this passage: the material circumstances of an impending accident and a sacred timeless time (“zamansız zaman” in Tanpınar’s phrase). This cultural space is described as being without gravity. Reading Pamuk’s work together, it is evident that the “accident” (kaza) represents the risk and potential of crossing/transgression of the border of Turkish national cultural logic. The crossing promises redemption. The use of the word “threshold” (es¸ik) is significant in this passage. For Pamuk, the vehicle for making this crossing is textual, both in the novel’s plot and as an author of the modern novel. Pamuk’s next two novels, My Name is Red and Snow, are the transnational novels that established his international reputation and led to his winning the Nobel Prize. Suturing the chronotopes of nation and city, or nation and empire, allows Pamuk to increase his readership and legibility. Osman’s “death” (the death of the search for authenticity) is a metaphor for transgression. The next novel places us directly into the context of an Islamic worldview centered in Istanbul during the Ottoman classical era. This is the discursive context of Pamuk’s search for new forms. The threshold, or es¸ik, is also a symbolic term employed by Tanpınar (he also has a poem with that title). It is the cultural space of transformation, a Janus-space between two identities. If two main chronotopes in the tradition of the Turkish novel are din and devlet, the threshold between them becomes the representative space for Pamuk’s redefinition of Turkishness. The epiphany of transformation that is traditionally reserved for the modernist hero, in Pamuk’s world, is transferred to the reader. To emphasize Pamuk’s critique of essentialized authenticity, he not only describes the failure of Dr. Narin’s movement for purity; at the end of the

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novel, Osman finds Süreyya, the owner of the factory that made the New Life caramels, in a small Anatolian town that has maintained its authenticity and avoided being changed by “the wind blowing from the West.” This is an apt context to describe the enforced national provincialism against which Pamuk writes. In its final manifestation as an object, a sweet candy that quickly dissolves, the New Life becomes a metaphor for demystification. The purity that Osman seeks is reduced to this caramel, its angel-image trademark, and its now-blind producer, who ironically lives out his days on Ziya (“light”) street. Pointing to the false binary logic of nationalism and orientalism, Pamuk repeatedly parodies the conspiratorial thought it produces. At the novel’s close, Osman/the author-figure is consoled by an old Turk: Take it easy! This too shall pass. … Today we are altogether defeated. The West has swallowed us up, trampled on us in passing. They have invaded us down to our soup, our candy, our underpants; they have finished us off. But someday, someday perhaps a thousand years from now, we will avenge ourselves; we will bring an end to this conspiracy by taking them out of our soup, our chewing gum, and our souls. (Pamuk 2007: 290–1) In this passage, Pamuk extends the melancholy of the “Decline Paradigm” to the present day. By exposing the futility represented in this passage, Pamuk brings sorrow (hüzün) together with parody. The speaker is condemned to define himself (and his country) through the double bind that is “self” and “other.” This is none other than Pamuk’s ridicule of the so-called East–West binary, rather than his espousal of it. “The New Life” refers to two eponymous texts: Rıfkı Hat’s mysterious book and Pamuk’s novel. Thus, The New Life is structured around a selfreferential absent text of the same name, the account of which constitutes the novel. Snow, a novel that also addresses the themes of coup and conspiracy, has an identical structure: a novel that is woven out of the account of an absent text. In Snow, the absent text is a book of poems by the main character; the account of these poems, which remain inaccessible to the reader, constitutes the novel we read. The book of poems purports to reveal the identity of the protagonist, which is just another absence. Rıfkı Hat’s “The New Life” is also ostensibly about the protagonist Osman, but it remains an absence. Both novels, rather than telling the story of their main characters, provide an account of the historical, cultural, and political contexts that “constitute” them. This metanarrative framing, which takes precedence over character, is used to varying degrees by Pamuk in all of his novels beginning with The White Castle. In order to better understand the existential crisis faced by characters like Osman and Ka who represent homo secularis we can turn to the novels of Yusuf Atılgan.

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Yusuf Atılgan’s Existential Crisis of Secular Modernity: Motherland Hotel (1973) Osman is a character that is alienated from his family, society, and nation. He is on the margins of society and he is the type of character one would find in the existential novels of Yusuf Atılgan or Og˘uz Atay. These are novels in which the characters reach an existential impasse, reducing their lives to meaninglessness that often ends in suicide. Pamuk’s novels as well are full of moments of existential crisis experienced by characters such as Refik, Darvınog˘ lu, Galip, Osman, Velican, Ka, and Kemal. Many of these characters experience a Sartrean “nausea” in which the bareness of life as homo secularis fills them with disgust. This figure of crisis finds its iconic example in Yusuf Atılgan’s Motherland Hotel, a novel that stresses the alienation effects of the secular state. Atılgan’s Motherland Hotel traces the pathological alienation of an antihero, Zebercet, a hotel clerk in an Anatolian town. Zebercet, emptied of an emotional life, is defined materially by his clothes, his job, his daily routine, and his bodily needs of food, sleep, shelter, and sex – for which he rapes the hotel maid. This is a godless world reduced to material relations. The occupants of the hotel are similarly defined starkly by occupation: a military officer, a teacher, and cattle-dealers. A night’s visit to the hotel by a young woman, with no apparent occupation, disrupts this scenario by filling Zebercet with obsessive fantasies that lead to his gradual breakdown, his murder of the maid, and then suicide. In his novel, Atılgan portrays a national space reduced to its bare materiality without any possibility of grace or redemption. The only option left for Zebercet, a representation of homo secularis, is selfsacrifice, which recurs as a trope in Turkish literature.15 Insight into the link between this literary trope and ideologies of secularism can be traced back to the late Ottoman author Bes¸ir Fuad (1852–87), who was an atheist vanguard of enlightenment positivism and empiricism. His infamous “documented suicide” of February 5, 1887 represents the paradigmatic intersection of text and suicide (forbidden in Islam). In this case the “author” is killed off by the “self” in a “westernizing” gesture of secular modernity that is also blasphemy and a manifestation of circular reasoning verging on the absurd (the logic is something like “by killing myself and documenting the physical act, I will establish a milestone of modernity”). As an iconic figure of homo secularis, Bes¸ir Fuad, his suicide and its representation pave the way for the representation of other suicides in Turkish literature, including that of Zebercet.16 The trope of suicide enters into Turkish literary modernity as an ironic act of textual production (and literary modernity) that can be traced through to Pamuk’s fiction. Suicide also evokes the strong influence of authors like Dostoevsky (in The Possessed), and the existentialism of authors like Sartre (in Nausea), both of whom were influential for Turkish literature. The description of Zebercet’s suicide is presented in tones of the absurd and tragicomic:

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The Literary Politics of the Secular-Sacred As he swung, his eyes and mouth open, his legs tensing, struggling, he raised his arms and tried to grab the rope above his head. (What happened? Had he suddenly remembered something he’d forgotten to do? Or had he, at the last minute, recalled that the single true virtue in the world was to protect this extraordinary gift of life that had been given to him, to stay alive despite all, to persevere? Or, rather, was this the innate reaction of bestial, living flesh toward death?) (Atılgan 1973: 172)

The passage emphasizes the opposition between the material and the spiritual. As the depiction of a suicide by hanging, it is remarkably close to Suad’s suicide in A Mind at Peace. However, Atılgan embeds a significant political subtext into this scene. The date and time of Zebercet’s suicide is the date (November 10) and time (9:05 a.m.) of Atatürk’s death (Moran 1983). While the sounds indicating the collective remembrance of this national mourning filter into the room from the outside, Zebercet kills himself, thereby directly linking the figurehead of secular modernity to his own suicide and recasting that suicide as one of political protest. Atılgan is an author who conveys the materialist, secular extreme of authoritarian modernity.17 The setting, the abode of the (national) hotel, is significant, as it also echoes the abodes of secular emptiness that Pamuk describes in his novels. The hotel was once the home of Ottoman Anatolian Greeks who were expelled during the population exchange that was written into the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. It is something of a haunted locale of displacement. The name of the hotel is “motherland,” establishing a direct reference to the nation-state. Atılgan emphasizes that, as a hotel, this abode is temporary rather than permanent, and for its proprietor, something of a prison. The prison theme was dominant in Turkish literature during the Second Republic. The basic parallel that is drawn in this genre is the metaphoric equivalence between the nation and the prison.18 This trope entered Turkish literature with Nâzım Hikmet, returning with literary representations of Turkish military coups, to establish a dominant subgenre. The subtlety of Atılgan’s novel is that the “prison” is part of the everyday rather than an exceptional site of detention or incarceration. Zebercet’s pathological alienation is furthermore normalized in the novel. He is not only obsessive, turning a room in which a woman has stayed into a “museum” and refusing to have it cleaned, he sexually exploits the hotel’s peasant maid, and murders her before he kills himself. In Zebercet’s fantasy, the maid becomes the surrogate for the mysterious bourgeois woman who stays at the hotel for one night. Through this inversion, Atılgan adds a critique of class-consciousness and an indictment of modernity that is reserved for some and denied to others who remain victims of unaccounted-for violence. The discrepancy between the representations of the two women seems to trigger the violence against the peasant, who is an indictment against the overall project of modernity. The “unattainable” bourgeois woman is an

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indictment of the same project. Zebercet’s “impotence” is conveyed by the bodily response of his erection and ejaculation as a result of hanging himself. The leitmotif of suicide also appears in Misfits. This motif can be traced to Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace, in which the revolutionary atheist Suad kills himself, ending the possibility of romance between Mümtaz and Nuran. In . this novel, the character Ihsan reprimands Suad for advocating a “theology in reverse” in his extreme secular nihilism. Tropes of the secular-sacred return to dominate the Turkish novel in post-1980 literature. Zebercet’s existential crisis re-emerges in Pamuk’s fiction as well, in a revised form. Pamuk’s alienated characters confront their existential crises with quests that involve writing and textual production. This recourse is introduced by Atay in Misfits, enabling the development and regeneration of Turkish literature away from social realism. The move from the material to the spiritual is accompanied by a reassessment of the role of the Ottoman past, the setting of Istanbul, and the influence of Sufism. I argue that this constitutes a transition from conspiracy and coup to secular Sufism, which nevertheless maintains its critique of the state in a new idiom.

Melodramas of Conspiracy, Burlesques of Coup: Snow (2002) My Name is Red and Snow are the two novels that established Pamuk’s reputation as an author of world literature.19 Not coincidentally, both represent not only secularism, but Islam, as authorizing discourses, My Name is Red in the sixteenth century and Snow in the 1990s. Snow self-consciously describes a literary engagement with “political Islam” in the Turkish context. The novel is informed by specific national events that left their indelible mark on 1990s Turkish politics, namely the Susurluk scandal that established a concrete link between the mafia, members of parliament, and clandestine paramilitary groups; the Sincan affair, in which tanks were sent out as a warning after a pro-Palestinian play in the town of Sincan; the “postmodern coup” of Prime Minister Erbakan’s resignation and the subsequent closing of the Islamically oriented Welfare Party by the constitutional court for antisecular activities; and the Merve Kavakçı headscarf affair (Jung and Piccoli 2001; Kavakçı 2010). All of these events demarcate a cultural fault-line between secularism and Islam in 1990s Turkey. Pamuk himself describes the novel as his first and last “political novel.” This is ironic, in that all of his novels exhibit, as I have argued, a politics of form that constitutes interventions in Republican history and identity to manifest a “literary politics.” In fact, Snow is neither more nor less political than the rest of Pamuk’s novels, but is a consistent representation of Pamuk’s literary politics and dissident literary modernity. Pamuk’s parody of the political coup finds its fullest development in his seventh novel, Snow. Here, characters occupy such unstable ideological positions that the Republican “coup” becomes what can only be called a theatrical performance. This novel, with Kafkaesque overtones, follows the

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journalist and poet “Ka” to the remote Anatolian town of Kars near the Armenian border, where soon after his arrival the performance of an early Republican didactic play on modernization erupts into a military coup. In Kars, Ka (an erstwhile representative . of homo secularis) finds literary inspiration, the love of an acquaintance, Ipek, and gets mixed up in political intrigues that pit leftists, Islamicists, Kurds, and nationalists against one another. In the quasi-surreal world of the coup, characters misread the politics depicted in theater, newspapers, and television as reality. In Kars, Ka writes a revelatory collection of poems entitled Snow that the novel withholds from the reader – a characteristic use of the absent text by Pamuk. When arrested, Ka divulges the hideout of a leader of the Islamic resistance, Blue, and is forced to flee. Snow choreographs the narrative strategies associated with postmodern parody as an indictment of political coups fueled by conspiracy. But the novel plays these parodic elements in the plot off against the literary conventions of one of the oldest traditions of Eastern literature: the Sufi romance quest to reunite with a beloved. The result questions the apparent oppositions of Islam and state, sacredness and secularism, and din and devlet. Snow, set in 1996 Turkey, takes the small town of Kars as a microcosm for the nation and the ideologies of secular (Turkish), ethnic (Kurdish), and religious (Islamic) nationalism. The central character Ka is a secular Republican intellectual, a leftist “misfit” from Istanbul bourgeois circles living in exile in Frankfurt. Reminiscent of Kafka’s character “K.,” Ka is subject to the authority of ambiguous political forces in Kars. In keeping with the “prison theme,” Kars is a microcosm of the nation-state as a space of incarceration or even a police state. In Snow, Kars represents poverty, violence, and the worst outcomes of Republican secular nationalism as manifest in the coup. Ka returns to Turkey and takes an assignment as an investigative journalist for the secularist daily Cumhuriyet (The Republic). This task is conflated with . his seeking out of his beloved Ipek and his return to poetry writing, in which poems come to him in Romantic-prophetic revelations. Upcoming local elections in Kars reveal that the Welfare Party (Refah), an Islamist political party, stands to win.20 (The Welfare Party was an actual political party led by Necmettin Erbakan. Erbakan, rising to the position of prime minister, was forced by the military to resign in 1997 and the Welfare Party was outlawed by the constitutional court for anti-secular activities in 1998.) To complicate matters, there has been a spate of suicides by young Muslim women who have been pressured to remove the veil by the dictates of the state. Once Ka arrives in Kars, a crack theater troupe representing the secular establishment helps instigate a coup with military support to forestall the eventuality of a Muslim political victory in the elections. The coup is the cooperative effort of three entities, the military (represented by Colonel Osman Nuri Colak), the “deep state” of ultranationalist paramilitary groups (represented by Z Demirkol), and a figurehead actor who was once in contention for the role of Atatürk (Sunay Zaim). These figures are pitted against

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the growing political enfranchisement of Islam represented by the Welfare Party, the students of the religious high school, and Blue, the figure of militant Islamic resistance. Blue paradoxically describes himself as having vacillated between atheism and Islam. Later, he was influenced by Ayatollah Khomeini, Frantz Fanon, Sayyid Qutub, and Ali Sheriyati, and fought . in Chechnya and Bosnia. He is furthermore Ka’s rival in his affections for Ipek. In this way, the triangle of unrequited love that structures the plot of Snow is similar .to that of The New Life: Ka/Osman (Republican secular figure of devlet), Ipek/Canan (mystical Sufi beloved), and Blue/Mehmet (secular Islamic figure of din). The outcome is similar as well: Ka and Osman as well as Blue and Mehmet are all killed off. The central focus of the novel is political conspiracy and coup. A coup is “staged” by the secular–military alliance with the help of dramatists when it becomes evident that Islamist and Kurdish candidates stand to win in upcoming elections, thus threatening the secular modern basis of the Republic. Ka serves as a weak, ambivalent character, a parody of the Republican intellectual reduced to being a narrative vehicle torn by loyalties to various competing factions that overwhelm him. He is a leftist secularist whose newfound poetic inspiration gives him an insecure consciousness of the divine. Positioned as he is between secularism and Islam, Ka (who is literally and figuratively an abbreviation) is a fragmented symbol of a number of other elements in the novel: kar (or snow), Kars (the microcosm of the nation as prison), Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (a Republican poet who embraced Sufism), and Kadife (who decides to wear the veil as a symbol of political Islam, is the leader of the “suicide-girls,” and who both unveils and unwittingly kills the actor-representative of the secular coup). Though he is a weak character, Ka’s point of view, buttressed by “Orhan,” holds the plot of the novel together. More to the point, Ka is susceptible to the emotional and ideological power of those around him. In Snow, the ideological positions of Turkish nationalism, political Islam, and leftism are all presented and parodied through discourses of conspiracy. Establishing the novel’s metanarrative framework, “Orhan” is the authorfigure and “detective” who pieces Ka’s story together. “Orhan” states that his novel – which we are reading – has an aim: to seek to unveil the hidden symmetries that determine Ka’s life (Pamuk 2005b: 87). These hidden symmetries have to do with mirrored “conspiracies” of secularism and Islam. In doing so, “Orhan” learns that Ka was guilty of revealing the whereabouts of the Islamist militant Blue to the coup authorities. That is, he is revealed to be something of a secularist “mole.” Together, both “authors” are responsible for developing kar (or snow), as a metaphor for politics, identity, and faith.21 Ka’s poetry collection, Snow, is a map of the experiences of self and nation in Kars. Orhan’s novel, Snow, is a satire and a tragedy; his homage to Ka is also an indictment of a character caught in the machinery of Republican politics. The Republican author-intellectual is as much a target of Pamuk’s parody as is ideological discourse; that is, the novel is also Pamuk’s parody of himself.

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Furthermore, as a Republican intellectual, “Orhan” is the one vested with the authority to present a vision of modernity that can be either secular and/or Muslim. His novel is a testimony and account of this condition of Turkish modernity in crisis. A point missed by most international reviewers of the novel is that Snow is a satirical novel full of in-jokes, parodies, puns, and send-ups of Republican Turkey.22. Things are not what they seem in Kars. The veiled Kadife and the secular Ipek are sisters of the leftist Turgut Bey. Both sisters have had illicit affairs with the Islamic terrorist Blue, who is also involved with their veiled friend,. Hande. All the characters are compromised figures. Ka’s infatuation with Ipek is also colored by his jealousy of Blue. The novel assumes the character of a melodrama as Ka is murdered by Islamist followers of Blue, and Blue is murdered by secularists tipped off by Ka. Every ideological position is ridiculed and exposed for its hypocrisy. The only figure left standing is the dissident writing-subject who has conveyed the novel as a devastating indictment of Turkish political culture. Melodrama as Parody Snow is a novel that is structured around two dramatic performances: My Fatherland or My Headscarf and A Tragedy in Kars. The troupe that performs these plays is described as being “Brechtian and Bahktinian,” emphasizing the leftist, didactic function of the performance. The first play is an updated version of the “enlightenment masterpiece” My Fatherland or My Scarf. The new version uses the word “türban” instead of “çars¸af” in acknowledgment of the fact that the scarf has now become the symbol of political Islam, or from the secular perspective, irtica. It is a drama of “state feminism,” a didactic play representing the secular values of the cultural revolution.23 In the play, a traditional veiled villager removes her veil (or çars¸af) and declares her freedom with the help of soldiers of the Republic, who protect her from the patriarchal wrath of “religious zealots”. The intended meaning is congruent with secular conversion to modernity as the feminine subject of modernity is scripted into Republican ideology as a symbol of progress. Performed in Kars 60 years later, however, the play loses its didactic Kemalist message and is stripped of its moral and intent, as is evident from these passages: Most of the locals in the National Theater were shocked and confused by the first scene. … And as they watched this mysterious covered woman wandering up and down the stage, it was not immediately clear that she was meant to be sad: Many in the audience saw her as proud, almost arrogant. … When the woman made her grand gesture of independence, launching herself into enlightenment as she removed her scarf, the audience was at first terrified. Even the most westernized secularists in the hall were frightened by the sight of their own dreams coming true. … Having

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expected a bespectacled village girl, pure-hearted, bright-faced, and studious, to emerge from beneath the scarf, they were utterly discomfited to see it was the lewd belly dancer Funda Eser instead. Was this to say that only whores and fools take off their headscarves? If so, it was precisely what the Islamists had been saying all along. (Pamuk 2005b: 47–8) Unclear about how to read and interpret the play, the audience is confounded. The chaos resolves in favor of the secularists and the coup, led by a rogue faction of the “deep state” headed by Z Demirkol, who has joined forces with Sunay Zaim and the theater troupe. The play is presented along with a series of other skits, poems, songs, and acts. The reaction of the audience recasts the secular play into a parodic melodrama that verges on camp in places. The traditional çars¸af has been politicized as the türban, read as a symbol of political Islam by secularists. This representation of the cultural revolution both contains anti-Islamic and thus orientalist conspiratorial thought as well as conceals, in this staging, the military violence of an actual coup. My Fatherland or My Headscarf is a play in which a woman, torn between the authority of din and devlet, espouses devlet with the help of military force. As such, the play is one of secularist catharsis. It dramatizes the dilemma of the “exchange of women” between religion and secularism that is enforced by military violence. As astutely observed by Sibel Erol, Pamuk’s intent is not to describe the coup as a drama, but rather to expose and parody the conspiratorial logic of the coup in its entirety: Sunay’s theatrical coup represents nothing less than a parody of Turkish history, which is marked by a series of similar coups. … Pamuk here amply exposes the hypocrisy of the [secular] Turkish public, who on the one hand criticize any military coup as a loss of democracy while on the other hand want the status quo guaranteed. (Erol 2007: 414) However, the novel goes even further by revising representations of national history as a melodrama of repetitive clichés. Pamuk’s version of the Turkish military coup is a burlesque performance based in conspiracy that still leads to the tragic loss of life. In terms of Republican historiography, it conjures both the 1997 “postmodern coup” as well as the so-called Sincan Event and the Merve Kavakçı affair. The misreading of religion and political Islam by the state is at the core of Pamuk’s critique. From the secular perspective, the conspiracy focuses on irtica, or the state’s label for the Islamic threat to the secular state. If Kemalism describes the political disestablishment of religion, irtica describes the re-establishment of Islam in politics. In Snow the persistent confusion of representation and reality stands in for this foundational misreading and is at the core of Pamuk’s novelization of the coup.

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Ironically, in the wake of the theatrical coup staged by Sunay Zaim and Z Demirkol, in the midst of tanks, gunshots, and roundups, Ka is nonplussed and filled with peace: “His whole mind was fixed on the beauty of the silent night. … He was mightily thankful to be present in this silent and forgotten country, now filling him with poems” (Pamuk 2005b: 166). Indeed, the coup brings with it a sense of mystical inspiration, insight, and transformation. Ka’s poem “The Night of the Revolution” reflects the intersection of secularism, revolution, and the sacred: The new poem … portrayed the bed, the hotel in which he lay, and the snowy city of Kars as a single divine unity. … It began with his childhood memories of other coups, when the whole family would wake up to sit around the radio, listening to military marches; it went on to describe the holiday meals they’d had together. (Pamuk 2005b: 167) By assigning this poem to the Memory axis of his symbolic snowflake icon, Ka recasts the coup as a legacy of the past that is full of warm feelings of family. Ka sleeps a restful night. This cozy distortion of military violence, Pamuk argues, is part of the logic of conspiracy, coup, and Republican nationalism. The theme of melodrama within the novel is reinforced by the fact that everyone in Kars, including Turgut Bey and his daughters, Blue, and Z Demirkol watch the Mexican telenovela known as Marianna, in which the underdog heroine must overcome constant obstacles to attain happiness. The telenovela (an actual series) is characterized by weepy, heart-breaking, and highly improbable characters, coincidences, and twists of events – just what Ka experiences in Kars. The subjects are universal: love, betrayal, jealousy, seduction, violence, revenge, passion, oppression, sexism, corruption, and incest. Pamuk uses the melodrama as a platform for revealing the political landscape of Kars and Turkey. Read from this perspective, Kadife would be the persevering heroine of the “melodrama within the novel,” who represents the headscarf-girls and overcomes the obstacles of her relationship with Blue and her prison term for Sunay Zaim’s death/suicide, to end up married with a child (and still wearing her headscarf). Comically, the leftist Turgut Bey tries to legitimize Marianna by providing a Marxist critique of the melodrama: Perhaps out of his embarrassment to be seen so caught up in a silly soap opera, Turgut Bey now offered a running commentary on the underlying reasons for Marianna’s and Mexico’s persistent poverty; he applauded Marianna for her own war against the capitalists and as the show began he even addressed the screen: “Be strong, my girl, help is on its way from Kars.” (Pamuk 2005b: 240)

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The parallel between the political story and the melodrama serves as a means of parodying Turkish politics and the cultural logic of the Republic. The intellectual Ka even claims that he has “discovered the importance of melodramatic sensibilities” from Marianna: “He [Ka] also understood that his intellectual pretensions, political activities, and cultural snobberies had brought him to an arid existence that cut him off from the feelings this soap opera was now provoking in him” (Pamuk 2005b: 241). The effect of the telenovela is profound for those on all sides of the political spectrum; after Ka’s torture, Z Demirkol states: Do you want me to tell you why I love Marianna? … Because she knows what she wants. But intellectuals like you, you never have the faintest idea, and that makes me sick. You say you want democracy, and then you enter into alliances with Islamist fundamentalists. You say you want human rights, and then you make deals with terrorist murderers. … You say “feminism,” and then you help these men wrap their women’s heads. (Pamuk 2005b: 355) What does it mean that almost everyone in the novel Snow is rooting for the underdog heroine of a melodrama? It is evident that Pamuk is using the melodrama as part of literary pastiche to make a political argument. In this framing, the characters are acting parts determined by sites of ideological power. This allows Pamuk to cast their goals and desires as a farce. The most serious and grave political events, such as a military coup, become parody and burlesque in Pamuk’s world. Conversions from the Left to Islam Doubles and “converts” are common in Pamuk’s fiction. Both The New Life and Snow make use of character doubles, doppelgängers, and converts who assume new identities. This is a trope first successfully used by Pamuk in The White Castle to subvert the binary thought that undergirds nationalism, orientalism, and modernity. It is a technique faithfully used in the rest of Pamuk’s fiction. In terms of conspiracy, the double, traitor or mole functions to subvert fixed sites of identity. Not only are Ka and the . author-figure “Orhan” doubles, so are the almost indistinguishable sisters Ipek and Kadife, and the two Islamic high-school students Necip and Fazıl.24 In Snow, in particular, . these doubles transgress the cultural secular–religious divide. Ka falls for Ipek; Muhtar and Blue are former leftists who have turned to faith, politics, and even terrorism. Necip/Fazıl are a pair of characters opposed to “Orhan”/Ka. Together, Necip, Fazıl, and Ka establish a direct allusion to Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, a Republican author who turned to Sufism. Necip is tempted by atheism and Ka by religious faith. Even the paramilitary member of the “deep state,” Z Demirkol, like Ka, was once a leftist journalist and poet who left Turkey for Germany after the 1980 military coup. The Islamic

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terrorist Blue was also a former leftist who, in typical Pamuk irony, is sensitive enough to write poetry! Ka, in his associations, thus bears facets of other characters that are secularists, atheists, Islamists, and ultranationalists. As such, Snow is an indictment of Ka’s unstable position as Republican intellectual as much as it is of the coercive logic of Republican secularism. Finally, “Orhan’s” novelized homage to Ka inscribes Ka’s experiences of love and “inspiration” in a way that causes Orhan to imitate Ka’s experiences. Only one character successfully escapes Kars to expose the tragic and mystical inner workings of this microcosm of the Republic: “Orhan” the writing-subject. As part of his parody, Pamuk returns to a trope he developed in earlier novels, conversions to either secularism or Islamism. In Snow, this is most often presented as former leftists converting to Islam, a phenomenon that occurred in Turkey beginning in the 1990s with the rise of political Islam. Among other things this reveals both secular socialism and religion (din and devlet) as being perpetual sites of cultural and political power – a conspiratorial, literary argument that Pamuk first makes in The Black Book (see Chapter 6). As soon as he comes to Kars, the secular Republican intellectual poet Ka becomes aware of a quasi-divine presence, which is always associated with “snow” in the narrative: As the snow covered the steep mountains no longer visible in the distance, covered the Seljuk castle and the shanties that sprawled among the ruins, it seemed to have swept everything off to another world, a world beyond time; when it occurred to him that he might be the only person to have noticed, his eyes filled with tears. … The desolation and remoteness of the place hit him with such force that he felt Allah within him. It was less a certainty than a faint image at this point, like struggling to remember a particular picture after taking a swift tour through the galleries of a museum. (Pamuk 2005b: 19) For Ka, this vision is conflated with emotion and a poetic impulse, unifying his sense of the religious with the act of writing. This intersection of God and text is significant to Pamuk’s project, as (published) writing is always tied to redemption in the face of recurring obstacles such as coup, conspiracy, and unrequited love. Later, in a discussion with Muhtar, Ka states, “If I were an author and Ka were a character in a book, I’d say, ‘Snow reminds me of Allah!’ But I’m not sure it would be accurate. What brings me close to Allah is the silence of snow” (Pamuk 2005b: 60). Again, it is the medium of snow that conjures the divine, leading to the inspiration to write. Snow is a blank presence, the hidden secular-sacred center between Ka’s poetry and the novel by “Orhan.” Ka’s presence in Kars brings consciousness of the mystical together with the crises of authoritarian secular nationalism as represented by the coup. Ka’s experiences have little to do with organized Islam, as is evident from

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sarcastic quips like “‘Everything I know about Islam is from The Message – you know, that film starring Anthony Quinn’” (Pamuk 2005b: 93). Nevertheless, the conflation of the secular and the sacred is emphasized throughout the novel. For example, an exchange between Ka, Hande, and Turgut Bey about Ka’s poetic inspiration unfolds as follows: [Ka:] “I can’t be sure, but I think it is Allah who is sending me the poems.” [Hande:] “Is it that you can’t be sure of Allah, or simply that you can’t be sure it’s Allah who is sending them?” [Ka:] “It’s Allah who sends me poems,” Ka said fervently. [Turgut Bey:] “He’s seen the rise of political Islam,” said Turgut Bey. “Maybe they’ve even threatened him, scared him into becoming a believer.” (Pamuk 2005b: 124) In this exchange, Ka, caught between the poles represented by Hande, a “believer”, and Turgut Bey, an atheist, is shown to be gravitating toward a religious perspective from one that is secularist. Ka states, “‘I think you’re right. … As it happens, I’ve already decided to answer the call that’s been coming from deep within me my whole long life and open my heart to Allah.’ … They all caught his sarcastic tone” (Pamuk 2005b: 131). Rather than describing a conversion per se, this experience is the symptom of an existential crisis – of the variety we see in the work of Atılgan and Atay. Ka’s individual crisis is an allegory for the crisis of Republican nationalism represented in the coup, which carries the theatrical manifestation of a deus ex machina. Ka is at the mercy of a number of “outside forces” that not only write his poems, but write his destiny (as in the “prophetic” newspaper articles that foretell what will happen to him). Once in Kars, his appropriation by these outside forces becomes something of a mystical experience, that ultimately leads to his exile from the national space of Kars (and Turkey). Kars, like the Middle Eastern nation-state, is a space of skewed cultural logic, whose meaning is contradictory, obvious, melodramatic, and inscrutable. In other words, its meaning can only be understood through a historical, cultural, and political cartography of the dominant antinomy of din and devlet. In an exchange with Blue, in which he “hears” a revealed poem, Ka tries to impress his own experience of the divine onto the Islamist, who is also presented as Ka’s doppelgänger: It was as if the hand that was writing belonged to someone else. Ka knew Blue wouldn’t be able to see it, but that did not stop his wishing Blue could know that Ka’s hand was in thrall to a higher power. […] “Before I got here, I hadn’t written a poem in years,” he [Ka] said. “But since coming to Kars, all the roads on which poetry travels have reopened. I attribute this to the love of Allah I’ve felt here.”

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The Literary Politics of the Secular-Sacred “I don’t want to destroy your illusions, but your love for God comes out of Western romantic novels,” said Blue. “In a place like this, if you worship God as a European, you’re bound to be a laughingstock. … You don’t belong to this country; you’re not even a Turk anymore. First try to be like everyone else. Then try to believe in God.” Ka could feel Blue’s hatred. (Pamuk 2005b: 327)

The passage points to the issue of authenticity and belonging as it intersects with writing in the scene as well as from the representational perspective of “Orhan.” The “meta” position of the author-figure bears witness to Ka’s transformations in character. “Orhan,” though he bears witness, remains the staunch figure of secular modernity as he authors the tragedy of Ka and Kars as an indictment of Republican nationalism. . Many characters in Snow have experienced a kind of conversion. Ipek’s ex-husband Muhtar, a failed poet, is one such character, who merges leftist political engagement with religion by running on the ticket of the Welfare Party. A Kurd, he describes his Marx-to-Muslim experience, which takes him from thoughts of suicide to mystical faith and then politics, as follows: Now here I was, climbing the [Sufi, Kurdish] sheikh’s staircase step by step, tears streaming from my eyes. Something was happening that I had secretly dreaded for a long time and that in my atheist years I would have denounced as weakness and backwardness: I was returning to Islam. … People like me find peace only when fighting for a cause in a political party with like-minded people. This is why I joined the Welfare Party; I knew it would give me a deeper and more meaningful spiritual life than I had found with the men in the [dervish] lodge. This is, after all, a religious party, a party that values the spiritual side. My experience as a party member during my Marxist years prepared me well. (Pamuk 2005b: 55, 57) Muhtar, in a typical parallel to Ka, is inspired to write a poem describing his conversion, entitled “The Staircase.” After Ka listens to Muhtar’s conversion story, he is invited by the same Kurdish Sheikh Saadettin Effendi for a visit. Thus, Ka’s poetic inspiration begins to merge with his religious awakening. All the while, the paradoxical mix of mysticism and Marxism carries a strain of the absurd, which infuses the novel.25 In Snow, the comic scene between a reticent and drunk Ka and the Kurdish Sufi Sheikh Saadettin Effendi in the dervish lodge functions to present the secularist perspective on mystical Islam while questioning that same perspective: [Sufi Sheikh:] “Aren’t you going to tell us why you’re so afraid of us?” [Ka:] “I’ll tell you, but I don’t want you to take offense. … I’ve always wanted this country to prosper, to modernize. … I’ve wanted freedom for

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its people,” Ka said. “But it seemed to me that our religion was always against all this. Maybe I’m mistaken. … I grew up in Istanbul, in Nis¸antas¸ı, among society people. I wanted to be like the Europeans. I couldn’t see how I could reconcile my becoming a European with a God who required women to wrap themselves in scarves, so I kept religion out of my life. But when I went to Europe, I realized there could be an Allah who was different from the Allah of the bearded provincial reactionaries.” [Sufi:] “Do they have a different God in Europe?” asked the Sheikh jokingly. He patted Ka’s back. […] He [Ka] kissed the sheikh’s hand again. When he saw how easily he could do this, he felt pleased with himself. But one part of his mind still operated differently, in a Western manner, so he also despised himself. […] [Ka:] “There’s a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in Allah. But now I want to believe in that God who is making this beautiful snow fall from the sky. There’s a God who pays careful attention to the world’s hidden symmetry, a God who will make us all more civilized and refined. … I want to believe in the God you believe in and be like you, but because there’s a Westerner inside me, my mind is confused.” (Pamuk 2005b: 96–8) In this passage a number of things become apparent. First, Ka describes himself as being divided between an irreconcilable, cynical “Western” perspective of secularism and a religious desire for local authenticity. This condition leads to sentiments of self-hatred. As such, the state of duality that Pamuk develops in his fiction is internalized in the character of Ka, who is able to switch between these two perspectives. Snow is the only Pamuk novel in which the protagonist is openly drawn to religion and tempted by faith (din) in a consistent manner. This reveals part of the cultural logic of Turkish society in the 1990s in which the opposition of Muslimhood and modernity was being questioned. Ka succinctly puts it this way: “‘I wanted to be a Westerner and a believer’” (Pamuk 2005b: 143). Furthermore, Ka’s poetic inspirations are religiously colored. Like his fellow citizens, Ka, however, is susceptible to both poles of secular and religious authority, and under duress, reveals the whereabouts of the Islamic terrorist Blue to the secular leaders of the coup in exchange for safe passage back to Germany. As a character who wavers between secularism and faith and the poles of din and devlet, Ka is vulnerable; he is marked for sacrifice and is later murdered in a political assassination by the forces of militarized Islam represented by the followers of Blue. Thus, Ka suffers a fate similar to Celâl in The Black Book, Mehmet in The New Life, and to the meddah in My Name is Red. In a parallel temptation by faithlessness, Necip, a student at the religious high school, indicates that he is questioning his faith and is drawn to atheism. (He aspires to be the first Islamist science-fiction writer.) His story is

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represented by Ka’s poem, “Where Allah Does Not Exist.” In keeping with the theme of political assassination, Necip is murdered by the militarized forces of secularism, during the theatrical coup at the National Theater. His friend Fazıl also expresses doubts about religion (and continues writing Necip’s sci-fi novel after his friend’s death). As much as “Orhan” writes Ka’s sacralized secular account of political transformation, so too does Necip write Fazıl’s secularized sacred account. The trope of political assassination or ideologically motivated murder appears in all of Pamuk’s novels, and often constitutes the detective story or mystery subplots of his fiction. Pamuk unites the politically motivated crime (including the coup) with the genre of what is termed the “metaphysical detective story” to explore and excavate Turkish cultural history, identity, and the epistemologies that support them (see Chapter 6). Ultimately, “snow” is the symbol of this metaphysical search in which redemptive acts of writing replace the blankness of nihilism. Both “Orhan” and Ka are not just weaving metaphors of snow, they are writing against its whiteness, which threatens to overwhelm them in its material fragility and its blank sacredness. “Snow” is literally and figuratively the absent text at the center of the novel that subverts the existential impasse and Sartrean “nausea” experienced by homo secularis. Like the marginalized characters in other Pamuk novels, Ka is an alienated and isolated figure on the periphery of society. He is in a state of double displacement: Ka is both a leftist political exile as well as a stranger to contemporary Turkish society and Kars. As a frustrated author and a writer manqué, he is a typical Pamuk protagonist, whose authorial agency is thwarted by the cultural logic of the Republic. Rather than being victims of suicide, like the characters of Atılgan and Atay, Pamuk’s characters like Ka and Celâl (in The Black Book) are victims of political conspiracy that pits the “author” against an ideologically motivated fanatic. The Symbolic Power of the Coup The coup can be read as a symptom of a Republican national “conspiracy” of secular modernity. It is triggered by a paranoid mode of thinking that reads Islamic and ethnic Kurdish political representation as a threat to the secular state and its territorial integrity. The coup in Pamuk’s work is both a legacy of the Kemalist cultural revolution as well as a defining event of the Second Republic. Ka, forced to leave Turkey after the 1980 coup, links that Cold War national trauma to its parody, the theatrical coup in Kars. Snow, though described as a “political novel,” simply rearranges and emphasizes themes and tropes that are present in most of Pamuk’s fiction. The coup, for example, appears in all of his novels (except for My Name is Red) as a historical event that represents secular state/military intervention into everyday life. Snow is distinct, less in its political idiom than in its satiric representation of the coup as a melodramatic performance, nevertheless with dire consequences. Part of Pamuk’s ironic argument in Snow rests in the fact that Ka survives the 1980

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coup and its aftermath, but he meets his end in the wake of Sunay Zaim’s absurd theatrical coup. That is, the representation and symbolic power of the coup is as effective as actual military force. The coup, ironically, brings peace and happiness to Ka and the residents of Kars. Immediately in its wake, Ka is filled with pleasant nostalgia: The peacefulness in the empty street took Ka back to the curfews of his childhood and his youth … all Ka wanted was to go outside and play in the empty streets. As a child he’d loved those martial-law days like holidays, when his aunts, his uncles, and his neighbors would come together in a common cause. … They felt happier and more secure during military coups. … Ka remembered how the grown-ups in his life would congratulate each other after military coups, in much the same way that they congratulated one another during the old religious holidays. (Pamuk 2005b: 173) The conflation of the coup and the celebration of Islamic bairams provides insight into the cultural logic of Kars as a microcosm of the Republic. In its implementation of a new order, the coup is presented as a sacred and ritual act of the incarnation of secular modernity. It is sacred in its allusion to the self-determination of the Muslim nation secularized during and after the partition of the Ottoman Empire. This is the period when “Turkishness” became “sacralized” as secular. Later, Ka thinks “A small part of him was secretly relieved that the military had taken charge and the country wasn’t bending to the will of the Islamists” (Pamuk 2005b: 181). In the wake of the coup, the city is described blithely as follows: When he [Ka] returned to the enchanted white street to see swarms of joyous children throwing snowballs, he forgot all his fears. … No one seemed to be complaining about the coup; instead, the mood was much as he [Ka] remembered from the coups of his childhood: There was a sense of new beginnings and of a change from the vexing routines of everyday life. (Pamuk 2005b: 217) The coup, in other words, brings with it transformative power. This transformation is also imbued with mystical and quasi-religious overtones. Pamuk first alludes to the coup as such a secular-sacred event in The Black Book, in which Celâl’s secret messages embedded into his columns variously indicate social revolution, the coming of the Messiah, and Judgment Day. Only in the cultural logic of Middle East nationalism can the apocalyptic and the revolutionary be thus wedded in the figure of the coup. The Snowflake Icon Like The New Life, Snow situates its readers into the position of characters. By portraying the truth-functions of conspiracies based on various sites of

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(political) power, Pamuk describes the debilitating ideological landscape that constitutes contemporary Turkey. As such, Ka is presented as a fragmentary character that conveys and associates a number of different perspectives without occupying one himself. In fact, Ka is as much a narrative vehicle connecting various ideological perspectives as he is a character. This is reinforced by his poetic inspirations, whose titles serve to constitute a fragile and unstable “self” as depicted in the snowflake icon:

Starsand andTheir Their Stars •IMAGINATION •IMAGINATION friends Suicide Suicideand andPower Power friends Am Going Going IIAm AllHumanity Humanity~~ All to Be Happy to Be Happy and the Stars and the Stars Heaven Heaven Snow Snow REASON REASON

Dog. Dog. MEMORYMEMORY-

I, Ka Ka I, ThePlace PlaceWhere Where The GodDoes DoesNot NotExist Exist // God

DreamStreets Streets Dream

ToBe BeShot Shotand andKilled Killed To MEMORY MEMORY ThePlaceWhere/ PlaceWhere/ The the World WorldEnds Ends the TheNight Nightof of The theRevolution Revolution the HiddenSymmetry Symmetry Hidden

TheChocolate ChocolateBox Box The IMAGINATION IMAGINATION

Love Love Privationsand and -Jealousy Privations -Jealousy Difficulties Difficulties

Chess Chess ^REASON ^REASON

Ka declares that “this snowflake was his life writ small” (Pamuk 2005b: 87). The snowflake image incorporates the axes of Imagination (or Poetry), Reason (or Philosophy), and Memory (or History). These are categories that are inspired by Sir Francis Bacon’s “tree of knowledge.” The allusion to Bacon, an icon of Enlightenment philosophy, is significant to Republican modernity, which espouses Enlightenment ideals in its construction of secular modernity and homo secularis. However, in the construction of Ka’s individual identity, these ideals manifest in material and mystical contexts. As Ka indicates, all of the poems he writes in Kars come from “elsewhere”. The author-figure “Orhan” explains, “A careful reading reveals that Ka did not believe himself to be the true author of any of the poems that came to him in Kars. Rather, he believed himself to be but the medium, the amanuensis, in a manner well-exampled by predecessors of his modernist bêtes noires” (Pamuk 2005b: 377). The snowflake is both material and spiritual, a map of Ka’s individual experiences in Kars, that links the secular and the sacred.

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This individual and idiosyncratic formation is contrasted to “snow” in the collective sense, which here also alludes to the Turkish nation-state. The tension between “I” and “we” is best captured by Orhan when he admits: “I was not immune to the power of that shimmering fiction that any citizen of an oppressive and aggressively nationalistic country will understand only too well: the magical unity conjured by the word we … all were inextricably bound by the same hopeless story” (Pamuk 2005b: 393). This “hopeless story,” one of conspiracy and coup, represents the discursive power that results in Ka’s tragedy. It is also the national limit that Pamuk transcends through his own writing. The particular axes and nodes of the snowflake, as named, are only place-holders for the possibility of the development of individual authorial subjectivity. In this case, the manifestation of this icon of the poetic self – that is, of the author – is permanently deferred. The snowflake is an empty signifier. We have no direct and concrete access to the poems that the snowflake icon signifies, and the notebook that contains them has been lost. What we have is a surrogate, the redemptive text of Pamuk’s novel, in which a writingsubject maintains dissidence in the face of state authority. The dissonant presence of this author-figure is evident from its sudden intrusions into the narrative. For example, in Chapter 40, we read, “At this point, to enhance the enjoyment of my story and make it easier to understand, I [‘Orhan’] must cut short this chapter and start a new one” (Pamuk 2005b: 374). As stated earlier, the agency of an authorial perspective has been questioned in the plot through Ka and shown to be unstable over the course of the novel. Ironically, the reassertion of authorial agency is one of the central modernist/ deconstructive paradoxes of Pamuk’s fiction. Toward the end of the novel, we read: It seemed that almost everyone I [“Orhan”] met on my walks around Kars was waiting for just such a hero, some great man ready to make the large sacrifices that would deliver them all from poverty, unemployment, confusion, and murder; perhaps because I was a novelist of some repute, the whole city, it seems, had been hoping that I might be that great man they’d been waiting for. Alas, I was to disappoint them. (Pamuk 2005b: 422) In Pamuk’s two most recent novels (Snow and The Museum of Innocence), the narrative space allotted to the “author-figure” increases as a measure of textual control and authorial identity construction. As I have argued, the very process of novelization is always represented in Pamuk’s plots and becomes a redemptive act in the face of the obstacles of conspiracy, coup, and unrequited love. Furthermore, the narrative construction of the author, as a figure of agency, renown, and fame, is a secondary manifestation. Such a figure, however, is a facsimile of the Enlightenment cogito, and also of Republican modernity. Its presence in the novel contradicts Pamuk’s dismantling and

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deconstruction of the Republican secularization thesis, and demonstrates its modernizing successes rather than its shortcomings. In repeatedly and ritualistically dramatizing the development of the modern writing-subject as a redemptive author-figure, Pamuk sacralizes the production of literary modernity itself, establishing the overarching sacredness of the material production of the book. This is a doubled book, the account of whose production appears in the plot of The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, My Name is Red, Snow, and The Museum of Innocence. Pamuk’s literary text is always material and mystical in its dissidence. Metaphors of Snow The image of snow appears in a number of canonized modern literary texts, from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain to Kafka’s The Castle, from Melville’s Moby Dick to Dostoyevsky’s The Underground Man, from Joyce’s “The Dead” to Gide’s Pastoral Symphony, from Bronte’s Wuthering Heights to Hemingway’s stories and from Thoreau’s Walden to a corpus of Russian literature. It is an established trope of world literature that appears as a material and spiritual metaphor, something that Pamuk sustains in his work as well. Snow repeatedly appears in Pamuk’s work, culminating in his novel of that name. In its myriad definitions and nuances, Pamuk turns “snow” into a floating signifier that is overdetermined, paradoxical and contingent on various contexts. In the novel, snow serves to deepen the main themes. Snow is temporary, an unstable agent and object of transformation. It assumes an individualized form as a snowflake and a collective form as whiteness. It signifies erasure as well as the possibilities present in the absent text. It is silent, pure, inspirational, and divine, as well as deadly and terrorizing. When Ka first arrives in Kars, it reminds him of “hopelessness and misery”; shortly thereafter, it reminds him of Allah. In short, it is a metaphor for many things, including the conflation of the secular and the sacred. “Snow” appears as the title of a poem, a collection of poetry, and the novel itself. Two of these three texts are inaccessible to the reader. The third (the novel) is a material–mystical redemption of this absence. In the novel, Ka’s missing poetry collection is described in mystical terms: He [Ka] had told me [“Orhan”] he had come to believe that the emerging book had a “deep and mysterious” underlying structure; he had spent his last four years in Frankfurt filling in the blanks in this hidden design … he’d had to withdraw from the world, abstaining from its pleasures like a dervish. In Kars he had felt like a medium, as if someone were whispering the poems into his ear. … He labored to reveal what he had become convinced was the hidden logic of this testament to the visions and inspirations he had experienced in Kars. (Pamuk 2005b: 257)

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The hidden logic in the book of poems remains concealed, but is revealed through the novel itself. The snowflake, furthermore, is both revealed and occulted, both absent and present. The material and mystical qualities of the absent text, an empty signifier, are transferred to the novel, which becomes a vehicle for insight into Turkish self and society. Ka’s snowflake is a symbol of his material–spiritual incarnation through the text as well as his demise. He represents a Turkish literary modernity that is both latent and manifest. Islamist and Secularist Conspiracies As opposed to The New Life, which focuses on a single conspiracy and resistance to it, Snow represents multiple conspiratorial narratives. These center on the secular–military alliance represented by Z Demirkol and Colonel Osman Nuri Colak. (To this alliance, Pamuk adds the thespian Sunay Zaim, a satirical figure of secular modern performativity.) In other personifications of ideology, Islamic terrorism is represented by Blue, and leftist socialism by Turgut Bey. In the novel’s background are allusions to the ethnic nationalism of Armenians and Kurds. In keeping with a dominant trope of conversion, Muhtar Bey and Blue are former leftists who have turned to Islam. A few quick examples will serve to establish that Pamuk’s approach is to parody the hypocrisy of these positions, as well as to describe the ideological contexts in which these paradoxical positions form. In the melodramatic scene of the chapter entitled “I Hope I’m Not Taking Too Much of Your Time,” the Islamist position is presented in contrast to the secular state perspective. The farcical scene is set in the New Life Patisserie, conjuring Pamuk’s earlier novel of the same name. This version of the elusive “new life” is again determined by the logic of conspiracy as it intersects with a story of obsessive love and the lover/beloved trope. The scene dramatizes the violent intersection between . secularism and radical Islam on one hand and the doomed love between Ipek and Ka on the other. The exchange between Nuri Yılmaz, the State Institute of Education director, and his murderer, who is a representative of the Freedom Fighters for Islamic Justice, sent to kill the director for his atheism and his enforcement of the headscarf ban, establishes two dominant conspiratorial logics, one secularist, the other Islamist: [Islamist murderer:] “How can you reconcile Allah’s command with this decision to ban covered girls from the classroom?” [Secularist Nuri Yilmaz:] “We live in a secular state. It’s the secular state that has banned covered girls, from schools as well as classrooms.” [Islamist:] “Can a law imposed by the state cancel out Allah’s law?” [Secularist:] “In a secular state these matters are separate.” […] [Islamist:] “My question is this, sir. Does the word secular mean godless?”

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The Literary Politics of the Secular-Sacred [Secularist:] “No.” [Islamist:] “In that case, how can you explain why the state is banning so many girls from the classroom in the name of secularism, when all they are doing is obeying the laws of their religion?” (Pamuk 2005b: 40)

The stock positions are presented in a comic fashion that exposes the internal consistency and logic of ideological thought. For example, the director presents the conspiratorial logic of the radical secular position (almost identical to the radical Islamic position!): [Secularist:] “Of course, the real question is how much suffering we’ve caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols and using women as pawns in a political game. … Has it ever occurred to you that foreign powers might be behind all this? Don’t you see how they might have politicized the headscarf issue so they can turn Turkey into a weak and divided nation?” (Pamuk 2005b: 43) In keeping with Pamuk’s parody of conspiratorial thought, the director mentions the invisible hand of “foreign powers” and their ultimate goal: weakening and dividing the Turkish nation-state. Pamuk maintains his parody, this time, by focusing on the conspiratorial logic of the Islamist position that also identifies a “secret plan.” The director is forced by his murderer to read his own death sentence, as prepared by the Freedom Fighters for Islamic Justice, which reveals the logic of Islamist conspiracy: “I, Professor Nuri Yılmaz, am an atheist. … I confess to being a pawn in a secret plan to strip the Muslims of the secular Turkish Republic of their religion and their honor and thereby to turn them into slaves of the West” (Pamuk 2005b: 46). Both perspectives focus on persecution, respectively, of the nation and of Islam. Furthermore, each side has devotees who represent two varieties of fundamentalism centered on din and devlet. Nevertheless, in terms of rhetoric, they are remarkably similar in that they present the embattled position of a victimized group against a shadowy enemy with hidden resources and aims. The zero-sum logic of conspiracy pits victims against perpetrators in the fantasy of self-determination. In exchanges such as this, Pamuk reveals that nationalism and secular modernity are susceptible to conspiratorial thought to such a degree that Turkishness itself could be defined as a discursive formation predicated on political conspiracy. Through conspiracy, Pamuk presents a microcosm of essentialized identity politics. In Ka’s meeting with Blue, we are informed of yet another level of conspiracy, which reinterprets the murder of the director. Blue states, “But of course the whole thing is a state plot. First they [the secularists] used this poor director to enforce their cruel measures, and then they incited some madman to kill him so as to pin the blame on the Muslims” (Pamuk

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2005b: 76). Thus emerges the hermeneutic position of conspiracy and counterconspiracy that Pamuk first described in The New Life. This is an endless spiral of circular reasoning in which a disenfranchised group attempts to secure the upper hand. The notion of conspiracy as an actual epistemological and ontological force in Snow is furthered through one of Pamuk’s literary twists. In Kars, the local newspaper, the right-leaning and provincial Border City Gazette, in a kind of journalistic determinism, prints accounts of events that have yet to occur, events which transpire as they have been represented textually. Serdar Bey states, There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens. They fear us not because we are journalists, but because we can predict the future; you should see how amazed they are when things turn out exactly as we’ve written them. And quite a few things do happen only because we’ve written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about. I know you won’t want to stand in the way of our being modern. (Pamuk 2005b: 29) Pamuk identifies the cooperation between state power and the media as targets of critique in this passage. The definitive flourish of anti-realism sets up a causal inversion that is representative of the cultural logic of Kars and the nation. The link that is established in this logic is between state-sponsored modernity (and “enlightenment”) and the (conspiratorial) text; a link that Pamuk’s work acknowledges and strives to break. Turgut Bey is another character that espouses the logic of conspiracy, this time from the leftist perspective. After the news of the director of the Institute of Education’s politically motivated assassination, Turgut Bey states: “The Islamists have embarked on a cleanup operation. They’re taking care of us [leftists] one by one. If you want to save your skin, I would advise you to increase your faith in Allah at the earliest opportunity. It won’t be long, I fear, before a moderate belief in God will be insufficient to save the skin of an old atheist.” (Pamuk 2005b: 131) Here, conspiracy emerges as a force of conversion to further complicate Pamuk’s techniques of parody. Later, as Ka is trying to convince Turgut Bey to sign the comically absurd “joint declaration to the West” (together with an Islamist and a Kurdish nationalist) at the Hotel Asia (so he can sleep with . Ipek), Turgut Bey states: Speaking as the Communist modernizing secularist democratic patriot I now am, what should I put first, the enlightenment or the will of the people? If I believe first and foremost in the European enlightenment, I

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The Literary Politics of the Secular-Sacred am obliged to see the Islamists as my enemies and support this military coup. If, however, my first commitment is to the will of the people – if, in other words, I’ve become an unadulterated democrat – I have no choice but to go ahead and sign that statement. (Pamuk 2005b: 242)

Based on this and other passages, the scenario that emerges in Kars is that social reality is determined by conspiratorial ideology. This phenomenon and the threat of the military coup are constant distortions of the political landscape. Theatrical impresario Sunay Zaim reiterates the Islamist conspiracy from the secular perspective as follows: Atatürk had no time for bird-brained fantasists; he had people like you [Ka] swinging from ropes from the very first day. … No one who’s even slightly westernized can breathe free in this country unless they have a secular army protecting them. … If we don’t let the army and the state deal with these dangerous fanatics, we’ll end up back in the Middle Ages, sliding into anarchy, traveling the doomed path already traveled by so many tribal nations in Asia and the Middle East. (Pamuk 2005b: 203) Pamuk’s use of political conspiracy to represent modern Turkey, and thereby critique it, should be evident through such passages. Pamuk seems to be arguing that the popular legitimacy of such conspiracies becomes problematic when combined with state (and military) power. Ka, for his part, is also the object of conspiratorial thought. Necip states: “Everyone in Kars is very curious to know why you’ve come here. They think you’re on a secret mission or else you’ve been sent here by the Western powers” (Pamuk 2005b: 136). Ka, ultimately, does get pulled into the conspiracy of the military coup, which, in the end, results in his political assassination. (This is yet another dramatization of the “death of the author” that runs throughout Pamuk’s work.) The slanderous article printed in the Border City Gazette summarizes Ka’s unstable position, as he is made into a target of national wrath by the media (something Pamuk would later live to experience himself): Many readers have telephoned our offices to express their regret about [Ka] this godless imitation-European’s decision to stir up dissent in our city in these troubled times. They have voiced particular concern about the way in which he has wandered the shantytowns, knocking on the doors of the most wretched dwellings to incite rebellion against our state and indeed, even in our own presence, vainly attempting to stick his tongue out at our country and even at the great Atatürk, Father of our Republic. The youth of Kars know how to deal with blasphemers who deny Allah and the Prophet Muhammad (SAS)! (Pamuk 2005b: 295)

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This self-reflexive position of the “blasphemous” author as the target of the state is a very real opposition, one with which this study began. Ka’s position as a “traitor” is remarkably similar to that of Pamuk when he was charged with “insulting Turkishness.” In an unfortunate irony, reality truly imitates art in this respect, as Pamuk had to seek the protection of bodyguards and leave the country as well. (Pamuk has been documenting the targeting of authors in his novels since The Black Book.) . Dramatizing Conspiracy: Irtica, (Un)veiling and Atheism A second melodramatic performance, A Tragedy in Kars, which occurs at the end of the novel, serves as a sequel to My Fatherland or My Headscarf. As with the first performance, this one also merges political representation with melodrama. It also includes a number of other skits in the format of an evening’s entertainment. The second play is distinctly different than the first. Influenced by Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the play is described as a blood feud that ends in suicide. Adapted to Kars and Turkey, the blood feud is centered on Kadife and whether or not women should wear the veil; Funda Eser plays her secular rival. It is improvised and unscripted, pitting figures of secular Republicanism against one another: the authoritarian coup leader/ leftist revolutionary (Sunay Zaim), the Republican woman (Funda Eser), and her “nemesis” the veiled political Islamist (Kadife). Intended to make a secular, didactic statement, the shorter skits leading up to the “removing the veil” scene are described as follows: Though he [Sunay Zaim] was a rich and enlightened member of the ruling elite, Sunay’s character enjoyed dancing and joking with the poorest villagers and, indeed, engaged them in erudite discussion of the meaning of life, as well as regaling them with scenes from Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, and Brecht. … As one outburst followed another, it grew harder to imagine that they conformed to any logic at all. (Pamuk 2005b: 392) A Tragedy in Kars conjures an existentialist “theater of the absurd” performance that incorporates comedy and Vaudeville mixed with horror or tragedy, characters caught in hopeless situations who are forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions, clichéd dialogue, wordplay, nonsense, and either a parody or dismissal of realism. In short, the play is a representation of liberation from the confines of secular authoritarian rule. The secular state (represented by Sunay Zaim) attempts to have the “political Islamist” (Kadife) remove her veil, shoot him (and unwittingly take the rap for his murder), and perhaps even kill herself. All of the themes raised earlier in the novel of secularism, veiling, political Islam, women/gender, modernity, and representation are contained in this

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scene. As with the first play, in the sequel, a woman removes her head covering. Immediately afterward, she fires a stage prop gun whose chamber is supposedly empty. The gun, given to her by Sunay Zaim, ends up killing him when she fires it even though it is not loaded. Again, in this scene Pamuk underscores the fact that the theatrical representation carries real force in the world of Turkish politics. Zaim’s final theatrical gesture is an attempt to frame her for a crime (against secularism). In consideration of the possibility that he had arranged for his own murder, the final drama of the novel is one that harkens back to other suicides of homo secularis. While questioning realist representations, the death, as previously reported in the Border City Gazette, affirms the discursive force of the secular word in print. Arrested for murder, Kadife (a dissident victim of the state) is later released after serving a short prison term. Kadife, the hero of this melodrama, has exercised her own agency, symbolically ending the political “theater” of the coup. At the same time as Sunay Zaim is killed, so too is Blue, an event that maintains the secular–sacred symmetry of the plot while doing away with the excesses of secular and religious authority. One of Pamuk’s arguments in Snow is that individuals living in nations like Turkey are often “scripted” in their actions and beliefs by the discourses of ideology or conspiracy. Ka, who finds himself in the absurd position of walking around Kars with two bodyguards provided by the coup leaders, is a prime example of one who cannot find a stable position of resistance against this scripting. The potential of textual resistance/redemption contained in his poetry is also stripped bare and absented. All that is left in Pamuk’s plot is the unrealized potential for such dissidence. Ka is also an object of parody in the novel; as a facet of “Orhan,” Pamuk is also parodying himself as a secular Republican intellectual. As the paradoxical author-figure, “Orhan” both reveals the debilitating phenomena of coups and conspiracies as well as participates in critiquing them – he is complicit as a participant-observer whose guilt is overwhelming. The parodic elements in Snow, its doubled structure that “reconstructs” a lost friend’s life, its central absent text, and its metafictional techniques can all be traced back to a Turkish novel that was published 30 years earlier: Atay’s Misfits.

Og˘ uz Atay’s Parody and the Dissidence of Metafiction: Misfits (1971–2) Tanpınar’s Time Regulation Institute and Atay’s Misfits, along with Pamuk’s The New Life and Snow, constitute a genealogy of post-Kemalist parody. Pamuk acknowledges Atay’s canonical novel as an influence on his own work. Misfits is considered to be the first example of metanarrative in Turkish literature (Moran 1983; Ecevit 2005). Its varied innovative uses of parody and form, which are also political, have also been noted by the literary critical . establishment in Turkey (Inci 2007). Literary critic Nurdan Gürbilek writes of the varieties of parody in the novel:

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For example, [Misfits] demonstrates mimicry, and parody that relies on the hyperbolic imitation of another’s use of language; it uses mockery as a technique of indictment or estrangement; … it demonstrates a kind of burlesque that inverts the serious and the farcical by ridiculing what’s serious and making it frivolous or by misreading the absurd as if it were serious. But the combined effect of all of Atay’s techniques is that it constructs … a [dissident] perspective of irony. (Gürbilek 1995: 28) Nurdan Gürbilek goes on to describe Atay’s ironic attachment to the modernizing authority of Kemalism. The same authorial dilemma holds true for Pamuk. It is this parodic mode, in the context of Kemalism, that carries with it political force. Pamuk, who wrote his first (unpublished) critical article in the mid-1970s on Atay’s novels, states: In 1972, as soon as Misfits came out I bought it and read it, then read it again. The author was unknown, as was the book, which spoke to me as if it were revealing a sirr [secret]; for this reason (among others) I loved it. … The author’s sensitivity, the details he noticed (the strangeness of things [es¸ya]), his lack of confidence, his fears, his cynicism, his talking to himself (“Jeez, where did this Olric come from?”) all resembled me. Had I been twenty years older, I might have written this novel. (Pamuk 1999: 189) The high parodic tone, puns, and word games in Misfits can be seen in Pamuk’s novels beginning with The Black Book. Both The New Life and Snow bear the stamp of Atay’s influence. In particular, the structure of Misfits is remarkably close to Snow. Both novels have author-figures that reconstruct the lives of close friends who have died under the unfortunate circumstances of assassination and suicide, respectively. Much like Orhan reconstructs Ka’s life, Turgut Özben reconstructs the life of Selim Is¸ık. Is¸ık, in a parody of the (enlightenment) encyclopedia trope and the “Encyclopedia of Famous Men” that was an incomplete literary project by Nâzım Hikmet, has attempted to compile an “Encyclopedia of Misfits.” In keeping with the writer manqué theme, the project remains unfinished. Indeed, the encyclopedia becomes the absent text of Misfits, in whose place emerges Atay’s own satirical novel of secular modernization. Turgut Özben, like the Osman of The New Life, increasingly becomes alienated from his family and society. This characteristic alienation of modernization can be traced from Atılgan to Atay to Pamuk. In the process, the novels become increasingly more mystical in scope. The fact that Özben (lit. “True Self”) is pursuing Is¸ık (or “the light”) establishes the quasi-mystical quality of the quest. (Similarly, Osman is pursuing the “light” of the book.) All of these novels seek to broaden the scope of literary representations to include marginalized figures who find themselves on a quest to transcend their confinements as homo secularis.

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In keeping with the trends of the existential novel as represented by Atılgan, Atay’s Selim Is¸ık commits suicide. However, Atay introduces an innovation in form that pushes the Turkish novel into the realm of metanarrative. Like the author-figure in Snow who represents Ka’s life, Turgut Özben serves to piece together Selim’s life through narrative and to leave it as a testimony to the Turkish writer manqué, a fiction of witness, in the form of the novel. In this way, Atay is a pioneer in revising the Republican novel, redefining it and critiquing its function. Misfits, for the first time, conveys the redemptive possibilities inherent in the novel during an era of stark existentialism. Its redemption, furthermore, is situated in its form and the techniques of metanarrative, parody, intertextuality, and pastiche. As an indication of this textual redemption, the novel, whose publication the “author/editor” Turgut Özben describes as being forbidden, actually does get published. The novel is an account of its own production. Much like the structure of a Pamuk novel, in this early template the somewhat failed author in the plot is redeemed by the publication of the actual novel. The information regarding the publication of the book is given in a false preface entitled “The Beginning of the End.” The verisimilitude of the book is emphasized in this preface but contradicted in a short “Publisher’s Note” that immediately follows it. While the former claims it is a work based in real events, the latter asserts that it is a subjective work of fiction. The indeterminacy created here is an intentional aspect of Atay’s satire: Despite finding this book suitable for publication, let it be known that it is our conviction that the novel’s characters do not represent the citizens of our nation. It is true that these protagonists – who would perhaps better find themselves in the setting of a fable – do not fit the structure of our society. Here, we would like to state that in publishing this book, whose actual author or authors are unknown to us, we regard the book to be more like a document that illuminates the personality of the author or authors and that our actual intent in publishing it is to present this testimony to you. (Atay 1972: 22) Atay’s characters are drop-outs, or rather, people who have been unable to get a foothold in secular modern Turkish society. “Tutunamayanlar” literally means “those who have not been able to take hold” and refers to citizens of the modern Republic who have not been able to make their way, find success, or make a livelihood in their desired or particular line of work. Atay also plays with the encyclopedia trope of Enlightenment progress. Like Hikmet’s project that led to the publication of Human Landscapes from My Country, Atay articulates an encyclopedia that is set in opposition to the Encyclopedia . of Famous Turks (Türk Mes¸hurlar Ansiklopedisi), a 1946 publication by Ibrahim Alaettin Gövsa, who was a Republican writer and modernizer. Both authors put their focus on the marginalized and peripherialized

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people not represented by the secular modern Republican vision. In Misfits, Turgut Özben identifies Selim Is¸ık as a figure of Republican counter-culture. Beginning with him, he compiles an “Encyclopedia of Misfits” to draw attention to the plight of those who have suffered under the secular model. This gesture, however parodic, is also one of leftist social humanism. In an idealized “utopic” conclusion, the plight of the non-conformists achieves recognition through Özben’s publication of Is¸ık’s notebooks and writings, which he has fashioned into a pastiche novel. The final section of the novel is a letter from Özben in which he presents his own biographical entry in the “encyclopedia,” thus completing his journey from Republican engineer to drop-out non-conformist. This same journey is present in The New Life and Snow and much of Pamuk’s work, which is a catalog of such nonconformists rebelling or questioning middle-class social norms. Indeed, Pamuk’s own memoir describes his decision to write along the same trajectory (Pamuk 2005a).

Conclusion: The Crisis of Homo Secularis All of the novels discussed in this chapter describe secular modern characters or protagonists who are either assassinated, killed, or commit suicide. Often they are representatives or products of Kemalist, socialist, or nationalist ideologies. They are professional representatives of secularism. Osman is an architect, Blue is an engineer, Ka is a leftist secular intellectual, and Sunay Zaim is a state theater artist. These are all literary representations of homo secularis. Perhaps Atay’s description of “disconnectus erectus” best describes the particular species of human being constructed through ideologies of secularism. Atay humorously describes these endangered creatures: [Disconnectus erectus is] an awkward and easily startled animal. There are even some the height of a human being. At first glance, it resembles a person from external appearances. However, its paws and particularly its claws are quite weak. On steep terrain, moving upward, its grip always falters. It descends swiftly by sliding (and frequently falls). … Because all of their habits depend on the principle of mimicry, they don’t realize they are hungry unless they see other animals feeding. … Even though sacred books have forbidden the consumption of these animals, they are secretly hunted and their meat is sold illegally. … Since it has been proven that they carry microbes harmful to humans, the Directorate of Municipal Health has banned the slaughter of disconnectus erectus [tutunamayanlar]. Medical doctors assert that their consumption leads to lethargy, a slight feeling of distress, an unprovoked guilty conscience, and baseless self-incrimination. … The time has come to think about preventing the decrease in their numbers by protecting them in disconnectus erectus reservations. (Atay 1972: 152, 153, 154)

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Atay’s ridicule of this “species” is an allegory for the crisis of the intellectual class of the secular Republic. Disconnectus erectus is disconnected not just from its society, but from itself as well. In a different historical context, political philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes of homo sacer as one who is beyond the protection of the (Roman) law, vulnerable to the whims of the state. Agamben describes homo sacer (“sacred man”) as an individual who exists paradoxically in law as an exile. The law allows society to identify the individual as homo sacer. The law both mandates exclusion yet gives the individual an identity. Agamben holds that life exists in two capacities, biological (Greek: Zoë) and political (Greek: Bios). The effect of homo sacer is, Agamben says, a schism of one’s biological and political lives (Agamben 1998). As “bare life,” the homo sacer has biological life, but no political significance. He is ironically marked for sacrifice. We can, for example, observe the “bare life” of Zebercet in the confines of the “Motherland Hotel.” For the others, it is evident that they do live as exiles under the laws of the Republic. Many of these characters are internal exiles. The characters described here are not exactly homo sacer, but what I have been calling homo secularis – secularism alienates them from society, and from their own selves. We can define homo secularis as the subject of Turkish secular modernity divided into a doppelgänger of self and other. The texts assembled here describe homo secularis in a Turkish context, one who is susceptible to becoming a symptom of secular ideology; to such a degree that one of the only spaces allotted to him is (self) sacrifice. The dominant tropes of Turkishness in The New Life and Snow are conversion, coup, and conspiracy. These tropes are often presented in a mode of parody and demonstrate the development of Pamuk’s work as a vehicle for political critique. The historically grounded representations of revolution that appeared in his early novels now serve as the object of satire in the coup. The logic of Middle Eastern national self-determination presented in Cevdet Bey and Sons has devolved into Middle Eastern conspiracy. Concomitant to these developments, the text and the author are presented through mystical and redemptive processes. The “book” in The New Life has transformative properties in the promise of the new life of an “other world” that transcends secular modernity. The moment of poetic inspiration in Snow is presented as mystical experience of the divine. In both novels, the trope of the beloved is conflated with the possibility of social change through textual production. Both texts of The New Life and Snow emerge out of the Sufi context of the quest and/or the story of unrequited love. As such, both redefine secularism through contexts of sacredness and mysticism that promise redemption. The progatonists of both novels are killed as a direct result of their engagements with text/beloved – Osman in a bus accident and Ka in a political assassination. The distinction between them can be summarized in that Osman is, in the final analysis, a “reader” and Ka is an “author.” Both figures are unable to find a way out of the ideological landscape that inflects contemporary Turkey.

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Through writing about coup and conspiracy and contexts of devlet, Pamuk’s authorial project reveals itself as an inscription of secular-sacred texts. In other words, in their critiques of ideology, they are expressions of postsecularism because they contradict and deny the Republican secularization thesis. They are furthermore articulations of postorientalism because they reject the internalized orientalism of Kemalism. They accomplish this through serious consideration of mystical experiences. Both novels, in their settings of Istanbul and Anatolia, juxtapose city to nation. In this juxtaposition, and in keeping with the traditional representations of Anatolia in the Republican novel, the nation is poor, ignorant, neglected, and deceived. In short, the same opposition between intellectual and provincial that occurs in the earliest Republican novels of Halide Edib and Yakup Kadri presents itself in Pamuk’s ostensibly postmodern novels. However, Pamuk’s fiction is a decidedly postsecular, postorientalist response to the secularization thesis of the early Republican novel. The tropes of coup and conspiracy in his novels identify a crisis in secular modernity that can be traced in the secular-sacred spaces of The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence.

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Novelizing Secular Sufism

I tried to imagine – if God were speaking through me, what would he be saying? I began to write very meticulously, slowly, trying to figure this out. That is prose writing, fiction writing. (Pamuk 2007: 359) Like a shaman who can see the souls of things [objects], I could feel their stories flickering inside me. (Pamuk 2009: 512)1 You speak of faith, but you are on the path of reason. (Tanpınar 2011 [1949]: 333)2 The Secret is sacred, but it is also somewhat ridiculous. (Borges 1993 [1944]: 133)

This chapter re-examines the Republican literary field as a cultural space defined by intersections of secularism and Sufism. Various iterations of “secular Sufism” occur in the modern Turkish novel.3 Rather than arguing, along with the secularization thesis, that society moves from religion to secularism and modernity, the texts under consideration in this study reveal that tropes of religion, mysticism, redemption, and grace are not only present in ostensibly secular Turkish literature, but are also formative forces of political critique. The Black Book establishes that mystical thought occurs even about material things and even in existential contexts. The hüzün Pamuk describes in all his work, but specifically in his memoir on Istanbul, might be termed a mystical melancholy that emerges from existential angst. Hüzün is a symptom of being between din and devlet, in a state of yearning (for the beloved, authorship or both). The Museum of Innocence, what Tanpınar would call “a novel of objects,” demonstrates that the assembly of material things in a collection is a result of unrequited (Sufi) love that can serve to re-establish that same mysticism. Pamuk’s novels argue that there is a hidden symmetry or center to his work (and to Turkish literature writ large) (Pamuk 2010). This

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symmetry can be traced in the manifestations of a spectrum of relations between din and devlet, including: (1) the political and cultural authority of temporal (secular) and spiritual (sacred) power; (2) redemptive secularism (as in certain narratives of Turkish modernity); (3) mystical materiality (what Tanpınar calls the “Exaltation of Es¸ya”); or (4) secularized religiosity (as in understandings of Muslim “Turkishness” recast as a civic site of identity). Discrepant iterations such as these are present in Pamuk’s work, where they exist in a state of paradox without closure or resolution. This chapter describes the last major mode of Pamuk’s dissident writing, which establishes the antimony of the secular-sacred through combined tropes of din and devlet. Intertextual allusions to the literature and history of mystical Islam enable the re-enchantment of secularized texts through what I have been calling “secular Sufism.” As one literary articulation of Islam and state, secular Sufism is a theme that appears early in the Turkish novel and can be traced through close readings in almost every period of its development. It is found in the works of Halide Edib, Tanpınar, Nâzım Hikmet, Yas¸ar Kemal – and is a palpable absence in the existentialism of Atılgan and Atay. Pamuk, in addition to adapting the form of the Sufi quest that equates the “seeker” with the “sought,” makes specific, extended reference to important historical Sufi figures from Rumi and Ibn Arabi, to S¸eyh Galip and Fazlallah Astarabadi. The emergence of these themes out of the dilemmas of everyday Istanbul life begins in The White Castle and reappears as a structural and thematic element in all of his later novels.4 Novels such as The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, and Snow all experiment with the idea of mystical transcendence and redemption through writing. The mystical themes of Snow have been evident to foreign commentators on the novel (Heyking 2006; Caryl 2005). Pamuk’s mystical plots unfold as follows: The “beloved,” whether a man, woman, the divine, a dream, or an identity, is the object of the protagonist’s desire for reunion. Reunion with the “beloved” (the Venetian slave . in The White Castle, Rüya in The Black Book, Canan in The New Life, Ipek in Snow, and Füsun in The Museum of Innocence) fails on the level of plot, giving rise to a state of unrequited love. In place of the reunion, the Sufi narrative gives the seeker what he needs rather than what he wants. For Pamuk, the surrogate object of desire is always textual. The quest delineates a “writing-subject” that often manifests as an author figure and results in the production of the literary text. The surrogate “gift” materializes in the narrative as an authorial innovation in literary modernity. For example, secular Sufism allows Pamuk to insist on the hybridity of self and other (The White Castle); to acknowledge the mutual influence of Eastern and Western literature as an intertext (The Black Book); to use the “absent text” to destabilize the masternarrative of modernization through metafiction (The New Life); to mount literary critiques of political ideology (Snow); and to emphasize the mystical literary modernity of material culture (The Museum of Innocence).5 Pamuk’s work consequently acquires a mystical dimension that serves to re-enchant narratives as he uses sacredness

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to update secular Republican narratives: Material and spiritual are reunited in his fiction through the grace of an absent beloved. In the process, the sacredness of the text (a literary space that overwrites binary logics from nationalism to modernity and from orientalism to secularism) is reaffirmed as a cultural intertext or palimpsest. The Black Book, Pamuk’s fourth novel, focuses on Istanbul as a palimpsest by mixing genres and themes, including the detective story, unrequited love, hack journalism, the Sufi quest, existentialism, urban spaces, and pop culture.6 Evoking Res¸at Ekrem Koçu’s own Istanbul Encyclopedia (Pamuk 2005a: 151–69), Pamuk states of the novel: [The Black Book] is a personal Istanbul encyclopedia. … At its heart are again real places like Nis¸antas¸ı, apartment life, and Aladdin’s Store. From here the book opens up to Beyog˘ lu and all of Istanbul. And from there to the Eastern story tradition, to Sufi tales and parables, and to Rumi and S¸eyh Galip. While describing the love between Rüya and Galip and Galip roaming through Istanbul, I had S¸eyh Galip’s Beauty and Love in mind. (Pamuk 1999: 139)7 In the novel, the protagonist Galip (representing the “disciple”) seeks his wife Rüya (lit. “dream”), whom he suspects is hiding out with the journalist Celâl (representing the “pir” or master) in the streets of Istanbul. Only by ghostwriting the absent Celâl’s outlandish columns does Galip experience a spiritual reunion of sorts with his beloved, thereby establishing that writing can be a form of redemption.8 Scenes in Istanbul’s urban spaces, from the Bosphorus to whorehouses and from mannequin museums to editorial offices, fill the novel with a symmetry of digressions. Thus, the textual authority of hybrid Eastern and Western traditions established in The Black Book emerges out of the loss of a beloved for whom nothing but writing can compensate. The text is thus sacralized in Pamuk’s work as a vehicle of grace and redemption. Returning to the Second Republic, the period of his formation as a struggling author, and the bourgeois circles of 1970s Istanbul, Pamuk’s eighth novel, The Museum of Innocence, brings the theme of unrequited love together with objects and memory. This is another intersection of the material and the mystical. The eponymous “museum”, broadly construed, becomes the cultural space of the nation, which has been fragmented into the narcissistic and obsessive perspective of a spurned lover, Kemal (another homo secularis figure). His museum contains the everyday objects that tell the story of his illicit romance with his beloved, Füsun. The novel itself consequently consists of an inventory of used or discarded everyday objects, each as it appears in the museum catalog, an inventory that Pamuk has actually reproduced in Istanbul. The museum allows readers to see the objects described in the novel for themselves and to purchase mementoes from the museum store. This actual reproduction of a literary representation of a museum – an erstwhile storehouse

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of national-cultural memory – is ironic to say the least. While the museum offers a monument to obsessive and unrequited love, it also exposes the haunted emptiness of the object of desire and pays homage to its loss. As such, Pamuk’s “silent house” of the imagined community has, over the course of five novels, transfigured into a “museum” that speaks through a repository of objects whose meaning signifies either pathos or pathology. In as much as the museum emerges out of unrequited love, thereby repeating the same pattern of secular Sufism established in Pamuk’s earlier novels, it also presents a form of material recuperation for spiritual loss. In The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk has inverted the logic of his own fiction.

Black Bile, Black Humor, and Black Ink: The Black Book (1990) The “blackness” of The Black Book emerges from its particular pastiche of genres, tropes, and themes including noir fiction (of Patricia Highsmith, for example), black humor, black ops (the 1980 coup was part of a covert operation supported by the CIA), black bile (hüzün), black passion (kara sevda or tragic love), and black ink (redemptive authorship). The setting is the blackness of Cold War era, peripherialized Istanbul (vis-à-vis the nationstate). In a favorite Pamuk technique, “blackness” is overdetermined in the novel, giving it a spectrum of nuances. The “blackness” of the novel is a paradoxical empty signifier that is contingent on various contexts, what Ottomanist Walter Andrews has perceptively analyzed as a “black box” (Andrews 2000). As a counterpoint, it is constantly snowing throughout the novel; the overdetermined potential represented by “whiteness” is addressed in Pamuk’s Snow (see Chapter 5). A defining aspect of The Black Book is the thematic movement between elements of Turkish culture that are secular and material as well as sacred and mystical. The novel’s epigraph represents these two perspectives, metonyms for din and devlet: “According to what Ibn Arabi [twelfth-century Sufi and philosopher] relates as an accomplished fact, a sainted friend of his, whom spirits elevated up to the heavens, on one occasion arrived on Mount Kaf, which circumscribes the world, and observed that the mountain itself was circumscribed by a serpent. Now, it is a well-known fact that there is no such mountain which circumscribes the earth, nor such a serpent.” – The Encyclopedia of Islam (Pamuk 1996b: xi) Here, the perspective represented by Ibn Arabi is also of myth, mysticism, and literary imagination, whereas the perspective of the “encyclopedist” is that of positivism and reason. Though they are presented as distinct in the passage, Pamuk’s aim is to blur their boundaries to arrive at a secular-sacred

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narrative space. Pamuk himself describes the rational and the mystical as two poles of literary influence that anticipate terkip between them: I’m interested in Sufism as a literary source. … I look upon Sufi literature as a literary treasure. As someone who has come from a Republican family, as I sit at my desk, I exist as one that has been profoundly influenced by Cartesian, Western rationalism. At the center of my existence rests this rationalism. But on the other hand, I expose my soul to other books and other texts as much as I can. I don’t see those texts in an instrumental way, I enjoy reading them, and they are pleasurable. This seat of pleasure influences the soul. And my rational control extends to where my soul is influenced. Perhaps my books are formed in the struggle and conflict between these two centers. (Pamuk 1999: 152) This dialectic in Pamuk’s work also functions on the level of narrative structure. Not only is the novel organized into two main parts, each chapter alternates between first-person and third-person points of view. The first person (Galip) is ostensibly “fiction” whereas the third person (Celâl) masquerades as “nonfiction.” Both narrative points of view are conscious of another shadowy presence in the narrative, which is referred to variably as “He/Him” and the “Eye” (or by extension “I”). This ambiguous presence is described as possessing some divine qualities. On one hand, it is the text’s “consciousness” of the reader and on the other hand, it is the text’s consciousness of the author. Reader and author become somewhat conflated. Thus, protagonist, author, reader, and narrator are involved in a textual relationship that establishes a continuum from the material to the mystical. In “The Eye” chapter of the novel, the narrator describes what he terms a “metaphysical experiment.” This is also a narrative experiment, as the chapter traces the vacillation between a first-person (“I”) and a third-person (“he”), a vacillation that Pamuk ties to the hybridity of “self” and “other” in The White Castle. Here, it links the material body (“eye”) to a mystical perspective (“He”). Pamuk identifies three positions through grammar and narrative: “I,” “he,” and “He.” This is a progression from self to other to divine (and back). Celâl narrates, The eye knew me, and I knew the eye. … This eye was there to ease my passage into this “metaphysical experiment,” which I would later decide bore the hallmarks of a dream [rüya]; it was there, above all, to be my guide. … I knew at once that the experiment on which I was about to embark had … everything to do with that emptiness I felt inside me. … I know I’m empty inside. … As I leaned against the mosque wall, I thought, The eye knows too! … The eye was my creation, just as I was the eye’s! … We were one and the same, he and I. … But who was He? … He was, of course, the eye. … I would warn my readers against seeing my

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“metaphysical experiment” as some sort of awakening; this is not the exemplary tale about a man whose eyes suddenly see the light. … The “I” leaning on the mosque wall longs to be Him. … I thought all this as I watched myself from the outside. (Pamuk 2006b: 114–19) In this scene, Celâl is literally and figuratively outside, yet “leaning on,” the sacred space of the mosque. The existential emptiness he feels inside is a symptom of Republican secularization (as also demonstrated by Atılgan and Atay). In response, he fabricates an omniscient, guiding, point of view, thereby opening a secular-sacred cultural space through writing. The “metaphysical” aspect of the chapter is tied to writing and authority. Both “I,” “he,” and “He” emerge from the pen of the writer (as Pamuk first demonstrates in The White Castle). They might be defined as “self,” “other,” and “author.” Writ small, this is a template for the triangular structure of Pamuk’s novels that might also manifest as “lover,” “beloved,” and “author.” The vacillation that is exhibited between perspectives in the novel, when read against the political and historical Republican context, is one of liberation from the strictures of authorizing discourses such as state nationalism and European orientalism. For, if the authentic essence of the “self” is represented by the insider “I,” the colonizing aspect of the “other” is represented by the outsider “He.” This is the experience of crossing the traditional discursive boundaries of the text and its point of view. In other words, it is the experience of another consciousness. In Pamuk’s world this consciousness is both represented textually, as embedded in the structure of the narrative, as well as being the experience of the character and reader. In The Black Book and other Pamuk novels, the characters experience moments of epiphany in which they become aware of another consciousness.9 That is, the literary structure of the novel mimics the process of a kind of mystical enlightenment (which is also represented in Sufism). This slippage in narrative point of view is repeated clearly at the novel’s close: Then toward morning he [Galip] aches remembering Rüya [“dream”] and gets up from the desk to gaze at the city sleeping in darkness. I [authorfigure] remember Rüya and, getting up from the desk, I gaze at the city’s darkness. We [author, reader, protagonist(s), narrator] remember Rüya and gaze at Istanbul’s darkness. (Pamuk 1996b: 400, my emphasis) Rüya (the mystical dream) is not just a missing character, but also the possibility of mystical redemption out of the material, existential blackness. However, for Pamuk, this same secular blackness is doubled in nuance, as textual redemption, which is emphasized by the final words of the novel, “Yes, of

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course, except for writing, the sole consolation” (Pamuk 1996b: 400). This same secular-sacred narrative structure is reflected thematically in the pairing of a Republican-era missing-persons story with various historical accounts of Sufism. To emphasize the quest of becoming an author in a secular modern context as being something of a mystical experience, Pamuk relies on the symbol of the green pen and green ink. The green pen is given to young Galip (the disciple) by Celâl (the master); green is the color he uses when he writes and corrects his articles.10 As a child, Galip loses the pen in the waters of the Bosphorus while out on an excursion with Rüya. The Bosphorus is a defining space of Istanbul that could even be read as representing the “unconscious” or a border between conscious and unconscious (or between Europe and Asia, modernity and tradition, writer manqué and writing-subject, etc.). When Celâl writes a column about the Bosphorus drying up, he provides something of a depiction of Istanbul’s material unconscious. The Bosphorus is an aspect of Istanbul that Tanpınar reads as being a major source of the mystical in the city (Tanpınar 2011); Pamuk works to demystify the same locale through a material depiction of it after it dries up. Celâl writes: “What is beyond doubt is that the heavenly place we once knew as the Bosphorus will soon become a pitch-black bog” (Pamuk 2006b: 16). Even the Bosphorus cannot escape Pamuk’s black ink, which sits in contrast to the green ink of his pir. Rüya’s 19-word goodbye note to Galip is also written in green ink. We learn that Celâl purchased the green pen from Aladdin’s store. That the pen comes from this store is significant. As is known, in Antoine Galland’s early eighteenth-century translation of The Thousand and One Nights, the story of Aladdin was one that he had added to the original himself in the process of translating the work (as Pamuk reveals in the novel). The story emerges as a work of genuine creative writing out of an imitative process of translation (as if by stages). Similarly, Galip’s original authorship (“The Black Book”) will emerge out of a process of imitating Celâl’s columns. Galip’s transformation to being an author is presented through the vehicle of the pen’s green ink, green being the color of sacredness in Islam and of the mystical in Pamuk’s novel. When Celâl the author is assassinated at the end of the novel, we learn that more “green” than “red” flows from his body as one of the bullets pierces the pen in his pocket. In this opposition of green and red (which is also emphasized by the description of nearby traffic lights alternately blinking those colors) the mystical and the material are juxtaposed. The Detective Story as Sufi Parable One of the organizing narrative genres of The Black Book is the “metaphysical detective story.” This is a genre with a literary genealogy that extends to James, Poe, Borges, Chesterton, and Nabokov, one that Pamuk returns to in The New Life and My Name is Red. By introducing this genre into the Turkish context, Pamuk deepens his historiographic and identity-based literary arguments against the Republican state.

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In Detecting Texts, Merivale and Sweeney define the genre as follows: A metaphysical detective story is a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions – such as narrative closure and the detective’s role as surrogate reader – with the intention, or at least the effect, of asking questions about mysteries of being and knowing which transcend the mere machinations of the mystery plot. Metaphysical detective stories often emphasize this transcendence, moreover, by becoming self-reflexive (that is, by representing allegorically the text’s own process of composition). … Metaphysical detective stories themselves explicitly speculate about the workings of language, the structure of narrative, the limitations of genre, the meanings of prior texts, and the nature of reading. … The genre exemplifies postmodernism’s concern with intertextuality, pop-culture pastiche, metafiction, and what John Barth famously called “the literature of exhaustion.” (Merivale and Sweeney 1999: 2, 7) All of these concerns apply to the Pamuk detective story, which is material and mystical. He, however, politicizes the genre by making it contingent on discourses and ideologies of the Republican state. Pamuk situates this genre in an entirely new context (the Muslim city of Istanbul) with sociopolitical concerns that transcend its literary conventions. By embedding the metaphysical detective story within the authoritarian legacy of Republican modernity, history, and secularism, Pamuk, as I have been arguing, makes a political argument through form. Thus, the absent text at the center of the genre does not just remain a deconstructive literary technique, but becomes a vehicle for revising and rewriting dominant discourses. In this fashion, Pamuk turns what some critics have labeled “postmodern play” into socially engaged and revolutionary art.11 The dissident secular-sacred spaces he creates are not simply defined by hermeneutic games, but are at one and the same time defined by challenges to the state in the form of postsecularism, postorientalism, postKemalism, and even neo-Ottomanism. The above-mentioned literary techniques and strategies are central to Pamuk’s project of excavating Istanbul and questioning secular modern epistemologies. By situating his novel in Istanbul and Eastern literary traditions, Pamuk is able to further refine the metaphysical detective story of The Black Book through mystical Islam, or Sufism. In short, he uses the metaphysical genre as a rhetorical mode in which to develop new arguments about Republican identity, history, and secularism that redefine Turkishness. Merivale and Sweeney list the conventions of the genre as follows: (1) the defeated sleuth; (2) the city or text as labyrinth; (3) the text as an object that is purloined, embedded, infinite, or constraining; (4) clues that are ambiguous, ubiquitous, meaningful, or meaningless; (5) the missing person, the “man of the crowd,” the double, and lost, stolen, or exchanged identity; and (6) the absence, falseness, circularity, or self-defeating nature of closure to the

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investigation (Merivale and Sweeney 1999: 8). Pamuk transforms these conventions and politicizes their meaning and function. For example, in The New Life and The Black Book, the defeated “detective” is a “seeker” who drops out of secular Republican bourgeois society in search of a missing person (Rüya, the mystical “dream,” or Canan, the mystical beloved) or a mysterious text; Istanbul is a labyrinthine and palimpsestic text inscribed in opposition to the discourses of the nation; the clues are legacies of Ottoman Islamic cultural history that make a literary argument rather than solving the crime; the double complicates imposed identity; and, the quest is on-going and ontological, transcending and surpassing the solution to the crime. Pamuk, in short, transforms the detective story into a Sufi parable of redemption, whereby the protagonist undergoes a process of self-realization that follows his trajectory out of bourgeois society and into the role of an author.12 This change involves the contestation and transgression of other social sites of authority, including the family, the nation, and the state. Love Story as Mystic Romance Another way Pamuk maintains the structures of Sufi tradition in the contemporary novel is by updating the genre of what Ottomanist Victoria Holbrook has analyzed as the Turkish “mystic romance.” She defines this genre through the mesnevi form as follows: Mesnevi verse had historically been a forum for theoretical exposition or fictional narrative, as well as varied combinations of the two. Rhyming couplets were employed in kinds of narrative verse when categorized by their contents; mesnevi verse genre is in one sense a gauge of possibilities of the range. There were epic, historical chronicle, treatise, and personal narrative (even of such things as sexual conquest), as well as romance mesnevis. … “Turkish romance” is defined here as a love tale, which may be supplemented by other kinds of materials. (Holbrook 1994: 8) One of the better-known Ottoman mystic romances is that of Beauty . and Love by the Mevlevi S¸eyh Galip (Holbrook 1994; S¸eyh Galip 2005; Iz 2012 [1965]). Galip is the namesake of the protagonist in Pamuk’s The Black Book, and Pamuk identifies the work as a direct influence while he was writing his novel (Pamuk 1999). Pamuk revises and updates the traditional form of the mystic romance in all of his novels (except the first two). His revision is based on the influence of authors such as Borges and Calvino, and it signifies an important manifestation of his secular Sufism. The literary influence of Jorge Luis Borges on Pamuk’s work is obvious. Borges pushes the limits of modern literary narrative, enabling the wholesale contestation of modernism. His position at the nexus of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern texts is reflected in Pamuk’s own literary positioning. On

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Borges as the source of the literary possibilities in Islamic texts and mystical literature for innovations in the modern novel, Pamuk states: There [my first stay in New York at Columbia University in 1985], at the age of thirty-three, I began to read old Sufi allegories, all the classic texts of Islamic mysticism – most of them are classical Persian texts – with an eye on Borges and Calvino. They taught me to look at literary texts as sort of structures that have metaphysical qualities. I learned from Borges and Calvino to delete the heavy religious way of classical Islamic texts and see these texts as sort of geometrical shapes and metaphysical structures and [as] allegories and parables full of literary games [and paradox]. … Borges and Calvino opened a secular way of looking at classical Islamic heritage [for me]. (Nobel Web 2006) A secular author, Pamuk’s exposure to, and incorporation of, Islamic mysticism occurs through the influence of world literature. He, in turn, begins to include mystical allusions and forms into the Turkish novel, in a way that alters the secular basis of that form. Pamuk transposes Borgesian techniques of treating pre-modern Islamic texts into Republican literature to create a secular-sacred Turkish literary modernity. The obvious literary devices Pamuk borrows from Borges include: (1) doubles; (2) non-fiction genre artifice; (3) exhaustive lists and inventories of objects; and, importantly, (4) Islamic intertextuality. The use of Islam in Borges’ work has been commented on by literary scholar Ian Almond.13 Almond states: The multiple identities that Borges reveals in his various encounters with Islam disconcert as much as they dazzle. The Oriental teller of tales, the moral admonisher, the detached, Western chronicler and historical “expert,” the anti-Muhammadan satirist, the eccentric dabbler, the student of the esoteric and, finally, the Orientalist biographer. … And so the uses of Islam in Borges’ stories remain varied: a convenient set of “Eastern” colors, a moral stage-set for a handful of tales, an object of satire, a model for fanaticism, a pillar of orthodoxy, and a breeder of heresies. (Almond 2007: 88–9, 90) Islamic cultural history and literary tradition provides Borges’ (and Pamuk’s) work with an alternative archival source, intertextuality, and mysticism. Almond argues that Borges’ literary representations of Islam ultimately lead him to a self-reflexive, postorientalist moment of epiphany, whereby he realizes that the discursive power of orientalism at work in his stories is an appropriation of Islam that contains the projection and representation of his own literary self. As adopted by Pamuk, however, Islam opens a space of alterity that serves as a platform for the critique of secularism. The introduction of

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Islamic (Sufi) histories and genealogies into the Turkish Republican context occurs with The Black Book, which Pamuk was writing during his literary soul-searching about the Ottoman and Islamic past in New York, and continues through My Name is Red. Introducing discursive contexts of Islam into the Republican secular modern context enables a literary politics that is a direct contestation of the secularization thesis and its historiography. It is interesting to contemplate that “archival” tropes of Sufism and Islam entered Pamuk’s work through the world literary system and Borges, which in turn, led to a rediscovery of his own local literary traditions. Pamuk opposes secular modern narratives to mystical narratives, including the Sufi quest. Sufism emphasizes the personal, internal, spiritual dimension of Islam.14 Containing elements of theosophy, Sufism is the attempt to understand Allah and the world through mystical insight. A multifaceted exploration of the human impulse to seek, know, and experience the divine, Sufism generally involves an ascetic rejection of physical and material indulgence (along with social renunciation), ecstatic experiences of union with the divine, exultant expressions of love for Allah, theosophical contemplation of the nature of Allah, and stages of spiritual development (Sells 1996; Ernst 2011 [1997]).15 There is no one Sufi theosophy, but there are a number central ideas, including nearness to the divine, spiritual poverty, the primacy of experience over intellect, a true understanding of oneness (or tevhid), the developmental stages of the self (or nefs), and the dissolution of the seeker into the godhead in a state of union/absence (or fena) accompanied by a return to normal life with a consciousness of the divine in a state of presence (or beka).16 In the Sufi quest, the object of desire is not attained, but insight about the self serves as a surrogate. Feriddun Attar’s thirteenth-century The Conference of the Birds functions as one dominant model of the Sufi quest in literatures of the “East.” This is an account that is repeatedly alluded to in the work of Borges. For example, at the end of the story, “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” Borges includes a footnote that summarizes Attar’s work and then adds: “This ambiguous analogy [between Attar’s poem and a novel mentioned in Borges’ story] and others like it may merely signify the identification of the searcher with the sought” (Borges 1993 [1944]). After Pamuk’s encounter with Sufi literature while writing The Black Book, he begins to structure all of his novels around Sufi tropes. The Black Book, The New Life, My Name is Red, and Snow are structured as quests that redefine the literary text itself as a manifestation of redemption in a material world. As if to emphasize this phenomenon, Pamuk describes the way textual practices such as reading have the power to alter the material world and the objects in it. For example, in The Black Book, as Galip reads obsessively through Celâl’s columns on Rumi, we learn that, “Galip felt the objects in the room changing yet again” (Pamuk 2006b: 255) and that “as he read Celâl’s columns, the objects surrounding him kept changing” (Pamuk 2006b: 257). Such depictions not only allude to the relation between material objects and texts (that assume mystical

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properties), but also reveal the position of the author as a mediating presence between the secular and the sacred. Double Blasphemy The Black Book plays with the familiar idea that sacred books, like the Qur’an or the Bible, contain mysteries that must be interpreted. In provoking the need for interpretation, the novel suggests, they are not unlike detective fiction, or maps of cities. All provide clues that will bring the diligent reader closer to a desired goal – the presence of Allah, the solution to a mystery, the end of a journey. Pamuk’s parallel between religious and fictional stories is intentional. If we consider for whom might this parallel be considered blasphemous, we would have to conclude that both sites of secular authority (devlet) as well as sites of religious authority (din) would consider such a parallel blasphemous. From a literary perspective, however, we wouldn’t simply point to a transgression of secularism or religion; on the contrary, we could identify the articulation of a secular-sacred space that allows contexts of secularism to coexist, and be influenced by, those of Islam. The mutual influence is transformative, and identifies Pamuk’s work as a political catalyst whereby the novel becomes a space of critique and transformation of Turkishness as being predicated neither on secularism nor Islam. The Encyclopedia as Trope References to the encyclopedia run throughout Pamuk’s work. This begins in The Silent House with Selahattin’s incomplete attempts to author an encyclopedia that would “allow the East to catch up with the West.” They continue with The White Castle, in which Selahattin’s grandson Faruk Darvınog˘ lu attempts to have the author of the Ottoman manuscript he has found included in an Encyclopedia of Famous People (originally a 1930s project by Nâzım Hikmet that turned into his masterpiece Human Landscapes). This is a tradition that conjures the work of the popular historian and novelist Res¸at Ekrem Koçu. Pamuk describes him as a devoted “westernizer,” but it is clear that Koçu’s depictions of Ottoman terror, horror, and violence feed into classic orientalist tropes of Islam. Koçu’s 11-volume Istanbul Encyclopedia has assumed a cult status in Turkish literature.17 Pamuk writes of his compassion and understanding for the innocent optimism of a man [Koçu] who thought he could take a form [the encyclopedia] that took centuries to develop in Europe and, in his own haphazard fashion, master it in one fell swoop. Behind that gentle condescension is the secret pride we take in seeing a book from an Istanbul writer caught between modernity and Ottoman culture, one that refuses to classify or in any way discipline the anarchic strangeness. (Pamuk 2005a: 167)

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The irony, of course, is that Pamuk could be referring to himself, if the form under consideration was understood to be the “novel” rather than the “encyclopedia.” Pamuk, inspired by Koçu, both parodies the encyclopedia as a model of positivism and embraces it as an inspiring model of literary form. The Black Book itself constitutes a subjective encyclopedia of Istanbul. In fact, Pamuk’s description of Koçu’s project is surprisingly close to his own, especially if we consider the historical mode of writing Pamuk has returned to repeatedly. Pamuk states that Koçu’s aim was “to combine history with literature, to take the strange riches from the archives and turn them into newspaper and magazine articles, to be forever roaming from bookshop to bookshop, to make history something that could be ingested with ease” (Pamuk 2005a: 157). Here is the source of the iconic scene of the “author” who emerges from the archive, a scene that is constantly replayed with variations in Pamuk’s novels. Indeed, in an odd twist of fate, Koçu’s on-going work on the Istanbul Encyclopedia stopped in 1973, the year Pamuk began writing fiction. Furthermore, Pamuk brings Koçu’s work into dialogue with Borges.18 In terms of form, Pamuk borrows from the Borgesian encyclopedia trope in his transformation of the Turkish novel. The encyclopedia is a text that mediates between modernity and tradition. In its attempt at comprehensive knowledge of people, places, things, and events, it aspires to a modernist goal of universal knowledge. It is a genre susceptible to manipulation, as Borges establishes, by blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction. In the Republican context, Pamuk teaches us, the encyclopedia also has its double: the novel. Each of the sections of The Black Book that are ostensibly articles by Celâl are in fact “entries” on Istanbul. Like a textual museum, the encyclopedia is a repository of cultural memory and traditions. Pamuk makes political use of this textual museum to provide brief cultural histories of various Sufi sects. Genealogies of Sufism: Mevlevis, Bektashis, Nakshibendis, and Hurufis Pamuk presents a number of historical vignettes about Sufi groups and traditions in The Black Book that serve almost as short demonstrations of Pamuk’s historiographic, archival, parodic and secular-sacred modes of writing. These vignettes refer to religious traditions that exceed the boundaries of the modern nation-state by evoking a transnational literary and cultural past covering a geography from the Balkans, through the Middle East and into Central Asia. In “The Letters in Mount Kaf” chapter, Pamuk describes how the followers of the thirteenth-century pir Haci Bektash Veli, or the Bektashis, are both descendants from the seventh-century Nakshibendis and had gone underground due to political oppression, to resurface in the modern era as Marxists. That is, Pamuk goes as far as mystifying Marxism by penning an argument that claims that Marxists are actually an occulted mystical

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brotherhood of former Bektashis. In this account, Pamuk locates and describes an intersection between the secular ideology of Marxism and the mystical traditions of Islam. The paradox is both a parodic inversion as well as a revision of the authority of secularism. Similarly, in the “We are All Waiting for Him” article by Celâl, Pamuk pens an allegory about the messiah and the mahdi (the occulted redeemer of Islam in Shi’a belief). In this chapter, the messiah serves as the embodiment of an absent text. In a literary exegesis of a long forgotten novel written in French by an Ottoman exile in France called Le Grand Pacha, Pamuk presents us with a text (within a text within a text) in which state authority, represented by a Pasha, confronts the authority of Islam represented by “Him,” or the messiah. In this particular secular-sacred literary articulation, the Pasha interrogates the messiah. Again, the chapter traces an inversion of the two poles of authority of din and devlet. The narrator claims that the very followers of the messiah will eventually turn him into a pariah, blaming him for their miseries, just as they had awaited his arrival for their salvation.19 Finally, we are told, the messiah will become the victim of an assassin’s bullet. This account foreshadows the end of the novel, in which Celâl is gunned down together with Rüya – Galip’s wife and the object of his quest. The absence of the “dream” can only be compensated for by writing, the “sole consolation.” The “Who Killed Shams of Tabriz” chapter addresses the fourteenth-century mystical tradition of Mevlevism.20 The mystery of the death of Celâleddin Rumi’s confidante Shams is interpreted through conspiratorial logic. In Pamuk’s blasphemous revision, the murderer is revealed to be none other than Rumi himself: “the person who most benefited from Sham’s death was Rumi, for it turned him from a theology teacher of no distinction into the great Sufi poet of all time; if anyone had a motivation, it was he” (Pamuk 2006b: 261). As such, the sacred pir of the Mevlevi order is given the persona of a base murderer. Here, the inversion functions along the axis of sacred and profane. The inversion functions as a transgression of accepted beliefs and traditions. As a result, Pamuk commits the double blasphemy of insulting two sites of authority. The final chapter that directly addresses a history of Sufism is “Riddles in Faces,” which describes the Hurufi mystical brotherhood and its fourteenthcentury pir, Fazlallah Astarabadi. Hurufi gave mystical significance to Arabic letters as a means of prophecy and soothsaying. Pamuk updates his interpretation of this order by describing how the 1928 alphabet reform, as part of the secularizing cultural revolution, affected the “mystery of letters.” He writes: When he [Galip] studied the sinuous flames licking up against their bodies, he could easily make out the alifs and lams that made up the first four letters of the word Allah, but stranger still – as these men were consumed by the flames of the Arab alphabet, the tears falling from their eyes resembled the Os, Us, and Cs in the Latin alphabet. This was the

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The embodiment of the cultural revolution as inquisition is significant in the way letters are depicted as inflicting bodily pain and as being the product of bodily suffering. Again, though conjuring a mystical Islamic past, Pamuk overwrites it with the authority of secular modernity to make a two-step argument about secular and Islamic authority. This argument identifies the mutual dependency of religious and secular authority while advocating against the cultural dominance of one over the other. Pamuk’s fiction argues that this antinomy is productive of literary modernity and Turkishness in the novel form. Finally, in “Mysterious Paintings,” Pamuk rewrites a famous parable from Rumi’s Mesnevi. In Rumi’s version a mirror is hung to reflect an original painting in a competition between painters, and the “mirror” subsequently wins the painting competition. In Pamuk’s parable, the mirror and the painting together assume mystical qualities. They “influence” each other, such that viewers “after contemplating each wall at length … would wander back and forth between them for hours as they struggled to give a name to the intense and mysterious pleasure that the twin views afforded them” (Pamuk 2006b: 398). The mirror is also equated with the Turkish word for “secret,” or sirr. The silver lining added to glass to turn it into a mirror has the same name. Sirr then becomes both a material object and a mystery or mystical orientation. The Encyclopedia of Islam defines sirr as follows: Sirr (a.), lit. “secret”, denotes in Islamic spirituality two notions, at first sight distinct but which certain adepts did not hesitate to combine. … The first notion is that of secret, mystery, arcana, in the sense of a teaching, a reality or even a doctrinal point, hidden by nature or which is kept hidden from persons considered unworthy of knowing it. … The second notion is that of a “subtle organ”, one of the layers of the “heart”, making up the human spiritual anatomy, which may be translated by “secret, inner consciousness.” (Amir-Moezzi 2012) In the allegorical opposition between the source and its reflection (imitation), it is the establishment of an antinomy between them that leads to a productive resolution. This resolution grants agency to both sides. Thereby, dominant discourses of colonialism, secularism, modernity, nationalism, and orientalism are undone through a mystification that holds the promise of innovation, in this case, of the novel-form. Could it be that these Sufi cultural histories provide insight into the modern Republican present? Could they actually be linked to the secularism of leftist ideology and language reform and cultural revolution? Pamuk confronts the masternarratives of modernity with a mystical Islam borrowed from tradition

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and literary models like Borges. In so doing, he is creating his own postsecular fiction out of the literature and logic of conspiracy. Part of his argument, as demonstrated above, is that traditions of Sufism can be demystified and secularized through the novel form. Similarly, he argues that state secularism is an unacknowledged tarikat. More importantly, he demonstrates that writing combines both the material and the mystical in establishing a secret center. Demystifying state-secularism equates to a critique of Republican modernity. Sacralizing the material blackness of the city of Istanbul reveals the potentially transcendent, redemptive quality of marginalization. Sacralizing and secularizing gestures describe the dominant forces of Pamuk’s fiction. His novelization of secular Sufism is part of this process. For Pamuk, the novel enables the mystification of writing and the demystification of Republican authority. Secular Sufism and the Birth of the Author The indeterminate murderer of Celâl and Rüya is hinted to be a retired military colonel, Fatih Mehmet Üçüncü, a once-devoted reader of Salik’s columns.21 Üçüncü and Salik have been in distant contact since the era of the 1960 military coup, an era that promised a social revolution. In terms of Republican history, The Black Book is focused on the Second Republic between the 1960 and 1980 military coups, one of Turkey’s darkest periods. It also traces the era of Pamuk’s troubled emergence as an author. (After sequestering himself to write for eight years, Pamuk won a first-novel award in 1979, but couldn’t get this novel published due to the censorship restrictions of the 1980 military coup.) The Black Book, in its noir, is filled with the lament and pathos of this period that, as he states at the end of the novel, “provincializes the city.” In much of Pamuk’s work, the emergence of the author is presented as a mystical experience. The obstacles to this self-actualization are conspiracy, political assassination, and coup. From the start, the production of the novel, in other words, involves political engagement. However, it is also the vehicle of self-actualization and transcendence. That is, it opens a dissident secular-sacred space. As if to emphasize this point, Salik, in his columns, conflates the secular and sacred tropes of Revolution, Judgement Day, and the “liberation of the East”; something that Üçüncü at first believes, and then dismisses as a mass deception of Salik’s readers. Between 1960 and 1980 Üçüncü has transformed from one who believes in social revolution to one who has become an ardent nationalist. The murderer is the author of The Mystery of Letters and the Loss of Mystery, which Salik helped him publish in 1962. The murderer both represents the doubled figure of the obsessed, confused “reader” as well as the force of the state and the military coup. Salik’s murder and the 1980 coup, which provides the denouemont for the novel, are almost simultaneous events. In a favorite literary re-enactment for Pamuk, the murder dramatizes the “death of the author,” meant to liberate the “text.” In the face of these “black” events,

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Pamuk argues that writing can serve to compensate with its own redemptive (black) inscriptions of text that maintain mystery. The secular Sufism of the plot persists as Galip’s “black book” is part of a Mobius strip narrative that is also Pamuk’s The Black Book. As such, the novel becomes a sobering and complex intersection of Republican national politics and literary innovation. Two chapters in the novel, “The Mystery of the Letters and the Loss of Mystery” and “The Discovery of Mystery,” trace the story of F.M. Üçüncü and his book.22 Üçüncü is a mysterious author who has experienced the Ottoman–Republican transition period. He critiques the alphabet and language reforms in terms of the “disenchantment” of modernity and the need for “re-enchantment.” His is a theory that is a veiled critique of the cultural revolution. In tracing a trajectory from the secular to the mystical, he locates this re-enchantment in the agency of the author. In terms of the metaphysical theme in the novel, Pamuk contrasts the “discovery of the mystery” to the “solution of the mystery,” which is the goal in a traditional detective story. By discovering the mystery through writing, Galip is able to transcend the effects of the murder and withstand the effects of the coup. Üçüncü’s book is divided into three parts. The first addresses the biography of Fazlallah Astarabadi, the pir of the Hurufi mystical brotherhood, and summarizes the author’s interpretation of the sect:23 In “any given historical period,” the winning side [East or West] was the one that succeeded in seeing the world as a mysterious place awash with secrets and double meanings. Whereas the side that saw the world as a simple place, devoid of mystery and ambiguity, was doomed to defeat and its inevitable consequence, slavery. (Pamuk 2006b: 304) The second part of the text addresses the loss of mystery. This idea is summarized as follows: There existed in both Eastern and Western traditions the idea of a center hidden from the world: the “idea” in ancient Greek philosophy, the Deity in Neoplatonic Christianity, the Hindu’s Nirvana, Attar’s Simurgh, Rumi’s Beloved, the Hurufi’s Secret Treasure (kenz-i mahfi), Kant’s noumenon, the detective novel’s culprit. In F.M. Üçüncü’s view, a civilization that lost its notion of such a center could not help but go off kilter. (Pamuk 2006b: 304) The secular materialist Republic is just such an off-kilter society, afflicted by existential emptiness, awaiting an (author) figure that might reintroduce the mystery. This might also involve the perfect murder, a missing person, or any other absent text. The third part of the text addresses the re-discovery of the mystery, “There was only one way forward, and that was to vanquish this

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emptiness … by devising a new system that linked the lines in faces to the letters in the Latin alphabet” (Pamuk 2006b: 306). Furthermore, letters are linked to words, which are in turn linked to texts, which have mystical properties: If every letter in every face had a hidden meaning, and if each signified a concept, it followed that every word composed of those letters must also carry a second, hidden meaning. … The same could be said of sentences and paragraphs – in short, all written texts carried second, hidden meanings. … It would be at that very moment when the woeful reader, weakened by the pull of the story, sank so deep into it as to lose his bearings, that our long-awaited savior, the Messiah some dared only name as “He,” would finally manifest Himself. (Pamuk 2006b: 318–19) This logical progression develops from the “mystery of letters” to the “loss of mystery” and from the “discovery of mystery” to the manifestation of the Messiah. In this conceptualization, among the identities of the messianic “He” is that of the author. A link is established between the sacred letters of the Qur’an and the Hurufis through Arabic letters in faces (identity). The “transliterated” Latin alphabet that has lost its mystery leads to a conundrum: How to resacralize the secular object of sacrilege? This is the challenge faced by the Republican author and Pamuk. If the Arabic alphabet is considered sacred, even divine, its “transliteration” into Latin letters (and translation) is blasphemous. The very act of writing in the wake of the 1928 alphabet reform is one that is politicized. Indeed, Galip is encouraged to write for the first time after reading F.M. Üçüncü’s work. The desire is re-affirmed by the subsequent murder of Salik. What persists after the “death of the author,” and the end of the “dream” (of reunion), is writing. Writing emerges as the sole redemptive vehicle of mystery and the mystical in The Black Book. This is reinforced by the fact that the murder of Celâl Salik opens the way for Galip to become a ghost-writing columnist and author of a “black book” – that is, for the author-figure to emerge. And though Pamuk craftily stages the “death of the author” through Salik’s murder, the role is redeemed, recreated, and emphasized by the birth of the novelist who sees in the blackness of ink the possibility of the re-emergence of the imagination. Thus the blackness of the novel is both secular and sacred, conjuring the melancholy of lover and beloved, the military coup, writing, text, and intertextuality in an Istanbul provincialized and plagued by the authority of the nation-state.

Mystical Melancholy, or Hüzün in Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005) What is the central function of Istanbul in Pamuk’s fiction? Broadly, it constitutes the literary space that enables Pamuk to transcend the masternarratives of

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secularism, modernity, and orientalism. Like Proust’s Paris, Joyce’s Dublin, or Dickens’ London, Pamuk’s Istanbul is as much a state of mind as a geographical reality. Istanbul is depicted repeatedly and obsessively in all of Pamuk’s novels. The Black Book, however, is a distinct cultural excavation of the city.24 Pamuk’s Istanbul is written and over-written; it is a text and a palimpsest. It is archival. It is the under-represented consciousness of Republican otherness. As such, it is an engine of literary transformations. Istanbul, in its materiality, emerges as the basis for a discrepant consciousness in Pamuk’s oeuvre. It is a psychic space of cultural memory and cultural history. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents contains an iconic passage comparing city and psyche through a metaphorical reference to the “eternal city” of Rome: Suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past – an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. … And the observer would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other. … We can only hold fast to the fact that it is rather the rule than the exception for the past to be preserved in mental life. (Freud 1961 [1930]: 18–20) Conceived of as just such a psychic entity, Istanbul (or “the second Rome”) is a site of collective memory that both predates the nation and surpasses it in scale and scope. This cosmopolitan memory is imperial, multi-ethnic, multilingual, multi-religious and layered as Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, Ottoman, and finally indeterminately Turkish. The memory of the city is sacred, as reflected in its Christian, Jewish, and Muslim ruins and relics. The city, divided between Europe and Asia, represents a duality that is reflected in narrative consciousness and serves as the engine of Pamuk’s novelizations of the secular and the sacred. However, in The Black Book, the city is not just divided between continents, it is also divided between surface and underground. As if manifesting Freud’s metaphor, the guide taking Galip through the underground mannequin museum states, Each incarnation of Istanbul (a.k.a. Byzantium, Vizant, Nova Roma, Anthusa, Tsargrad, Miklagrad, Constantinople, Cospoli, Istin-Polin) had its historical origin in the inevitable and necessary passageways and tunnels below in which the previous civilization has sought refuge, which in turn had created the incredible double-level construct below the city – but … the civilization below had always managed to wreak vengeance on the one above for having pushed it under. (Pamuk 1996b: 167)

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This passage describes the “return of the repressed,” presented, however, through the logic of conspiracy. In the “Master Bedii’s Children” chapter, the civilization depicted underground, as if in a secret museum, is the embodiment of a spurious Turkish authenticity that waits to overtake the city like zombies. The chapter evokes a Dantean descent into hell. The museum contains figures that predate the cultural revolution. (In a gesture of self-parody, the mannequins also include the figures of Cevdet Bey and Selahattin, characters from Pamuk’s first two novels.) Instead, the mannequins that do manage to surface (reach consciousness) are cut into pieces by at least one shop-owner and displayed in their dismembered state. This is what the city, in a moment of transnational neo-liberalism and globalization, inflicts upon national authenticity. Kevin Robins captures this dilemma of Turkish modernity when he writes: “There is a choice, it seems, between assimilation of an alien modernity [Europe] and reversion to the spurious authenticity of (ethnic or religious) origins. It is a false choice, an absurd choice” (Robins 1996: 63). Pamuk’s novels argue the same point, opting instead to excavate, deconstruct, and parody both essentialized poles of the equation. This process alone reveals the presence of a heretofore occulted agency, embodied in Pamuk’s work through the figure of the author. The literary landscape in which Pamuk establishes secular and sacred tropes is his imagined city of Istanbul. Pamuk’s memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, establishes that the authorial self is constructed as doubled, in the secular and sacred cosmopolitan spaces of Istanbul. In The Black Book, among other novels, Istanbul connects the Republican present to the Ottoman past; it connects Turkey to Europe; and finally, it enables an on-going critique of Anatolian nationalism. Pamuk’s memoir-cum-history follows a trajectory that unites author and city, beginning with Orhan’s birth in the city and his early conviction that his self is doubled (thus maintaining a dominant leitmotif from his fiction). Other dominant literary motifs appear, including the museum, the beloved, the coup, cultural revolution, and Turkishness (secular and religious).25 The chapters proceed in a dialectical fashion moving between descriptions of the city, its famous authors, and the development of the artist – first as a painter and finally as a writer. The portrait of the artist is thereby intertwined with a chronicle of the city. The memoir/city-history does not attempt to conceal the influence of modern Ottoman and Turkish Republican authors as does the English version of Other Colors. Here, we do learn about the lives and works of Ahmet Rasim, Abdülhak S¸inasi Hisar, Ahmet Refik, Yahya Kemal, Tanpınar, Kemalettin Tug˘ cu, and Res¸at Ekrem Koçu. The period that these authors span witnesses the development of Istanbul literary modernity from the Hamidian reign to Atatürk, a period in which the first Ottoman Turkish newspapers and novels were published. It also traces the Empire-toRepublic trajectory inscribed in historiographies and literature, including the constitutional era beginning in 1876, the Young Turk era beginning in 1908, and the cultural revolution beginning in 1922. As might be expected, these

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Turkish authors are presented along with a nineteenth-century French “grand tour” tradition in which the influential Istanbul travelogues of Nerval, Gaultier, and Flaubert are discussed, thus establishing one “hidden symmetry” of the book. (Melling’s realistic panoramic engravings, his “insider’s eye,” and ties to the Ottoman palace during a period of early nineteenth-century Ottoman modernization are also discussed in detail.) It is through the urban, cultural, and literary context of Pamuk’s Istanbul that we again learn the degree to which Pamuk cannot be read without considering the influence of late Ottoman modernity. Ironically, the influence of the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman, which Pamuk abandoned with his third novel, reasserts itself in his memoir of the city. Hüzün: Mystifying “Turkishness” Pamuk’s often-discussed description of hüzün, the melancholic affect or emotional register of Republican Istanbul, is also doubled. Pamuk describes Istanbul’s cosmopolitan hüzün as emerging from the loss of empire, a French notion of decadence and melancholy, as well as an Islamic and Sufi tradition of anguish and suffering in the absence of, or separation from, the divine. Pamuk’s hüzün is specific to Istanbul (not the nation) and distinct from melancholy in a number of ways. From a Republican perspective: (1) it is “communal rather than private”, (2) it “veils reality” instead of bringing insight, (3) it “brings us [Istanbulites] comfort”, and (4) “the city of Istanbul carries [hüzün] as its fate.” Continuing to deepen his definition, Pamuk states that from an Islamic perspective hüzün “conveys a feeling of deep spiritual loss” as reflected in the Qur’an – furthermore, in Islamic history, it becomes split, representing two different traditions. The first, perhaps more orthodox tradition states that excessive concern with the material world will lead to hüzün, which is a symptom. The second more positive Sufi mystic tradition claims that hüzün is natural spiritual anguish due to separation from Allah.26 This is anguish whose presence alludes to and intuits the presence of the divine.27 That is, for Pamuk it is the absence of hüzün that causes distress, not its presence – which is somewhat natural. Furthermore suffering becomes sacred (known as çile) and is an honor: Islamic culture holds hüzün in high esteem. Pamuk’s etymology of Republican hüzün is multilayered and complex. Additionally, he states that, in its positive and negative valences, it is central to Istanbul cultural production and literature. Suddenly, we realize that hüzün, in its overdetermined ambiguity, is another absent text waiting to be over-written. Pamuk quickly turns to a favorite literary technique, a Borgesian academic contextualization that brings two disparate traditions (“East” and “West”) together to fill the void. Thus, in his discussion of hüzün, Pamuk alludes to El Kindi, Ibn Sina, and Robert Burton. Pamuk continues with his definition of the indefinable by distinguishing hüzün from melancholy. Whereas Burton the “Westerner” believed that melancholy was predicated on solitude as a cause or a symptom, El

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Kindi the “Easterner” believed hüzün was a mystical state and affliction that had nothing to do with solitude but focused on the community of believers (or ummah). For the former, solitude and individuality held sway; for the latter, return to the community and communal purpose. Pamuk emphasizes the great “metaphysical distance” between the two understandings. For the author in the city, however, hüzün is doubled. Pamuk’s five-page litany of instances of Istanbul hüzün embeds the authorial self in the city as both an individual and as part of a collective distinct from the Republican nation-state. I argue that for Pamuk hüzün is both a secular affliction and a sacred condition of mystical consciousness. This describes both the withdrawal of the author from society to write and the redemptive effect of that process to transform national constraints. (This is a secular variation on beka and fena.) These constraints, as I have argued, can be secular or religious, and nationalist or orientalist. Pamuk’s struggle against discursive sites of state power becomes apparent when he establishes a genealogy from Gautier to Yahya Kemal to Tanpınar (and to himself). This genealogy traces a trajectory from an external European gaze to an internal attempt at authenticity, which conceals/belies the internalized orientalism of Republican modernity. He describes the effects of this internalized authorial gaze in the “Under Western Eyes” chapter. Moreover, near the end of his treatise, Pamuk begins to redefine hüzün (after a lurching segue into tropical tristesse) as rupture from the Ottoman Islamic past. Here, hüzün emerges as the legacy of the separation between din and devlet, and the Republican dominance of state authority that peripheralized Istanbul as being a non-national space of cultural memory. In his discussion of hüzün, Pamuk reveals his unstable position as both insider and outsider. After painstakingly including himself as part of the collective that constitutes the city, he alters his perspective by otherizing sections of the populace. Moving from the perspective of “us” to that of “them,” Pamuk writes: “By neglecting the past and severing their connection with it, the hüzün they feel in their mean and hollow efforts is all the greater” (Pamuk 2005a: 103, my emphasis). Here, the term takes on yet another (this time negative) nuance of Ottoman Islamic historical denial, from which Pamuk disassociates himself. Pamuk continues to overdetermine hüzün in something of a literary exercise and argument. He switches from “outside observer” to “insider.” This switch accurately recapitulates the genealogy mentioned above, which linked an orientalist gaze to native authenticity. (Though indeterminate, the “us” is citydwellers more than Anatolian Turkish nationals.) Next, he states that the city bears its hüzün by choice. This is an odd rhetorical turn. It introduces local agency into the lineage of outsider representations, and not to the people or the nation, but to the city itself. But then Pamuk separates himself from hüzün, vacillating from authenticity to orientalism, and trains an elite cosmopolitan gaze onto the lower classes of the city: He states that hüzün is the “pain of life” for residents who live in dignified resignation to “poverty and

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depression.” He claims, like a dismissive outsider or self-hating insider, that hüzün explains “their choice to embrace failure, indecision, defeat, and poverty … with such pride” (my emphasis). He writes, in the strain of the authoritarian modernizer, a figure that he parodies frequently in his fiction: They all gave the impression that because of this hüzün they’d been carrying around in their hearts since birth they could not appear desirous in the face of money, success, or the women they loved. Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Istanbul; it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed. (Pamuk 2005a: 104, my emphasis) Here, Pamuk unwittingly exposes the dilemmas of a common Turkish trope: the Republican divided self. That is, he displays the position of the “colonizer” and the “colonized” trapped in the same person. He shows the condition of belonging to a community that another facet of the same self despises, denies, and denigrates. It is this dilemma that contextualizes the doubles that incessantly appear in Pamuk’s work. Pamuk continues by stating that hüzün does not refer to an individual standing against society. Rather, returning to the self-critical perspective of “us,” he states, “it suggests an erosion of the will to stand against the values and mores of the community and encourages us to be content with little, honoring the virtues of harmony, uniformity, humility” (Pamuk 2005a: 104). Now Pamuk’s literary proof becomes clearer: his perspective slips and shifts from insider (“us”) to outsider (“them”). It does so inherently in the space of the city, whose cosmopolitanism is a constant threat to the “us” of the nation (the “impure” city both does and does not belong). This unstable condition of suffering is bound up with the mystical and honorable lament of hüzün. The binary logic presented here constitutes an epistemological and ontological trap that presents a challenge to Pamuk in the memoir, though he successfully transcends it in his fiction. Thus, in the need to find a site of belonging, it is fitting that Pamuk ends his treatise on hüzün by referring to a genealogy of Turkish authors. This genealogy is significant because Pamuk credits the authors with inscribing an Istanbul of hüzün in their works and, just as importantly, he situates himself into the literary genealogy. Pamuk gleefully embraces the literary hüzün that emerges from the cityscape and its ties to cosmopolitan European and Istanbul authors, the Qur’an, and Sufism. The hüzün of the people and the nation, however, which he has alluded to as well, is something he recognizes, but dismisses and despises.28 The Istanbul authors he discusses are Abdulhak S¸inasi Hisar, Yahya Kemal, Tanpınar, and Res¸at Ekrem Koçu. Of them he states: It is these four heroes, whom I will discuss from time to time in this book, whose poems, novels, stories, articles, memoirs, and encyclopedias opened my eyes to the soul of the city in which I live. … [They] drew their

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strength from the tensions between the past and the present, or between what Westerners like to call East and West; they are the ones who taught me how to reconcile my love for modern art and western literature with the culture of the city in which I live. (Pamuk 2005a: 111) By placing himself into this genealogy, Pamuk has again revealed the constructed nature of hüzün and his own agency in perpetuating that construction; furthermore, he has implicitly admitted a genealogical link to the nineteenthcentury French authors who described Istanbul with such Romantic orientalist flourish.29 As such, Pamuk has traced out the orientalist–nationalist binary logic that undergirds and confounds Republican secularism. The same binary also opens the way for a revisionary reading of Turkishness. This revised Turkishness is neither orientalist nor authentic, it is rewritten through the novel, novelized, as the literary suture between secularism and Sufism. We can see in Pamuk’s attempt to bring din in relational dialogue with devlet, the attempt at a new type of cultural authority, one that is predicated on, rather than segregated from, tradition. This new authority is clearly postsecular and postorientalist in its foundations. The novel is uniquely positioned to capture the resurgence of this authority, whether as a literary articulation of neo-Ottomanism or a demystification of secular state power. City Contra Nation As a work of nonfiction, Istanbul provides an important parallax view onto Pamuk’s fiction. The memoir explicitly intervenes in the tense relationship between author and state by delineating the city between them as a space of critique. The memoir both traces the marginalization of the city during the Republican era (what Pamuk terms its “provincialization”) and sets the foundation for its resurgence. Istanbul not only argues that the city and the development of the author are entwined, it establishes a counternarrative to the dominant mode of Republican secularism. The memoir also describes the period of Pamuk’s early literary influences between 1952 and 1974. In doing so, it documents the encroachment of the nation-state over the city and the eclipsing of Istanbul by Anatolia. In literary terms, it coincides with the dominance of social realism and the village novel. In many ways, Pamuk’s treatise on hüzün is a meditation on this dismissal of the former Ottoman capital city and seat of the caliphate. Importantly, in the middle of the memoir, Pamuk describes a process of “Turkification” in a chapter that precedes one titled “Religion.” These refer to two distinct, and ostensibly contradictory, communal formations: nation and ummah. By juxtaposing secular and religious themes, what argument is Pamuk trying to further? In general, Pamuk is negative and dismissive of “Turkification,” bearing witness to state-sponsored violence against

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non-Muslims residing in the city (mostly Greeks and Armenians). But he is also a secularist. An important instance of slippage occurs. “Turkification,” as reiterated by Pamuk, is predicated on Muslim identity. The two go together like a doppelgänger, though Muslim identity has been suppressed and oppressed by the state, Turkish nationalism is clearly Muslim before becoming secular. The city, as a legacy of a Turkish Islamic state, bears this doubleness in its very essence. The Republican state disavows and denies its Muslim legacy, though it reacts to it neurotically when that state is threatened (whether real or perceived). Pamuk implies that the city is a cultural space that does not need to police a perceived border between the secular and the sacred in the same way that the state does. It is tolerant of both, including other faiths and ethnicities, in a tradition of cosmopolitanism. Here begins Pamuk’s class-based reading of Islam. In his world, Islam was associated with the poor and the household help. Piety and poverty were equated. Secularism signified an elite bourgeoisie who were the proprietors of the nation-state. The disenfranchised and the dispossessed needed Islam. The logic of conspiracy quickly enters into Pamuk’s descriptions: You could almost say it was a relief to know they depended on someone else to save them, that there was another power [Allah] that could help bear their burdens. But the comfort of this thought was sometimes dissolved by the fear that one day the poor might use their special relationship with God against us. (Pamuk 2005d: 177) Later, Pamuk links the legacy of military coups to this secular anxiety about religion. Nevertheless, Islam, in Pamuk’s childhood, is another absent text. He writes: “to move away from religion was to be modern and western. … But that was in public. In private life, nothing came to fill the spiritual void. Cleansed of religion, home became as empty as the city’s ruined yalıs and as gloomy as the fern-darkened gardens surrounding them” (Pamuk 2005d: 180). This is another clue that the sacredness that finds its way into Pamuk’s novels has nothing to do with the practices of organized Islam, but is part of an urban literary tradition. It is Pamuk’s experience with the novel that enables the emergence of a mystical idiom that can be linked to Sufism.

A Novel of Objects: The Museum of Innocence (2009) The above-mentioned trope of the encyclopedia, bringing together history and literature, is significant to understanding Pamuk’s work and the influence of the Turkish tradition on his novels. Pamuk personifies the encyclopedia through the obsessions of the collector, a figure he engages in his first postNobel novel, The Museum of Innocence. The value of material culture and “things” is present in the trope of the “archive” or “museum” that recurs

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in much of Pamuk’s work. Capturing a literary trope that traces the rise of the modern novel from Dickens to Henry James and from Joyce to Nabokov and, in the Turkish tradition, the novels of Tanpınar, Pamuk creates stories out of objects. The museum, we come to understand, is both an institution of national modernity as well as the foundation of literary modernity. In Istanbul, he describes his fetishizing of “pieces” of the city as follows: There were times – when every strange [city] memento seemed saturated with the poetic melancholy of lost imperial greatness and its historical residue – that I imagined myself to be the only one who had unlocked the city’s secret. … The objects I brought back from my aimless walks, my attempts at “getting lost” – a few old books, a calling card, an old postcard, or a strange piece of information about the city – these things were indispensible proof that the walk I’d taken was “real.” Like the Coleridge hero who wakes to find himself holding the rose of his dreams, I knew these objects were not of the second world … but of a real world that matched my memories. (Pamuk 2005d: 353–4) This infusion of things and fragments with cultural and historical memory is reflected in the concerns of Kemal Basmacı, the novel’s protagonist, whose dream of love only exists in the mundane objects that are its evidence and testimony. (In Turkish, “Kemal” means perfection and “Basmacı” a maker/seller of printed cloth; here, it signifies the “perfect copy” or “perfect cliché” in Pamuk’s ridicule of the Istanbul bourgeois.) Kemal’s infatuation with objects describes a fetish caused by separation from his beloved, Füsun. In “The Consolation of Objects” chapter, things become a surrogate for union, as Kemal enters into the bed of their erstwhile lovemaking, and caresses himself with her objects before introducing them into his mouth: One palliative for this new wave of pain, I discovered, was to seize upon an object of our common memories that bore her essence; to put it into my mouth and taste it brought some relief. … I picked it up [her cigarette butt], breathing in its scent of smoke and ash, and placing it between my lips. … I picked it up and rubbed the end that had once touched her lips against my cheeks, my forehead, my neck, and the recesses under my eyes, as gently and kindly as a nurse salving a wound. … I would usually spend my two hours in the apartment daydreaming in bed, 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. (Pamuk 2009: 156–7)

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The consolation of material objects that “release their analgesic” and “soothe the soul” is a corollary to the spiritual redemption of the text. These objects will ultimately lead to the production of a novel that describes Kemal’s fall from bourgeois life and the tragedy of a relationship largely lived in fantasy. In turn, the novel will lead to the construction of a museum (Füsun’s house) to hold these objects in an act of redemption and worship of the martyred body of the beloved. Kemal’s museum is a reliquary of sorts. What is being described in The Museum of Innocence is the birth of a secular faith centered on an absent object of desire. Füsun (or “spell”) serves the same function in the production of the surrogate of the museum as Rüya (or “dream”) serves in the production of the “black” book. Separation from the beloved leads to the spiritual manifestation of the material object, whether novel or museum. In their collection of essays, The Exhibit in the Text, Caroline Patey and Laura Scuriatti describe the productive intersection between collecting, museum, and literary text: Once it ceased to be the exclusive preserve of the noble or the rich, the gentle art of collecting was threatening to disrupt the grand taxonomies of official culture with its individual choices. … The routes of consistency, chronology and genealogy have powerful adversaries inclining on the contrary towards the juxtaposition of times and spaces, heterogeneous groupings and the adventures of fragmentary vision. Remarkably, these tensions – continuity versus fragment, encyclopedia versus idiosyncracy – found their way into poetry and above all the novel. … No surprise, then, that so many contemporary writers – Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Antonia Byatt, John Fowles, David Lodge, Italo Calvino – should, yet again, turn to the museum as a favorite textual location and use it as the rationale of their work and a hermeneutic instrument! (Patey and Scuriatti 2009: 4–5) By creating a text out of an exhibit and an exhibit out of a text, Pamuk is situating the collecting impulse in individual desire that is nonetheless the kernal of literary modernity as well as a material-mystical quest and an allegory for the fragmentation of the secular nation. Pamuk is using the order of words to inflect and critique the order of things and vice versa. Whereas The Black Book entwines fiction and “nonfiction” and My Name is Red braids image and inscription, The Museum of Innocence brings together objects and textual memory. As I have been arguing, tropes of the material and the spiritual work in tandem in the creation of a Pamuk novel. Whereas The Black Book identifies writing as the “sole consolation” of a secular redemption, The Museum of Innocence identifies the museum as the same locus of consolation. Kemal states, “Because all the objects in my museum – and with them, my entire story – can be seen at the same time from any perspective, visitors will

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lose all sense of Time. This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well-built museums, formed from the heart’s compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.” (Pamuk 2009: 520) Pamuk is moving toward the central idea that novels, in their accumulation of things and creation of spaces of contemplation, are museums; and that museums, in their ordering and display of objects, are novels. Both social spaces are predicated on “curating” the object. Hence Pamuk’s articulation of the museum–novel duality. The writer, he argues, is both author and curator. (The term comes from the Latin cura meaning both to “care for” and to “cure,” duties traditionally reserved for religious figures.) Furthermore, these two social spaces are secular and sacred. In The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk inverts the expected trajectory that moves from the material to mystical. The novel’s themes are not focused on textual production, but on the accumulation, representation, and display of fetishized things. The museum is the attempt to extract the story from memory and history. In accumulating its objects for display, Pamuk is now involved in material production. Unlike his other novels, The Museum of Innocence, as an ostensible museum catalogue, produces the object that it describes. The actual Museum of Innocence opened to the public in Istanbul in 2012. Things described in the novel give rise to the tragic story of Kemal and Füsun; furthermore, the story literally constructs a museum that displays those particular objects. In the museum, which I visited while it was under construction, each display corresponds to a chapter in the novel. What is Pamuk arguing for by bringing the forms of the novel and the museum together? Scholars have commented on the central place of the museum in the construction of national history and identity (Knell et al. 2011). In the scope of Pamuk’s oeuvre, museum-like spaces occupy an important place beginning with the Ottoman archive that appears in The Silent House and The White Castle. The manuscript found in that archive enables the construction of a mystical captive’s tale (a new type of novel) focusing on Hoja and the slave. The Black Book describes the haunting underground museum of Master Bedii’s authentic Turks, whereas Celâl’s apartment serves as a personal archive of papers that occupies Galip for days, enabling him to assume a new identity. In The New Life, Dr. Narin, in his struggle against the Great Conspiracy, establishes both an archive of intelligence reports as well as an autobiographical museum devoted to his son. My Name is Red displays the royal Ottoman treasury as an archive of rare manuscripts and illustrations that tells a forgotten history of Islamic manuscripts and leads to the capture of the murderer. Snow reconstructs the biography of Ka from his personal artifacts, papers, and possessions. These museum spaces serve to write an alternative history to official narratives. The significance of the archival space to cultural memory and history, and more importantly to the redefinition of the novel,

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has already been discussed. By foregrounding material culture and objects, the kernels of independent stories, Pamuk is able to move away from the ideological constraints of Republican modernity. The objects, in a sense, speak for themselves. The personas of archivist and collector are indispensable to Pamuk’s literary production. In the conclusion to The Museum of Innocence, the author-figure Pamuk and the collector Kemal engage in long conversations. Kemal has hired “Pamuk” to write the story of the exhibits that will make up the museum. These passages personify the authorial self as being divided between two related personas of collector and novelist. Here, and in other novels, the divided-self functions to inflect the bourgeois Republican self with the alterity of a writing-subject who documents the transformation, deconstruction, or disappearance of that self. In other words, the narrator is also revealed to be an author. The hybrid possibilities that emerge from the following relationships also expose and alter the ideological discourses of secularism: master and slave, Galip and Celâl, Osman and Mehmet, “Orhan” and Black, “Orhan” and Ka, and finally “Orhan” and Kemal. In The Museum of Innocence, Kemal states: I could see it all [objects meant for display in the museum] – and like a shaman who can see the souls of things, I could feel their stories flickering inside me. … The line joining together these objects would be a story. In other words, a writer might undertake to write the catalogue in the same form as he might write a novel (Pamuk 2009: 512) The border between collector and author blurs considerably here. The process of accumulation specific to creating both social spaces is conflated. The admittance ticket, included in the novel, is the means by which the “reader” reunites novelist and collector (the other coupling in the story) in the real world by returning to the museum – that is, to the objects that are the source and origin of the novel. In a parody of both positions, the exchanges between the two are businesslike in the novel, as if hiring a Nobel laureate to write a museum catalog was ordinary. Kemal states, when discussing the role of the museum guards, “Their job is to make visitors feel that they are in a place of worship that, like a mosque, should awaken in them feelings of humility, respect, and reverence” (Pamuk 2009: 519). By extension, these directives about the museum also hold true for the textual museum of the novel, which, in Pamuk’s case, emerges as one that both parodies and sacralizes the secular. Pamuk parodies the bourgeoisie of Istanbul throughout the novel (in vacuous notions of “happiness,” “westernizing,” “status,” and “imitation”). He returns to a leitmotif that runs throughout his work, bourgeois youth gone wrong; specifically, those who do not adopt a professional career in the

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articulation of the Kemalist modernist ideal. Kemal’s renunciation of this bourgeois class is met with shock: A wide variety of rumors reached my ears: I’d gone soft in the head; I’d become a creature of the night; I’d joined a secret Sufi sect in Fatih; there were even those who said I’d become a communist and, like so many militants, gone to live in a gecekondu shanty. (Pamuk 2009: 223) In The Museum of Innocence, however, Pamuk works toward some degree of reconciliation with this class he cannot keep from ridiculing. The first character that fits the trope of the misfit or blacksheep is Refik in Cevdet Bey and Sons, who aspires to ideals that will improve the plight of Anatolia. Other characters fall or drop out of secular society (much the way Pamuk did to become an author). This is true for Faruk Darvınog˘ lu the historian, Galip the lawyer, Osman the engineering student, Ka the journalist-poet, and Kemal the lovelorn collector. Failed, broken, or unrequited relationships are the instigation for these characters to undertake a redemptive quest. The quest leads to redemption through the process of writing. The journey, with its constantly deferred or unattained goal, is sacred not least of all because it constructs the self in all its complexity and contradiction. The occulted redeemer of the crisis of secular modernity in Pamuk’s world is the author. Shadowing Pamuk’s protagonists, indeed, is the figure of the author, as a double. At the end of each novel he appears, sometimes subtly like the ambiguous narrator of The White Castle, or the first-person intrusions in The Black Book and The New Life. But the author-figure becomes increasingly more prominent. He appears as an autobiographical character (“Orhan”) in My Name is Red. In Snow, he is beside the reader the entire journey, looking over his shoulder as Ka’s friend, “Orhan Pamuk,” and in The Museum of Innocence he assumes the narrative voice rather obtrusively: “Hello, this is Orhan Pamuk!” The protagonist and the narrator are not always distinct entities in the Pamuk novel. Furthermore, the autobiographical strain of representing the self, as I have argued, is a legacy of secular modernity that places Pamuk’s work between the modern and the postmodern. As a gesture of political dissidence, the author-figure is the voice and expression of post-Kemalism, the local variety of postsecularism. Thus, we realize that Pamuk, as with the political authors of his youth, remains socially engaged in the text, long after that text has been complicated and decentered by doubles, metanarratives, and intertextuality. This major contradiction only makes sense once Pamuk’s work has been properly contextualized in the Istanbul literary tradition. Though he describes Kemal’s world, he ridicules it mercilessly, placing it on display, much as Kemal exhibits the fetishized objects of his beloved. (This ridicule can be summarized in the incessant and absurd use of the word “happiness,” a symbol and sign of bourgeois vacuity.)

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Just like the Pamuk novel, Kemal’s museum is predicated on an absent text, a sirr or secret of the non-secret, which waits to be revealed and written. Kemal states: “The silvery moonlight pouring through the windows into my museum, which sometimes seemed as if it might never be completed, gave the building and its empty center a frighteningly vacant aspect, as if it were continuous with infinite space” (Pamuk 2009: 512). The empty center can only be filled by the text of the author, a revelation of sorts that gives wholeness and meaning to the absence. The empty center mentioned by Kemal conjures the “secret center” that Pamuk claims distinguishes the novel from other narrative forms, imbuing it with an element of the mystical. Pamuk describes this mystical center in his Norton lectures: “The center of a novel is a profound opinion or insight about life, a deeply embedded point of mystery, whether real or imagined” (Pamuk 2010: 153). He suggests earlier in his lectures that the center emerges from the encounter between two disparate stories that nevertheless inflect each other, as in Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. I have been arguing that for Turkish literary modernity, these two dominant stories can be summarized by din and devlet, an iteration that brings with it connotations of the Ottoman past, Islam, modernity, and state secularism. Indeed, Pamuk, in the mixing of his genres, includes multiple juxtaposed texts in his novels, thereby imbuing the book with its hidden symmetry through intertextuality. The “intertext” delineates the mystical in Pamuk’s fiction. The mystical is revealed through the act of literary creation. The text mediates between the worldly and divine. This mediation enables Pamuk to occupy both material and spiritual perspectives in his fiction.

Conclusion: The Hidden Symmetry of Secular Sufism In a discussion of the presence of Sufism in the contemporary novel, religious studies scholar Carl Ernst states: This literary form [the novel], which is intimately tied to both personal identity and social critique, has also been used for the expression of Sufism. … In Turkish, the novel Nur Baba by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanog˘ lu depicted a Bektashi dervish exercising a sinister influence over an upperclass Ottoman woman. … More recently, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has incorporated extensive Sufi imagery into his writings, especially The Black Book. (Ernst 2011 [1997]: 218) The two novels mentioned by Ernst represent a vacillation in attitudes toward Sufism. In the former case, Sufism is an impediment to secular modernity; in the latter case, Sufism is central to the development of literary modernity and to basic freedoms of thought and religion. These literary representations, separated by almost 70 years, also trace a vacillation from the dominance of tropes of secular devlet to those of mystical din in Turkish literary culture.

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The “hidden symmetry” or “secret center” that Pamuk often refers to in his fiction and nonficton is delineated by these two oppositional narratives. In the Republican context, the representation of secular modernity in the novel was both belated and, in its social realist iteration, lasted into the 1980s with few exceptions. As a subtext, the Republican novel was also engaged in various explorations of the sacred as established by the foregoing discussions of canonized works of Turkish literature. If not through the depiction of mystical experience in otherwise secular contexts, often, this sacredness manifested through the novelization of tropes and structures of Sufi literature and traditions that had been denigrated by Republican modernity. Pamuk developed this sacred aspect of fiction by reflecting it in the form of the secular novel. As such, Pamuk’s work began to represent both the secular modernist approach as well as one that was mystical and (from the perspective of the state) anachronistically “pre-modern.” The former appeared through tropes of revolution, coup, and the “modernizing” author-figure. The latter appeared through tropes of Sufism, the Ottoman past, the archive, and redemption. The antimony between din and devlet that this gave rise to could find a natural habitat in the depiction of cosmopolitan spaces of Istanbul. Often, the pairing of these seeming opposites could be tragicomic and easily captured in strains of melodrama and conspiracy as reflected in Pamuk’s mature novels. The Black Book is a very inward-looking novel that excavates the city of Istanbul to find connections between European and Middle Eastern cultures and forms. The protagonist, as is common in Pamuk’s world, undergoes various transformations from lawyer to detective, from reader to nonfiction journalist, and finally to author. These personas trace a development from secular Republican professional to creative writer. In this process, the military coup is transformed from a violent intervention into the promise of Revolution and Judgment Day as marked by the (blasphemous) coming of the messiah/author. This savior is responsible for the revelation of a secular-sacred holy book, an homage to city, psyche, and the East/West intertext. This book does not have light surging from its pages (as in The New Life), it is black. Similarly, The Museum of Innocence, focused on Istanbul in the first instance, expands to include museums throughout the world. This transnationalism is bound to cultural history in The Black Book and part of a globalizing context in The Museum of Innocence. Whereas The Black Book is specific to Istanbul, what happens in a corner of Istanbul in The Museum of Innocence resonates with myriad other places in the world. Kemal’s obsessive pathology is the pathology of a life that unites object and memory in the worship of the absent beloved. The museum that results is a corollary to the national museum itself: a secular temple based on the fantasy of a happy synthesis (for instance, between tradition and modernity). The parody and the tragedy that constitutes the alternative story can only be accessed through a literature that maintains metahistorical distance. This is what the Pamuk novel does, in this case maintaining and parodying the melodramatic love story that is embodied in Yes¸ilçam films. Pamuk’s novel is

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just such a melodrama with profound implications for understanding self and nation. Kemal’s character also evokes Mustafa Kemal, the founder of the Republic, whose goal of establishing museums extended from historical sites to ancient Anatolian history and his own self. The Atatürk mausoleum in Ankara contains a small museum that houses the personal artifacts of the secular modernizer, including combs and toiletries, clothes, binoculars, letters, photographs, documents, uniforms, shoes, weapons, and even a mysterious photograph that shows a cloud formation, a cumulous cloud taken by a citizen, that had assumed the profile of the leader himself. In this mystification, the secular leader has become a mystical force, who appears in the heavens and controls nature. This, too, is a secular-sacred museum of innocence that awaits its demystification. Pamuk’s innovation is to not only excavate a lost world of Republican kitsch, it is to set everyday popular culture – from local soda to insect spray, from popular Yes¸ilçam films to street food, from military coups to bourgeois hotels and restaurants – in opposition to the somber and national military culture of the Republican state that regularly manifested itself in the military coup from 1960 to 1997. Though materialism is emphasized in many aspects in both novels, it is also linked to Pamuk’s dominant mystical and secular-sacred theme of textual production.

Conclusion The Blasphemies of “Turning Turk”

“Wilt thou turn Turk and save thy soul yet?” (Daborne 2000 [1612]: 228)1 Religious conversion appears to need explaining in a way secular conversion to modern ways of being does not. (Asad 1996: 263) Internationally, I am perceived to be more Turkish than I actually see myself. … Once you get to be internationally known, your Turkishness is underlined … it is imposed by other people. (Pamuk 2007: 378)

The White Castle describes the constant pressure put on a Christian slave to convert to Islam and thus gain his freedom (in one instance, at the threat of execution). He never does so in the plot. In time, he assumes the position of his former Muslim master. The threat of forced conversion is deferred and sublimated into the narrative of the novel itself. It becomes a passive conversion such that the religious and ethnic identity of the slave-narrator becomes indeterminate. On one hand, the slave does not “turn Turk,” to use an idiom of the day. On the other hand, his first-person account, or the story itself, does. The story transforms, or is appropriated – from being a “captive’s tale” it becomes a “tale of conversion.” In other words, Pamuk constructs a firstperson narrative voice through which both master and slave seem to speak. If the Venetian doesn’t “turn Turk,” the novel itself does and is appropriated into the Istanbul context by the mysterious author-figure. “Conversion,” real or textual, is the topic through which I’d like to re-examine Pamuk’s literary argument. In its early articulations in the Mediterranean world, the ethnonym “Turk” had no set ethnic designation, but a religious one. Going back to the Crusades, the metaphor “turning Turk” referred to the act of conversion, in this case to Islam, and to the betrayal implicit in any act of conversion. “Turning Turk,” originally a derogatory expression, also connoted betrayal, irrationality, immorality, and unethical behavior (Vitkus 2003). The phrase was used

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figuratively for “a change of condition or opinion” (Dyce 1867: 464) or to “go over to the other side” (Bate 2009: 276). I read the “turn” of turning Turk literarily as that of a trope (from the Greek tropos meaning “turn, direction, way”), a turn that creates figurative language, establishes new levels of interpretation, and structures meaning.2 Furthermore, in addition to religious conversion, in the era of nationalization, turning Turk refers to an ideological conversion, to Turkification, and state projects to establish secular modern identity. The Turkish cultural revolution is about turning Turk as well, about becoming a Turk of social revolutions led by the state, or devlet. Devlet comes from the Arabic dawla, which also means “a turn” (Rosenthal 2012 [1961]). In this iteration, “turning Turk” conjures the Turkish state formation, whose cultural conversions evoke betrayal or loyalty, depending on one’s perspective. The currency and persistence of “turning Turk” rests in the synchronicity of its determinants; it refers to both an Islamic as well as a secular state of being, a cultural antinomy of din and devlet. As such, the phrase, as it is articulated in early modern and modern contexts, signifies orientalizing and nationalizing tendencies at once. “Turning Turk,” furthermore, juxtaposes Islam to the internalized orientalism of Turkish modernization in an encounter that I have been arguing is the hallmark of the modern literary canon. Broadly, my concluding analysis uses conversion as a metaphor for approaches into and paths out of contexts of alterity/Otherness. Switching to the other side, or passing, is a way in and out, a mode of translation between discourses and cultural logics that are illegible to each other; even a form of contrapuntal reading, to use Said’s term (Said 1993: 32, 66).3 It is a useful concluding metaphor for a study that examines literary intersections of religion and secularism, not least of all because it also describes both a variety of blasphemy and cultural translation. If we consider “Turkishness” to be an iteration of both the secular and the religious, “turning Turk” has a dual secular-sacred sense. It could be described to represent a specific condition of instability or transgression, a “secular blasphemy.” In a context that examines European secular affronts to Muslim religious authority, Talal Asad defines “blasphemy” as the “breaking of taboo”: The modern problem of blasphemy, one might say, is a European invention. For a secular society that doesn’t acknowledge the existence of such a thing as blasphemy, it is quite remarkable how much public discourse there is about it. … Of course Europe’s proscription of theological language in the political domain makes such a use of the word “blasphemy” inconceivable. But does this impossibility merely signal a secular reluctance to politicize “religion,” or is it the symptom of an incapacity? This question is … an invitation to look again at an empirical feature of modernity, especially the notion of secular criticism. (Asad et al. 2009: 56–7)

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Pamuk’s blasphemy is one such example of secular criticism. In the Turkish case, it is often what is involved in bringing iterations of devlet together with those of din. All of the authors examined in this study engage in the important work of secular criticism. As such, each is involved in his or her own variety of insulting “Turkishness” in its secular or sacred manifestation; each is a blasphemer from the perspective of the state. This is why so many of these authors have been considered to be traitors to the nation and have been targeted by the state for censure, exile, litigation, or even death. Pamuk and his work have suffered the same fate. However, they have also ushered in a new literary modernity that transcends the received discursive confines of Turkishness entirely. This feat relies on the site of Istanbul as enabling the confluence of Turkish and world literatures. Ironically, it is Pamuk’s anachronistic development of the writing-subject or “author figure” in an era of the “death of the author,” upon which this foundational revision of Turkish cultural, and by extension, political identity depends. In a further irony, Pamuk’s writingsubject, compromising and compromised at once, is a product of the very secular modernity he critiques through the form of his novels. “Turning Turk” also implies an engagement with otherness and a loss of self in some measure, but more importantly the conflation of the two. The convert (dönme in Turkish, lit. “the one who turns”) is a native informant and a traitor, a devotee and a proselytizer at once. The convert, a liminal figure that draws the gaze and suspicion of two dominant sites of authority and identification, is also the embodiment of a condition of translation and represents a context of cultural translation. The term “cultural translation” was coined by anthropologists to describe cultural encounters in which “self” and “other” make sense of one another. In this understanding, translation refers not to lexical issues per se, but to modes of thought, the exertion of power, representation, and institutionalized practices (Asad 1986). Through this lens, The White Castle is a novel about cultural translation between self and other; a process that repeats in all of Pamuk’s novels. In Translating Orients, Tim Weiss defines a “translational approach” to interpretation as follows: The translational approach, which takes a subject matter and changes it from one place, state, form or appearance to another, recomposing it in other registers, involves three linked processes: (1) resistance, (2) identity shedding and identity making, and (3) possibility seeking. … To respond to the dual challenges of fundamentalisms and groundlessness, interpretation has need of all three aspects of this heuristic operation. Without an aspect of resistance (i.e., critique) and the shedding and making of identity, the exploration of possibility would turn into an idle fantasy or a utopian quest. (Weiss 2004: 204–5) Such a translational approach seems long overdue in the case of Turkish texts. Nearly all Turkish – and Muslim – cultural and literary practices are

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embedded in a broader field of translatability and untranslatability – a field of indeterminacy. That is to say, legibility is contested, a function of mechanisms of power between insider and outsider discourses. Often, appropriation of the literary text manifests through secondary, disciplinary discourses (popular and academic both) from political science to sociology, from history to anthropology, and from gender to religious studies. A dominant outsider discourse might distort readings due to its various appropriations of the Turkish cultural field. It might lead to exclusions; for example, by turning the literary text into a symbol of violence, patriarchy, fanaticism, or inscrutability – a state of absolute alterity. To take the indeterminacy of cultural translation into consideration means analyzing the ways in which Turkish literature in English is enabled by prior orientalist, national, and colonial histories, or at the other extreme, simply dismissed. Reading Turkish authors as cultural translators, as well as authors of secular critique, reveals their complexity. It resists the fact that what gets conveyed in English through literary texts has the greatest legibility when it resonates with secondary or disciplinary discourses. Yet the phenomenon of disciplinary appropriation limits meaning and interpretation and restricts readings of literary translations to various ghettos of understanding. Over the last century or so, for each generation there has been one dominant Turkish writer who has represented contemporary Turkish literature to an English-reading audience. Since the last years of the Ottoman Empire (which lasted until 1922), only four or five names stand out. These representative authors and their texts reveal that the mediation between Turkish and English occurs in a controlled relationship of dominance that vacillates between the logic of geopolitics on one hand and an expression of authenticity or national self-determination on the other; between the two poles of orientalist and national encounter. Accompanying the “one country, one author” principle that dominates in the international publishing of lesser-known literary traditions are shadow discourses through which authors and texts travel and circulate, one connected to the contact zone between national and geopolitical contexts. These shadow discourses are often based in disciplines such as politics, religion, and history that constrain and instrumentalize the meanings of literature and translation. However, cultural translation offers the possibility for other types of interventions. Cultural translation refers not just to the limited act of moving from source to target language, but to increasing the understanding of other (unknown, concealed, or repressed) cultural and symbolic contexts. It refers to the greater condition of constant slippage between embedded discourses, to the effects of an intertext traveling between cultures and illuminating both. Emily Apter’s notion of a “zone of translation” is useful in this broader interdisciplinary conception of cultural translation: An act of disruption, translation becomes a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history; a means of rendering self-knowledge

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foreign to itself; a way of denaturalizing citizens, taking them out of the comfort zone of national space. … Translation is a significant medium of subject re-formation and political change. (Apter 2006: 6) This study has attempted to “reposition” Pamuk’s work for the sake of cultural translation. To read him not only as the product of a national tradition, but to “denaturalize,” de-nationalize, and complicate that tradition as it is restricted by secondary discourses. The interpretations of Turkish literature presented here demonstrate that the nation-form fails miserably in explaining its authors. One example is the threat posed by canonized Turkish authors to the state. In Apter’s understanding, these are authors that render self-knowledge foreign to itself. They are authors that engage in the subversive process of subject re-formation vis-à-vis “Turkishness” as a metonym for the authority of orientalism, nationalism, and modernity. Perhaps what Apter reads as subject re-formation and political change involves the suturing of insider and outsider perspectives for the sake of cultural legibility in a larger field of illegibility. It hardly bears emphasis that the Turkish cultural field is often illegible, perceived as being derivative: not modern enough for European epistemologies and not Islamic enough for religious ones. There is no dominant colonial legacy to fall back upon, unless one rather paradoxically considers the Ottomans themselves. Therefore, “turning Turk” is an unavoidable eternal return that gives rise to problems of cultural and political representation. This leads to something of a condition of cultural untranslatability. For example, though she is of great interest in Gender Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, none of Halide Edib’s work has ever been translated into English besides her own translations (and a Lahore publication of Ates¸ten Gömlek called The Daughter of Smyrna). Atılgan and Atay have never been translated into English. Only two of Tanpınar’s novels and a few short stories have ever appeared. Though widely known as a leftist dissident, only a fraction of the work of Nâzım Hikmet has been translated. Even Pamuk’s first novel hasn’t been translated. Almost none of the work of these authors has been treated in a book-length, English-language scholarly, critical study, and the monographs that exist in Turkish have never been translated. The basic conclusion that can be drawn is that moving away from secondary discourses – even with their distortions – results in a condition of silence, illegibility, and untranslatability. Cultural translation is intertextual, an attempt at “thick” translation that includes meta-textual elements and cultural context.4 It is evident that Turkish authors need more opportunities to represent the cultural context of their work as what we might term “cultural translators” – figures that convey and contend with what it means to write from a historically, geographically, and politically determined position of “Turkishness.” These contingencies actually function to revise and redefine literary modernity. However, secondary discourses and disciplinary readings do dominate. A simple example of this type

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of reading would be Christopher Hitchens’ review of Snow that appeared shortly after the novel’s English publication. The review appeared in The Atlantic monthly and is a paradigmatic example of how a novel is misread instrumentally as a document of Turkish geopolitics at the expense of its literary modernity. Hitchens begins by “scripting” Pamuk into the role of a native informant, orientalizing him as a “Turk.” In his instructive misreading, Hitchens, with no irony, casts the then as-yet-to-be Nobel laureate into the role of a “dragoman” (an official diplomatic interpreter), who can serve only as an interpreter of Turkish politics and policy to the West. What does the job demand? Writing instrumental novels as an “interpretive guide.” Hitchens states: Well before the fall of 2001 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 dragoman, an interpretive guide to the East. … The hope was and is that an apparently “answering” voice, attuned to irony and rationality and the quotidian rather than the supernatural, would pick up the signals … and remit them in an intelligible form. … Orhan Pamuk, a thoughtful native of Istanbul who lived for three years in New York, has for some time been in contention for the post of mutual or reciprocal fictional interpreter. (Hitchens 2004, my emphasis) The neo-orientalist distortions of this framing are self-evident: The postulation of a “Muslim world”; the intimation that the human qualities of irony and rationality are absent from places like Turkey; the suggestion that the everyday is of no concern to fatalist “Easterners” (only the hereafter); and finally, the assumption that cultural and political intelligibility is the onus of the Other than rather than the Self. Hitchens, who after declaring the post for native informant open and being excited by Pamuk’s resumé, dismisses anything (that is, the literary prose) that does not fit into the narrowly defined policy matrix, as being “decent if unoriginal.” From the first sentence, Hitchens has forgotten that he is reviewing a literary text, which is in any case of no interest to him except as ethnography and insight into the Muslim mind, something he “knows” to be irrational and violent and which his reading subsequently confirms. The peculiar mechanistic phrase “reciprocal fictional interpreter” merits some further discussion. Hitchens unintentionally suggests through this phrase that the candidate for “dragoman” must be able to address discourses of representation regardless of their veracity and that fiction from the “Muslim world” (to have any value) must maintain the contradictory role of functioning disciplinarily: as ethnography, anthropology, or political science. Or why bother reading it? These fictions are what mediate the politics of domination, which is really based in part on maintaining mutual unintelligibility between audiences.

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Since cultural translation (as a potential space of mutual transformation) is the focus here, I wish to dwell on this issue of intelligibility. The legibility Hitchens has in mind has nothing to do with literature, culture, or humanism. His is the concern of the legibility of the secondary discourse – the disciplinary one. In fact, he is incapable of reading or attempting to read Pamuk in any other way except through the lens of disciplinary power as a “Muslim Other,” presenting him, for lack of a better term, as a “Mechanical Turk.”5 What he doesn’t stop to consider is that Pamuk, as a political author, is aware of this fact as well. He has pulled Hitchens into a twice-fictionalized world: first, through manipulating discourses of disciplinarily grounded orientalism that he knows certain readers will expect (satisfying the need for factual insights into political science, policy, history, or religion); and second, through a fictive account of subject-formation in 1990s Turkey. Whereas Hitchens should be able to distinguish between the facts and fictions represented in these two textual registers, he conflates them, and reads Pamuk’s work and fictional world literally through the absolute difference of professional or academic essentializations.6 Thus emerges Hitchens’ misreading – which nevertheless bears meaning in the cultural and political currency of the secondary disciplinary discourse. A more comprehensive reading would perhaps analyze these two registers as being distinct, or in opposition to each other. Hitchens never realizes that he is as much the object of Pamuk’s intervention as Pamuk is of his. Pamuk, of course, is not interested in being a dragoman. Or to put it more bluntly, Pamuk fails as dragoman (he doesn’t stick to the disciplinary logic), and Hitchens fails as a reader (he misinterprets Snow as a policy brief on Islam and democracy). Hitchens insists on reading Pamuk as a native informant and his fiction as a diplomatic report. The Turkish state has acted on similar misreadings. The move from Pamuk’s imposed identity of “dragoman” as specified in Hitchens’ 2004 review, by 2005, transforms into the imposed identity of “political dissident” when the Turkish judiciary misreads Pamuk’s literary authority as political authority and charges him under Article 301 for denigrating “Turkishness” – something his work has redefined and deconstructed for decades. Pamuk, in his comments on Kurds and Armenians, became the unwitting embodiment of what scholars have called the Sèvres Syndrome.7 This is a mindset that anticipates the colonial division of the nation as was stipulated in the longdefunct 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. In the treaty, both Kurds and Armenians were promised national territory within today’s borders of Turkey. A part of history, the treaty is still perceived to be a threat to Turkish self-determination and independence. However negatively the treaty is perceived in the popular imagination in Turkey is how Pamuk has been perceived as well. As this example illustrates, the Turkish author is forced to struggle in a field of indeterminacy if he or she is to succeed in conveying new meanings and understanding as a cultural translator rather than reinforcing old clichés as a dragoman. Transforming indeterminacy into legibility is a function of cultural translation. Disciplinary positionings of “Turkey” and the reception of Turkish literature reveals that the “discourse of the Turk” still dominates.

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Canonized Turkish writers often struggle under a debilitating paradox: Their works are included in the national literary canon, yet they as authorintellectuals are despised, exiled, or tried as traitors. They might be termed vatan haini (“traitors to the nation”) while simultaneously being held up as exemplary keystones of literature and pillars of the canon. The paradox is of the dissident author who is yet canonized, who represents Turkey yet is also cast out; this condition of doubleness, or of translation, or state of conversion, this schizophrenic shimmer, marks the situation of Turkish literary modernity and the modern novel as a field of contestation. These authors represent the limit of the Turkish social and juridico-political order; they occupy a position that we cannot fully explain as long as we occupy just one perspective of insider or outsider. They are in their various acts of cultural translation, something like converts with knowledge of two worlds. They each “turn Turk” and “insult Turkishness” in their own ways. Read chronologically, a story of literary dissidence emerges. This dissidence is based in gender (Halide Edib), ideology (Nâzım Hikmet), Istanbul cosmopolitanism (Tanpınar), Anatolian tradition (Yas¸ar Kemal), existentialism (Yusuf Atılgan), counter-culture (Og˘ uz Atay), and postsecularism (Orhan Pamuk). Pamuk received very mixed reviews for his first three novels that appeared in English (beginning in the 1980s and 1990s with The White Castle, The Black Book, and The New Life) and positive reviews for the subsequent two (My Name is Red and Snow). Concerns about reception have kept Pamuk from having his first two novels appear in English until the recent publication of The Silent House in 2012. My Name is Red and Snow made conscious use of various secondary discourses by foregrounding the symbols and images of Islam, sultanic power, and visual art in one case, and ideology, gender, and politics in the second. This process alone signifies a conscious negotiation of cultural logics that serves to increase the scope of Pamuk’s legibility beyond the nation. Pamuk obliquely questions the metanarrative of Turkist secular nationalism in its various manifestations and thus is clearly postnational, though engaged in the work of interrogating national transformations. These include historical synchronicity, genre mixing, multiperspectivalism, doubles and doppelgängers, pastiche, intertextuality, metafiction, and metahistory. Such techniques function for Pamuk to critique and redefine the cultural contexts of modernity for Turkey. His novels perform their own transgressions by reintroducing sublated contexts that secular modern ideology has elided, excised, and made obsolete. The gesture that occurs early in Pamuk’s work, of making the doubled Janus-face of the modern intellectual, the colonized, the nationalist, or the convert into an aesthetic model has been developed in subsequent work. He has succeeded in figuring vast juxtapositions, putting disparate time periods, chronotopes, traditions, and metaphors into conversation with each other. Pamuk does not avoid the politics of the secular and the sacred that divides and dominates his work, but turns it into an engine of literary innovation that repeatedly transgresses and questions the borders of Turkishness.

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In terms of form, Pamuk began writing in the late 1970s with an almost socialist conviction in narratives of historical realism (as in Cevdet Bey and Sons), adopted multiperspectival modernism after the 1980 coup (as in The Silent House), introduced an aesthetic of metafictional deconstruction (as in The White Castle), established new forms of East/West intertextualitity (as in The Black Book), updated the forms of the Sufi quest (as in The New Life), elevated material culture such as Islamic art to a model of form (as in My Name is Red), and leveled political critiques against the secular state (as in Snow), before returning, cyclically, to the era of his formation as an author and Republican objects of unrequited love in 1970s Istanbul (as in The Museum of Innocence). In Pamuk’s case, the crisis of modernity that the novel engages and revises emerges out of the unresolved and unresolvable tensions between the cultures of din and devlet, which define a modernity that is not just national, but literary. I have argued that the literary modernity traced by the authors in this study reflects cultural and political slippage between Turkish tradition and modernity, between Islam and secularism, between Sufism and materialism, and between the Ottoman past and national present. The shorthand script for these tensions is conveyed in the various relationships between din and devlet, where the former represents narratives of realism, existentialism, and secularism, and the latter narratives of tradition, redemption, and the mystical. Tropes of the modern Turkish novel, as examined in this study, emerge from the intersection of secular and sacred contexts that include Istanbul, the Ottoman Islamic past, the secular state, conversion, Sufism, coup, cultural revolution, and lover/beloved. Through various re-inscriptions of these contexts, the novels under consideration here perform re-enactments of the formative dilemmas of Turkish modernity. In other words, the novelistic performance dramatizes negotiations between din and devlet. Commentators of “world-systems” approaches tend to misread literary innovation as emerging from the cosmopolitan centers of Europe or America in opposition to a peripheral novel of the national tradition (Casanova 2004; Moretti 2005). My argument here is that this does not hold up in Pamuk’s fiction. The literary innovations of his work emerge from an archive of regional cosmopolitan forms distinct from “Western” literature. I have argued throughout this book that the literary spaces opened by Pamuk’s work double as the vantage point for a number of sustained cultural and political critiques. Writing from a triangulated position – represented in Pamuk’s work by Istanbul, the city of two continents – the author critically engages both the national tradition and traditions of world literature. One major outcome of such an intervention is the revision of “Turkishness” beyond any fixed nationalist, secularist, or orientalist essentializations. Read together, Pamuk’s novels can thus be described as postsecular, postorientalist fiction that traces the transformation of homo secularis into a liberated figure of the secular and the sacred.

Notes

Introduction: The Polemics of the Author 1 Ultranationalist Yasin Hayal was arrested as an accomplice in the murder of journalist Hrant Dink. The threat against Pamuk was widely reported in the Turkish press. For Hayal’s verbal threat see, for example, “Bu Ne Cüret!” (January 25, 2007) Radikal. Retrieved December 30, 2011, from http://www.radikal.com.tr/ haber.php?haberno=211115. Hayal’s written threat appears in translation in the . epigraph. The Turkish original is “Akıllı ol, canından olma.” See Istemil, Hüseyin (October 1, 2007) “Pamuk’a ‘Hayal’ Ürünü ‘Dikkat Ölürsün’ Tehdidi,” Vatan. Retrieved December 29, 2011, from http://haber.gazetevatan.com/Haber/139517/1/ Gundem. Yasin Hayal was sentenced to life imprisonment for involvement in the murder of Hrant Dink and, on a lesser charge, for the death threat against Pamuk. See Arsu, S¸ebnem (January 17, 2012) “Turkish Verdict in 2007 Murder of Editor Fuels Outrage,” New York Times. Retrieved January 17, 2012, from http://www. nytimes.com/2012/01/18/world/europe/turkish-verdict-in-2007-murder-of-editor-hrantdink-fuels-outrage.html?_r=1&emc=tnt& tntemail0=y. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the Turkish in this study are by the author. 2 As reported in “Neonationalist Organizations Set to Protest Ergenekon Trial” (October 14, 2008) Today’s Zaman. Retrieved December 30, 2011, from http:// www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?load=detay&link=155858. 3 For a popular news media representation of Turkey’s resurgence, see Ghosh, Bobby (November 28, 2011) “Erdog˘ an’s Moment,” Time. Retrieved January 8, 2012, from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2099674,00.html. 4 Whereas Rushdie had been the target of an Islamic state, Pamuk was the target of a secular state. 5 Kemal Kerinçsiz, the district attorney who charged Orhan Pamuk with “insulting Turkishness” under Article 301–1, is now also under arrest as is popular historian and conspiracy theorist Yalçın Küçük, who has targeted Pamuk in anti-Semitic rants. 6 In revealing this cultural logic, Pamuk’s novel The New Life parodies the contentions of a great conspiracy and a great counter-conspiracy. 7 See http://www.ergenekonteror.com. 8 The secularization thesis claims that societies “progress” through rationalization and modernization and religion loses its authority in social and political life. 9 Cevdet Bey and Sons was awarded the Orhan Kemal Novel Award in 1983. Orhan Kemal (1914–70) was one of the main proponents of social realism along with Kemal Tâhir and Yas¸ar Kemal. The guidelines of the award explicitly state that the award recognizes novels “written with realist and socialist intent and under the condition that they do not oppose or counter Orhan Kemal’s artistic vision and worldview.” See Orhan Kemal Kültür-Sanat Merkezi (2006) “Orhan Kemal

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Roman Armag˘ ını: Yönetmelik.” Retrieved January 7, 2012, from http://orhankemal. org/v04/yonet_tr.htm. Yılmaz Güney’s Cannes Palme d’Or winning film Yol (1982), directed by proxy while he was in prison, is in significant ways a cinematic adaptation of the main themes, form, and content of Book One of Human Landscapes. See Güney, Yılmaz and S¸erif Gören (1982), Yol, Turkey. A juxtaposition of Pamuk’s translated works to his untranslated works reveals important insights into the differences between his national and international audiences. The body of his untranslated works includes his first two novels, Cevdet Bey ve Og˘ ulları and Sessiz Ev, his screen play Gizli Yüz (The Hidden Face), and large sections of the nonfiction collection Öteki Renkler (parts were translated in an abridged and edited version as Other Colors). To this could be added his unpublished works; namely, around 200 pages of an incomplete early novel of “bourgeois Marxism.” As of this writing, The Silent House is scheduled to be published in 2012; the other works remain untranslated by the author’s own intent. Classic works on Turkish modernization history in English that espouse the “secularization thesis” include Lewis, Bernard (1961) The Emergence of Modern Turkey, London, New York: Oxford University Press; Mardin, S¸erif (1962) The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Berkes, Niyazi (1964) The Development of Secularism in Turkey, Montreal: McGill University Press. These texts accepted the Eurocentric assumption that state secularization (or “Westernization”) equated to modernization. For a brief overview of this notion in the scope of world literature, see Moretti, Franco (2000) “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1(January–February): 54–68; Moretti, Franco (2003) “More Conjectures,” New Left Review 20(March–April): 73–81. See, for example, the following reviews of the novel: Eder, Richard (September 2, 2001) “My Name is Red: Heresies of the Paintbrush,” New York Times Book Review. Freely, Maureen (August 27, 2001) “Novel of the Week: My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk,” New Statesman, 130: 41. The “discourse of the Turk” is the phrase I use to refer to a corpus of essentialized literary and historical narratives that construct either an overly negative (orientalist) or an overly positive (nationalist) Turkish identity. This discourse bears the vacillation of what I term an orientalist–nationalist binary. It is informed by the power of the state, whether imperialist or nationalist. I have adapted the phrase to modern literary contexts from the high orientalist account of Thomas Shirley: see Shirley, Thomas (1606 [1936]) “Discours of the Turkes”, Denison Ross, Ed., London: Camden Society. These include: (1) 1908 “Young Turk” constitutional revolution; (2) the 1913 Bab-i Ali Coup; (3) the 1922–4 abolishment of the Sultanate, establishment of the Republic and abolishment of the Caliphate; (4) the 1960 coup; (5) the 1971 “coup by memorandum”; (6) the 1980 coup; and (7) the 1997 “postmodern coup.” The Ergenekon conspiracy is the most recent and on-going manifestation of this phenomenon. Some consider it to be a “counter-coup” against the secular-military establishment that has been targeted as masterminding a conspiracy to topple the governing Muslim-based AK Party. As such, widespread arrests also double as an opportunity for silencing secular political opposition. For a documentary on Turkish Republican military coups with archival footage, see Savas¸, Elif (2000) COUP/DARBE: A Documentary History of the Turkish Military Interventions: 158 min. The recuperation of Sufism in modern Turkish literature is a topic that demands further study. Maligned during the era of Turkist modernism in novels such as Yakup Kadri Karaosmanog˘ lu’s Nur Baba and Res¸at Nuri Güntekin’s Yes¸il Gece,

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Sufism as a cultural influence has resurfaced in Turkish literature since 1980, particularly through the influence of Pamuk’s work. This trope of din is now commonplace in Turkish literature. 20 As of this writing, one of the only serious book-length literary analyses in Turkish is Ecevit, Yıldız (2004) Orhan .Pamuk’u Okumak: Kafası Karıs¸mıs¸ Okur ve Modern Roman, Cag˘ alog˘ lu, Istanbul: Iletis¸im. In the US, the only book-length analysis is McGaha, Michael D. (2008) Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk: The Writer in his Novels, Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. A number of edited volumes on Pamuk’s work exist. . See, for example, Kılıç, Engin, Ed. (1999) Orhan Pamuk’u Anlamak, Istanbul: Iletis¸im; Kılıç, . Engin and Nüket Esen, Eds. (2008) Orhan Pamuk’un Edebi Dünyası, Istanbul: Iletis¸im; and Afridi, Mehnaz and David Buyze, Eds. (2012) Global Perspectives on Orhan Pamuk: Existentialism and Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan. 1 Literary Revisions of the Secular Modern 1 Uttered by Ömer, the self-proclaimed Rastignac of Cevdet Bey and Sons. 2 Article 301, which came into effect June 1, 2005, was amended on May 8, 2008 to read: “A person who publicly denigrates the Turkish nation [Türk milleti], the State of the Republic of Turkey or the Turkish Grand National Assembly, the Government of the Republic of Turkey or the judicial bodies of State shall be sentenced a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to two years.” This removed “Turkishness,” replaced it with “Turkish nation,” and otherwise expanded the scope of the law. See Algan, Bülent (2008) “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(12): 2238–52. 3 For more on Article 301, see Algan, Bülent (2008) “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(12): 2238–52. 4 The social construction of “Turkishness” itself is a secular-sacred formation, as a late Ottoman Muslim community was reimagined as being ethnically determined through World War I and the Turkish War of Independence. The slippage between religion and ethnicity imbues ostensibly secular Turkish national identity with the sacredness of its Sunni religious underpinnings. By evoking Armenians and Kurds, Pamuk in the first instance is conjuring an imagined community based on religious distinction (Muslim/Christian); in the second instance he is conjuring an imagined community based on ethnicity (Turk/Kurd). Both Armenians and Kurds were furthermore represented as having claims to Anatolian territory in the defunct Treaty of Sèvres (1920). The perceived “insult” to the state is thus three-fold as the “blasphemy” against ethno-religious national self-determination effectively targets Islam, ethnicity, and national territory. 5 Prominent Turkish scholars have illuminated the central place of secular modernity in Turkish literature and literary history through critical books that examine periods, authors, and literary genealogies. They include Berna Moran, Selahattin Hilav, Talat Halman, Yıldız Ecevit, Nurdan Gürbilek, Jale Parla, and Azade Seyhan. This body of work provides important insights into understanding the main trajectories of Turkish literature from a secular perspective. 6 Prominent critics and reviewers 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. This study argues that this assumption gives rise to persistent misreadings of the author’s work. As one example of Pamuk’s placement in an international canon, John Updike makes a novel-by-novel comparison between Pamuk and Thomas Mann (as reflected in Cevdet Bey and Sons), Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner (The Silent House),

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Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino (The White Castle), James Joyce (The Black Book), Franz Kafka (The New Life), A.S. Byatt and Umberto Eco (My Name is Red). One might add Dostoyevsky (Snow). See Updike, John (September 3, 2001) “Murder in Miniature: A Sixteenth-Century Detective Story Explores the Soul of Turkey,” The New Yorker. Updike relies on a genealogy that disregards the local literary context entirely. In 1997 I witnessed a left-leaning professor of Turkish literature ask Pamuk two questions after a Seattle lecture on human rights in Turkey. One of Pamuk’s conclusions was that “There are no human rights in Turkey.” In the same talk, Pamuk referred to sixteenth-century Ottoman archival sources that served as the background for his then forthcoming novel, My Name is Red. The subsequent questions directed toward him were revealing of the reactions elicited by Pamuk then: (1) Q: “Can you read Ottoman texts?”; A (Pamuk): “No”; (2) Q: “Have you ever spent time in jail?”; A (Pamuk): “No.” The exchange summarizes both Pamuk’s attempt to gain political-literary legitimacy as well as his lack of legitimacy as a writer from the perspective of the engaged left, which considered Pamuk to be a paradigm of depoliticization in the wake of the 1980 coup and unsuited to represent Turkey as a whole. Paul de Man makes an early theorization of the term “literary modernity” in a way that is illuminating to the Turkish context. In opposing “modernity” to “history” and “literature,” de Man postulates a triangulated critique. One of his points is that literature bears the paradoxes of modernity: “To write reflectively about modernity leads to problems that put the usefulness of the term into question, especially as it applies, or fails to apply, to literature. There may well be an inherent contradiction between modernity, which is a way of acting and behaving, and such terms as ‘reflection’ or ‘ideas’ that play an important part in literature and history. The spontaneity of being modern conflicts with the claim to think and write about modernity; it is not at all certain that literature and modernity are in any way compatible concepts. Yet we all speak readily about modern literature and even use this term as a device for historical periodization, with the same apparent unawareness that history and modernity may well be even more incompatible than literature and modernity. The innocuous sounding title of this paper may therefore contain no less than two logical absurdities.” See de Man, Paul (1970) “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Daedalus 99(2): 384–404. In the Turkish context, literature maintains an on-going paradoxical tension with respect to secular modernity and its history. For my purposes here, literary modernity is a useful analytical lens with which to analyze Pamuk’s position and the Turkish canon because it allows for paradox without the need for resolution. This gesture of reconciliation – if not outright apology – can also be traced in Pamuk’s Nobel lecture, which plays on the tensions of traditional father-and-son tropes with the “father” representing national tradition and the son mediating between paternal respect and the exigencies of global change. The lecture was rather selfconsciously delivered in Turkish, an indication of the target audience. See Pamuk, Orhan (2006) “Nobel Lecture: My Father’s Suitcase.” Retrieved January, 26, 2011, from http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture_en.html. See Pamuk, Orhan (2007) “The Paris Review Interview,” Other Colors: Essays and a Story, New York: Knopf. The Turkish version of this collection of belles-lettres is vastly different in its content and in many respects should be treated as a separate work. See. Pamuk, Orhan (1999) Öteki Renkler: Seçme Yazılar ve Bir Hikaye, Istanbul: Iletis¸im. The discrepancy between these versions, published eight years apart, is telling. The Turkish version acknowledges a debt to the Turkish literary tradition with detailed commentary on authors such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Kemal Tâhir, Orhan Kemal, Aziz Nesin, Yas¸ar Kemal, and Og˘ uz Atay, whereas the English version contains no commentary on these authors whatsoever.

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The elision reveals both a profound anxiety of influence and reception that revolves around the issue of whether Pamuk will be read as a “Turkish” or a world author. For more on the division of twentieth-century Republican Turkish history into first (1923–60), second (1960–80), and third republics (1980–present), see Zürcher, Erik J. (1993) Turkey: A Modern History, London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. The era of governance by the AK Party beginning in 2002 arguably constitutes a fourth republic that could be characterized as postsecular. In English translation, this periodization is slightly shorter, 1990–2010, as his first two novels are only now being translated. The space between the publication of Cevdet Bey ve Og˘ ulları in 1982 and of Masumiyet Müzesi in 2008 also represents the measure of a radically transformed Turkish literary modernity. For the classic 1960s study of “Empire-to-Republic” secular modernity, see Berkes, Niyazi (1964) The Development of Secularism in Turkey, Montreal: McGill University Press. For a study that examines the nostalgia for secularism in the contemporary era of Muslim modernity, see Özyürek, Esra (2006) Nostalgia for the Modern, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. See, for example, Poulton, H. (1997) Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic, London: Hurst & Co.; Mango, Andrew (2000) Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey, New York, NY: The Overlook Press. For a study that examines Republican novels for various historiographic constructions of Turks and their origin, see Belge, Murat (2008) Genesis: “Büyük Ulusal . Anlatı” ve Türklerin Kökeni, Istanbul: Iletis¸im. The sustained historico-literary projects of early Republican authors were concerned with the role of the state and the vexed relationship between Istanbul and Anatolia. State–society relations (in the disciplinary mode of social-scientists) in the scope of Turkish national history dominated these works. It is common for authors before 1980 to engage in aspects of national history, historiography, or Anatolian realism through fiction. In his popular history on the Ottomans, Andrew Wheatcroft writes: “By the late nineteenth century, after seventy-five years of ever-closer contact [with Europe], the Ottomans were stereotyped by the West under two attitudes. The first is as ‘the Lustful Turk’, which is the title of a widely circulated pornographic novel first published in 1828 and which remained popular throughout the nineteenth century. It stands for the prurient imagination which invested the Ottomans with such vices as enabled Westerners to dismiss them as worthless. The second stereotype is of ‘the Terrible Turk’ – a story of perverted valour, or how, in an evil society, even virtuous qualities are demeaned. Thus, the Turk can be courageous and honourable, but at heart he is a beast, which outweighs all else” (Wheatcroft, A. (1993) The Ottomans, London: Penguin Books, p. xxix). It should also be emphasized that the term “Turk” was used within the Ottoman Empire to refer pejoratively to peasants and rurals. For an analysis of the Turkish alphabet and language reforms and the role of the Turkish Language Society, see Lewis, G. (1999) The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success, Oxford: Oxford University Press. The history and development of a national master-narrative was the focus of this author’s unpublished dissertation project; Göknar, Erdag˘ (2004) “Between ‘Ottoman’ and ‘Turk’: Literary Narrative and the Transition from Empire to Republic,” Near & Middle Eastern Studies, Seattle, WA: University of Washington, Ph.D. dissertation. A secularist historian of the 1960s, Niyazi Berkes describes the situation as follows: “The battle between the secularists and the Khilafatists was far from being over. Under the amended Constitution Mustafa Kemal was elected president of a

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republic that was an Islamic state. … Nothing could have been more uncomfortable for Mustafa Kemal than to be President of an Islamic republic, just as nothing could appear more unbecoming than this to the Khilafatists.” Berkes, Niyazi (1964) The Development of Secularism in Turkey, Montreal: McGill University Press, p. 457. See Casanova, Jose (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; Taylor, Charles (1998) “Modes of Secularism,” Secularism and Its Critics, Rajeev Bhargava, Ed., Delhi: Oxford University Press. For developments in the debate see Taylor, Charles (2007) A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. For one commentary on the post-1980 resurgence of this political script, see Kaplan, Sam (2002) “Din-u Devlet All Over Again? The Politics of Military Secularism and Religious Militarism in Turkey Following the 1980 Coup,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34(1): 113–27. “Din” is the root of the Arabic terms for “habit,” “way,” “account,” “obedience,” “judgment,” and “reward.” According to The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, “Dı-n encompasses social and spiritual, as well the legal and political behavior of the believers as a comprehensive way of life, a connotation wider than the word ‘religion.’ There is no dichotomy in the Qur‘a-nic concept of dı-n, between law or state and religion.” See Ahmad, Anis, “Dı-n,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World. Retrieved January 10, 2012, from http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t236/e1102. The same encyclopedia defines dawlah (in Turkish, devlet) as “An Arabic term from the root d-w-l, meaning to rotate, alternate, take turns, or occur periodically, dawlah, in a modern context, refers to the state. … The modern understanding of dawlah as a sovereign state with the attributes of statehood did not come until the period of the Ottoman Empire’s confrontation with Christian Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. … By the mid-nineteenth century, the word dawlah had taken on the meaning of Weber’s celebrated definition of state as a political organization that, based on its juridical sovereignty, monopolizes the legitimate means of violence within a given territory. … Although in theory many Muslims believe that there should be no separation between religion and state, in practice the separation was achieved early in Islamic history.” See Akhavi, Shahrough, “Dawlah,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World. Retrieved January 10, 2012, from http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t236/e0183. In Central Asian Turkic languages, “devlet” also signifies physical and spiritual “constitution.” For a study on the role of antinomies in debates of colonial modernity in terms of race, Orient, and nation, see Kaiwar, Vasant and Sucheta Mazumdar, Eds. (2003) Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. One subtext of this study is the perceived threat posed by Turkish authors and texts to discourses of secular devlet. This threat pits the state against authors who are engaged in various historical and cultural explorations and reinscriptions that do not reflect the identity, historiography, or ideology of Turkism. “Turkishness” (or being a “Turk,” both secular and religious) gives rise to dilemmas that are cultural, political, and legal; that is, authorial, in scope due to its being the unacknowledged secular-sacred formation of processes of both din and devlet. Importantly, this introduction of din into a milieu defined by devlet makes Pamuk’s work more legible in the arena of world literature. This occurs through the conduit of enabling secondary discourses such as “Islam,” “empire” (history), and “orientalism,” for example. This allows his fiction to travel more extensive transnational and cosmopolitan itineraries where the tensions between, and anxieties about, religion and state are commonplace. Book sales and readership increase as a result. Ironically, without an understanding of the cartography of

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the Turkish cultural-historical context, the presence of Pamuk’s work in worldliterary systems is more susceptible to misreadings. This is one of the dominant frameworks for the analysis of Turkish literature. However, it remains an under-theorized approach and uncritically accepts the basic tenets of secular modernity. Scholarship on modern Turkish literature brings important insights to this problematic without, however, challenging the guiding assumptions of the secularization thesis – which is one aim of the present study. The critique that the antinomy din and devlet simply replaces well-worn oppositions such as East and West or secularism and Islam misses the point that in this understanding din and devlet are not opposed dialectically in the anticipation of resolution in favor of one pole or another, or combined in synthesis. Rather, both in its historical usage as a script for political legitimacy and authority, and in its present theoretical and analytical rearticulation to trace literary-cultural tropes in this study, din and devlet represent productive tension within a structural unity. This “invented tradition” of the early Republican era can be traced in novels that divide the self between “colonizer” and “colonized” to create national identity. See Pamuk, Orhan (2010) The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. These contexts could be furthermore described by dominant tropes of the modern Turkish novel that I trace in Pamuk’s work, including “revolution,” “coup,” “conversion,” “archive,” “beloved,” and “authorship.” For recent historical surveys of Turkish literature in English, see Göknar, Erdag˘ (2008) “The Novel in Turkish: Narrative Tradition to Nobel Prize,” Cambridge History of Turkey: Turkey in the Modern World, Res¸at Kasaba, Ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Halman, Talat (2011) A Millennium of Turkish Literature: A Concise History, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. After the institution of last names in 1934, authors did add official surnames. I use the commonly accepted names. The last names that are usually left off are: Halide Edib (Adıvar), Nâzım Hikmet (Ran), and Yas¸ar Kemal (Gökçeli). Halide Edib for running afoul of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk during the early years of the cultural revolution (forced to leave Turkey between 1925 and 1939); Nâzım Hikmet for his communism (forced to flee the country in 1950 after imprisonment for over a decade); Yusuf Atılgan for his communism; and Yas¸ar Kemal for his socialism and speaking out on behalf of Kurds. Suffering exile or imprisonment has been a common experience for authors in late Ottoman and Republican Turkey. Nâzım Hikmet and Yas¸ar Kemal appeared in Pamuk’s edition of Radikal, but they are included here because of the nature of their aesthetic innovations in literary form rather than their socialist engagement. If what was advocated through the Republican cultural revolution was state-sponsored conversion to modernity, novels of Turkish literary modernity question and qualify the conversion by reinscribing suppressed or peripheralized cultural forms. Halide Edib and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, though stylistically different novelists than Pamuk, effectively describe the half-measures of secular modernity when they acknowledge the formative influences of Ottoman Islamic modernity and cosmopolitanism in Istanbul. Nâzım Hikmet and Yas¸ar Kemal, on the other hand, foreground the people and the folk (halk) as their most important literary concern and influence. They take the plight of Anatolian villagers as an object of literature and politics. Yusuf Atılgan and Og˘ uz Atay see in the authoritarian legacy of Ottoman-Republican modernization (as manifested through the military coup) a profound alienation and existentialism, one that destroys characters or, in the case of Atay, allows them a limited subversive outlet through parody and writing. Pamuk relies on all of these aspects of literary resistance in constructing his fictions.

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36 These are all bilingual authors or authors with intimate knowledge of other literary traditions, the effects of which on Turkish literary modernity (often understood only through its monolingualism) have been overlooked by literary critics. Pamuk and Halide Edib were educated in American English; Tanpınar was influenced by and knew French literature well; Hikmet, a Russian-speaker, was educated in Moscow; Yas¸ar Kemal was raised in a home where Kurdish was spoken; Atay had detailed knowledge of the European novel canon; and Atılgan did translations from the English. Except for Pamuk and Kemal, all of these authors were literary translators from European languages into Turkish. Furthermore, Halide Edib, Tanpınar, and Hikmet had knowledge of the Ottoman language (with elements of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish written in script), as they were educated before the Soviet-inspired 1928 alphabet change to Latin letters and the language purification reform that followed. For more on the Turkish language reform see Lewis, Geoffrey (1999) The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Parla, Jale (2008) “Wounded Tongue: Turkey’s Language Reform and the Canonicity of the Turkish Novel,” PMLA 123(1): 27–40. 37 The Mevlevi theme appears in the following novels discussed in this study: Adıvar, Halide Edib (1935) The Clown and His Daughter, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.; Pamuk, Orhan (trans. Güneli Gün) (1996) The Black Book, New York, NY: Harcourt Brace; Tanpınar and Ahmet Hamdi (trans. Erdag˘ Göknar) (2011 [1949]) A Mind at Peace, New York, NY: Archipelago Books. 38 Pamuk read me a scene from his notebooks on this incomplete political novel, which described the thoughts and feelings of the bourgeois protagonist who has decided to “liberate” (that is, steal) a book from an Istanbul bookstore. The novel focuses on youths from well-to-do Istanbul families who have ideological convictions in Marxist socialism and want to engage in acts of civil unrest (such as stealing property or tossing a bomb at the prime minister) yet come from the middle classes. About 250 pages of this novel exist in longhand. Personal conversation with the author on incomplete novel (July 7, 2004), Cihangir, Istanbul. 39 Pamuk revisits Anatolia in his fourth and sixth novels, The New Life and Snow, respectively. Both novels mostly take place outside of Istanbul and contain strong parodies of modernization history and national ideology. . 40 See, for example, Ilhan, Attila . . (2002) Allah’ın Süngüleri: Reis Pas¸a,. Istanbul: Is¸ Bankası Kültür. Yayınları; Ilhan, Attila (2005) Gazi Pas¸a, Istanbul: Is¸ Bankası . Kültür Yayınları; Ilhan, Attila (2007) O Sarıs¸ın Kurt, Istanbul: Is¸ Bankası Kültür Yayınları. 41 Hikmet’s historiography situates Republican anti-imperial and anti-colonial nation building into an international history of socialist revolution. This type of historiographic revision is a dominant technique in the early Republican novel that places literary representation in the service of ideology. By juxtaposing nationalist and socialist epics in Human Landscapes, Hikmet allows us to reread distinct ideological and historical discourses together. See Hikmet, Nâzım (1968) Kuvayi Milliye, Ankara: Bilgi; Hikmet, Nâzım, et al. (2009) Human Landscapes From My Country, New York, NY: Persea. 42 The nuances of irony and parody present in Pamuk’s novels do not often survive translation. This is another cause of misinterpretation, especially when satire is combined with physical or verbal scenes of violence: The violence conveys, the satirical nuance does not. See, for example, Erol, Sibel (2007) “Reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow as Parody: Difference as Sameness,” Comparative Critical Studies 4(3): 403–32. During a personal conversation with Pamuk, he repeatedly interrupted himself with bouts of laughter while reading a draft version of the violent “theater coup” scene from Snow. The humor in this scene is clearly lost on English readers based on reviews of the novel. Personal conversation with author on draft of Snow (February 21, 2001), Taksim, Istanbul.

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43 Casanova claims that authors from a national tradition are burdened by the political context of the nation-state and only begin to write true literature once freed from these constraints. Only then do they become legible in the world literary system. This argument does not hold true in the case of Pamuk, who I argue develops and maintains a more significant level of literary-political engagement after he becomes a global author and through the form of his later novels. That is, he is more of a political author once outside of the national literary horizon; indeed, his politics secure his acceptance in the “republic of letters.” Casanova seems to accept the idea that “great” literature and politics maintain separate discursive spaces. This notion has been questioned by colonial and postcolonial scholars, beginning with Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayrati Spivak. The synchronic and intertextual aspects of Pamuk’s fiction alone provide a critique of developmental models of world literature. See Casanova, Pascale (2004) The World Republic of Letters, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 44 The connection between objects and memory is significant to Pamuk’s work. His critique of secular modernity is predicated on the narrative display of such material evidence. Not only is the Ottoman legacy reimagined through material culture, Pamuk’s novels describe various repositories of objects. The archive and treasury are obvious spaces. Other spaces emerge as well: The “house” contains the silences and repressions of homo secularis; the “castle” the possibility of a utopian hybrid identity; the “museum” the everyday relics of obsessive love that also constitute a cultural history of 1970s Istanbul. In addition, Pamuk frequently sets scenes in apartments or urban spaces that contain bric-a-brac or collections maintained by obsessed characters-cum-curators. 45 Republican material culture is also represented in Pamuk’s work, most prominently in The New Life and The Museum of Innocence. 46 Pamuk’s writing on Tanpınar is revealingly inconsistent. He can praise him in one commentary and dismiss him in the next. He desperately argues in one essay that Tanpınar is far from a modernist author, but rather is a legacy of the nineteenth century. His criticism vacillates from accusing Tanpınar of being a nationalist to insinuating he is an orientalist. However, in terms of literary genealogies of the Turkish tradition, Tanpınar is the modernist father to Pamuk, the postmodernist son. Pamuk’s literary project emerges through Tanpınar’s work. See Pamuk, Orhan (1995) “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ve Türk Modernizmi,” Defter 8(23); Pamuk, Orhan (2005) “The Melancholy of the Ruins: Tanpınar and Yahya Kemal in the City’s Poor Neighborhoods,” Istanbul: Memories and the City, New York, NY: Knopf; Pamuk, Orhan (2005) “Four Lonely Melancholic Writers,” Istanbul: Memories and the City, New York, NY: Knopf. 47 This is, in one provocative sense, a historico-cultural parallel to the on-going emergence of the Republic into the transnational arena of EU and international geopolitics. Such a transgression incurs the wrath of the secular-national establishment who reads this global emergence as a loss of national sovereignty. Pamuk has allowed us to see another irony of the present political moment. No longer are religious traditionalists cast as reactionaries of change, but in a curious inversion, secularist modernizers are. In other words, the fundamentalists of the day can be either religious or secular. What does this spell but perhaps a search for the middle ground, or an uneasy return to faith, a problem the protagonist Ka reluctantly grapples with in the novel Snow. In Pamuk’s fiction, passing, switching places, and ideological conversion are always means of eluding a political impasse. 48 The novel appeared in an English version in 1935. In the same year it appeared in serial in Turkish in the newspaper Haber. The first Turkish publication in book form appeared in 1936. Though Turkish literary histories exclusively claim that the novel was written in English first, a careful reading and comparison reveals that the Turkish text was likely the template for the English, not vice versa. The English

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version reads obviously as “translationese,” including some direct translations of idioms, in marked distinction to Edib’s other work in fluent English. The novel has a film adaptation and a contemporary adaptation as a mini-series. The coup is an omnipresent theme in Pamuk’s work. Faruk Darvınog˘ lu finds the Ottoman manuscript that constitutes The White Castle in a forgotten archive he returns to after he has been purged from the university faculty as a result of the 1980 military coup. The exercise of state power represented by the coup is superseded by the textual discovery of the Ottoman manuscript and its inspired translation into contemporary Turkish. The manuscript signifies a new cultural context that indicates a path of egress beyond the limitations of the nation-form. The Black Book unfolds under conspiracy and an impending coup that is an example of “thick writing” based in various histories and identities located in the city. This black, dense, and convoluted prose becomes a tactic of resistance, a preemptive measure to avoid the discursive (under the threat of real) incarceration of a possible coup. The New Life is based on a struggle over conspiracies, coup, and counter-coup, which parodies nationalism itself as producing a particular kind of debilitating cultural logic. My Name is Red is a historicized dramatization of the tensions between artist and the constant threat of secular and religious authorities. Snow begins with a parody of coups themselves and takes the 1997 “postmodern coup” as its inspiration. Here, in wonderful irony, the military coup becomes a failed artistic performance, second rate and short-lived. As in his early fiction, Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence refers to the 1980 coup in a realist historical fashion. Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) is the influential forefather of cultural Turkism based in Durkheim-influenced social engineering. His notion of the “new life” was a new Turkish national life, somewhat less austere than Kemalism. He wrote a book of poems entitled The New Life and his ideas were influential in Turkish modernization. See Parla, Taha (1985) The Social and Political Thought of Ziya Gökalp, 1876–1924, Leiden: E.J. Brill. Four of the novels under consideration in this study have main characters who commit suicide: Suad (A Mind at Peace), Zebercet (Motherland Hotel), Selim Is¸ık (Misfits), and, arguably, Sunay Zaim (Snow). I contend that the suicides are all contingent on ideological contexts of secular modernity. Pamuk’s screenplay The Hidden Face (Gizli Yüz, directed by Ömer Kavur, 1991) follows the same themes and structure of secular Sufisim: an account of unrequited love out of which self-realization (and the ability to “tell one’s own story”) emerges. The screenplay was published in 1992 but was never translated into English. See Pamuk, Orhan (1991) Gizli Yüz, Istanbul: Can Yayınları. Translation modified. In something of a “biblio-erotic” passage about “handling” books published in Turkey, Pamuk states: “After combing through the shelves of Istanbul’s antiquarian booksellers in the Sahaflar Market for upward of ten years, I concluded that every book published in the Latin alphabet from the founding of the republic to the 1970s had passed through my hands.” Pamuk, Orhan (December 18, 2008) “My Turkish Library,” New York Review of Books. Retrieved January 6, 2012, from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/dec/18/my-turkish-library/?page=2. Another of Pamuk’s authors who is a victim of political assassination is Ka in Snow. The “sacrifice” of these figures enables the birth of Pamuk’s own writing-subject. Orhan Pamuk writing as Celâl Salik in Radikal.

2 The Untranslated Novels of a Nobel Laureate 1 In “The Ideology of Modernism,” Lukács states: “Modern religious atheism is characterized, on the one hand, by the fact that unbelief has lost its revolutionary

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élan – the empty heavens are the projection of a world beyond hope of redemption. On the other hand, religious atheism shows that the desire for salvation lives on with undiminished force in a world without God, worshipping the void created by God’s absence.” See Lukács, Georg (1963 [1957]) “The Ideology of Modernism,” The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, Devon: Merlin Press, p. 44. As stated by Refik, a main character in Cevdet Bey and Sons. For a discussion of the state-sponsored construction of official Republican historiography, see Behar, Büsra Ersanlı (1992) I_ktidar ve Tarih: Türkiye’de “Resmi Tarih” Tezinin Olus¸umu, 1929–1937, Istanbul: Devlet Basımevi. For key interdisciplinary studies that address aspects of the Empire-to-Republic historical transition through the modern Turkish novel, see Naci, Fethi (1981) Türkiye’de Roman ve Toplumsal Deg˘ is¸me, Istanbul: Gerçek; Moran, Berna (1983) . Türk Romanına Eles¸tirel Bir Bakıs¸, Istanbul: Iletis¸im; Parla, Jale (1990) Babalar ve . Og˘ ullar: Tanzimat Romanın Epistemolojik Temelleri, Istanbul: Iletis¸im; Timur, Taner (1991) Osmanli-Turk Romanında Tarih, Toplum, ve Kimlik, Istanbul: . AFA Yayıncılık; Parla, Jale (2000) Don Kis¸ot’tan Bugüne Roman, Istanbul: Iletis¸im; . Parla, Jale (2011) Türk Romanında Yazar ve Bas¸kalas¸ım, Istanbul: Iletis¸im. For recent scholarly studies in English on historical and comparative aspects of the modern Turkish novel, see Seyhan, Azade (2008) Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context, New York, NY: Modern Language Association; Findley, Carter V. (2010) Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History 1789–2007, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Ertürk, Nergis (2011) Grammatology and Turkish Literary Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Gürbilek, Nurdan (trans. Victoria Holbrook) (2011) The New Cultural Climate in Turkey: Living in a Shop Window, London: Zed Books. . For . recent examples, see Ilhan,. Attila (2002) Allah’ın Süngüleri: Reis Pas¸a, . Istanbul: Is¸ Bankası Kültür Yayınları; Ilhan, Attila (2005) Gazi Pas¸a, Istanbul: Is¸ Bankası . Kültür Yayınları; Özakman, Turgut (2005) S¸u Çılgın Türkler, Istanbul: Bilgi; Ilhan, . Attila (2007) O Sarıs¸ın Kurt, Istanbul: Is¸ Bankası Kültür Yayınları; Özakman, Turgut (2009) Cumhuriyet: Türk Mucizesi, Istanbul: Bilgi. It is not coincidental that these historical novels about the anti-colonial, anti-imperial establishment of the sovereign Republic (against European desires) appeared around the time Turkey began accession talks for membership in the EU. EU intergration is seen as a loss of sovereignty to Europe by these secular authors. Broadly, two dominant narrative threads, corresponding to literary and secular modernity, define Turkish literature. Historiographic authority traces the secularization thesis of devlet, whereas literary authority harbors the traditions, legacies, and enchantments of din. The tensions between historiographic and literary authority in Pamuk’s early fiction can be summarized through his articulation and development of dominant “tropes of Turkishness” that recur in these early novels, including those based in din (like Sufism, memory, and archive) and those based in devlet (like secularism, revolution, and coup), or both (like religious or ideological conversion or writing and authorship). These tropes link Pamuk to the Turkish national tradition and enable us to trace his transformations of that tradition. They also served to increase the scope of his readership by enabling specific readings by academic discipline (“disciplinary readings”) that recast literary contexts as objects of study in fields such as History, Politics, Religion/Islamic Studies, Middle East Studies, and Anthropology. My Name is Red and Snow, in particular, are commonly assigned in university courses outside of literature departments. They have also been the subject of reader’s guides and included in Middle Eastern literature surveys. See Us¸aklıgil, Halit Ziya (1998 [1892]) Hikâye: I_nceleme, Istanbul: Yapı Kredi; Evin, Ahmet (1983) Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, Minneapolis, MN: Bibliotheca Islamica.

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8 By forcing literature out of its historiographic mode, Pamuk reclaims the novel from Republican discourses of Empire-to-Republic modernization. Darvınog˘ lu, after losing faith in the discipline of history, presents us with a literary artifact from a forgotten archive. He translates this manuscript in an impressionistic fashion, not for its historical value, but to disseminate its story, which constitutes the main text of The White Castle. 9 Much of the debate about narrative representation in the discipline of history that appears in The Silent House is reflected in the work of Hayden White. See White, Hayden (1978) Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; White, Hayden (1987) The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; White, Hayden (2000) Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; White, Hayden (2010) The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 10 Between “historian” and “author” emerges the hybrid. figure of the “translator” who both transliterates texts and translates cultures. Ilknur, the art historian in Cevdet Bey and Sons, represents the first appearance of a series of (cultural) translator figures in Pamuk’s work; she is able to read the Ottoman language and can translate texts written by Cevdet Bey and Refik for Ahmet. The “authors” in Pamuk’s texts are termed “writer manqués” in Jale Parla’s description. See Parla, Jale (2007) “The Writer-Manqué: Orhan Pamuk and His Predecessors,” Paper given as part of Turkey: Political and Literary Intersections Conference, Duke . University; Parla, Jale (2011) Türk Romanında Yazar ve Bas¸kalas¸ım, Istanbul: Iletis¸im. Themes of the failed author and the incomplete or absent text predominate in Pamuk’s novels. 11 Pamuk alludes to the Turkish canon in this novel through references to prominent revolutionary figures in late Ottoman and Republican literary history. Part One cites Namık Kemal (1840–88) and Tevfik Fikret (1867–1915), both known for their opposition to Sultan Abdülhamid. Part Two cites Yakup Kadri Karaosmanog˘ lu’s novel, Ankara. This is also a novel in three parts, which depict (1) Istanbul during the late Ottoman Allied occupation, (2) Ankara during the cultural revolution, and (3) a future utopia of the Anatolian village. Part Three alludes to the renowned poet Nâzım Hikmet (1902–63). Pamuk also references an international canon: Hölderlin, Balzac, and Rousseau are alluded to repeatedly, for example. 12 Cevdet Bey and Sons is a social and economic history of the establishment of the Republic and the rise of a Muslim bourgeoisie who will later constitute the secular Republican elite. The transformation from Ottoman Muslim to Republican Turk gives rise to dilemmas of definition regarding “Turkishness.” We can summarize this dilemma by stating that manifestations of “Turkishness” are predicated on various relational iterations of din and devlet. Pamuk’s experimentation with the contexts of this antinomy leads both to new notions of literary modernity as well as a redefinition of Turkishness itself. Pamuk’s depictions of historical contexts of identification in Cevdet Bey and Sons, however, accepts the implicit understanding that religion is a precursor to ethno-national identification (that is, the notion that one must be Muslim before being a “Turk”). 13 For each of the three periods, these oppositions are (1) constitutional rule versus sultanic autocracy, (2) cultural revolution versus Anatolian, Islamic tradition, and (3) socialist revolution versus nationalist coup. The three distinct revolutionary phases are referred to in Turkish as mes¸rutiyet, inkılâp, and devrim, respectively. 14 Cevdet Bey and Sons, in its three parts, alludes to revolutionary moments under three state formations with separate constitutions: the late Ottoman state, the monoparty Republican state, and the ideologically divided Cold War Republican

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state. To emphasize the contingencies of revolution, Pamuk develops the theme of identity and ideology. In each part of the novel, at least one main character (Cevdet, Refik and Ömer, and Ahmet, respectively) repeats the identical question, “Ben Neyim?” (“What am I?”). This rhetorical question underscores the crisis in Turkish identity with respect to historical change. Just as Ahmet Has¸im describes a people “lost in time,” Pamuk’s fiction describes characters with no fixed identification. Their identities vacillate due to the pull of various ideological compasses. Snow is a paradigmatic example of this aspect of Turkish cultural logic as it affects the intelligentsia. Characters in the first two sections of the novel are authors of incomplete or unread book projects: Cevdet Bey writes an unfinished memoir, My Half-Century in Business (Yarım Asırlık Ticaret Hayatım); Refik writes a utopian vision of Anatolian progress entitled The Development of the Village (Köy Kalkınması) as well as keeps a journal; Muhittin writes a collection of poems. All of these characters have failed aspirations as authors in keeping with the theme of the writer manqué. See Lukács, Georg (1963 [1957]) The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, Devon: Merlin Press; Lukács, Georg (1962) The Historical Novel, London: Merlin Press. By simply portraying the cosmopolitan, multi-lingual, and multi-ethnic context of late Ottoman Istanbul, Pamuk is arguing for the legibility of the era’s society rather than dismissing it as being simply “backward.” Part One depicts characters that are Armenian (Mari Çuhacıyan), Jewish (Es¸kinaz), and converts to Islam (Fuat Bey, a dönme). As a Muslim, Cevdet Bey is a minority in the business circles of Istanbul’s Jews, Greeks, and Armenians. French is the lingua franca of elite culture. In short, Pamuk has provided a historically realistic literary description of fin de siècle Istanbul. Cevdet Bey will marry the daughter of an Ottoman pasha, loyal to the sultanate, to increase his social standing. The context of Part One repeatedly evokes cosmopolitan Ottoman din as the backdrop to the emergence of secularism. A.H. Tanpınar’s novel Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü extends the metaphor of time and its synchronization as an allegory for cultural revolution and belated modernity in the Turkish context. See Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi (1962) Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, Istanbul: Dergah. Though this appears to represent the opposition of modernity and tradition, it also reflects another: colonizer and colonized. The legacy of the conflation of the two is significant. After the end of the Allied occupation, the cultural revolution actually reinstituted the foreign time and calendar in the articulation of a semi-colonial logic. In official understandings of the Empire-to-Republic narrative, “Empire” represents tradition and darkness whereas “Republic” represents modernity and light. Pamuk’s first two novels accept this trajectory and the Eurocentric underpinnings of the secular masterplot. However, the unilinear (diachronic) and omniscient historiography of Cevdet Bey and Sons becomes multivalent (synchronic) and multiperspectival in The Silent House – a formal change that signifies a political challenge to the secularization thesis. After his second novel, Pamuk never returns to diachronic modernization historiography as a formative component of his literary modernity. For a general introduction to the debates of modernist Islam through primary source material, see Kurzman, Charles (2002) Modernist Islam, 1840–1940: A Sourcebook, Oxford: Oxford University Press. For an insightful study on “belated modernity” that is commonly cited in Turkish scholarship, see Jusdanis, Gregory (1991) Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. In bringing together technology (the chronograph) and Muslim time, the scene is metonymic of Ottoman Muslim modernity. The historical reality of an Ottoman Muslim modernity is denied in official Republican Empire-to-Republic narratives.

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24 Themes of “dream” (or rüya) and “time” (or zaman) reveal the influence of Tanpınar’s work, particularly the novels A Mind at Peace and Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü. 25 For alternative historical assessments of Abdülhamid’s rule, see Kayalı, Hasan (1997) Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; Deringil, Selim (1998) The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909, London: I.B. Tauris. 26 This perspective conflates nationalism and socialism as well as orientalism since it reflects the cultural logic of an internalized Turkish version of top-down colonial- and/ or Soviet-style modernization. 27 Pamuk’s fiction consistently draws attention to processes of identity-formation in crisis. His characters are often drawn with an uneasy and unstable sense of self. Cevdet Bey, for example, muses, “Why am I this way?” This retort finds parallel expression by other characters in each part of the novel. 28 For more on this period of Republican history, see Zürcher, Erik J. (2004) Turkey: A Modern History, London: I.B. Tauris. 29 For more on the relationship between engineers and secular ideology in the Turkish . context, see Göle, Nilüfer (1986) Mühendisler ve I deoloji: Öncü Devrimcilerden . Yenilikçi Seçkinlere, Istanbul: Iletis¸im. 30 The Turkish term inkılâp (“revolution”) describes the social engineering of this period. In Cevdet Bey . and Sons, the character Süleyman Ayçelik ironically defınes inkılâp as follows: “Inkılâp is the project of providing what’s in the best interest of the people (halk) to the people, despite the people but for . the people” (Pamuk, Orhan (1996 [1982]) Cevdet Bey ve Og˘ ulları, Istanbul: Iletis¸im). This succinctly summarizes one of the overarching dilemmas of Republican secular modernity. 31 In the intervening years, a series of wars have occurred that culminated in the partition of Ottoman territory and the rise of the modern Middle East. The influx of refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus and the expulsion of Armenians and Greeks (“Rum”) have resulted in vast demographic changes making Anatolia more Muslim, preparing the way for the establishment of a predominantly Muslim Republic. Ironically, this transformation in the religious identity of the population is diminished and concealed by strong state secularism. 32 Such proponents of Turkism are popularly derided as “kafatasçı” or “skull-studiers” (i.e., phrenologists) due to the racist belief in the link between cranial features and race. 33 The conflicted figure of the “engineer-poet” reappears in Snow in the characters of the Islamic fundamentalist Blue and the leftist-turned-Islamist Muhtar. The rational/imaginative divided self is another symptom of the cultural revolution that invests characters with contradictory traits of din and devlet. The murder and literal separation of miniaturist Velijan’s body into two halves at the end of My Name is Red is another dramatization of the divided self. 34 As part of the conversion, Muhittin’s conspiratorial thinking and struggle for authenticity is depicted satirically by Pamuk through the following passage: “As for now, he was trying to direct his hatred toward targets: The French who were killing our racial brothers and then the Arabs who stabbed us in the back. … But no, no, he was more angry at the Jews and the masons. … Then there were Albanians and Circassians who, as Mahir Altaylı said, were dangerous because they’d infiltrated the state. And then there were the Kurds. And then, of course, the communists” (Pamuk, Orhan (1996 [1982]) Cevdet Bey ve Og˘ ulları, Istanbul: . Iletis¸im, p. 318). Pamuk develops political conspiracy into a dominant trope that reappears in many of his novels (see Chapter 5). 35 For theoretical developments of the notion of modernity as conversion, see van der Veer, Peter, Ed. (1996) Conversion to Modernities, London: Routledge; Washburn,

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Dennis and A. Kevin Reinhart, Eds. (2007) Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology, and Transformations of Modernity, London: Brill. . See, for example, Kahraman, Hasan Bülent (2002) “Içselles¸tirilmis¸, Açık ve Kapalı Oryantalizm ve Kemalism,” Dog˘ u-Batı August–October(20): 153–78. The White Castle represents Pamuk’s first self-conscious engagement with the discourses, dramas, and performances of orientalism writ large. Among the novel’s achievements is a deconstruction of the binary logic of orientalist thought, which extends to Republican secular modernity as well. The theme of railroads reappears in Pamuk’s work with The New Life. The author of the text-within-a-text, “The New Life,” is the retired state railways employee Rıfkı Hat. The New Life proper is Pamuk’s novelistic record of characters seduced by the possibilities represented in an influential, absent text. This is, among other things, a national allegory for (and critique of) the power of ideological discourse. Namık Kemal (1840–88), a member of the “Young Ottomans,” was an author and statesman who advocated for liberal change during the Hamidian era. The Young Ottomans were able to achieve their goal, though short-lived, with the promulgation of the Ottoman constitution in 1876. He is also known for his polemical engagement with Ernest Renan over the role of Islam in modernization. See Mardin, S¸erif (1962) The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Kemal, Namık ([1326 A.H.]) Renan Müdafanamesi, Istanbul. The principle of Devletçilik (statism), one of the “six arrows” of Kemalism, establishes a governmental policy of top-down modernization. The scene between Refik and S¸evket Süreyya Aydemir is revealing in this regard. Aydemir was a historical figure who was a founder and theorist of the Turkish Kadro (Cadre, or revolutionary vanguard) movement that strove to shape an ideology between communism . and Turkish nationalism. See Aydemir, S¸evket Süreyya (1968 [1932]) Inkılâp ve Kadro, Istanbul: Bilgi. In the chapter entitled “State” (“Devlet”), Pamuk presents the state as being in conflict over a number of political forces including inkılâp/ kadro, irtica (“religious reaction”), the left and communism, and the right and nationalism. Refik is opposed to the use of force to bring about revolution, reform, and progress. By focusing on the village, Refik is attempting to engender a consciousness beyond the state perspective, but he meets with no support. Frustrated, he says, “Ah, I can neither take a stand for or against the state!” (Pamuk, Orhan . (1996 [1982]) Cevdet Bey ve Og˘ ulları, Istanbul: Iletis¸im, p. 409). Here, Pamuk makes the point that “darkness” is not something that can simply be eradicated by the will of the state and certainly not by force. Through Ömer, he provides a critique of the military suppression of the Kurdish uprising known by the place-name Dersim. In short, the historiographic representation that coalesces around this period is problematized through characters who attempt, yet fail, to enact social and industrial projects of modernization. Refik’s book Köy Kalkınması (The Development of the Village) has no impact and Ömer withdraws to a life of seclusion in Anatolia. A French revolutionary cultural influence can be discerned in Part One, a German national-socialist influence in Part Two, and a Soviet socialist Russian influence informs Part Three. A number of texts, earlier written by characters, reappear in the last section. Refik’s . journal, sections of which were excerpted in Part Two, reappears as Ilknur, who knows how to read the Ottoman script, reads sections aloud. Cevdet Bey’s memoirs also appear. These accounts of the two preceding periods are literally “in the hands of ” the third generation; furthermore, they can only be accessed through the vehicle of a historian who makes the past. legible. . The Turkish Workers Party, or Türkiye Is¸çi Partisi (TIP), was founded in 1961, abolished after the 1980 military coup, and re-established in 2010.

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44 What You Seek (Nâzım Hikmet, May 25, 1962) what you seek is not in your room but outside trucks are carrying what you seek cranes with cement blocks hoist it what you seek is in the trees of Leningrad street and in the escalators of metros what you seek is in stations of separations and reunions and in the food sack of the tall woman in a red headscarf what you seek is in the frescoes of Rubliov you can ask two bronze figures what you seek one stands before the Russian cinema the other before the Moscow cinema in Sverdlov Square a full-bearded stone figure stands he knows best what you seek what you seek is in the red brick structure in Revolution Square what you seek is in the people on the streets what you seek is in you Hikmet, Nâzım (2007 [1962]) “Aradıkların,” Bütün S¸iirleri, Istanbul: Yapı Kredi, p. 1816. 45 This same phrase, “sonuna kadar gitmek,” appears in The White Castle as well, where it has become a mantra for the actualization of literary-textual authority over discursive and ideological confinements. 46 The scene that represents the crossing of this horizon is the depiction of “Darvınog˘ lu in the archive” as recounted in the “Preface” of The White Castle, where the unemployed, alcoholic historian finds and crudely transliterates and translates the “captive’s tale” entitled “The Quiltmakers Stepson.” The “quilt” is a metaphor for the technique of literary pastiche that Pamuk uses to construct his novel. Arguably, it is a metonym for the Turkish novel tradition itself, which is constructed out of the juxtapositions of various traditional and modern influences. The title also includes an intertextual allusion: Cervantes, in his “Prologue” to Don Quixote, refers to himself as the “stepfather” of his novel. For more on pastiche, see Hoesterey, Ingeborg (2001) Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; Orr, Mary (2003) Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts, Cambridge: Polity. 47 The allusions to canonized author-intellectuals of the Ottoman/Turkish tradition with revolutionary bent emphasize Pamuk’s acceptance of a Turkish literary history that echoes the Empire-to-Republic dialectic: Namik Kemal and Tevfik Fikret (Part One), Yakup Kadri Karaosmanog˘ lu (Part Two), and Nâzım Hikmet (Part Three) all advocated revolutionary change and were persecuted by the state. Here, literary history follows the revolutionary dialectic from Empire to Republic. This body of work is contrasted to European authors (or their characters) of revolutionary bent, including Balzac (Rastignac), Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Hölderlin. The two contrasting “archives” are presented in the expected “East versus West” opposition, which I argue in this chapter and book is a misleading rubric that inadvertently emphasizes orientalist epistemologies and conceals actual tensions between productive cultural forces such as din and devlet. In other words, in the polyglot cosmopolitan setting of Istanbul, these “archives” are not necessarily in opposition at all. 48 Hikmet also uses a “darkness and light” opposition to indicate revolution and socio-historical progress. See, for example, the following lines from the poem “Like Kerem”: “if I don’t blaze/if you don’t blaze/if we don’t blaze/how will the/dark-/ness/ become/ illuminat-/ed?” Hikmet, Nâzım (2007 [1930]) “Kerem Gibi,” Bütün S¸iirleri, Istanbul: Yapı Kredi, p. 205.

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49 The Cevdet Bey and Sons reference is discussed above. The “Preface” of The White Castle refers to an “Encyclopedia of Famous Men,” which is also the working title of the earliest draft of Hikmet’s Human Landscapes. My Name is Red refers to a mythical mesnevi poet, “Blond Nâzım of Ran”: “Ran” is the official last name of Hikmet, who was of fair color. His challenge to “paint a picture of happiness” was a famous quip made by Hikmet to the painter Abidin Dino in his poem “Straw Yellow”: “could you paint a picture of happiness Abidin/without taking the easy way out/not the picture of a young angel-faced mother nursing her rosecheeked babe.” See Hikmet, Nâzım (2007 [1961]) “Saman Sarısı,” Bütün S¸iirleri, Istanbul: Yapı Kredi, p. 1759. Of course, in My Name is Red, this is precisely how Pamuk depicts happiness in contrast to the engaged socialist context Hikmet refers to and names in his poem: “could you paint a picture of happiness Abidin/the picture of Cuba in mid-summer 1961.” This was the summer that Hikmet experienced the jubilation of going to Havana to present Fidel Castro with the World Peace Award. 50 Hikmet’s “Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin” is a good example of the intersection of material (socialist) and mystical themes. Sheikh Bedridden (1359–1420) was a fourteenth-century Sufi sheikh whose syncretic movement was crushed by the Ottoman state. Ottomanist Heath Lowry describes his movement as follows: “It [the Sheikh Bedreddin Revolt] was depicted in the contemporary Byzantine sources (and later Ottoman ones) as a revolution whose central doctrine was a kind of bond of charitable Communism, supported by a mystic love of God, in which all differences of religion were overlooked. … The end of the fourteenth century was a point in time when the paradox of a state whose urban administrative structure had a high Islamic character, yet whose ruling elite and its peasant population in the countryside were typified by what I have termed an Islamo-Christian syncretism, clashed” (Lowry, Heath (2003) The Nature of the Early Ottoman State, Albany, NY: State University of New York, p. 138). Somewhat paradoxically, Hikmet uses this “martyred” historical figure to argue for an early historical precedent for socialism in the present. It is one example of what we might term mystical Marxism or secular Sufism. See Hikmet, Nazım (trans. Randy Blassing and Mutlu Konuk) (2002) The Poems of Nazım Hikmet: Revised and Expanded Edition, New York, NY: Persea. 51 For more on Hikmet’s life and work, see Fuat, Memet (2000), Nazım Hikmet: Yas¸amı, Ruhsal Yapısı, Davaları, Tartıs¸maları, Dünya Görüs¸ü, S¸iirinin Gelis¸meleri, Istanbul: Adam; Fuat, Memet (2001) Nazım Hikmet Üstüne Yazılar, Istanbul: Adam; Hikmet, Nazım (trans. Randy Blassing and Mutlu Konuk) (2002) The Poems of Nazım Hikmet: Revised and Expanded Edition, New York, NY: Persea. 52 Hikmet writes in the 1961 preface. to Human Landscapes that a Turkish Encyclopedia of Famous People (Mes¸hur Insanlar Ansiklopedisi) was one of the texts available to him as a prisoner in the Bursa Prison. This gave him the form for the idea of a literary work that would be written in the guise of an “encyclopedia” narrated by a series of proletarian figures. Unlike the encyclopedia of enlightenment intent that Selahattin Darvınog˘ lu writes in Pamuk’s second novel, The Silent House, meant to modernize the “East,” Hikmet’s work presents a realistic portrayal of individual Anatolians. In this respect, rather than an encyclopedia of modernizing devlet, his would be a compendium of local traditions. The prison’s inmates, peasants, workers, and tradesman – representatives of the halk – and their everyday, personal stories gave him the content for the work. Combining the encyclopedia as form with the content of the oral histories of fellow inmates, Hikmet created a formally challenging literary text. It also included, under the historical influence of the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, the monumental struggle of the twentieth century between ideologies of fascism and socialism. . Hikmet ended up combining the two projects under the title Memleketimden Insan

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Manzaraları (Human Landscapes from My Country). As planned, it would begin with the German invasion, moving chronologically backward in time until the Boer War in 1880, from where it would pick up in the present and move forward in time. This would include accounts of people from other classes to portray the dialectic of historical exploitation. In short, this was a plan for a synchronic historiography. The unifying frame of the work would be historical, or more accurately, historiographic. Though he had written 66,000 lines of this work, only a portion survived police raids and the work remained fragmentary and incomplete when he fled Turkey for Moscow in 1950. For more on Hikmet’s experiences in prison, see Hikmet, Nâzım (2002) Kemal Tahir’e Mapushaneden Mektuplar, Istanbul: Tekin; Kemal, Orhan (2010) Bengisu Rona, In Jail with Nazım Hikmet, London: Saqi. This is the very claim made by Muhtar Bey in conversation with Refik in Part Two of Cevdet . Bey and Sons. See Pamuk, Orhan (1996 [1982]) Cevdet Bey ve Og˘ ulları, Istanbul: Iletis¸im. There is an obvious Faulknerian influence in the novel. In particular, the characters, themes, structure, and style of As I Lay Dying are prominent. The southern gothic and grotesque themes that are conveyed to the Turkish context function to parody the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman. Metin is the depoliticized figure of future neo-liberalism; Nilgün is an aspiring engaged leftist studying sociology; and Faruk is the Republican intellectual, a figure of crisis. Hasan is a convert to ultranationalist, Turkist ideology, a favorite Pamuk character (and an updated version of Muhittin in Cevdet Bey and Sons). Dr. Selahattin is similar in character to his contemporary, Dr. Nusret of Cevdet Bey and Sons. See, for example, Pamuk, Orhan (2005) “Res¸at Ekrem Koçu’s Collection of Facts and Curiosities: The Istanbul Encyclopedia,” Istanbul: Memories and the City, New York, NY: Knopf. Darvınog˘ lu pursues what he believes are clues to the existence of another state within the Ottoman Empire, a so-called “plague state” or veba devleti formed at a time when inhabitants of Istanbul fled the plague. His archival evidence for this state, a letter he once read, has disappeared from the documents. See Pamuk, . Orhan (1995 [1983]) Sessiz Ev, Istanbul: Iletis¸im, pp. 164–6. For an overview of debates on history and narrative, see Roberts, Geoffrey, Ed. (2001) The History and Narrative Reader, London: Routledge. Darvınog˘ lu’s history project will remain incomplete. As a cultural object, the historian’s notebook he keeps while doing research in the Gebze archive makes a revealing journey throughout the novel. It is handled by many of the characters who represent differing ideological perspectives. The notebook begins this journey in the archive and the back seat of the Darvınog˘ lus’ run-down Anadol. Faruk uses the car to travel to and from the Gebze archive where he does his research and tries to resolve his declared “crisis in history.” The Anadol was a Turkish automobile whose symbol was the Hittite stag statue representative of the secular revisionist Anatolian history thesis of the early Republican era. This history claimed that all ancient and classical civilizations that had existed in Anatolia from prehistory to the present, including Sumerian and Hittites, had contributed to Anatolian culture and were thus constituitive of Turkishness. In Pamuk’s hands, the Anadol stands for the broken down, second-rate vehicle of history that fails to transport the family (the nation) to its destination of modernity. With the notebook in the back seat of the Anadol, Metin, the youngest grandchild, makes repeated professions of adolescent love to the object of his affections, Ceylan, in the car. Ceylan literally means “gazelle,” which is a personification of the Anadol symbol. At a point where a mechanic is trying to repair the car, Metin hands to a frustrated and annoyed Ceylan Faruk’s notebook of historical research so she can pass the time.

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His overtures, like the notebook, are all met with indifference. Metin gets abandoned with the broken-down vehicle and is accosted by a group of ultranationalist (ülkücü) youths who rob him and take his money. One of them, Hasan, steals the notebook from the back seat of the Anadol. Later, fearing the authorities will pursue him as a result of his attack of Nilgün, he boards a train for Istanbul’s Haydarpasha station (the same station where Nazım Hikmet’s Human Landscapes begins). The notebook ends up in the hands of this nationalist youth who has attacked the left-leaning Nilgün, leading to her sudden death. Hasan, flipping through Faruk’s notes on the train, finds nothing of relevance in them and tosses the notebook of history into the wagon’s trash. This dramatization of the discarding of history parallels what Pamuk’s novel does in its revision of a Turkish literary modernity, once dependent on the historical imperative of secular modernization. See, for example, Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies, a novel that actualizes a “deck of cards” narrative form described by Darvınog˘ lu. Calvino, Italo (1976) The Castle of Crossed Destinies, New York, NY: Harcourt Brace & Co. In Evliya Çelebi’s work, Davınog˘ lu finds a narrative unity that he admires. He describes Evliya as someone with “one soul” in contrast to which he sees himself as divided in the present. Evliya is the representative of a religious and secular Ottoman figure who can navigate both worlds with ease. Darvınog˘ lu admires his rhetorical skill and writing, and meditates on his work as a model of form for his own. See Dankoff, Robert and Sooyong Kim (2011) An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi, London Eland Books. See Dankoff, Robert (2006) An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Çelebi, London: Brıll. However, The Silent House ends where Cevdet Bey and Sons began, with the family of Ottoman statesman S¸ükrü Pasha. Thus, the two novels complete a narrative cycle that thematically moves from din to devlet (separating them as part of the secularization thesis) and then returns to traditional late Ottoman contexts of din (reuniting them). For more on the life and work of Yas¸ar Kemal, see Kemal, Yas¸ar and Alain Bosquet (trans. Eugene Lyons Hebert and Barry Tharaud) (1999) Yas¸ar Kemal on His Life and Art, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press; Andaç, Feridun (2003) Living Through the Words of Yas¸ar Kemal, Istanbul: Dünya; Gürsel, Nedim (2008) Yas¸ar Kemal: Bir Geçis¸ Dönemi Romancısı, Istanbul: Dog˘ an; Naci, Fethi (2008) Yas¸ar Kemal Romancılıg˘ ı, Istanbul: Yapı Kredi; Kemal, Yas¸ar (2011) Yas¸ar Kemal: Röportaj Yazarlıg˘ ında 60 Yıl, Istanbul: Yapı Kredi.

3 A Voice from the Ottoman Archive 1 As stated by Faruk Darvınog˘ lu in The Silent House. 2 The modern was part of the on-going project of secular progress, associated with an elite movement to rapidly “civilize” society that borrowed from both the Soviet example and the European civilizing mission. Having come of age during the second or third generation of this secular movement, Pamuk began to question and challenge its excesses through literature. It is my contention that Turkish literary modernity has always functioned to question, qualify, and subvert secular modernity. 3 This multi-layered aestheticization characterizes Pamuk’s work in a way that I describe as begin “postsecular” and “postorientalist.” These theoretical perspectives enable critiques of the historical function and the political logic of orientalism, nationalism, and secular modernity in the construction of Turkish identity and subjectivity. 4 Writers of the generation after the last major Cold War military coup (September 12, 1980) – which affected all aspects of Turkish politics, society, and culture and broadly represented the transition between leftist-socialist and neo-liberal worldviews –

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have been increasingly free to resurrect Ottoman cultural history and “Ottomanesque” language with Arabic and Persian vocabulary. In literature, this led to drastic changes as writers responded to the political transformations by moving away from engaged social issues and realism in a manner that questioned grand narratives of nationalism, Kemalism, and socialism through aesthetic experimentation with content and form. Thus, in the wake of the 1980 coup, along with non-realist and fantastic genres, the Ottoman historical novel, Ottoman .themes, and Sufism gained currency as represented, for example, by the work of Ihsan Oktay Anar, Nedim Gürsel, and Elif S¸afak. This legacy for the states that emerged from most Ottoman territories is generally extremely negative, a kind of “dark ages” that is referred to reductively as an “occupation” (of up to 500 years). The nationalist slant of these discourses has been critiqued by scholars for their anti-Islamic cultural biases. The violent re-mapping of Ottoman territories due to colonial encroachment and national secession movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constructed an overwhelmingly negative legacy. Most surprising is the fact that the Republic adopted the same anti-Ottoman discourse. Though not explicitly a “postcolonial” national state, the Republic fashioned and fabricated a historiography of colonization out of the Ottoman past. Iraklis Millas describes it as follows: “The idea of a ‘terrible’ and overtly negative Tourkokratia provides useful images that sustain the ideology of the Greek nation state, nurturing the values that preserve national identity. A negative past, presented as the outcome of a problematic relationship with Others, is required for a number of related reasons: it justifies the revolt against those Others, that is, the Greek Revolution (or War of Independence) in 1821, the existence of a sovereign Greek state, the personal and communal sacrifices made in the past for the nation. It also explains why Greece is not as advanced as other European states or as successful as its ancestors, the ancient Greeks; in other words, through their problematic relationship with the Greeks in the past, the Turks serve as the scapegoats for what is wrong about the Greeks in the present (see Herzfeld 1987)”; Millas, Iraklis (2006) “Tourkokratia: History and the Image of Turks in Greek Literature,” Working Papers European Studies, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, p. 9. Pamuk’s revision of the Ottoman legacy as being more than a dark ages of the colonization of oppressed Anatolian Turks appears in particular in his two novels that are set in Ottoman Istanbul (The White Castle and My Name is Red). Pamuk’s return to Ottoman contexts in his fiction is an actual gesture of “de-orientalization” in contrast to the anti-Ottoman and self-orientalizing perspective of the cultural revolution. Almost without exception, Republican literary histories have tended to exclusively emphasize the modernizing “development of secularization” paradigm. See, for example, Özön, Mustafa Nihat (1941) Son Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi, Istanbul: Maarif Matbaası; Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi (1956) XIX Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi, . Istanbul: Ibrahim Horoz Basımevi; Levend, Agah Sırrı (1973) Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu; Kurdakul, S¸ükran (2002) Çag˘ das¸ Türk Edebiyatı, Istanbul: Evrensel; Kudret, Cevdet (2004) . Türk Edebiyatında Hikâye ve Roman, Istanbul: Dünya Kitapları; Enginün, Inci (2006) Yeni Türk Edebiyatı: Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e, (1839–1923), Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları; Halman, Talat Sait (2006) Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi, Ankara: TC Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlıg˘ ı. The novel makes use of deconstructive themes of writing that recall the work of Derrida on écriture. The narrative structure and plot in particular lends it to theoretical interpretations based on a trajectory of colonial and postcolonial works from Said’s Orientalism to Bhabha’s Nation and Narration and Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other. However, the link that this establishes between Pamuk and postcolonial theory is misleading. The literature of Istanbul and the Turkish tradition, situated in semi-colonial modernity, secularism, and Islam, is outside the

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theoretical economy of postcolonial thought proper. For one example of an insightful Derridean reading of Pamuk’s work, see Farred, Grant (2007) “‘To Dig a Well With a Needle’: Orhan Pamuk’s Poem of Comparative Globalization,” The Global South 1(1–2): 81–99. Farred does not take Pamuk’s untranslated works into account. See also Said, Edward W. (1978) Orientalism, New York, NY: Vintage Books; Bhabha, Homi (1990) Nation and Narration, London: Routledge; Derrida, Jacques (trans. Patrick Mensah) (1998) Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. The same synchronic narrative structure is at work in My Name is Red. I use the term “metahistorical” in allusion to the theorization of Hayden White, who analyzes the function of linguistic structures in historical narratives to uncover ideological forces. Metahistory, in the case of Pamuk, refers to the changeable narrative forms of history, to the manner in which history is fictionalized, and to the presence of literary tropes that mediate history, and are, in a sense, agents of cultural translation and meaning. See White, Hayden V. (1973) Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pamuk is inspired in his reformulation of literary modernity by primary sources from Ottoman thinkers and authors, including Katip Çelebi (1609–57), Evliya Çelebi (1611–82), and Naima (1655–1716), all of them Ottoman cosmopolitans of Istanbul. .See Pamuk, Orhan (1995 [1985]) “Beyaz Kale Üzerine,” Beyaz Kale, Istanbul: Iletis¸im: 183–93. This perspective is succinctly conveyed by historian Ethem Eldem, who writes: “The Turkish Republic is in many ways an orientalist project.” See Eldem, Ethem (2007) “The Turkish ‘Case’,” Consuming the Orient, Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Archive and Research Centre. This very “project” is dramatized by Pamuk in Cevdet Bey and Sons and parodied in The Silent House. The “prologue” as a metafictional literary device is employed variously by authors such as Stendhal in Three Italian Chronicles, Walpole in The Castle of Otranto and Cervantes in Don Quixote. See, for example, Nadeau, Carolyn A. (2010) “Reading the Prologue: Cervantes’s Narrative Appropriation and Originality,” Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, New York, NY: Infobase Publishing. “Hikâye” is one of the first Ottoman Turkish terms used to describe fiction, and specifically the novel form. See Us¸aklıgil, Halit Ziya (1998 [1892]) Hikâye: I_nceleme, Istanbul: Yapı Kredi. The Turkish version of the novel refers to this epigraph as a “translation” (çeviri), whereas the English version by Victoria Holbrook identifies it as a “mistranslation.” For a provocative application of the concept of sirr as the “secret of the nonsecret,” see Almond, Ian (2010) Sufism and Deconstruction: A Comparative Study of Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi, London: Routledge. The “archive story” that Darvınog˘ lu foresees as a model of form for history that is representationally accurate includes facts and story (“hikâye”), which he describes in The Silent House as being a “joker card.” Pamuk relies on a similar model of compounding stories to revise literary modernity. The “joker” is an absence upon which the events and plot are contingent. It functions as a joker because it has the potential to transform events by relating them in various new sequences. The “joker” of story as presented in Pamuk’s novels is used by Hoja and slave repeatedly to gain patronage. It is also used by Pamuk in the construction of his new novel. One of Pamuk’s joker cards in The White Castle is as follows: a narrative structure whereby the first-person narrator reveals his movement from one character to another in a way that alters the surface plot of the captive’s tale. That is, we follow Pamuk’s captive’s tale to the point at which the characters switch places (through Chapter 10). In the final chapter, 11, he also has the narrator switch to another point of view. The authorial voice is freed from its initial first-person identity in the

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plot to assume one that is indeterminate. As such, a formal literary innovation mimics the action in the story. In short, Pamuk’s “joker” card revises the orientalist captive’s tale as a Sufi tale of conversion by relying on metafictional techniques. The doubling of the narrative that is introduced in The White Castle is used in other ways throughout the rest of Pamuk’s novels. Thus, the “archive story” is defined by its intertextuality (like the uncatalogued, contiguous documents of an archive), its multiperspectivalism, and its alternative historiography. Darvınog˘ lu’s crisis in history, which is metonymic of a crisis in Republican modernity, is furthermore answered by Pamuk through a new kind of mixed genre in which autobiography, history, literature, memoir, and detective work appear together. Hoja’s rhetorical refrain, “Why am I what I am?” recalls similar questions by characters in Cevdet Bey and Sons. Here, it seems to be introjected into the past by Faruk himself, or by the presence of an authorial voice, a figment of Pamuk’s own agency. See, for example, Krstic, Tijana (2011) Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Ottoman Empire, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. In Turkish, the term hoca has two operative meanings. In the Republican context, it has a secular nuance and refers to a teacher or university professor like Darvınog˘ lu. In the Ottoman Islamic context, it refers to a medrese graduate, one of the ulema, and describes the “master” in the story. In other words, “hoca” refers to both the Republican professor of history as well as the medrese-educated master. In the framework of my argument, hoca is a secular-sacred figure of both din and devlet. Both “hoja” characters (Darvınog˘ lu and the “master”) are trapped by the societies in which they live. Both rely on the instrumental use of narrative to gain some semblance of freedom. The “Preface” reveals that these treatises were presented to Mehmet IV . between 1652 and 1680. See Pamuk, Orhan (1995 [1985]) Beyaz Kale, Istanbul: Iletis¸im. The reference to “quiltmaking” is also metaphorical, as the technique of literary pastiche used by Pamuk is a narrative version of juxtaposing and “stitching” together unrelated materials to create a whole based on pattern and theme. At the end of the novel, the narrator is goaded to show his “captive’s tale” to a traveler from Italy. This traveler states that the narrator’s “double” in Italy had claimed that the narrator in Turkey spent his spare time sewing quilts (i.e., “writing texts”). Though the narrator is insulted at this insinuation, figuratively, it is accurate. The novel is itself a narrative patchwork, or literary quilt of genres, perspectives, and periods. There are allusions to Cervantes in the “Preface” and final chapter of the novel. Cervantes represents a figure held captive by “Turks” as well as being an author who is credited with writing the first early modern novel, Don Quixote. Cervantes’ experience of (religious) captivity and literary authority is re-enacted by Pamuk in The White Castle as if to announce the birth of a new variety of Republican, Istanbul novel, which can be read as part of world literature. Pamuk’s Quixote-like figures are the novel’s “captives”: Darvınog˘ lu, the slave, and the narrator whose allegorical experiences of captivity and liberation enable the revision of Republican literary modernity. For an overview of historical and cultural encounters in the Mediterranean through primary source texts, see cooke, miriam, et al., Eds. (2008) Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida, Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press. My Name is Red is set in the wake of the Battle of Lepanto, which is referred to in the novel as the catalyst for Enishte Effendi’s visit to Venice and his first exposure to European portraiture. This gives rise to the attempt to create a new kind of text as represented in the Sultan’s secret book.

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28 Many of Pamuk’s novels contain the leitmotif of a failed, forgotten, or unread text, book, or manuscript. As in Cevdet Bey and Sons, this might be autobiographical (Cevdet Bey’s “Fifty-Years as a Businessman”), scientific (Refik’s The Development of the Village), or poetic (Muhittin’s Poetry). It might be a source of secular-sacred inspiration (the mysterious book in The New Life, poetry in Snow), incomplete (the secret manuscript in My Name is Red, Selahattin’s encyclopedia in The Silent House), or translated/rewritten (“The Quilter’s Stepson” in The White Castle). In The Black Book, this theme focuses on ghost-writing and mystified authorship. In Pamuk’s mature work, the “absent text” is often a structural device, enabling Pamuk’s own narrative innovations. The motif of the incomplete, failed, or “absent text” of the Pamuk novel, for example, is redeemed by the very text Pamuk has written. Read together, these narratives identify, critique, and subvert the processes articulated by discourses of orientalism, nationalism, and modernity. 29 Generally speaking, the anxiety to which this gives rise is resolved through state violence in the form of revolution or coup, both recurring tropes in Pamuk’s work. The underlying dilemma of Republican Turkishness is the paradox of secular identification and Islamic affiliation. This paradox was deepened through the cultural revolution, which attempted to “deorientalize” Turkey by suppressing visible signs of Islam and military coups, which linked progress with military authority. The “religion-as-ethnicity” formula of secular Turkishness was always understandably unstable and could only be enforced by authoritarian means, whether military, state-based, or judicial. Authors who crossed this line could be charged with insulting “Turkishness,” whose sacredness (tied to its Islamic ethnogenesis) the “insult” itself inconveniently exposed. The Eurocentric forms of modernity that didn’t recognize this paradox were simply a borrowed shirt of orientalism and colonialism. The cosmopolitanism and literary modernity that did recognize it gave rise to new creative forms, as Darvınog˘ lu’s literary discovery in the Ottoman archive reveals. 30 As master and slave switch places, the presence of an absence, the narrator, appears in the last chapter to qualify the fixed identities of slave and master by arguing for a subjectivity of contraditions. They, due to the switch, are hyphenated identities now, slave-master and master-slave. As such, both have escaped their respective confinements in identity. The master-as-slave writes a number of books upon returning to Italy, including A Turk of my Acquaintance. So, too, does the slave-asmaster write a number of books, including The Quiltmaker’s Stepson (these are also twinned texts). The metafictional emergence of the narrator out of the shadows of narrative structure in Chapter 11 reveals: (1) Pamuk’s deconstruction of oppositional thought and orientalism that undergirds traditional “captive’s tales”; (2) in a Sufi tone, the ecstasy of union between self and other; (3) the yearning for and reintroduction of the sacred; and (4) the sorrow of separation and exile. Not only does Pamuk allude to a mystical space, he asserts that this space is attainable through writing in an assertion of narrative redemption. For Darvınog˘ lu, the manuscript he finds in the archive and translates redeems him in the face of the depredations of state violence manifest in the 1980 military coup. The epilogue to the novel, a “mistranslation” of Proust by a novelist of the early Republic, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanog˘ lu, alludes to the mystical birth of love out of mystery. Indeed, one of Pamuk’s accomplishments in this novel is the reintroduction of Ottoman Istanbul, mystery, and enchantment into the secular novel form through a story of love. 31 This passage allegorically evokes the cultural revolution and casts the period as “darkness” in contrast to the earnest hopes of illuminated revolutionary change depicted in Cevdet Bey and Sons. 32 This is more accurately termed tasavvuf; that is, the Sufi science of moving through degrees of the knowledge of sacredness.

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33 The homoerotic reading that critics have commented upon emerges from this transformation. 34 For the sake of undermining fixed identities of Republican Turkishness and their myths of origin, Pamuk uses tropes of archive and conversion to redefine Republican diachronic time and secular revolution. 35 The “window” is also a device used by Cervantes in “The Captive’s Tale.” The captive first glimpses Zoraida, and the possibility for love, conversion, and freedom, through a window in which she is framed. 36 Pamuk is having some fun at the reader’s expense here. Though it diminishes the place of the “author” vis-à-vis the text, his comment imbues the narrator with a quasi-mystical power that will develop into the author-figure in subsequent texts. 37 A Mind at Peace is part of a roman fleuve that includes the untranslated novels, Song in Mahur and Outside the Scene. 38 For more on Tanpınar’s life and work, see Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi (1996) Yasadıg˘ ım Gibi, Istanbul: Dergah; Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi (1998 [1969]) Edebiyat Üzerine Makaleler, Istanbul: Dergah; Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi (2002) Mücevherlerin Sırrı: Derlenmis Yazılar, Anket, ve Röportajlar, Istanbul: Yapı Kredi; Kerman, Zeynep . and Inci Enginün, Eds. (2008) Günlüklerin Is¸ıg˘ ında Tanpınar’la Bas¸bas¸a, Istanbul: Dergah; Okay, M. Orhan (2010) Bir Hülya Adamının Romanı Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Istanbul: Dergah. 39 For more on Tanpınar’s poetic and aesthetic symbolism, see Kaplan, Mehmet (1982) Tanpınar’in S¸iir Dünyası, Istanbul: Dergah; Demiralp, Og˘ uz (2001 [1993]) Kutup Noktası: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’ın Yapıtı Üzerine Eles¸tirel Deneme, Istanbul: Yapı Kredi. 40 My reading offers a different nuance than others that have emphasized Suad as being a character adapted from Dostoyevsky and introduced into the Turkish novel by Tanpınar. Granted, the literary influence is apparent. Nevertheless, Suad is arguably also an authentic Republican figure of secular revolution. See, for example, Moran, Berna (1983) “Bir Huzursuzlug˘ un Romanı: Huzur,” Türk Romanına . Eles¸tirel Bir Bakıs¸: Ahmet Mithat’tan Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’a Istanbul: Iletis¸im; Gürbilek, Nurdan (2011) “Bad Boy Turk (1),” The New Cultural Climate in Turkey: Living in a Shop Window, London: Zed Books. 41 The work of Yakup Kadri Karaosmanog˘ lu in particular espouses this perspective. . See Karaosmanog˘ lu, Yakup Kadri (1946) Atatürk, Istanbul: Iletis¸im; Karaosmanog˘ lu, Yakup Kadri (1980) Vatan Yolunda, Istanbul: Birikim. 42 The perhaps unexpected presence of Christian imagery and tropes as well as Islamochristian intersections can be found throughout Turkish literature. Some obvious examples include novels by Karaosmanog˘ lu, Tanpınar, and Halide Edib. The Ottoman imperial context, in which Orthodoxy and Islam coexisted in the urban spaces of Constantinople/Istanbul, is one obvious historical basis for this intersection. For more on Islamochristian syncretism in early Ottoman contexts, see Lowry, Heath (2003) The Nature of the Early Ottoman State, Albany, NY: State University of New York; Krstic, Tijana (2011) Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Ottoman Empire, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 43 The form of this novel relies on earlier Ottoman Islamic first-person narrative traditions (such as Evliya Çelebi, Katip Çelebi, Mustafa Âlî, and others) rather than simply “Western” forms such as the realist and modernist novel as reflected in Cevdet Bey and Sons and in The Silent House. Pamuk states of The White Castle, “I decided to set my story in the middle of the seventeenth century … so my protagonists could make use of the writings of Naima,. Evliya Çelebi, and Katip Çelebi” (Pamuk, Orhan (1995 [1985]) Beyaz Kale, Istanbul: Iletis¸im, p. 190). 44 The state-sponsored impositions of Turkishness, however, force Tanpınar to compromise through his conceptualization of a “Turkish Istanbul” (Türk Istanbul).

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This is a concept developed by Tanpınar’s mentor, the poet Yahya Kemal, that re-historicizes the city under the ideological influence of Turkism. In this understanding, the origins of Turkishness are extended back to 1453 (for Tanpınar) and the Battle of Malazgirt in 1071 (for Yahya Kemal). See Tanpınar, . Ahmet Hamdi (1946). Bes¸ S¸ehir, Istanbul: Dergah; Kemal, Yahya (1964) “Türk Istanbul I & II,” Aziz Istanbul, Istanbul: Istanbul Fethi Cemiyeti; Pamuk, Orhan (trans. Maureen Freely) (2005) Istanbul: Memories and the City, New York, NY: Knopf. 4 Reimagining the Ottoman Legacy 1 Response given by Hoja to the Sultan when asked what evidence he used to predict the end of the plague in two weeks’ time. 2 These include works by Rifa’at Ali Abou-El-Haj, Suraiya Faroqhi, Haim Gerber, Leslie Peirce, Gabriel Piterberg, Donald Quataert, Dana Sajdi, Heath Lowry, and others. 3 Abdülhamid II’s reign is an example of the first reaction and Kemalist rule is an example of the second. 4 For a useful primary Ottoman source on the lives and work of calligraphers, painters, limners, and book-binders in Istanbul and the region, see Akın-Kıvanç, Esra (2011) Mustafa ‘Ali’s Epic Deeds of Artists: A Critical Edition of the Earliest Ottoman Text about the Calligraphers and Painters of the Islamic World, Leiden: Brill. 5 Reviews that explicitly mentioned the Noble Prize in conjunction with My Name is Red include those by Richard Eder and Maureen Freely. This was a first for Pamuk, indicating his changed status from national to global author. See Freely, Maureen (August 27, 2001) “Novel of the Week: My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk,” New Statesman, 130: 41; Eder, Richard (September 2, 2001) “My Name is Red: Heresies of the Paintbrush,” New York Times Book Review. 6 The IMPAC Dublin literary award is one of the largest monetary awards for a single novel and the only one to recognize and award both author and translator as producers of the work. See Dublin City Public Libraries “International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.” Retrieved March 14, 2012, from http://www.impacdu blinaward.ie. 7 For a political reading of My Name is Red in conjunction with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, see Kadir, Djelal (2011) “The Siege of Baghdad: Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Orhan Pamuk, and the Commissions of History,” Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. 8 For more on the Ottoman Empire as participating in an early modern European context, see Goffman, Daniel (2002) The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 9 In The White Castle, the historical and allegorical mediation between Ottoman and Republican narrative times is accomplished through Darvınog˘ lu; in My Name is Red, such intertemporal mediation is more subtly accomplished through an implied reader. 10 Pamuk argues that a novel prefigures an “implied reader” (following Wolfgang Iser) as well as an “implied author.” His emphasis on the incarnation of the author here and elsewhere in the plot reveals a modernist rather than postmodernist literary orientation. (The “author” in Pamuk’s work is protected and reified rather than killed off.) See Pamuk, Orhan (2007) “The Implied Author,” Other Colors: Essays and a Story, New York, NY: Knopf. 11 Historians have made similar arguments regarding Ottoman historiography. See Brown, L. Carl, Ed. (1996) The Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East, New York, NY: Columbia University Press; Todorova, Maria (1997) Imagining the Balkans, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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12 For more on the Decline Paradigm, see Quataert, Donald (2003) “Ottoman History Writing and Changing Attitudes Towards the Notion of ‘Decline’,” History Compass 1: 1–10; Sajdi, Dana (2008) “Decline, Its Discontents, and Ottoman Cultural History: By Way of Introduction,” Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyles in the Eighteenth Century, London: I.B. Tauris. 13 Pamuk makes another iconic reference to twentieth-century Turkish literary modernity through an allusion to “the poet Blonde Nâzım of Ran.” (Pamuk also makes an explicit reference to Hikmet in Cevdet Bey and Sons and an implied one in The White Castle – to the “Encyclopedia of Famous Men.”) Here, the poet Nâzım Hikmet (who assumed the last name “Ran” in 1934) is recast as a writer of mystical mesnevi verse romances. The specific reference is to Nâzım Hikmet’s challenge, made in a poem, to the painter Abidin Dino to paint a “picture of happiness.” Hikmet warns him not to take the easy way out by depicting a mother and child. The happiness that is then conjured in the poem is the manifestation of socialist revolution. In My Name is Red, the image of happiness is indeed a “mother-and-child” depiction that conjures the sacredness of “Madonna and child” and the profane worldliness of Shekure standing in as Madonna with Orhan as the prophet-author as child. The picture of happiness is undercut by the incestuous Oedipal context (Shekure is also the name of Pamuk’s actual mother). Yet the revisionary work of Pamuk’s “third pen” is evident as it functions to separate image from text, rewrites the contextual story, and re-sacralizes it. Pamuk’s revolution, updating Hikmet’s, is one of literary reformulation. 14 As opposed to the text-based Ottoman archive represented in The White Castle, My Name is Red introduces a visual archive focused on miniatures. Both novels focus on literal and figurative “translations” of Ottoman texts into secular modern Turkish contexts. The White Castle, so to speak, translates from the Ottoman language to modern standard Turkish and My Name is Red, from illuminated manuscript image to modern literary idiom. In The White Castle, Pamuk’s use of translation to introduce a mystical context into the Republican literary field finds its corollary in My Name is Red, through the adaptation, or “translation,” of illumination as a modern textual form. Instead of sacralizing a Republican secular field through translation (as in The White Castle), Pamuk secularizes the sacredness of Islamic scribal arts in My Name is Red. From the perspective of Republican secular modernity, the former is blasphemous, whereas from the perspective of Ottoman Islamic orthodoxy, the latter is blasphemous. 15 In The White Castle, Pamuk sacralizes secular narrative contexts through translation/ writing that emerges out of an Ottoman archive. In My Name is Red, relying on a “third pen,” Pamuk in effect secularizes a sacred context through, as it were, “painting in words.” 16 The Qur’an, the sacred book, is set in opposition to this profane secret book being overseen by Enishte Effendi with the Sultan’s patronage. The first murder victim, a devotee of the imam from Erzurum, is a guilder and calligrapher, and takes a higher moral ground than the illuminator who has killed him. The opposition of the two pens is dramatized through these characters. 17 However, the murderer and master miniaturist who has absconded with the pages of the book attempts and fails to make a portrait of himself in place of the Sultan. This failure of illustration, like Black’s failure of inscription, is an intentional commentary on the absence of innovative or “modern” artistry. Pamuk’s literary modernity compensates for the absence. 18 For more on the domain of the text see the classic texts: Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; Barthes, Roland (1977) “The Death of the Author,” The Death and Resurrection of the Author?, Edited by William Irwin, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

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19 The realism of the “Ottoman style” is reflected in the subject matter of Master Osman’s pictures in the Book of Festivities. That the images depict real events is emphasized over and over again in the plot. See, also, Atıl, Esin (1980) “The Art of the Book,” Turkish Art, Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. In this chapter, Atıl states that the greatest contribution of the Ottoman workshop was a characteristically Ottoman genre: “illustrated histories of the empire documenting events with historic personages and actual locations” (p. 140). 20 For more on the intertextuality of Islamic miniature painting and storytelling, see de Bruijn, Petra (2006–7) “Bihzad Meets Bellini: Islamic Miniature Painting and Storytelling as Intertextual Devices in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red,” Persica 21: 9–32. 21 See also Enishte’s description of murals in Venetian palazzos: Pamuk, Orhan (2002) “I Am Your Beloved Uncle,” My Name is Red, New York, NY: Vintage International, pp. 22–27. 22 For more on the concept of the “material unconscious,” see Brown, William (1997) The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 23 Pamuk’s technique of doubling first- and third-person points of view first appears in The White Castle, in which “I” and “he” are literally doubles. 24 This act is necessary to manuscript/novel production. The murderer in My Name is Red both desires and eschews innovation in style. His motivation for killing Enishte Effendi is a combination of self-doubt and the revelation that his aesthetic past will not persist in any meaningful way but will be lost to history due to a host of political and social forces – as one style gradually replaces another. The murderer’s motive for killing Elegant Effendi is based on a slanderous accusation: Elegant Effendi claims the murderer’s participation in creating the secret book is blasphemous. The murderer has two victims: he kills one for being overly bound to Eastern tradition and one for being too slavish to Western innovation. Much like Pamuk himself, the murderer tries to juxtapose, synthesize, or transcend both poles. Once these obstacles are out of the way, the murderer moves on to the real task at hand: trying (and failing) to depict himself, in an aesthetic experiment with portraiture. Pamuk’s own “mixed style” in Turkish reveals his response to the presence of a number of stylistic forms: mix them as if you were mixing colors to produce an unusual hue. 25 For more on the life and work of Halide Edib, see Durakbas ¸a, Ays¸e (2000) Halide . . Edib: Türk Modernles¸mesi ve Feminizm, Istanbul: Iletis¸im; Enginün, Inci (2007) Halide Edib Adıvar’ın Eserlerinde Dog˘ u ve Batı Meselesi, Istanbul: Dergah; Hasan, Mushirul (2010) Between Modernity and Nationalism: Halide Edip’s Encounter with . Gandhi’s India, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Iz, Fahı-r (2012 [1977]) “K _ha-lide Edıb,” Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition. Retrieved January 23, 2012, from http:// www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_SIM-4153. 26 For a general overview of the themes of her work from a Turkish perspective, see Bekirog˘ lu (1999). 27 This exile is often described as being “self-imposed.” This is a highly ironic descriptor that ignores the forces of patriarchy and state power. 28 Adıvar, Halide Edib (1924) The Shirt of Flame, New York, NY: Duffield & Co.; Adıvar, Halide Edib (1926) Memoirs of Halide Edib, New York, NY: The Century Co.; Adıvar, Halide Edib (1928) The Turkish Ordeal, New York, NY: The Century Co.; Adıvar, Halide Edib (1930) Turkey Faces West: A Turkish Viewpoint of Recent Changes and Their Origin, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Adıvar, Halide Edib (1935) Conflict of East and West in Turkey, Lahore: S.M. Ashraf; Adıvar, Halide Edib (1935) The Clown and His Daughter, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd; Adıvar, Halide Edib (1937) Inside India, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd; Adıvar, Halide Edib (1953) Masks or Souls?, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

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29 See, for example, Sırman, Nükhet (2000) “Writing the Usual Love Story: The Fashoning of Conjugal and National Subjects in Turkey,” Gender, Agency, and Change: Anthropological Perspectives, Victoria Goddard, Ed., London: Routledge. 30 See Kurzman, Charles (2002) Modernist Islam 1840–1940: A Sourcebook, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 31 The following quote from The Turkish Ordeal demonstrates the level of Halide Edib’s critique in her English memoirs. Such critical quotes have been censored from all Turkish versions: “Take any man from the street who is shrewd, selfish, and utterly unscrupulous, give him the insistence and histrionics of a hysterical woman who is willing to employ any wile to satisfy her inexhaustible desires, then view him through the largest magnifying glass you can find – and you’ll see Mustafa Kemal Pasha [Atatürk]” (Edib, Halide (1928) The Turkish Ordeal, New York, NY: The Century Co., p. 185). 32 The novel is such a part of Turkish popular culture that not only a film adaptation (1967), but in 2007–8 a short-lived and updated mini-series based on the novel introduced the work to new audiences. The series was suddenly canceled after five episodes due to representations of the imam character that were deemed overly negative. See Altuntas¸, Birsen (January 22, 2008) “Takke Krizi ‘Sinekli Bakkal’i Kapattı!” Retrieved March 16, 2012, from http://www.milliyet.com.tr/2008/01/22/yasam/ayas.html. 33 See Smith, Margaret (2010 [1928]) Rabi’a the Mystic and Her Fellow-Saints in Islam: Being the Life and Teachings of Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya Al-Qaysiyya of Basra Together with Some Account of the Place of the Women Saints in Islam, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 34 Parallel tropes of patriarchal control and gender are analyzed in Turkish literature in an important volume edited by Jale Parla and Sibel Irzık. See Irzık, Sibel and Jale Parla (2004) Kadınlar Dile Düs¸ünce: Edebiyat ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet, Istanbul: . Iletis¸im. The book’s title contains the following literal and figurative meanings: “When Women Fall into Language” or “When Women Become the Subject of Gossip.” 35 For more on women, nationalism, and literature in the Turkish context, see Kandiyoti, Deniz (1988) “Slave Girls, Temptresses and Comrades,” Feminist Issues 8(1): 35–50; Kandiyoti, Deniz (1989) “Women as Metaphor: The Turkish Novel from the Tanzimat to the Republic,” Urban Crises and Social Movements in the Middle East, Kenneth Brown, Ed.: Paris: L’Harmattan; Kandiyoti, Deniz (1991) “End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism, and Women in Turkey,” Women, Islam and the State, Deniz Kandiyoti, Ed., Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press; Kandiyoti, Deniz (1991) “Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Millennium 20(2): 429–43. 36 Critics such as Yıldız Ecevit and Azade Seyhan conclude that Turkish literary formations are often modern and postmodern at one and the same time. In addition to the use of such hybrid terms (“modern-postmodern”), this study argues that what is being described constitutes another category of analysis entirely, reflected in terms such as “postsecularism” and “postorientalism.” In the scope of this chapter, these latter terms would describe the work of both Halide Edib and Pamuk. See Ecevit, . Yıldız (2001) Türk Romanında Postmodernist Açılımlar, Cag˘ alog˘ lu, Istanbul: Iletis¸im; Seyhan, Azade (2008) Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context, New York, NY: Modern Language Association. 37 See Prakash, G. (1990) “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32(2): 383–408; Dabashi (2008) Post-orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. 5 Political Parody from Coups to Conspiracies 1 From the diary of Antoine Roquentin. Sartre’s existential “nausea” describes a recurring condition for many of Pamuk’s characters including Refik, Faruk, Galip, Black, Ka,

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Osman, and Kemal. Arguably, this is a condition brought about by the ideology of Turkish secular modernity. For the purposes of this study, it is a defining characteristic of what I term “homo secularis” and can be traced throughout the Turkish novel. Spoken by Kirilov before he commits suicide in The Possessed. The New Life represents Pamuk’s archival mode of writing in two respects. First, the novel itself is an archive of now disappearing objects produced in the Republic, including the “new life” itself, which is the national life as well as a brand of caramel. Second, Osman accesses Dr. Narin’s “archive” of clandestine spy reports submitted by hired agents who are trailing his wayward son Mehmet. In this fashion, Osman is able to do the detective work of piecing together the transformations of “Nahit/Mehmet,” who has lost himself to the book. Furthermore, Dr. Narin has made a museum of archival material in memory of the “Nahit” phase of his son’s life. The museum and archive reveal Dr. Narin’s obsession with his son, whom he believes should follow the authority of (ethnoreligious) tradition. The most recent and on-going manifestation of this phenomenon is the development of a “counter-coup” by the religious-leaning AK Party government. Known as “Ergenekon,” in this inversion, the secular-military establishment has been targeted as masterminding a conspiracy to topple the governing conservative Muslim AK Party. As such, widespread arrests also double as an opportunity for silencing secular political opposition in the press. For a historical documentary survey of Turkish military coups, see Savas¸, Elif (2000) COUP/DARBE: A Documentary History of the Turkish Military Interventions: 158 min. For a general introduction to conspiracy theories, see McConnachie, James and Robin Tudge, Eds. (2005) The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories, New York, NY: Rough Guides. The New Life holds the record for being one of the fastest-selling novels in Turkish history, selling over . 170,000 copies in six months (Pamuk, Orhan (1994) Yeni Hayat, Istanbul: Iletis¸im). Despite this, the novel is considered to be one of Pamuk’s most difficult, giving rise to the need for commentaries to explain his transformations in literary modernity to a broader Turkish readership. Addressing this need were two books published in the novel’s wake: Yıldız Ecevit’s Reading Orhan Pamuk in 1996 and the edited volume Understanding Orhan Pamuk, issued by his publisher in 1999. See Ecevit, Yıldız (1996) Orhan Pamuk’u Okumak, Istanbul: Gerçek; Kılıç, Engin, Ed. (1999) Orhan Pamuk’u . Anlamak, Istanbul: Iletis¸im. Second editions of both volumes were subsequently published. Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) is the influential forefather of cultural Turkism based in a Durkheim-influenced social engineering. His notion of the “new life” was a new Turkish national life, somewhat less severe than Kemalism. He wrote a book of poems entitled The New Life in 1918 and his ideas were influential in Turkish modernization. The allusion to Rilke’s angels is quite evident. The famous line, “Every Angel is terrifying” from the Duino Elegies appears in the novel and alludes to angels as bearing the mystical potential for transformation and change that is beyond our human conception; they are both alluring and abhorrent. Pamuk uses a similar figuration of the Angel throughout the novel. See Rilke, Rainer Maria (trans. Stephen Mitchell) (2009 [1923]) Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, New York, NY: Vintage International. Such an assassination of the author occurs in The Black Book as well. Chillingly, it is a fate narrowly avoided by Pamuk himself (see Introduction). Like the figure of the “engineer” in Republican literature, the figure of the “doctor” represents Enlightenment positivism and the ideals of secular nationalism and Kemalism.

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12 Another parodic novel of Turkish modernity is Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute, a satire of the Kemalist Cultural Revolution through the account of a state institute of “time” synchronization. 13 An interesting aside here is that Osman’s first-person narrative as a “reader” reveals the author-figure “Orhan.” These are also the names of the first two Ottoman sultans who established the Ottoman state in the fourteenth century. 14 Gökalp could be considered a Turkish version of other nationalist ideologues such as Theodor Herzl. 15 “Zebercet” literally means chrysolite, a gem resembling an emerald. The crystallization of “greenness” can be read symbolically as the petrification of Islam (and the sacred and the redemptive), as green is the color of Islam. 16 See also Ahmet Midhat (1887) Bes¸ir Fuad, Istanbul: Tercüman-ı Hakikat Matbaası; . Okay, M. Orhan (1969) Bes¸ir Fuad: Ilk Türk Pozitivist ve Natüralisti, Istanbul: Hareket; Haniog˘ lu, M. S¸ükrü (2005) “Blueprints for a Future Society: Late Ottoman Materialists on Science, Religion and Art,” Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy, Elisabeth Özdalga, Ed., London: RoutledgeCurzon. 17 For background on Atılgan’s .life and work, see Yüksel, Turan, Ed. (1992) Yusuf Atılgan’a Armag˘ an, Istanbul: Iletis¸im. 18 Local films such as Yilmaz Guney’s Yol and Duvar articulate the theme of the “third-world” nation as a site of incarceration, as do American films such as Midnight Express. For more on tropes of incarceration, see Harper, Graeme, Ed. (2001) Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration, New York, NY: Continuum. 19 Both novels have been included in the Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics series, complete with chronologies and introductions. My Name is Red was included in this series in 2010 and Snow in 2011. 20 The Welfare Party (Refah), led by Necmettin Erbakan, was outlawed by the constitutional court in 1998. This party is mistranslated as the “Prosperity Party” in the English version of the novel. 21 For Pamuk, snow is a material and mystical symbol of transformation. It is contrasted to Melville’s well-known quote on the whiteness of snow: “But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul. … Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” (Melville, Herman (1851) “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Moby Dick; or, The Whale, New York: Harper & Brothers, p. 216). 22 Perhaps one of the paradigmatic misreadings of the novel is made by Christopher Hitchens in his review published in The Atlantic (see Conclusion). Hitchens, Christopher (October 2004) “Mind the Gap: Turkey is Everyone’s Idea of a ‘Successful’ Modern Muslim state. A New Novel Will Make You Think Twice,” The Atlantic. Retrieved January 25, 2012, from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ 2004/10/mind-the-gap/3487. 23 For more on state feminism and the veil in the Turkish and Middle Eastern contexts, see Göle, Nilüfer (1997) The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press; Scott, Joan (2007) The Politics of the Veil, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Ahmed, Leila (2011) A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence from the Middle East to America, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 24 Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904–83) was a Republican secular poet who turned to faith and Sufism. 25 Didactic scenes of Sufism are a common theme in early Republican literature. For example, in novels like Yakup Kadri Karaosmanog˘ lu’s Nur Baba and Res¸at Nuri Güntekin’s Yes¸il Gece, Sufism is portrayed as an anti-modern, anti-secular system

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of exploitation in which men prey on women or deceive their followers. This literary understanding is in keeping with the political and ideological orientation of the cultural revolution. In Pamuk’s work, scenes of Sufism assume an increasingly nuanced meaning. Sufism enters the content of Pamuk’s fiction with his fourth novel, The Black Book, and appears in the next three novels, The New Life, My Name is Red, and Snow as a thematic and structural element. (The narrative structure that places an absent text at the center of the novel is also part of The White Castle and The Museum of Innocence, though these novels do not directly allude to Sufism per se.) Of Pamuk’s eight novels, six incorporate this mystical/Sufi theme. 6 Novelizing Secular Sufism 1 Spoken by Kemal, the protagonist of The Museum of Innocence obsessed with objects having to do with his beloved Füsun. . 2 Spoken by the character Suad in conversation with Ihsan in A Mind at Peace. 3 For more on early Turkish mystical literature see, for example, Köprülü, Mehmed Fuad (trans. Robert Dankoff and Gary Leiser) (2006 [1918]) Early Mystics in Turkish Literature, London: Routledge. 4 The White Castle is, among other things, a tale of unrequited love. This tense, homoerotic relationship between an “Easterner” and a “Westerner” argues that the distinctions between them are purely constructed. The Ottoman Hoja desires a “union” of intellect and identity with the Venetian slave. The union remains textual, a written account of their relationship, as they seemingly switch places and separate. In the last chapter, however, Pamuk uses the capitalized third-person pronouns “He/Him” to refer to a mystified figure that might be either the Hoja or the slave, but is actually both. That is, their separation makes their previous identities indeterminate. Thus, Pamuk achieves a new authorial perspective, a mystical point of view that serves as the surrogate for a state of union with the beloved. This is one example of Pamuk’s paradoxical theme of “secular Sufism.” The failed, secularist historian Darvınog˘ lu finds redemptive value in “translating” what is essentially a Sufi tale of realizing the self through the other. 5 My Name is Red is also structured by a lover and beloved frame between Black and Shekure. The trials Black withstands in order to unite with Shekure enable the literary analysis of the cultural history of Ottoman miniatures. This, however, is a story of requited love as the lovers do reunite in the end. Pamuk describes this novel as his most optimistic as a result. 6 For various critical interpretations of the . novel, see Esen, Nüket, Ed. (2009 [1996]) Kara Kitap Üzerine Yazılar, Istanbul: Iletis¸im. 7 For more on Beauty and Love, see Holbrook, Victoria Rowe (1994) The Unreadable Shores of Love: Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press; Galip, S¸eyh (trans. Victoria Holbrook) (2005) Beauty and Love, New York, NY: MLA. 8 Pamuk’s screenplay, The Hidden Face (Kavur, Ömer (1991) Gizli Yüz, Istanbul: Palermo) follows the same pattern of secular Sufisim: an account of unrequited love out of which self-realization (and the ability to “tell one’s own story”) emerges. The screenplay was published in. 1992 but was never translated into English. See Pamuk, Orhan (1991) Gizli Yüz, Istanbul: Can Yayınları. 9 For example, in The White Castle, this is awareness of the novel’s narrator. In My Name is Red, it is awareness of the “reader.” 10 For more on the green pen in the plot of .the novel, see Parla, Jale (2011) Türk Romanında Yazar ve Bas¸kalas¸ım, Istanbul: Iletis¸im. 11 For an example of argumentation about the political tenor of postmodern literature which was published about the time of The Black Book, see Hutcheon, Linda (1990) The Politics of Postmodernism, London: Routledge.

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12 Most of Pamuk’s characters are secular Republican professionals and are products of secular modern institutions. This would include the engineers of Cevdet Bey and Sons, the historian of The White Castle, the lawyer and journalist of The Black Book, the engineering, architecture, and medical school students of The New Life, and the journalist/poet of Snow. These are mainly characters, however, that undergo a mystical transformation in the course of the novel. The exceptions would be the Muslim businessman Cevdet Bey and the historical characters in Pamuk’s Ottoman novels The White Castle and My Name is Red. This latter group serves a related but separate function of articulating contexts of Muslim tradition in the Republican present. 13 See also Weiss, Timothy (2004) “Borges’s Search or the Bibliophilic Orient,” Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 14 See, for example, L. Lewisohn, shortened by the editors; Zarcone, Th., Hunwick, J.O., Ernst, C., Jong, F. de, Massignon, L.-B. Radtke; Aubin, Françoise. (2012) “Tas.awwuf (a.),” Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition. Retrieved January 23, 2012, from http://www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_COM-1188. 15 See also Schimmel, Annemarie (1975) Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 16 Many of these Sufi ideas are conveyed through classical and modern literary texts. Pamuk plays with the opposition of fena and beka in The New Life. He seems to be influenced by Rilke and Henri Corbin’s work in this regard. In Sufism and Deconstruction, Ian Almond demonstrates the congruence between the Sufi philosophy of Ibn Arabi and the literary critical approach of Derridian deconstruction. In both cases, Almond identifies the “secret of the non-secret,” which he argues is termed sirr in the Sufi case and “erasure” in the Derridian case. By extension, the intersection of these two systems of thought, and the notion of the “secret of the non-secret” is evident in Pamuk’s novels (particularly in The Black Book and The New Life). Elsewhere, Almond also cites the work of Borges as another example of the literary confluence of Islamic mystical tradition and literary innovation, which he says approaches “post-orientalism.” See Almond, Ian (2010) Sufism and Deconstruction: A Comparative Study of Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi, London: Routledge. 17 It is also the subject of the award-winning film 10 to 11: Esmer, Pelin (2009) 10 to 11, Turkey: Sinefilm: 110 mins. 18 Seyhan identifies The Black Book as a “Borgesian Encyclopedia.” 19 This is the core story of Yasar Kemal’s Iron Earth, Copper Sky, discussed in Chapter 2. See Kemal, Yas¸ar (1963) Yer Demir, Gök Bakır, Istanbul: Can Yayınları. 20 For more on Rumi’s Mesnevi, see commentary included in Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı’s Turkish translation: Gölpınarlı, Abdülbaki, Ed. (1973) Mesnevi Tercümesi ve . S¸erhi, Istanbul: Inkılap. 21 As obsessed readers of Celâl’s columns, Üçüncü and Galip are doubles. Both are at the crime scene, and either could be the perpetrator. . 22 The book is reminiscent of Ismayıl Hakkı Baltacıog˘ lu’s 1958 text Türkler’de Yazı Sanatı. The text is addressed in Ertürk, Nergis (2011) Grammatology and Turkish Literary Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 23 For an overview of the Hurufi sect, see Bashir, Shahzad (2005) Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis, Oxford: Oneworld. 24 In terms of literary representation, the Istanbul of Cevdet Bey and Sons and the Istanbul of The Black Book are two different cities. The former is simply a historical stage in the transition from Empire to Republic and the latter a living entity that produces and revises history, identity, and text. One is a passive backdrop, the other has productive agency. 25 Chapters of the memoir intersect with Pamuk’s novels. The “First Love” chapter, for example, not only elucidates the last chapter of Cevdet Bey and Sons, it is also a

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condensed facsimile of the star-crossed love story that constitutes Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace. This parallels the two opposing “faces” of Allah as cemal (or beautiful) and celal (or stern). The unstated response to hüzün is huzur, as Tanpınar implies in his work. “Huzur” both means a state of “solace” or “repose” as well as “presence,” as being in the presence of the “beloved” or Allah. His constant depictions of Turkish history as being one of defeat and poverty reflect this position. The same attitude appears in Snow with respect to Kars and in other nonfiction pieces such as “The Anger of the Damned.” See Pamuk, Orhan (October 18, 2001) “The Anger of the Damned,” New York Review of Books. Retrieved April 2, 2012, from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2001/nov/ 15/the-anger-of-the-damned/?pagination=false. Though acknowledging his Turkish mentors in this way, Pamuk cannot refrain from belittling them. He might insinuate that they are naïve in their nationalism, imprecise in their methods, incomplete in their execution, or even simply impoverished, failed, and unacknowledged in their time. Assuming the tone of the modernizers he parodies elsewhere, Pamuk concludes that “The downfall of all four melancholy writers was the authors’ ultimate inability to be western” (Pamuk 2005a: 169). These authors do, however, constitute an important segment of the memoir, whose English publication appeared in 2004, before the Nobel award. Post-Nobel, Pamuk distances himself from this influence and association to the Istanbul tradition, as can be gauged by the English version of Other Colors from which mention of all Turkish authors (included in the Turkish version) has been excised. See Pamuk, Orhan (trans. Maureen Freely) (2007) Other Colors: Essays and a Story, New York, NY: Knopf.

Conclusion: The Blasphemies of “Turning Turk” 1 Spoken by the character of the Mufti to the Christian privateer Dansiker before the latter commits suicide. See Vitkus, Daniel (2003) Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 157. 2 This, in the first order, places “Turk” under erasure; Turk is variously an ethnicity, an intimation of Islam, an origin (Central Asia, nomadic, tribal); it can be traced back and multiplied until it becomes an empty signifier, a discursive formation, a place holder. Then the object-of-study, emptied of meaning, only signifies instrumentally as part of a formula or cultural economy. My interest here is in tracing a trope of conversion through texts. This process reveals that the national tradition marks a boundary or horizon that has witnessed a history of regular transgressions, confinements, and betrayals. 3 Said states: “Contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded” (Said 1993: 66). 4 I rely on an understanding of “cultural translation” taken from the field of Cultural Anthropology. Both Clifford Geertz, whose notion of “thick description” was later adapted by Appiah in his articulation of “thick translation” and Talal Asad’s understanding of maintaining elements of the foreign in textual representations of other cultures mediated by unequal languages contribute the concept as used in this essay. See Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2000 [1993]) “Thick Translation,” The Translation Studies Reader, L. Venuti, Ed., London: Routledge; Asad, Talal (1986) “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, James Clifford and George Marcus, Eds, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 5 This term brings mechanization and instrumentalization together with the label and orientalist image of “Turk.” The “Mechanical Turk” was an eighteenth-century

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hoax: ostensibly a machine constructed out of a turbaned mannequin that seemed to play chess. A hidden enclosure concealed a man who actually played as puppet master. In short, the “Turk” appears to act with agency, but is controlled by other means. 6 Critics in Turkey that have labeled Pamuk an “orientalist,” such as Hilmi Yavuz, are also misreading him, from the scope of essentializations of nativist perspective. Both sides fail to see that Pamuk’s intervention in literature is squarely postorientalist. He is not articulating the “cultural logic of colonialism” as Said defines orientalism. He is appropriating orientalist structures such as East/West and “othering” in order to dismantle them. His work verges into themes of postcolonial criticism, including third spaces, mimicry, and the divided self. As one obvious example, The White Castle is nothing if not a dramatized deconstruction of orientalist thought. 7 For an analysis of this phenomenon, see Michelangelo, Guida (2008) “The Sèvres Syndrome and ‘Kompo’ Theories in the Islamist and Secular Press,” Turkish Studies 9(1): 37–52. In his review of Snow, Hitchens postulates that the novel’s protagonist Ka stands for perhaps “Kemal Atatürk” or “Kurds” and “Armenians.” A lurching interpretation, it does nevertheless succinctly demonstrate how the contemporary Turkish subject is invested and overwritten with essentialized secondary political discourses. In this case, Ka, living in the 1990s, has been cast not only as an embodiment of the logic of the Treaty of Sèvres, but of the Treaty of Lausanne as well! 8 Edib had been a member of the Wilsonian Principles Society after World War I.

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Index

9/11 147 A Tragedy in Kars 186, 203–4 Abdülhamid II 42, 54, 56, 141, 152, 153, 263n11, 276n3 ‘Abd’ur Rahman Jami 153 Abou-El-Haj, Rifa’at Ali 276n2 absent text: The Black Book (Pamuk) 217, 223, 274n28; Cevdet Bey and Sons (Pamuk) 268n49, 274n28; Misfits (Atay) 45, 205, 206–7; The Museum of Innocence (Pamuk) 198, 240, 281n25; The New Life (Pamuk) 43, 168–72, 173, 180, 274n28; The Silent House (Pamuk) 268n52, 274n28; Snow (Pamuk) 44, 180, 184, 198, 204; The White Castle (Pamuk) 92, 104–5, 123–24, 198, 274n28, 281n25, 282n25 Adıvar see Edib, Halide afterword, false 111–12 Agamben, Giorgio 208 Ag˘ aog˘ lu, Adalet: Lying Down to Die 124 Ahmad, Aijaz 160 AK Party (Justice and Development Party) 5, 6, 20, 253n17, 256n11, 280n4 Aladdin 212, 216 Âlî, Mustafa 275n43 Ali, Sabahattin 21 Allah 148, 190–91, 198, 234, 284n27; absence of 110; as Al-Ha-liq, the Creator 137, 140; death of 74–75, 120; mystical symbol for 149; opposing “faces” of 284n26; separation from 230; and Sufism 110, 220

allegory 172–74 Almond, Ian 219, 283n16 al-t.abarı- 136 Amir-Moezzi, Mohammad Ali 224 Anadol. 269n61 Anar, Ihsan Oktay 271n4 Andrews, Walter 213 angel figure 169, 172–73, 174, 180, 280n9 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 284n4 Apter, Emily 246–47 archival mode of writing 35, 127, 280n3; see also Ottoman archive Armenians 36, 54, 234, 249, 254n4, 264n17, 265n31, 285n7; ethnic cleansing of 4–5, 19; and nationalism 199 art of the book 131, 132–50 Article 301–1 Turkish Penal Code 5, 19, 21, 249, 252n5, 254n2 Asad, Talal 19, 22, 28–29, 243, 244, 284n4 assassination: as literary theme 7, 43, 46, 48, 172, 193–94, 201, 202, 205, 207, 208, 216, 225, 261n55, 280n10; Pamuk 1, 5, 6, 7 Astarabadi, Fazlallah 211, 223, 226 Atay, Og˘ uz 11, 34, 35, 47, 87, 113, 165, 191, 194, 211, 215, 255n11, 258n35; “disconnectus erectus” 207; influences 183, 259n36; Pamuk on 205; in translation 247; turning Turk 250 Atay, Og˘ uz, Misfits 11, 34, 45, 124, 167, 169, 172, 183, 261n51; absent text 45, 205, 206–7; metafiction 45, 113, 167, 204–7; encyclopedia trope 45, 205, 206–7; false preface 206;

300

Index

literary modernities 167; parodic mode 204–207, 258n35; redemption 45, 167, 206; social realism 45, 183 atheism 37, 75, 120, 181, 183, 185, 189–94, 199–200, 201, 203–4, 261n1, 281n21 Atıl, Esin: “The Art of the Book” 278n19 Atılgan, Yusuf 11, 32, 34, 47, 165, 191, 194, 205, 206, 215, 258n34; influences 259n36; in translation 247; turning Turk 250 Atılgan, Yusuf works: An Idle Man 167 Motherland Hotel 11, 44, 45, 124, 261n51; existential crisis 34, 45, 167, 181–83, 211; secular modernity 181–83 Attar, Feriddun: The Conference of the Birds 220, 226 author: author-as-victim 48, 261n55; author-intellectuals 34, 67, 69, 71, 139, 187, 250, 267n47; birth of 52, 100, 225–27; death-of-the-author 14, 109, 172, 202–3, 225, 227, 245; implied 276n10; and nation state 260n43; polemics of 14 author-as-victim 48, 261n55 author-figure 14, 45, 52, 68, 69, 100, 130–32, 138, 148, 162, 198, 205, 211, 226, 227, 241, 243, 245, 275n36; The Black Book (Pamuk) 130, 137, 138, 239, 205, 241, 280n10; Cevdet Bey and Sons (Pamuk) 131, 264n15, 266n42, 273n20; The Museum of Innocence (Pamuk) 111, 130, 131, 197, 238, 239; My Name is Red (Pamuk) 130, 148, 162, 239; The New Life (Pamuk) 111, 130, 177, 180, 205, 239; Orhan Pamuk as 45, 111–12, 130, 131, 137, 138, 177, 185, 189, 190, 196, 197, 204, 238, 239, 281n13; Snow (Pamuk) 111, 130–31, 185, 192, 196, 197, 206, 239; The White Castle (Pamuk) 52, 111–12, 239 author-intellectuals 34, 67, 69, 71, 139, 187, 250, 267n47 authorship and writing 12, 22, 23, 34–35, 37–38, 45, 48–49, 52, 67, 78 Aydemir, S.evket Süreyya: I_nkılâp ve Kadro 266n40

Bab-ı Âli coup 166, 253n16 Bacon, Francis 196 Baltacıog˘ lu, Ismayil Hakkı: Türkler’de Yazı Sanatı 283n22 Balzac, Honoré de 263n11, 267n47 Barkey, Karen 32. 158 Barthes, Roland 1, 14 Barth, John 217 Bate, Jonathan 244 Battle of Lepanto 103, 273n27 Baudelaire, Charles 116 Beethoven, Ludwig van 116 Berkes, Niyazi 27, 178: The Development of Secularism in Turkey 256n20 berzah (or barzakh) 138, 147–50 Bhabha, Homi 260n43; Nation and Narration 271n9 bildungsroman 113, 153; see also Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman birth of the author 52, 100; and secular Sufism 225–27 blackness, as signifier 145, 213, 215, 225, 227 blasphemy 7, 13, 41, 48, 59, 181, 221,223, 244, 256n4; book as 132–50; and secular criticism 244–45 Borges, Jorge Luis 38, 46, 168, 210, 216, 218–19, 220, 222, 225, 230, 236, 255n6, 283n16 Bosphorus 216 Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights 198 Brown, Bill: A Sense of Things 141; material unconscious 142, 143–44, 175, 216 Brown, Carl 39, 94 Burton, Antoinette 77 Burton, Robert 230 Byatt, A.S. 236, 257n6 Calvino, Italo 218, 219, 236, 255n6; Castle of Crossed Destinies 270n62 captive’s tales 30–40, 81, 92, 102–5, 106, 108, 109, 127, 129, 237, 243, 267n46, 272n18, 273n24, 273n25, 274n30; Cervantes’ “The Captive’s Tale” 103–4, 273n25, 275n35 Casanova, José 28 Casanova, Pascale 23; The World Republic of Letters 251, 260n43

Index Çelebi, Evliya 80–81, 91, 156, 270n63, 272n12, 275n43 Çelebi, Evliya, Seyahatname 80–81, 84, 270n63; din ü devlet 105–6; Ottoman cosmopolitanism 105–6; social realism 80, 81, 84 Çelebi, Katip 272n12, 275n43 Cervantes 91, 106, 111, 123: Don Quixote 102, 103, 267n46, 272n14, 273n25; “The Captive’s Tale” 103–4, 273n25, 275n35 Chatterjee, Partha 158–59; The Nation and its Fragments 160 Chesterton, G.K. 216 Christian imagery 275n42 city: and hüzün 227–30, 232–233; fetishizing 234–35; as labyrinth 217; and nation 22, 53, 125, 179, 209, 232, 233–34; and nation-state 233, 234; synthesis in 114–17, 124 CNN-Turk 5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 235 collecting 236 collective memory 55, 58, 76, 85, 115, 118, 228 colonialism 7, 33, 57, 60–61, 95, 176, 224, 232, 258n29, 262n5, 264n19, 274n29, 280n4, 285n6 conspiracy and coup 1, 11–12, 162, 165, 201, 209, 234, 241, 274n29; The Black Book (Pamuk) 43, 44, 166, 167–72, 195, 209, 225, 261n49; Cevdet Bey and Sons (Pamuk) 43, 63–66, 84, 166, 208, 265n34; and melodrama 183–86; The Museum of Innocence (Pamuk) 209, 261n49; My Name is Red (Pamuk) 43, 166; The New Life (Pamuk) 11, 43–44, 94, 166, 167, 168–69, 174–77, 199, 201, 203, 208, 209, 237, 252n6; postmodern 5, 43, 63, 183, 187, 253n16, 261n49; The Silent House (Pamuk) 37, 43, 71, 91, 166, 168; Snow (Pamuk) 11, 24, 43, 44, 63, 94, 95, 166, 167, 177, 180, 183–86, 187–88, 189–90, 194–95, 197, 199–203, 208, 209; The White Castle (Pamuk) 43, 130, 166, 173, 261n49; see also Ergenekon conspiracy constitutional revolution (1908) see “Young Turk” revolution (1908)

301

conversion 13, 39, 42, 59–60, 61, 85, 86, 87, 103, 104–5, 106, 108–9, 111, 123. 130, 151, 153, 189–94, 199, 201, 208, 243, 260n47, 262n6; as metaphor 157–59, 244; and modernity 25, 34, 51, 52, 60, 84, 157–59, 184, 186, 258n35; partial 124–25; see also turning Turk Corbin, Henri 283n16 counter-archive of Istanbul 10, 122–24, 125 counter-conspiracy 5, 6, 11, 44, 166, 169, 170, 172, 174–77, 201, 252n6 counter-coup 253n17, 261n49, 280n4 coup see conspiracy and coup cultural revolution 11, 26, 27–28, 30, 33, 34, 36, 39, 44, 51, 54, 68, 71, 73; 85, 92, 93, 158, 186–87, 229, 251, 263n11, 263n13, 264n18, 265n33, 271n7, 274n31, 272n25; dwarfing 75–76; and secular modernity 57–63, 84, 101, 107, 114, 116, 118, 157, 223–25, 226, 258n35, 174n19, 274n29; Turkist 108, 244; see also Kemalist cultural revolution cultural translation 41, 87, 106, 244, 245–50, 263n10, 272n11, 284n4 Cumhuriyet 21, 184 cura 237 Dabashi, Hamid 160 Daborne, Robert 243 Dankoff, Robert 81; An Ottoman Mentality 105 Dante 171 darkness and light 53–54, 55–58, 62, 73, 215, 264n20, 266n40, 267n48, 274n31 Das Magazin 3 death-of-the-author 14, 109, 172, 202–3, 225, 227, 245 deep state 5, 184, 187, 189 Defoe, Daniel 50; Robinson Crusoe 86–87 DeLillo, Don 125 de Man, Paul: “Literary History and Literary Modernity” 255n8 Derrida, Jacques 14, 271n9, 277n18; Monolingualism 271n9 detective story 41, 134, 194, 226; as Sufi parable 216–18 devlet, definition of 244, 257n24; see also din ü devlet Dickens, Charles 228, 235

302

Index

din, definition of 257n24; see also din ü devlet din ü devlet 7, 8, 12, 13, 27, 30–35, 49, 128, 160, 168, 179, 210, 211, 240, 241, 244, 251, 257n25, 258n28; A Mind at Peace (Tanpınar) 116, 119–20, 122; The Black Book (Pamuk) 210, 213, 223; Cevdet Bey and Sons (Pamuk) 54, 57, 58–59, 62, 65, 85–87; The Clown and His Daughter (Edib) 150, 151–53, 157, 158; Iron Earth, Copper Sky (Kemal) 85–87; Istanbul: Memories and the City 231; My Fatherland or My Headscarf 187; My Name is Red (Pamuk) 126, 137, 141; The New Life (Pamuk) 172, 173, 175, 177; Seyahatname (Çelebi)105–6; The Silent House (Pamuk) 85–87; Snow (Pamuk) 184, 190, 191, 193, 200; The White Castle (Pamuk) 9, 53, 85–87, 97, 107, 108, 111, 122, 123, 126 Dink, Hrant 252n1 Dino, Abidin 268n49, 277n13 disciplinary readings 247, 262n6 “disconnectus erectus” 207 discourse of the Turk 11, 25, 104, 159, 249, 253n15 dissidence 7, 8, 14, 35, 64, 67, 83–84, 87, 96, 106, 122, 127, 160, 162, 198, 239, 247, 249, 250; the Kurds 44, 62, 83–84, 194, 266n40; as metafiction 204–7; Pamuk 4–5, 11, 19, 20–24, 28, 47–49, 53, 66, 162, 249 dissident modes of writing see archival mode; historiographic mode; parodic mode; secular-sacred mode divided self 33, 61, 95, 105, 115, 118, 232, 238, 265n33, 285n6 Dostoyevsky, Fydor 165, 168, 255n6, 267n47, 275n40; The Possessed 181; The Underground Man 198 doubles and doppelgängers 95, 189, 191, 204, 208, 219, 221, 222, 250; The White Castle (Pamuk) 105–8, 198, 239, 273n24, 278n23 Durkheim, Émile 261n50 Dyce, Alexander 244 East–West dichotomy 33, 37, 46, 53, 61–62, 75, 94, 113, 115–16, 119, 126, 149, 153, 180, 211, 121, 221, 226, 230–31, 233, 241, 251, 258n28, 267n47, 278n24, 282n4, 285n6

Ecevit, Yıldız 254n5: Reading Orhan Pamuk 280n7; Türk Romanında Postmodernist Açılımlar 279n36 Eco, Umberto 168, 236, 255n6 Eder, Richard 276n5 Edib, Halide 10, 36, 42, 50, 141, 149–50, 178, 209, 211, 258n33, 258n34, 258n35, 275n42, 279n31, 279n36, 285; influences 259n36; in translation 247, 260n48; turning Turk 157–59 Edib, Halide: works 151–53, 278n28 The Shirt of Flame 26, 154, 158, 247 The Clown and His Daughter 10, 33, 42, 260n48; din ü devlet 150, 151–53, 157, 158; exchange and agency of women 154–55; gendering Ottoman modernity 150–59; material culture 42, 161; Mevlevî theme 152, 259n37; Ottoman legacy 150–62; postorientalism 159–62; storyteller (meddah) 155–57; secular sacred mode 153; Sufism and Orthodoxy 152–54; turning Turk 157–59 The Turkish Ordeal 279n31 Strike the Whore 58, 154 New Turan 154 Efendi, Ahmet Midhat 21 . Efendi, Ismail Dede 116 Eldem, Ethem 272n13 El Kindi 230 Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman 35–38, 51–53, 70, 83, 85, 94, 114, 129, 157, 159, 229, 230, 262n4, 263n8, 264n20, 264n23, 266n37, 267n47, 269n55, 284n24; A Mind at Peace (Tanpınar) 114, 118, 119; Cevdet Bey and Sons (Pamuk) 36, 52, 53–66, 68, 71, 76, 81–82, 86, 94, 263n12, 263n13, 264n20; historiographic mode 9, 25, 38, 39, 51–52, 67, 68, 70, 94, 119, 135, 259n41, 263n8; My Name is Red (Pamuk) 135–36; and the secularization thesis 51, 68, 72, 76, 153, 198, 209, 210, 264n20; The Silent House (Pamuk) 9, 37–38, 52, 71–83, 94, 264n20; “Young Turk” revolution (1908) 54–57 Encyclopedia of Famous Turks 206 Encyclopedia of Islam 136, 213, 224

Index encyclopedia trope 45, 74–75, 205, 206–7, 221–22, 234, 236, 268n49, 268n52, 274n28, 277n13 Enlightenment, the 52–53, 56, 61, 62, 74–75, 82, 132, 148, 196, 197, 206, 280n11 Erbakan, Necmettin 42, 184, 281n20 Ergenekon conspiracy 1, 5–7, 253n17, 280n4 Ernst, Carl 240 eschatology 138, 147–50 Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics series 132, 281n19 Evren, Kenan 175 existential crisis 11, 12, 43–44, 46, 121, 122, 179–80, 191, 210, 215–16, 226; Motherland Hotel (Atılgan) 43, 34, 45, 167, 181–83, 211 existentialism 30, 32, 34, 172, 173, 194, 206, 210 existential nausea 44, 181, 194, 279n1 Fanon, Frantz 185 Faroqhi, Suraiya 276n2 “father” metaphor 30 Faulkner, William 86, 254n6; As I Lay Dying 269n55; The Wild Palms 240 feminism 149–50, 154, 158, 159, 186, 189 Fikret, Tevfik 263n11, 267n47 First Republic 36 Flaubert, Gustave 230 Foucault, Michel 14 Fowles, John 236 Freely, Maureen 276n5 Freud, Sigmund: Civilization and Its Discontents 228 Fuad, Bes¸ir 181 Galip, S¸eyh 12, 46, 116, 120, 211; Beauty and Love 212, 218 Galland, Antoine: The Thousand and One Nights 216 Garcés, Maria Antonia 103 Gaultier, Jules de 230, 231 Geertz, Clifford 284n4 gender 42, 149, 150–59, 247, 250 Gerber, Haim 276n2 Gide, Andre 113; Pastoral Symphony 198 globalization 2, 6, 23, 173, 229, 241 Gökalp, Ziya 5, 43, 60, 169, 175, 281n14; The New Life 177–79, 261n51, 280n9

303

Göle, Nilüfer 28 . Gövsa, Ibrahim Alaettin 206 Greeks 36, 54, 182, 234, 264n17, 265n31, 271n6 green 216, 281n15; ink 216; pen 216 Güney, Yılmaz: Yol 253n10 Güntekin, Res¸at Nuri: Green Night 58, 253n19, 281n25 Gürbilek, Nurdan 204–5, 254n5 Gürsel, Nedim 271n4 Gutenberg, Johannes 175 Haber 260n48 halk 26, 37, 52, 62, 75, 83, 85, 258n35, 265n30, 268n52 Halman, Talat 141, 155–56, 254n5 happiness, image of 239, 268n49, 277n13 Has¸im, Ahmet 55–56, 264n14 Hayal, Yasin 1, 252n1 Hemingway, Ernest 198 Herzl, Theodor 281n14 hidden/secret center 13, 34, 112, 156, 222, 240–41 hidden symmetry 34, 165, 185, 193, 210, 230, 240–42 Highsmith, Patricia 213 hikâye 52, 53, 57, 79, 80, 83, 127, 272n15, 272n18 Hikmet, Nâzım 6, 9, 21, 22, 34, 36, 38, 52, 84, 85, 178, 182, 205, 211, 258n33, 258n34, 267n47, 267n48, 277n13; allusions to 65, 66, 78, 81, 263n11, 267n47, 268n49, 277n13; influences 259n36; literary modernity 67–71; Pamuk on 67, 258n35; in translation 247; turning Turk 250 Hikmet, Nâzım: works: “Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin” 268n50; Human Landscapes from my Country 9, 34, 36, 67–71, 206, 221, 259n41, 268n49, 268n49, 268n52, 270n61; A People’s Resistance 6, 69–70, 83; “What You Seek” 64, 267n44 Hilav, Selahattin 254n5 “Him” (O) referent 104–5, 106, 108–11, 115, 124, 130, 145, 214–15, 223, 282n4 Hisar, Abdülhak S.inasi 229; Pamuk on 232–33, 284n29 historiographic metafiction 82, 95–96

304

Index

historiographic mode of writing 24, 26, 28, 35, 36, 43, 53, 60, 68, 71, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 95–96, 97, 102, 122, 123, 125, 126, 128–29, 133, 162, 166, 216, 256n16, 257n25, 262n6, 263n8, 266n40, 269n52, 273n19; The Black Book (Pamuk) 126, 222; Cevdet Bey and Sons (Pamuk) 8, 35, 41, 52, 53, 54, 66, 68–69, 82, 94, 133, 251, 264n20; development of secularism paradigm 50, 123; Empire-toRepublic 9, 25, 38, 39, 51–52, 67, 68, 70, 94, 119, 135, 259n41, 263n8; My Name is Red (Pamuk) 24, 94, 95–96, 143, 160, 220; The New Life (Pamuk) 126; Republican 9, 39, 50, 52, 57–58, 95, 102, 125, 127, 129, 130, 187, 229, 259n41, 271n5; The Silent House (Pamuk) 35, 52, 53, 73, 78, 79, 82, 94, 263n9; subjugated to literary authority 53, 66, 71, 262n6; The White Castle (Pamuk) 38, 43, 51, 53, 82, 95–96, 122 Hitchens, Christopher, review of Snow 248–49, 281n22, 285n7 Hitler, Adolf 121 hoca 273n22 hoja 40 Holbrook, Victoria 218, 272n16 Hölderlin, Friedrich 62, 263n11, 267n47 homo sacer 208 homo secularis 2, 11, 13, 14, 49, 51, 58, 74, 79, 81, 86, 92, 104, 110, 113, 165–66, 167, 172, 174, 180–81, 184, 194, 196, 204, 205, 207–9, 212, 251, 260n44, 280n1 hotel theme 182 Hutcheon, Linda 95 hüzün 12, 107, 113, 114, 117, 118, 122, 130, 180, 210, 213, 230–37, 284n27; Istanbul: Memories and the City 227–34 Ibn Arabi 171, 211, 213, 283n16 Ibn . Sina 230 Ilhan, Attila 6, 36, 50; Allah’in Süngüleri: Reis Pas¸a 259n40, 262n5; Gazi Pas¸a 262n5 illuminated manuscripts 41–42, 126, 144–45, 146–47, 277n14 image/text intertextuality 126, 136–41 implied author 276n10 implied reader 276n9, 276n10

inkılâp 62, . . 265n30, 266n40 Inönü, Ismet 150 insulting Turkishness 4, 5, 8, 19–20, 49, 123, 203, 245, 250, 252n5, 274n29 interior monologue 37, 72, 75 internalized orientalism 9, 10, 60–61, 74, 93, 125, 134, 139, 157, 159, 161, 209, 231, 244, 265n26 International Conference of Orientalists (1889) 21 International IMPAC Dublin literary award 132, 276n6 intertemporality 97, 127, 134–36 intertextuality 240, 247, 260n43, 267n46, 273n19, 276n9; Eastern and Western 13, 24, 97, 113, 116, 127, 241, 251: image/text 126, 136–41 irony 4, 11, 190, 203, 205, 248, 259n42 irtica 186, 187, 203–4, 266n40 Irzık, Sibel and Jale Parla: Kadınlar Dile Düs¸ünce: Edebiyat ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet 279n34 Iser, Wolfgang 276n10 Islam: class-based reading of 234; conversions to 189–94; political 3, 5, 6, 20, 23, 44, 141, 165, 166, 173, 183, 184–86, 187–89, 195, 199–203, 265n33, 285n7; and State orthodoxies 27–34, 133–34, 234, 257n20 Islamochristian 268n50, 275n42 Islamicization 175, 177 Istanbul 228, 229, 241, 283n24 James, Henry 21, 29, 216, 235 Jesus, secular 120–22 “joker card” literary device 79, 83, 91, 101, 272n18 Joyce, James 29, 86, 198, 228, 235, 255n6; “The Dead” 198 Kafadar, Cemal 148 kafatasçı 265n32 Kafka, Franz 29, 44, 183–84, 255n6; The Castle 198 k.alam (qalam) 136, 137, 149 Karagöz shadow theater 42, 155–56 Karaosmanog˘ lu, Yakup Kadri 5–6, 32, 36, 50, 178, 209, 267n47, 274n30, 275n41, 275n42; Ankara 263n11; Nur Baba 243, 253n19, 281n25; Sodom ve Gomora (Sodom and Gomorrah) 26; translation of Proust 100; Yaban (The Outsider) 58

Index Kavakçı, Merve 183, 187 Kaya, Ahmet 21 kaza 174, 179 Kemal, Mustafa (Atatürk) 6, 24, 58, 74, 110, 151, 153, 174, 178, 174–75, 182, 202, 229, 242, 256n20, 258n34, 279n31, 285n7; Speech 26, 70, 150 Kemal, Namık 20, 61, 263n11, 266n39, 267n47 Kemal, Orhan 67, 87, 252n9, 255n10; Orhan Kemal Novel Award 252n9 Kemal, Yahya 34, 116, 229, 231; Pamuk on 232–33 Kemal, Yas¸ar 9, 21, 34, 38, 52, 82, 83–85, 87, 250, 211, 229, 252n9, 255n10, 258n33, 258n34, 270n66, 276n44; influences 259n36; Pamuk on 83, 258n35, 284n29 Kemal, Yas¸ar, Iron Earth, Copper Sky 34, 37, 283n19; din ü devlet 85–87; mystification of social realism 9, 83–85 Kemalism 1, 2, 7, 25, 27, 33, 42, 51, 70, 82, 93, 119, 121–22, 124, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 157–58, 176, 186–87, 205, 207, 209, 239, 261n50, 266n40, 271n6, 276n3, 280n8 Kemalist cultural revolution 2, 10, 24–25, 32, 43, 51, 53, 68, 94, 97, 112, 151, 157, 158, 160, 161, 166, 178, 194–95, 281n12; Cevdet Bey and Sons (Pamuk) 55–63; The Silent House (Pamuk) 75–76; Snow (Pamuk) 95 Kerinçsiz, Kemal 252n5 Keyman, Fuat 28 Khomeini, Ayatollah 185 Kisakürek, Necip Fazıl 185, 189, 281n24 Koçu, Res¸at Ekren 229; Istanbul Encyclopedia 212, 221–22; Pamuk on 221–22, 232–33, 284n29 Küçük, Yalçın 252n5 Kurds 21, 184, 185, 192, 249, 254n4, 258n34, 259n36, 265n34, 285n7; and dissidence 44, 62, 83–84, 194, 266n40; ethnic cleansing of 4, 19; military operations against 58, 63; and nationalism 199, 201, 249; PKK insurgency 5 Kyd, Thomas: The Spanish Tragedy 203

305

language reform 24, 57, 74–75, 91, 97, 99, 101, 116, 118, 157, 178, 224, 226–27, 259n36, 261n54, 271n4 Lausanne, treaty of 27, 182, 285n7 Levantines 36, 54 Lewis, Pericles 29–30 literary modernity: Human Landscapes (Hikmet) 67–71; mapping 34–47; novelizing early Ottoman modernity 33, 38–42; parody of revolution and coup 34, 42–45; and novelizing the secular modern 35–38; and the secular-sacred 33, 45–47 lived duality 32 Lodge, David 236 lover/beloved trope 44–46, 65, 73, 100, 105, 106, 108–9, 110, 116, 118–20, 140, 149, 126, 152, 169, 172–74, 184, 185, 199, 208, 210, 211–12, 215, 218, 227, 229, 235–36, 239, 241, 251, 258n31, 282n1, 282n4, 282n5, 284n27 love story 218–21 Lowry, Heath 268n50, 276n2 Lukács, Georg 50, 54; “The Ideology of Modernism” 261n1 Mahmud II 114 Mann, Thomas 254n6; Magic Mountain 198 manuscript production 131 Marxism 64, 160, 188, 192, 222–23, 253n11, 259n38, 268n50 master and slave allegory 4, 39–40, 46, 86, 96, 99, 100, 102–5, 106–8, 109, 110, 111, 124, 125, 129, 132, 211, 238, 243, 272n18, 274n30 material and mystical book 170–72 material culture 32, 34, 35, 38, 128, 162, 260n44; The Clown and His Daughter (Edib) 42, 161; A Mind at Peace (Tanpınar) 40–41, 118; The Museum of Innocence (Pamuk) 24, 46–47, 211, 234, 238, 260n45; My Name is Red (Pamuk) 39, 124, 132, 142, 161, 237, 251, 260n45; The New Life (Pamuk) 44–45, 170–72, 173, 174, 237, 260n45; The White Castle (Pamuk) 39, 96, 123–24 material unconscious 142, 143–44, 175, 216 materialism 32, 46, 116, 176, 242, 251; historical 38, 57, 67; mystical 34, 35; secular 9, 120

306

Index

McClure, John: Partial Faiths 124–25 meddah 140, 141–42, 144, 152, 155–57, 193 melodrama: and conspiracy 183–86; as parody 186–89; Snow (Pamuk) 186–89, 199–200, 203–4 Melling, Antoine Ignace 230 Melville, Herman: Moby Dick 198, 281n21 memory 76, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 147, 260n44, 262n6; collective 40–41, 55, 58, 76, 85, 115, 118, 228; cultural 39, 47, 73, 106, 213, 222, 228, 231, 237; and objects 145, 212, 236, 241, 260n44 Merivale, Patricia and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney: Detecting Texts 217–18 mesnevi (poetic form) 84, 218, 222, 268n49, 277n13 metafiction 9–10, 22, 37, 43, 48, 113, 133, 137, 148, 167, 170, 217, 250, 251, 272n14, 273n18, 274n30; dissidence as 204–7; historiographic 95–96; Misfits (Atay) 45, 113, 167, 204–7; The Museum of Innocence (Pamuk) 47, 131; My Name is Red (Pamuk) 95–96; The New Life (Pamuk) 24, 41, 43, 170, 211; Snow (Pamuk) 44–45, 131, 204; The White Castle (Pamuk) 10, 12, 40, 51, 52, 80, 81, 95, 96–98, 106, 109, 110, 111–12, 122 metahistory 9–10, 37, 40, 51, 52, 78, 79, 80, 82, 122, 133, 148, 241, 250, 272n11 metanarrative 78, 180, 204, 206 Mevlit 42, 153 military coup (1980) 36–37, 39, 42, 43, 48, 52, 71, 73, 74, 85, 91, 96, 98, 102, 104, 123, 124, 166, 175, 189, 194–95, 213, 225–26, 251, 253n16, 255n7, 261n49, 271n4, 274n30 Millas, Iraklis 271n6 mimicry 106–8, 205, 207 miniature painting 10, 39, 41–42, 116, 134, 135, 140, 144–45, 146–47, 155, 156, 277n14, 282n5 Mir’aj, secular 146–47 modernity: and conversion 25, 34, 51, 52, 60, 84, 157–59, 184, 186, 258n35; see also literary modernity; multiperspectival modernism; Ottoman modernity; secular modernity

Mongol inkpot motif 142–43, 144 Moran, Berna 141, 254n5 Morrison, Toni 125 multiperspectival modernism 10, 24, 37, 40, 41, 66, 70–71, 72, 73, 79, 106, 122, 132, 250, 251, 264n20, 273n19 museum motif 46–47, 212–13, 230, 234–36, 241–42, 260n44, 280n3 My Fatherland or My Headscarf 186, 187, 203 “mystery of letters” 223, 227 mystical allegory 172–74 mystical melancholy see hüzün mystical/mystic romance 12, 44–45, 46, 116, 118, 122, 124,134, 169; love story as 218–21 mysticism 8, 9, 37, 49, 67, 99, 108, 116, 117, 192, 208, 210, 213, 219–20 Nabokov, Vladimir 21, 216, 235 Naima 272n12, 275n43 nation 149, 174, 177, 182, 212, 218, 228, 230, 269n61; building 53, 58, 72, 95, 153; and city 22, 53, 114, 125, 179, 209, 231, 232, 233–34; critiques of 153; division of 249; and empire 153, 179; as family with secrets 4; Kars as microcosm of 184, 185, 191, 195, 201; modern 25, 26, 33, 61; mother of 155, 158–59; narratives of 6, 8, 20, 39, 113, 123; purity of 27; reality of 115; representing 20, 116; and salvation 6; secular 125, 158, 172, 236; self and 46, 168, 185, 242; traitor(s) to 5, 21, 34, 71, 151, 158, 245, 250 nation-form 8, 51, 72, 93, 160, 247, 261n49 nation-state 2, 42, 64, 134, 169, 182, 197, 200, 222, 227, 231, 260n43; and city 233, 234; establishment of 11, 27, 166; Greek 271n6; Kars as microcosm 184, 185, 191, 195, 201; of narratives of 8, 20, 114; see also state, the National Action Party 6 Nazism 118, 121 neo-Ottomanism 217, 233 Nerval, Gérard de 230 Nesin, Aziz 89, 255n10 New York Review of Books 21, 85, 284n28 nihilism 11, 40, 44, 45, 165, 183, 194 Nizami: Hüsrev and Shirin 140

Index Nobel Prize in Literature 5–6, 11, 19, 20–21, 22, 23, 28, 83, 132, 179, 255n9, 282n5, 284n29 Norton lectures 240 objects 142, 169; and memory 145, 212, 236, 241, 260n44; The Museum of Innocence (Pamuk) 12, 14, 210, 212, 234–40, 251, 282n1 Ondaatje, Michael 122 oppositional dialogue 54, 61, 65, 72 Orhan Kemal Novel Award 252n9 orientalism 25, 159–62, 266n37; internalized 10, 60–63, 74, 93, 125, 134, 139, 157, 161, 209, 231, 244; and the Ottoman legacy 127–30, 161 orientalist-nationalist binary 253n15 Ottoman archive 122–24, 262n6; The Black Book (Pamuk) 220, 237; My Name is Red (Pamuk) 35, 134–36, 144, 162, 220, 237, 277n14, 277n15; The Museum of Innocence (Pamuk) 234–36, 241–42; The New Life (Pamuk) 237, 280n3; The Silent House (Pamuk) 39, 76–80, 85, 91–93, 97, 98–99, 237, 272n18, 273n19; Snow (Pamuk) 237; The White Castle (Pamuk) 35, 39–40, 69, 77–79, 85, 112, 122–23, 127, 130, 166, 237, 263n8, 267n46, 272n18, 273n19, 277n14 Ottoman cosmopolitanism 93, 102, 135, 160, 272n12; Çelebi 105–6 Ottoman decline paradigm 39, 95, 96, 128–30, 131, 136, 162, 180 Ottoman Empire, early modern 38–39 Ottoman legacy 33, 34, 41, 93–96, 123, 126, 260n44, 271n7; orientalizing 127–30, 161; The Clown and His Daughter (Edib) 150–62; My Name is Red (Pamuk) 10, 41, 94, 95–96, 130–50; The White Castle (Pamuk) 39, 94, 95–97, 105, 107, 112, 126, 128–29, 134, 271n7, 276n9 Ottoman modernity, early: gendering 150–59; novelizing 33, 38–42; Cevdet Bey and Sons (Pamuk) 54–57 Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, The 257n23 Özakman, Turgut: Cumhuriyet: Türk Mucizesi 262n5; Su Çılgın Türkler 262n5

307

Pamuk, Orhan: on Atay 205; as author-figure 45, 111–12, 130, 131, 137, 138, 177, 185, 189, 190, 196, 197, 204, 238, 239, 281n13; as dissident 4–5, 11, 19, 20–24, 28, 47–49, 53, 66, 162, 249; as “dragoman” 248, 249; edits Radikal 20, 23, 38, 48, 49, 258n35, 261n56; on Hikmet 67, 258n35; on Hisar 232–33, 284n29; on Yahya Kemal 232–33, 284n29; on Yas¸ar Kemal 83, 258n35, 284n29; on Koçu 221–22, 232–33, 284n29; New York Times review 21, 85, 284n28; Paris Review interview 14, 255n10; popular reactions to 1–2; quoted 19, 23, 34, 47, 50, 56–57, 58–59, 60, 61, 62–63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 77–78, 79, 80, 83, 85–86, 87, 91, 99, 100, 101, 105–6, 107–8, 110, 111–13, 127, 129, 133–34, 135, 138, 139–40, 143, 144, 146–47, 149, 152, 165, 168, 169, 171–72, 174, 175–76, 177, 179, 180, 186–87, 188, 189, 190–93, 195, 196, 197, 198, 299–202, 203, 205, 210, 212, 214–16, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223–24, 226–27, 231, 232–33, 234, 235, 236–37, 238, 239, 240, 243, 255n7, 265n30, 265n34, 266n40, 275n43, 277n13, 284n29; Radikal interview 5; on Sufism 213, 214, 219; on Tanpınar 112, 114–15, 232–33, 260n48, 284n29; Teuwsen interview 1, 2–5; trial 6–7, 8, 19–20, 23, 49; as “Turkish author” 2–3, 4, 5, 14–15, 48, 256n10 Pamuk, Orhan: works “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ve Türk Modernizmi” 260n46 The Black Book 10, 12, 13, 24, 41, 43, 46, 48, 69, 94, 116, 126, 133, 141, 190, 193, 194, 198, 203, 205, 236, 237, 255n6, 283n12; absent text 217, 223, 274n28; author-figure 130, 137, 138, 239, 205, 241, 280n10; birth of the author 225–27; blasphemy 221; conspiracies and coups 43, 44, 166, 167–72, 195, 209, 225, 261n49; din ü devlet 210, 213, 223; encyclopedia trope 73, 221–23; historiographic mode 126, 222; Istanbul 228, 229, 241, 283n24; metaphysical detective story 216–18; love story as mystical

308

Index

romance 218–21; Ottoman archive 220, 237; postsecularism 124, 250, 251; reception 250; redemption 45–46, 69, 137, 211, 212, 213, 215–16, 218, 220, 225, 226, 227, 236, 281n15; secular-sacred mode 35, 45, 46, 48, 195, 209, 210–27, 240, 241, 282n25; writing subject 130 Cevdet Bey and Sons 8, 10, 21, 53–54, 69, 73, 92, 101, 133, 239, 253n11, 254n6, 256n12, 262n2, 269n54, 269n56, 283n25; absent text 268n49, 274n28; allusion to Hikmet 67, 268n49, 277n13; author-figures 131, 264n15, 266n42, 273n20; conspiracy and coup 43, 59, 63–66, 84, 166, 208, 265n34; darkness and light 55–58, 73; din ü devlet 54, 57, 58–59, 62, 65, 85–87; as Empire-toRepublic bildungsroman 36, 52, 53–66, 68, 71, 76, 81–82, 86, 94, 263n12, 263n13, 264n20; frames of history vs. forms of literature 81–83; historiographic mode 8, 35, 41, 52, 53, 54, 66, 68–69, 82, 94, 133, 251, 264n20; Kemalist cultural revolution 55–63; memory 76; Orhan Kemal Novel Award 252n9; Ottoman Muslim modernity 54–57; parodic mode 222–23; redemption 69; secular masterplot 55–57, 58, 60, 85, 264n20; social realism 8–9, 21, 36–37, 41, 52, 64; translation 263n10; “Young Turk” revolution (1908) 54–57, 166 “Four Lonely Melancholic Writers” 260n46 The Hidden Face 253n11, 261n52, 282n8 Istanbul: Memories and the City 40, 46, 66, 112, 238; din ü devlet 231; hüzün 227–34; secular Sufism 227–34 The Museum of Innocence 12, 69, 239, 282n1; absent text 198, 240, 281n25; author-figure 111, 130, 131, 197, 238, 239; conspiracies and coups 209, 261n49; context 261n49; encyclopedia trope 234; material culture 24, 46–47, 211, 234, 238, 260n45; memory 212, 236; metafiction 47, 131; objects 12, 14, 210, 212, 234–40, 251, 282n1; Ottoman archive 234–36, 241–42;

redemption 46–47, 131, 236–37, 239; secular sacred 35, 45, 46–47, 209, 210, 211, 212–13, 242, 282n25; secular sacred mode 35, 45, 46–47, 209, 210, 211, 212–13, 234–40, 242, 285n25 My Name is Red 10, 13, 28, 37, 69, 77, 116, 124, 152, 183, 194, 198, 216, 220, 236, 251, 255n6, 255n7, 272n10, 273n27, 276n5, 276n9, 278n24, 281n19, 272n25; allusion to Hikmet 67, 268n49; artists in the Islamosecular State 133–34; authorfigure 130, 148, 162, 239; berzah (or barzakh) 138, 147–50; book as blasphemy 132–50; color red 142–43; conspiracies and coups 43, 166; din ü devlet 126, 137, 141; disciplinary readings 262n6; Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman 135–36; historiographic mode 24, 94, 95–96, 143, 160, 220; illuminated manuscripts 41–42, 126, 131–32, 134, 136, 144–45, 146–47, 277n14; image of happiness 277n13; image/text intertextuality 126, 136–41; material culture 39, 124, 132, 142, 161, 237, 251, 260n45; meddah (storyteller) 141–42, 152, 155–57, 193; metafiction 95–96; Mongol inkpot motif 142–43; objects that speak 142; orders of time 134–36; Ottoman archive 35, 134–36, 144, 162, 220, 237, 277n14, 277n15; Ottoman decline paradigm 129–30, 136, 162; Ottoman legacy 10, 41, 94, 95–96, 130–50, 271n7; Ottoman miniatures 10, 42, 134, 277n14, 282n5; plume needle motif 143–44; postorientalism 159–62; reception 250, 253n14; redemption 137–39, 145, 220; secret book 41, 131, 134, 136, 137, 138–39, 141–42, 144, 274n28, 277n16, 278n24; secular Mir’aj 146–47; secular sacred mode 133, 134–36, 137, 140, 144, 145–46, 147; terkip 146; “third pen” 145–46 “My Turkish Library” 261n54 The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist 47 The New Life 13, 60, 69, 109, 126, 189, 193, 195, 198, 239, 241, 259n59, 272n25; absent text 43,

Index 168–72, 173, 180, 208, 274n28; allegory of Turkish secularism 172–74, 280n11; author-figure 111, 130, 177, 180, 205, 239; conspiracy and coups 11, 43–44, 94, 166, 167, 168–69, 174–77, 199, 201, 203, 208, 209, 237, 252n6; counter-conspiracy 169, 170, 172, 174–77, 201, 252n6; din ü devlet 172, 173, 175, 177; historiographic mode 126; material culture 44–45, 170–72, 173, 174, 237, 260n45; metafiction 24, 41, 43, 170, 211; metaphysical detective story 216, 218; Ottoman archive 237, 280n3; parodic mode 35, 43, 168, 177–79, 204, 205; reception 250, 280n7; redemption 45–46, 69, 173–74, 177, 178–80, 208, 211, 220; secular sacred mode 45, 46, 170, 172–74, 274n28 “Nobel Lecture: My Father’s Suitcase” 255n9 Öteki Renkler: Seçme Yazılar ve Bir Hikaye 255n10 Other Colors: Essays and a Story 47, 87, 229, 253n11, 255n10, 284n29; “The Implied Author” 276n10 The Silent House 10, 24, 43, 69, 71, 84, 85, 133, 141, 213, 251, 253n11, 254n6, 266n20, 270n1, 270n65, 275n43; absent text 268n52, 274n28; conspiracy and coup 37, 43, 71, 91, 166, 168; death of Allah 74–75, 120; din ü devlet 85–87; as Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman 9, 37–38, 52, 71–83, 94, 264n20; encyclopedia trope 74–75, 221–22, 268n52, 274n28; frames of history vs. forms of literature 81–83; historiographic mode 35, 52, 53, 73, 78, 79, 82, 94, 263n9; Kemalist cultural revolution 75–76; literary influence of Evliya Çelebi 80–81, 105, 270n63; memory/speak memory 47, 76, 85; Ottoman archive 39, 76–80, 85, 91–93, 97, 98–99, 237, 272n18, 273n19; reception 250; redemption 69, 76, 82, 83, 86, 87; secular masterplot 37–38, 66, 86; secular modern, silence of 71–83, 85; social realism 79–80, 81 Snow 3, 13, 23, 64, 69, 92, 213, 237, 251, 255n6, 259n39, 264n14,

309

281n19; absent text 44, 180, 184, 198, 204, 274n28; assassination 261n55; author-figure 111, 130–31, 185, 192, 196, 197, 206, 239; conspiracy and coups 11, 24, 43, 44, 63, 94, 95, 166, 167, 177, 180, 183–86, 187–88, 189–90, 194–95, 197, 199–203, 208, 209; conversion 60, 189–94, 260n47; din ü devlet 184, 190, 191, 193, 200; disciplinary readings 262n6; divided self 265n33; Hitchens’ review of 248–49, 281n22, 285n7; homo secularis 92, 207–9; Kemalist cultural revolution 95; melodrama 186–89, 199–200, 203–4; metafiction 44–45, 131, 204; Ottoman archive 237; parodic mode 11, 35, 167, 183–89, 199–200, 201, 204, 259n42, 261n49; reception 250; redemption 45, 69, 190, 194, 197–98, 204, 211, 220; as satire 185–86, 259n42, 281n22; secular sacred mode 45–46, 190, 204, 274n28; snow as metaphor 185, 190–91, 194, 190–99, 281n21; snowflake icon 195–98, 199; suicide 261n51 “The Anger of the Damned” 284n28 “The Melancholy of the Ruins: Tanpınar and Yahya Kemal in the City’s Poor Neighborhoods” 261n46 unfinished novel 8–9, 36, 259n38 The White Castle 33, 37, 69, 93, 122, 132, 133, 134, 145, 147, 148, 166, 172, 180, 255n6, 267n45, 275n43, 282n25; absent text 92, 104–5, 123–24, 198, 274n28, 281n25, 282n25; allusion to Hikmet 67, 277n13; author-figure 52, 67, 111–12, 239; conspiracies and coups 43, 130, 166, 173, 261n49; conversion/Turning Turk 108–9, 189, 243; din ü devlet 9, 53, 85–87, 97, 107, 108, 111, 122, 123, 126; doubles 105–8, 198, 239, 273n24, 278n23; and Evliya Çelebi 80–81, 105–6; encyclopedia trope 75, 221, 268n49, 277n13; false preface 92, 99–101, 166, 267n46, 268n49; frames of history vs. forms of literature 81–83; “Him” referent 104–5, 106, 108–11, 115, 124, 130,

310

Index

145, 214–15, 223, 282n4; historiographic mode 38, 43, 51, 53, 82, 95–96, 122; master and slave allegory 4, 39–40, 46, 86, 96, 99, 100, 102–5, 106–8, 109, 110, 111, 124, 125, 129, 132, 211, 238, 243, 272n18, 274n30; material culture 39, 96, 123–24; metafiction 10, 12, 40, 51, 52, 80, 81, 95, 96–98, 106, 109, 110, 111–12, 122, 251; metahistory 10, 51; mimicry 106–8; orientalism 266n37; Ottoman archive 35, 39–40, 69, 77–79, 85, 112, 122–23, 127, 130, 166, 237, 263n8, 267n46, 272n18, 273n19, 277n14; Ottoman decline paradigm 129; Ottoman historical allegory 24, 41; Ottoman Istanbul 96–105, 106–12, 211, 271n7; Ottoman legacy 39, 94, 95–97, 105, 107, 112, 126, 128–29, 134, 271n7, 276n9; postsecularism 124–26; quiltmaking metaphor 102, 105–6, 123, 267n46, 273n24, 274n28; reception 250; redemption 45, 69, 82, 93, 99, 101, 104, 108, 111, 124, 211, 274n30, 282n4; Republican intellectual 79, 98–99; Republican novel 38, 52–53, 108, 123–24, 130, 133, 273n25, 276n9; secular sacred mode 38, 45, 46, 106, 109–11, 115, 122, 123, 145–46, 211, 277n15; self and other hybridity 211, 214, 215, 278n23; social realism 96 paradoxes 112–22 paranoia 11, 43, 165, 166, 167, 168, 174, 194 Parla, Jale 8, 30–31, 113, 117, 254n5; see also Irzık, Sibel and Jale Parla Parla, Taha 28 parodic mode of writing 11–12, 35, 39, 44–45, 75, 133, 141, 142, 156, 162, 167, 169, 238, 241–42, 259n42, 281n12; The Black Book (Pamuk) 222–23; and the meddah 141–42; melodrama as 186–89; Misfits (Atay) 204–207, 258n35; The New Life (Pamuk) 35, 43, 168, 177–79, 204, 205; Snow (Pamuk) 11, 35, 167, 183–89, 199–200, 201, 204, 259n42, 261n49 Patey, Caroline and Laura Scuriatti: The Exhibit in the Text 236 Paris Review 14, 255n10

Peirce, Leslie 276n2 Piterberg, Gabriel 276n2 plume needle 143–44 Poe, Edgar Allen 216 postcolonialism 33, 160, 260n43, 271n5, 271n9, 285n6 post-Kemalism 204, 217, 239 postmodernism 5, 14, 24, 82, 97, 125, 139, 148, 152, 176, 178, 183, 184, 209, 217, 218–19, 239, 260n46, 279n36; postmodern coup 5, 43, 63, 183, 187, 253n16, 261n49 postorientalism 11, 122, 139, 146, 158, 159–62, 209, 217, 219, 233, 251, 270n3, 279n36, 285n6 postsecularism 10, 25, 33, 37, 93, 109, 112, 124–28, 146, 209, 217, 225, 233, 239, 250, 251, 256n11, 270n3, 279n36 Prakash, Gyan 160 preface: false 92, 99–101, 111, 123, 166, 206, 267n46, 268n49; as literary convention 99, 272n14 prison narratives 36, 38, 62, 67, 69–71, 85, 91, 103, 110, 123, 182, 184, 185, 188, 204, 268n52 Proust, Marcel 29, 228, 274n30; Remembrance of Things Past 100 Pynchon, Thomas 125, 168 qalam (k.alam) 136, 137, 149 Quataert, Donald 276n2 quiltmaking metaphor 102, 105–6, 123, 267n46, 273n24, 274n28 Qur’an 42, 84, 101, 123, 127, 133, 134, 137, 138, 149, 153, 157, 172, 221, 227, 230, 232, 257n23, 277n16 Qutub, Sayyid 185 Rabi’a al-Basri 153 Radikal 20, 23, 38, 48, 49, 258n35, 261n56 railroads 61, 266n38 Rasim, Ahmet 229 reading subject 109 red 41, 142–43, 144 redemption 8, 9, 12, 13, 31, 39, 87, 113, 165, 166, 210, 211, 231, 241, 251, 281n15; A Mind at Peace (Tanpınar) 116, 119, 121; The Black Book (Pamuk) 45–46, 69, 137, 211, 212, 213, 215–16, 218, 220, 225, 226, 227, 236, 281n15; Cevdet Bey and Sons (Pamuk) 69; Misfits

Index (Atay) 45, 167, 206; The Museum of Innocence (Pamuk) 46–47, 131, 236–37, 239; My Name is Red (Pamuk) 137–39, 145, 220; The New Life (Pamuk) 45–46, 69, 173–74, 177, 178–80, 208, 211, 220; The Silent House (Pamuk) 69, 76, 82, 83, 86, 87; Snow (Pamuk) 45, 69, 190, 194, 197–98, 204, 211, 220; spaces of 69; through writing and authorship 11, 12, 34, 45, 49, 83, 137–39, 145, 147, 190, 194, 197–98, 204, 213, 220, 236, 239; The White Castle (Pamuk) 45, 69, 82, 93, 99, 101, 104, 108, 111, 124, 211, 274n30, 282n4 Refik, Ahmet 229 Renaissance, the 39, 40, 41, 99, 102, 132, 133, 143 Renan, Ernest 266n39 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 116 Republican Cold War coups (1960, 1971, 1980) 166 Republican historiography 9, 39, 50, 52, 57–58, 95, 102, 125, 127, 129, 130, 187, 229, 259n41, 271n5 Republican intellectual 11, 37, 53, 65, 68, 71, 73, 77, 79, 85, 91, 109, 119, 139, 167, 184, 185, 186, 190, 204, 269n56; crisis of 79, 98–99 Republican novel 30–31, 92, 93, 128, 151, 206, 209, 241, 259n41; din ü devlet 58, 86; secular masterplot of 8, 12, 20, 24–27, 37, 45, 47, 50, 51, 53, 55, 70, 85, 94, 122, 125; and social realism 21, 51, 53, 109, 241; The White Castle (Pamuk) 38, 52–53, 108, 123–24, 130, 133, 273n25, 276n9 Republican People’s Party 24, 36, 58 revolution see conspiracy and coup Rilke, Rainer Maria, 171, 283n16; Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus 280n9 Robins, Kevin 229 Rosenthal, F. 244 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 61, 263n11, 267n47 Rumi, Celâleddin 12, 35, 46, 111, 114, 211, 212, 220, 223, 226; Mesnevi 84, 224 Rushdie, Salman 5, 252n4 Saavedra, Miguel de Cervantes see Cervantes Sajdi, Dana 276n2

311

S¸afak, Elif 271n4 Safa, Peyami 36, 50, 160 Said, Edward W. 244, 260n43, 284n3, 285n6; Orientalism 271n9 Sartre, Jean-Paul 165, 279n1; Nausea 181, 194 satire 141, 168, 170, 185, 186, 194, 199, 205, 206, 208, 219, 259n42, 265n34, 281n12 scarf wearing see veil, the Scuriatti, Laura see Patey, Caroline and Laura Scuriatti Second Republic 9, 23, 52, 63, 83, 182, 194, 212, 225 secret book 41, 131, 134, 136, 137, 138–39, 141–42, 144, 274n28, 277n16, 278n24 secret/hidden center 13, 34, 112, 156, 222, 240–41 secular blasphemies 8, 13, 32, 47–49, 59, 66, 244 secular-sacred mode of writing 13, 29–34, 35, 38, 45–47, 133, 146, 209, 211, 222, 257n25, 273n22; A Mind at Peace (Tanpınar) 40–41, 112, 117; The Black Book (Pamuk) 35, 45, 46, 48, 195, 209, 210–27, 240, 241, 282n25; The Clown and His Daughter (Edib) 153; The Museum of Innocence (Pamuk) 35, 45, 46–47, 209, 210, 211, 212–13, 234–40, 242, 285n25; My Name is Red (Pamuk) 133, 134–36, 137, 140, 144, 145–46, 147; The New Life (Pamuk) 45, 46, 170, 172–74, 274n28; Snow (Pamuk) 45–46, 190, 204, 274n28; The White Castle (Pamuk) 38, 45, 46, 106, 109–11, 115, 122, 123, 145–46, 211, 277n15 secular masterplot 35, 139; Cevdet Bey and Sons 55–57, 58, 60, 85, 264n20; and the secularization thesis 8, 24–27; and the Republican novel 8, 12, 20, 24–27, 37, 45, 47, 50, 51, 53, 55, 70, 85, 94, 122, 125; The Silent House 37–38, 66, 86 secular modernity: and cultural revolution 57–63, 84, 101, 107, 114, 116, 118, 157, 223–25, 226, 258n35, 264n19, 274n29; Motherland Hotel (Atılgan) 181–83; The Silent House (Pamuk) 71–83

312

Index

secular Sufism 12, 13–14, 35, 45–47, 123, 183, 210–13, 281n25; and the birth of the author 225–27; hidden symmetry of 240–42 secular Turkish/ness 12, 41, 45, 51, 67, 77, 78, 81–82, 160, 187, 200, 210, 254n4, 274n29 secularism: use of term 1–2; debate 28–29 secularization thesis 12, 20, 22, 28–34, 55, 61, 113, 115, 123, 128–30, 253n12, 262n6; claims of 210, 252n8, 258n27, 270n65; and Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman 51, 68, 72, 76, 153, 198, 209, 210, 264n20; limits to 7–8, 39, 52, 66, 96–97, 130, 220; and the secular masterplot 8, 24–27 self-sacrifice 44, 121, 208; see also suicide Selim III 114, 120 Sèvres Syndrome 249, 285n7 Sèvres, treaty of 249, 254n4, 284n7 Seyfeddin, Ömer 5, 160 Seyhan, Azade 132, 254n5; Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context 279n36, 283n18 Sheriyati, Ali 185 Sibel, Erol: “Reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow as Parody: Difference as sameness” 187, 259n42 Sincan affair 183, 187 sirr 13, 100, 104, 205, 224, 240, 272n17, 283n16 snow as metaphor 185, 190–91, 194, 190–99, 281n21 snowflake icon 195–98, 199 social engineering 25, 26, 32, 39, 43, 55, 56, 57, 58, 108, 168–69, 261n50, 265n30, 280n8 social realism 22, 23, 33, 34, 38, 233, 252n9; Cevdet Bey and Sons (Pamuk) 8–9, 21, 36–37, 41, 52, 64; Iron Earth, Copper Sky (Kemal) 9, 83–85; Misfits (Atay) 45, 183; and the Republican novel 21, 51, 53, 109, 241; Seyahatname (Çelebi) 80, 81, 84; The Silent House (Pamuk) 79–80, 81; The White Castle (Pamuk) 96 “son” metaphor 30 spaces of confinement 69 Spivak, Gayrati 260n43

state: deep state 5, 184, 187, 189; and orthodoxies of Islam 27–34, 133–34, 234, 257n20; see also nation-state Stendhal: Three Italian Chronicles 272n14 stream of consciousness 10, 37, 66, 72, 76, 86 storyteller (meddah) 140, 141–42, 144, 152, 155–57, 193 Sufi parable 105, 109; detective story as 216–18 Sufi quest 46, 84, 133, 169, 211, 212, 220, 251 Sufism 35, 82, 100, 110, 183, 214, 220, 234, 240–41, 253n19, 262n6, 281n25, 283n16; and Allah 110, 220; Bektashi 222–23, 240; Hurufi 222–25, 226, 227; Mevlevî 35, 46, 114, 116, 118, 120, 152, 153, 157, 161, 218, 222–25, 259n37; Nakshibendi 222–25; and Orthodoxy 152–54 suicide 11, 44, 45, 119, 120–21, 124, 165, 167, 181–83, 184, 185, 188, 192, 194, 203, 204, 205–6, 207, 261n51, 280n2, 284n1 Süleyman the Magnificent 39 Susurluk scandal 183 Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth see Merivale, Patricia and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney Tâhir, Kemal 34, 36, 47, 50, 67, 87, 252n9, 255n10 Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi 13–14, 34, 35, 36, 47, 50, 75, 87, 91, 110, 151, 152, 174, 179, 210, 211, 216, 229, 231, 235, 247, 255n10, 258n35, 275n40, 275n42, 275n44, 284n27; influences 259n36; Pamuk on 112, 114–15, 232–33, 260n48, 284n29; turning Turk 250 Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi: works Five Cities 114 “Identity and the Exchange of Civilizations” 115 A Mind at Peace 10, 34, 40–41, 142, 265n24, 275n37, 282n2, 284n25; din ü devlet 116, 119–20, 122; as Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman 114, 118, 119; literary alchemy 117–20; material culture 40–41, 118; Mevlevî theme 259n37;

Index paradoxes 112–22; postsecularism 124–26; redemption 116 secular sacred mode 40–41, 112, 117; secular Jesus 120–22; suicide 182, 183, 261n51; terkip 110, 114–17, 119, 121–22, 148 The Time Regulation Institute 204, 264n18, 281n12 Outside the Scene 58, 275n37 Song in Mahur 275n37 tasavvuf 35, 118, 274n32; see also Sufism Taylor, Charles 28 terkip 110, 114–17, 119, 121–22, 123, 146, 214 Teuwsen, Peer 1, 2–5 The Atlantic Monthly 248, 281n22 The Times (London) 5 “thick description” 284n4 “thick writing” 261n49 thing theory, see Brown, Bill “third pen” 137, 140, 145–46, 148, 277n13, 277n15 Third Republic 23, 37, 256n11 Thoreau, Henry David: Walden 198 Thousand and One Nights 46, 216 threshold imagery 171, 174, 179 time motif 55–56, 57, 117, 134–36, 264n18, 264n23 tourkokratia 95, 271n6 traitors to the nation 5, 21, 34, 71, 151, 158, 245, 250 translation: Atay 247; Atılgan 247; cultural 41, 87, 106, 244, 245–50, 263n10, 272n11, 284n4; Edib 247, 260n48; Hikmet 247; and interpretation 245–46; as literary device 92, 99–101, 102, 103, 108–107, 109, 123, 126, 166, 177, 216, 227, 261n49, 263n8, 263n10, 267n46, 274n28, 274n30, 277n14, 277n15, 282n4; Pamuk’s works 3, 9–10, 33, 35, 38, 50, 87, 92, 96, 111, 132, 247, 251, 253n11, 256n12, 259n42, 261n52, 263n10, 272n16, 282n7; “thick” 247, 284n4; zone of 246–47 translational approach 245–46 Tug˘ cu, Kemalettin 229 “Turk”: definition of Turkish 4; as identity marker 25, 127–28, 160; use of term 26, 243, 249, 256n17, 284n2, 284n5

313

Turkey: EU accession 3, 5, 19–20, 260n47, 262n5; human rights 3, 5, 63, 255n7; a Muslim state 27–34, 234, 257n20; national identity 21, 254n4; Republic of Turkey Constitution 1924: Article 2 127 Turkification 108, 177, 233–34, 244 Turkish Historical Society 25 Turkish Language Society 25 Turkishness 2, 4, 5, 7, 13, 14–15, 19, 22, 23, 25, 33, 49, 60, 70, 92, 93, 103–4, 112, 117, 119, 124, 128, 150, 152, 158, 159, 161, 166, 174, 208, 224, 229, 243, 244, 247, 249, 254n2, 254n4, 262n6, 269n61, 275n44; anti- 28; Imagined 26; insulting Turkishness 4, 5, 8, 19–20, 49, 123, 203, 245, 250, 252n5, 274n29; Muslim 211; mystifying 230–33; Ottoman 161, redefining 25, 179, 217, 221, 251, 263n12; religion-asethnicity 98, 274n29; Republican 25, 53, 274n29, 275n34; secular 12, 41, 45, 51, 67, 77, 78, 81–82, 160, 187, 200, 210, 254n4, 274n29; as secular-sacred 244, 254n4 . Turkish Workers . Party (Türkiye Is¸çi Partisi, TIP) 64, 266n43 Turkism 2, 4, 7, 11, 25–27, 33, 40, 42, 53, 60, 93, 108, 116, 151, 157, 166, 167, 168, 177–78, 257n25, 261n50, 265n32, 278n18, 280n8 turning Turk 13, 108–9, 157–58, 243–45, 247 “two pens” theory 136–41, 145, 146, 149, 277n16 Understanding Orhan Pamuk 280n7 unrequited love 10, 12, 24, 46–47, 73, 93, 100, 116, 122, 133, 178, 185, 190, 197, 208, 211, 212–13, 251, 261n52, 282n4, 282n8 Updike, John 254n6 veil, the 3, 44, 153, 183, 184, 185, 186–87, 188, 199, 200, 203–4 Veli, Haci Bektash 222 Verlaine, Paul-Marie 116 Verne, Jules 171 Voltaire 267n47 Walpole, Horace: The Castle of Otranto 272n14 Waugh, Patricia 97–98

314

Index

Weber, Max 257n23 Weiss, Tim: Translating Orients 245 Welfare Party 5, 42–43, 183, 184, 185, 192, 281n20 Wheatcroft, Andrew 256n17 White, Hayden 78, 92, 263n9, 272n11 whiteness, as signifier 44, 110, 194, 198, 213, 281n21 window, as literary device 56, 110, 240, 275n35 women: agency of 154–55; exchange of 154–55, 187; and nationalism 158–59; and the veil 3, 44, 153, 183, 184, 185, 186–87, 188, 199, 200, 203–4 Woolf, Virginia 29, 72, 254n6 Wratislaw, Baron Wenceslas: Pedro’s Forced Travels in Istanbul: Memoirs of a Spaniard Captive to the Turks in the Sixteenth Century Age of Süleyman the Magnificent 102

writer manqué 109, 113, 120, 122, 130–32, 139, 145, 155, 166, 194, 205–6, 216, 263n10, 264n15 writing and authorship 12, 22, 23, 34–35, 37–38, 48–49, 52, 67, 78; redemption through 11, 12, 34, 45, 49, 83, 137–39, 145, 147, 190, 194, 197–98, 204, 213, 220, 236, 239 writing-subject 12, 14, 43, 46, 47, 52, 64, 67–68, 71, 82, 100, 109, 110, 113, 130–32, 138, 139, 145, 166, 186, 190, 198, 211, 216, 238, 245, 27n55 Yavuz, Hilmi 285n6 Young Ottomans 266n39 “Young Turk” revolution (1908) 42, 53, 54–57, 153–54, 166, 229, 253n16 Zürcher, Erik 27–28