Conversations with Orhan Pamuk

One Should Seek to Be a People’s Writer Rather Than an Elite Writer

Nursel Duruel / 1982

From Cumhuriyet, Seçkin yazar değil, vatandaş yazar olmanın yolu aranmanlı, December 30, 1982.

Nursel Duruel: The first impression one has after reading Cevdet Bey and Sons is the novel’s distinct historical time, which moves gradually and becomes so tangible that we can almost touch it! Could you comment on that?

Orhan Pamuk: Maybe I’ve discovered the time of the East without realizing it! Furthermore, the characters in the novel—whether the good family man and merchant Cevdet Bey, the railway builder and engineer [Ömer], or the painter [Ahmet]—are consciously or unconsciously trying to break apart this time through politics, commerce, and intellect. Maybe because they were somewhat successful in doing so, it became difficult for me to place the youngest generation of my characters into that form of the novel. When I finished the novel four years ago, I said to myself, Now I need other models of novel form. Jokes aside, I believe that this historical time in which the characters of the novel roam is still not fully foreign to us. Maybe in our country, too, most windmills are powered by machines, not water, but in our daily movements and basic human behavior, it seems as if the rules of our own time are very different than those of the West.

ND: You mentioned other novel forms. The form of Cevdet Bey and Sons is not far from the form of the classical or traditional novel.

OP: Yes! That was a conscious decision. While writing the novel, I was largely under the influence of Lukács [in Essays on Realism]. This means I was aware that I was also under the influence of Tolstoy, Stendhal, and Mann. However, I will argue that Cevdet Bey and Sons contains some elements that traditional novels do not employ. I’m much more comfortable using modern novel techniques in the novel I’m currently finishing; but I would like to add that these techniques in themselves justify nothing. Many people rightly argue that it isn’t enough to write like Balzac after Balzac. Furthermore, does it really take a lot of courage to say that writing like Woolf after Woolf or like Joyce after Joyce is also inadequate? The crux of the problem is to tear down all the techniques and styles to find your own form, but just considering that is frightening! Still one must try! Even if we don’t succeed in the end, at least we can console ourselves by saying that we dared to seek the meaning in life specific to us, believing such meaning must exist, even though we couldn’t find it. It’s often been said that the novel is a mirror held up to society. But first, we must acknowledge that even Turkey no longer fits into the narrow frame of those old traditional mirrors. The Turkish novelist must find the mirror to hold up to his own reality! Then we’ll understand that reality is not the old reality. In this way, the novel can fulfill its old task of reflection. I read somewhere that Carlos Fuentes said that a Latin American novelist must be both Balzac and [Michel] Butor. This statement seems accurate to me, if it means that a novelist who wants to reflect society must be experimental.

ND: Cevdet Bey and Sons spans a long period of time between 1905 and 1970. You must have done research to be able to talk about this period. How did you approach the material at hand?

OP: I’ve read a lot of memoirs and newspaper archives, but I never thought I’d use them in the novel. These sources are amusing, like the ones Rimbaud mentioned in the famous poem [Voyelles] where he found the color of vowels. I was not looking for details about the characters of my novel while reading the memoirs of former Ottoman pashas, the plans for national development that the authors self-published forty years ago, and old yellowing newspaper collections. For example, I thought I should mention the failed assassination of [Sultan] Abdülhamid in 1905 at the beginning of the novel. But if I hadn’t found one particular detail, maybe I wouldn’t have even put that in the novel: Two days after the event, a few pashas gathered in a mansion and told each other, laughing and joking, how scared they were when the bomb exploded! Sometimes such details seem more real to me than a bomb that killed forty people in the prime of life. The issue is finding such details by experiencing them, reading them, or making them up! I think, having found such a detail, the author should leave the rest to the reader’s imagination.

ND: As a writer, where do you think you stand and where do you want to stand?

OP: I don’t believe that producing literary works (I’m not talking about journalism) is a daunting task that demands great responsibilities toward society. Many of us kill the subjectivity that will give depth and flavor to our books with the coldness of an eminent statesman who controls everything. Dostoevsky said, We all came out of Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat.’ It’s as if the tradition of the Turkish writer says that we’ve come out of the kaftan of an acting statesman. I think that this moralistic attitude adopted by novelists—more than by our poets or short story writers—has led the author to adopt the paternalistic attitude of a superior person. Dostoevsky never saw himself as superior to his readers. Once this suffocating sense of responsibility is done away with, I know that every line we write will only increase the value of the work. If I knew that something would increase the value of my novels, I’d sit down to bargain with the devil. Distinguished writers who are ready to judge everyone but themselves and who belittle personal problems don’t deign to do such things! I think from now on one should seek to be a people’s writer rather than an elite writer. I don’t think that for a single moment either Sait Faik or Orhan Veli [popular authors in Turkey] felt the false notion of being an elite writer. We take them seriously today because they didn’t take themselves too seriously.

ND: You mentioned a novel you were finishing up.

OP: Yes, Descendants of the Devil. Although I tried rather different things in this novel, I can say that it is also a family saga, like Cevdet Bey and Sons. In these two novels, I accomplished my aims by narrating the decline of prominent families.

I Wanted to Show How Everything Eventually Sinks into the Overwhelming Banality of the Dreary Thing Called Everyday Life

Konur Ertop / 1983

From Milliyet Sanat, Her şeyin, günlük hayat denilen sıkıcı şeyin kahredici bayalığına battığını göstermek istediğimi söyleyebilirim şimdi, June 15, 1983.

Konur Ertop: The first thing that stands out about your novel is its rich details and historical accuracy! Of course, these are not enough to build a whole novel. But you have created a work of art that is also important in this respect. Can you tell us about your writing process and how you structured your novel based on facts?

Orhan Pamuk: I had a structure in mind. I needed to find details to fit it. I read memoirs, scanned old newspaper collections, sifted through a pile of junk. That’s how I found the details of this novel that I can call historical. Sometimes I also made them up! The important thing was whether these details could serve as suitable imagery for my purpose. Otherwise, I didn’t expect to decipher any past event from such readings. Tolstoy taught me that what we call history is woven with absurd, meaningless, ridiculous details. Maybe now I can say that while collecting details for Cevdet Bey and Sons, I wanted to show how everything eventually sinks into the overwhelming banality of the dreary thing called everyday life. But that wasn’t my only goal. If the things we call boring are arranged in a certain order, they both shine a light on the characters and are downright fun. I paid great attention to making it a fun book. If someone tells me that they had a laugh here or there while reading Cevdet Bey and Sons, I would be really happy.

KE: Did you know Cevdet Bey or any of his relatives?

OP: I didn’t know who Cevdet Bey was at first! I do not say this because I look down on novels that have a strong autobiographical aspect—because there are great autobiographical novels that I love very much—I say this because I care about Cevdet Bey being born as an image in me, being theoretical. I had written the middle part of the book, but I had a feeling of incompleteness. Then I realized that I had to go back further, find the beginning of everything, and make it up. That’s when I found the details I mentioned earlier. I recognized Cevdet Bey when I imagined a Muslim trader wandering among non-Muslim merchants in Sirkeci! Writing a novel is largely a job of finding such images; you must transform even people you know closely into images first. On the other hand, it can be said that I got to know the heroes of the middle and last generation of the book a little better. In fact, I tend to list off the books that inspired me to those who say that I’m an autobiographical novelist and state that I’m an autobiographical novelist to those who list the books that inspired me! If Kafka had been asked whether he knew Mr. Samsa, what would he have said? I don’t know whether he would have recalled Notes from Underground and his dull family as well as his life as a civil servant.

KE: Could you explain in detail your own life and the environment you grew up in?

OP: You ask me to explain. … I wouldn’t dare to do that in a short conversation. But it’s not hard to remember the details: Apartments, dark stairs, dusty, noisy radiators, moms and dads, grandmothers, meaningless snack kiosks, soccer players, aunts, uncles, the last trams, the doves napping between apartments, ugly and stupid chandeliers, books, cockroaches,