CityLog
Orhan Pamuk's Honorary Doctorate, Free University, May 4, 2007
"Apart from life itself, nothing is more astounding than writing." These words by Orhan Pamuk were repeated in the Laudatio he received from Dr. Mark Kirschner, Professor of Turkology at the University of Giessen. On May 4, 2007, Orhan Pamuk, the author of The Black Book, My Name is Red, Snow, and most recently Istanbul, among other works, was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Free University in Berlin before a packed lecture hall. Much of the praise of Pamuk's work at the event focused on both the wonderment, and the sobriety, with which the author seemed to approach his craft. Kirschner, recalling the words of Joachim Sartorius, said that Pamuk's work in translation had "empty spaces." The attempt to render it in another language other than Turkish led to the accretion of deficits, of spaces in the text where the reader was confronted with the inexpressible. In Pamuk's novel Snow, it is not only translation that creates empty spaces. Pamuk's poet character, Ka, writes a series of poems over the course of the narrative. The reader gets an intimate sense of the content of the poems, and even learns that the poem sequence is structured like a snowflake, but he never hears the words of the poems themselves. Pamuk creates empty spaces, spaces of deficit, that make the reader pause in wonderment, confronted with the unexpressed.
Kirschner went so far as to speak of the mystical quality of Pamuk's writing, but countermanded that same description by referring to the factual, cool, analytical quality of the novelist's craft, which reminds one of Kakfa and Mann. In Kirshner's view, there is something scientific about Pamuk's prose, but there also seems to be a spirit blowing through it.
Orhan Pamuk, in accepting his honorary doctorate, confirmed many of the insights of the Laudatio speaker. A graceful figure with an excited voice, Pamuk stood before the audience in the Henry Ford Bau of Freie Universitaet joking that he had not slept the night before for fear of the general exam he would have to take in order to receive his degree. Expressing an impressive artistic sobriety, and craftman-like humility, Pamuk spoke of what a joy it is for him to play with words. Just as children sit and play with toys, he said, he felt fortunate to be able to play with concepts, turning them around over and over again in his literary sandbox. Pamuk spoke eloquently and insightfully about what it means for a literary practitioner, a novelist, to receive an honorary academic degree. His own writing, Pamuk reflected, was suffused by his reading of the social sciences, of psychology, anthropology, sociology and history. Pamuk mentioned how he often sought to broach debates in the social sciences through his writing, though enveloping them in the artistry of novelistic prose. A friend had told him that the academic community appreciated his work so much, and celebrated him (Pamuk was named professor at Columbia University this year), because it sensed a reciprocal conversation partner in him since he engaged with the products of academe.
Pamuk called himself a serious reader of the social sciences, but then went on to subvert the divide between artistic creation and social scientific research. Expressing a deeply humanist commitment, he said that, in fact, all pursuits that seek to understand what it means to be human operate under the same horizon. Why do we believe? What should we believe? What is good? What is bad? Do we have a soul? Can we lose it? What do we want? What do we fear? He produced these questions in a Sprachgewitter from the podium, leaving the audience breathless. Despite his inextricable involvement in politics, especially with regards to global questions of the relationship between Islamic societies and European and American societies, as well as the battle of liberal Muslim intellectuals with fundamentalist and traditionalist groups, Pamuk emphasized throughout his acceptance speech that he was first and foremost a humanist and a scientific observer of the human condition.
Pamuk was charged by the Turkish Government for making comments against the State in 2005, and in early 2007 he cancelled many trips to Europe due to death threats from right-wing Islamic groups. Klaus Wowereit, the mayor of Berlin, addressed these issues directly in his welcome speech at the ceremony. He mentioned the political implications of a Turkish cosmopolitan intellectual who criticized the Turkish state, and who insisted on his place as a Muslim in a global scientific and humanist community. Referring to TurkeyÕs pursuit of membership in the European Union, Wowereit hoped that the Turkish government would adopt a different stance to intellectual heterodoxy, and internal criticism. The Free University's choice to award its 2007 honorary doctorate to Pamuk comes at a critical time, as Turkey has just completed the first stages of its negotiations to become a member of the European Union. The process is expected to take at least a decade, if it happens at all. In Europe, there is certainly a strong enough sense of the East/West divide, and the differences between Christian and Muslim societies, to make many citizens and policy makers suspicious of creating bridges with Turkey. If part of Pamuk's message seems to be an insistence on the importance of cosmopolitanism for Turkish society, he also seemed to have a message for the European audience: that difference, especially East/West difference, is spectral, even if not illusory.
In his reading from his new book, Istanbul, that concluded the granting of the honorary doctorate, Pamuk spoke of "the other Orhan." He said that, as a child, when his family traveled to Paris, he was astounded to encounter his own picture in his relatives' home. He felt there was a second Orhan out there, living in Paris, just as he lived in Istanbul. Pamuk said that he has continued to live with the sense of there being a second, spectral other self, projected abroad in some distant European land. Living with a sense of the two Orhans also means that Pamuk does not experience the East/West divide as a chasm of absolute separation, but as a boundary of tensions and "empty spaces" that create problems, questions and issues for his own life and art. In his commitment to bring language to the "silence between civilizations," as Kirshner put it in his Laudatio comments, Pamuk points out the abiding divisions between cultures, even as he creates words and discussions connecting them. Perhaps this is why nothing is more astounding than writing for Orhan Pamuk. He, like many literary figures on the fault lines of ethnic, national and cultural difference in our contemporary world, seems to be both playing with ideas, like a proverbial child in the sandbox, while also remaining solemn, scientific and serious about the purpose and outcome of those games.