Prosecuting Pamuk: Author and Narrator on Trial

Sep 23, 2005
The Simon
By Alan Williams

Two ideas usually hover closely around Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, author of My Name is Red, Snow, and, most recently, Istanbul, a memoir. The first is the Nobel Prize, which he will doubtlessly garner for the second idea, namely that his fiction is undeniably “prescient.” [...]
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On its cool surface, Snow traces the journey of Ka, a Turkish poet in exile [...]who travels to the isolated city of Kars [...] only to get swept up in a blizzard of politics between the pseudo-totalitarian republican government and Islamic fundamentalists. [...] he attempts the impossible task of courting both sides of the battle, and negotiating the flawed, self-protecting, and treacherous personalities in every camp in between, in the hopes of safely delivering himself, Ipek, and her family out of the fray.
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And just as a poem revolves around an unknown, missing center (it is revealed that all of Ka's poems written in Kars go literally missing and are ultimately unknown), it is Kars’ Armenian populace that is the missing space in Snow. [...]
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The Armenian Genocide is referenced several times, directly and indirectly. Ka trudges through snowdrifts by old homes and shops that had belonged to Armenians long since gone. [...] When representatives from Kars’ multitude of political views gather to sign a document about the military’s staged coup and its ensuing aftermath, the lack of Armenian voice becomes noticeable because of the very impossibility of having one. The Armenian absence and silence, like the omnipresent snow, like the hollows within the lines of a snowflake, permeate the novel.
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Since Snow is offered as a record-setting tale of fictional events in a place that is haunted by the massacre of a minority populace, would not Orhan the narrator also be on trial? Is Pamuk being indirectly persecuted for highlighting such truths, and, more specifically, the whitewashing of truths, in his fiction? The answers will come in December.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.