Earlier this year, Orhan Pamuk spoke about his memory of a visit Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter made to Istanbul in 1985. The trip was organized by PEN in order to draw attention to the persecution of writers in the wake of the 1980 military coup. Pamuk and a friend were their translators. He remembers standing with the other translator, "whispering to each other with some agitation, while at the other end, Miller and Pinter are whispering in the shadows with the same dark intensity. This image remained engraved in my troubled mind, I think, because it illustrated the great distance between our complicated histories and theirs, while suggesting at the same time that a consoling solidarity among writers was possible."
This has been a consistent theme throughout Pamuk's work: that a fundamental unity or cohesion exists, however obscured it may be by conflict, difference, and tension. He does not ignore apparent opposition or conflict; in fact, his characters and plots often center on them. David Remnick writes, "The polarities of Pamuk's books echo the basic polarities of Istanbul: the tension between East and West, the pull of an Islamic past and the lure of modern European manners and materialism."
John Updike, writing about Pamuk's novel Snow, describes what the narrator calls "perhaps...the heart of our story": a moment when he questions whether it is possible to understand another who has suffered more than oneself. In this case, the narrator wonders whether he can ever truly know his friend, a deceased poet, who is the subject of his story. Updike reflects upon the political implications of this problem, asking whether the privileged can understand the destitute. The compulsion of the narrator to systematically research the poet's last years, the uncanny ways in which the narrator's experience mirrors that of the poet, and the fact that the narrator writes the story of the poet at all, imply some level of comprehension despite the unknowable nature of the human soul. Updike expands on this theme by pointing to an irony implicit in any struggle. He writes, "Is not conflict, between classes and nations both, often between groups that understand each other all too well?"
Pamuk finds the tension between East and West, or Islam and Christianity artificial. His memoirs are filled with illustrations of a culture comprised of both worlds. He writes, "If anyone asked, my grandmother would say that she was in favor of Atatürk's Westernizing project, but in fact--and in this she was like everyone else in the city--neither the East nor the West interested her." This grandmother's five grandsons are all named after victorious sultans.
In his youth, Pamuk's window looked out on the ruins of a mansion once owned by a Circassian boy from the Caucasus sold into slavery in Istanbul, who worked for the governor of Tunis, was brought up speaking Arabic, joined the army and represented Tunisia in France, returned to Istanbul as a financial adviser, and later became Grand Vizier. While Grand Vizier, he took notes Arabic during meetings conducted in Turkish at the palace. He dictated these notes to his secretary in French, and was falsely rumored to be conspiring to establish an Arabic speaking state.
Pamuk's childhood home had a piano on every floor, although no one knew how to play piano. No apartment was complete without a glass cabinet filled with china and crystal that were never used. Untouched desks and Art Nouveau screens accented sitting rooms used rarely and awkwardly by residents more comfortable in traditional rooms with pillows and divans. Pamuk calls the former "sitting room museums", and relates that some families only opened them for holidays or special guests. Yet every house had them; they were recognized as necessary, although no one understood exactly why they were necessary. Pamuk writes, "Although everyone knew that Westernization meant freedom from the laws of Islam, no one was quite sure what else it was good for."
Charles McGrath finds the root of Pamuk's literary obsession with dopplegangers, doubleness, and split identity in "the doubleness of Turkey, torn between past and present, European modernity and Islamic traditionalism." This doubleness persists in his everyday life. When David Remnick visited Pamuk in his writing studio in a high-rise apartment building, the Muslim call to prayer sounded throughout the city. Pamuk laughed and said, "Sometimes my agent will call from New York, and the muezzin will start. You can tell that at the other end of the phone line he is thinking, Ah! The exotic East!"
On the increasing polarization between West and East, Pamuk said, "Some of us have a better understanding of the West, some of us have more affection for those who live in the East, and some, like me, try to keep our hearts open to both sides of this slightly artificial divide." His novels, and his lived experience as recorded in his memoirs, stand as a literary testament to the illusory nature of a clash of civilizations largely created and fueled by extremists on both sides, whose bizarre versions of reality currently hold undue influence over world events. His poetic candor would shame these Western and Eastern extremists if they were as open to ideas that challenge their own as Pamuk is to the underlying truth of the world around him.