Pointless Babble—Read at your own peril
I did something today that I did not do last time which, I must sadly say, has compromised my ability to reproduce from memory the contents of Orhan Pamuk's lecture. The act of taking notes is troublesome at a number of different levels:
(1) It is difficult to take notes well, and to take notes well consistently, particularly when portions of the lecture are short readings from sources.
(2) It is especially hard to take notes in au auditorium where the only source of illumination, both literal and metaphorical, is the reflection off the podium. Still, it's nice to be able to honestly say روشن شدم :-)
(3) The act of taking notes splits my brain into a number of parallel tasks, one mechanical (governing the physical act of writing) and at least three cognitive (the act of actively listening to Pamuk's present words, the act of recalling Pamuk's words, and the act of composing notes on Pamuk's past words that will be decipherable in the future). Given how hopeless I am at maintaining focus even in the absence of distractions, it is inevitable that the quality of all four tasks degrades when performed simultaneously.
(4) And if that were not enough, I wish to question the whole enterprise of note-taking (in those contexts where it is not particular technical terms that matter, but arguments and processes that can be more generally described). If it is to sketch out a scheme of the lecture, or of the salient points, then I've already remarked how such an act, when carried out during the lecture itself, degrades one's comprehension of the lecture. And if it is to serve as an aid to memory following the lecture itself, well, it is not clear to me why human memory isn't good enough (in the very short term, at least). And in any case, the process of reading badly written, cryptic lecture notes itself involves considerable interpretation, head-scratching, and hand-wringing—not very different from the act of recollecting the lecture from memory. It seems to me the most effective mental exercise, particularly when dealing with such topics and in such manner as Pamuk does, is to simply pay deep attention to the lecture when it happens, and then to immediately pour out one's thoughts onto (e-)paper in clear, complete sentences.
Oh well. I do what little I can with what little I have. And as always, comments in [brackets] represent ideas that are consciously my own reflections on the content of the lecture; this is to distinguish them from the rest of the post, which consists of my unconscious reflections on and recollections of the lecture.
The Lecture Itself
But if you, Gentle Reader, are reading this, and if you're not me (if indeed there is someone other than me who reads this!), then you don't and you shouldn't care about my babble. What matters is what (I remember and what my notes remember of what) Pamuk said today, in the second of six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on "The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist." Today's piece was titled " 'Mr Pamuk, Did You Really Live All This?'," being based on a question that Orhan Pamuk was apparently repeatedly asked after his latest novel came out in Turkey last year. It is this conflation of author and protagonist, imagination and reality, truth and fiction, naïve and sentimental (you knew that one was coming!) that Pamuk addresses—What is it? Is the author complicit? How long has this been going on? What is it about the novel that (perhaps uniquely) enables it to take on this illusion?
Pamuk says the immediate answer to the question is, of course, "No!" He is clearly not a figure walking around sixteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul, nor is he a Turkish poet exiled to Germany who gets stuck in the far eastern city of Kars, nor is he a coin or a dog or a horse or a tree or a corpse or any of the other narrators in My Name is Red. But, truly in the spirit of reading being a way to simultaneously hold contradictory ideas in one's mind, he goes on to say that it would be entirely understandable if the naïve reader conflated author and protagonist. And further, it may even be the case that the author wants the reader to make such an identification, and is thus writing in a fashion that subtly (or not) directs the reader towards such a conclusion.
Pamuk delightfully contrasts this non-linearity in the author-reader interaction by citing Borges' example of the letter Franz Kafka wrote to Max Brod, requesting him to burn all of Kafka's writings after his death. I don't remember the precise details of the story (damn note-taking!), but in essence Borges writes that for the ultimate outcome (Brod refuses to burn Kafka's writings) to have happened, Kafka had to have thought that Brod would have refused to burn the writings, and Brod in turn had to have thought that Kafka had to have thought that Brod would have refused to burn the writings, and Kafka in turn had to have thought that Brod had to have thought that Kafka had to have thought that Brod would have refused to burn the writings ... ad infinitum. This is not strictly true, of course—perhaps Kafka really did want Brod to burn them and Brod was just being contrary—but it is a lovely image of the potentially infinite loop of authorial – readerly expectations that one can so easily fall into.
The point was perhaps to illustrate Pamuk's claim, that the art of the novel (which, I presume, has to include both the writing and the reading of the novel) relies on an imperfect consensus of expectations between reader and author. The moment perfect consensus is achieved, the work is no longer a novel—not that it is no longer art, for it is still entirely possible to produce beautiful literature based on a system of shared conventional signs, but that it is no longer a novel [almost in the Bakhtinian sense of novelty]
Pamuk roots the question of conflation of author and protagonist in the birth of the novel, when the fictionality of novelistic writing is still debated. Daniel Defoe, for instance, claimed that Robinson Crusoe was a description of a real incident, and continued to make such claims of verisimilitude even after it came out that the book was a work of fiction. [It was almost as if Defoe wanted the artistic value of his work to be judged based on its realism, which could only work if he could convince his readership that such a situation could, indeed had, come about.]
Pamuk notes that the novel eventually rose to a position of great prestige in the modern West, and eventually entered other literary cultures too, swallowing and rendering obsolete pre-existing literary forms there too. Part of its extraordinary power [if you ignore colonial effects, of course] lay in its unique combination of the imaginary and the real: a dissident writer living under a repressive regime could write a novel that was a harsh critique of life while escaping scrutiny under the guise of being "merely" fictional. [Censors were smart on many occasions, but writers, the best ones at any rate, were always smarter.] In this case, the writer was in the tough position of having to argue to the authorities that her work was only "fictional" while simultaneously arguing to her readership that her work, although fictional, was nevertheless "real" and "truthful".
Pamuk argues that it is the novel's unique power of combining real and imaginary that on the one hand makes it such a potent tool in the hands of marginal or dissident writers, but that on the other hand also makes it prone to being questioned by naïve readers at the level of truth versus fiction. Such is also the case with other media, such as cinema, which claim similar levels of verisimilitude—they too fall victim to being questioned by naïve spectators. This situation is worsened when actors intentionally blurring the line between their on-screen personae and their real-life characters, something that I knew was pretty common in India [think of the Ramayana and Mahabharata TV serials and the apotheosis of the main protagonists to demigod status!], but which was apparently also pretty common in Turkish cinema in the seventies and eighties! The world is a small place sometimes, and not necessarily in ways of which we ought to be proud.
But what is it about the novel that allows it to combine real and imaginary so effectively, in precisely this particularly powerful manner? Pamuk's understated argument—one that I find quite persuasive and yet also one that I expect from an author in his particular position—is that it is novelistic detail: that particularly fine-tuned attention given to the smallest details of a large landscape painting that creates its interiors and gives it three-dimensionality, to use an image he evoked in the first lecture. Such novelistic detail arises only because the author is able to provide linguistic form to " expressions of sensory impressions": to convert her deeply felt personal experiences of both mundane and sublime into verbal form, and then to stitch them together into a novel. I'm expressing myself far less persuasively than Pamuk did in lecture, but in essence his point was that human beings experience, and respond to, sensory impressions in ways that are often universal, and yet express them in ways that are particular to their own place, time, and language. Out of this arises authorial style [and, I might add, cultural particularities], but as long as the experiences and the responses to them are universal, the writing can maintain novelistic detail.
Pamuk inserts an important note here: while the artistic consensus that exists between author and reader cannot be perfect, for then the novel would fail to be "novel", it also has to exist in some form of common, shared experience between author and reader. As the reader moves farther away from the author in space and time, the weight of meaningful, revealing novelistic detail falls away and the work begins to lose its tension-filled location in the gap between pure imagination and dreary reality, swinging instead towards the "fantasy" or "history" end of the spectrum.
Pamuk adds that the reader's quest for the real or imagined center of a novel—one of the primary pleasures in reading—also motivates the reader's desire to understand the author of the work. If it is indeed true that the author uses her skeins of accumulated sensory experiences to stitch together characters and situations and narratives in a novel, then it should also be possible for the astute reader to unwind those characters and discover those sensory impressions in the author. This is entirely different from discovering particular biographical details about the author, for it is at once more ineffable and more intimate. The example Pamuk gives is of a very detailed and entirely factually accurate autobiography which is presented to the public as a novel: inevitably, the sensitive reader seeks out a center, which may or may not correspond to something the author intended to portray or even recognized in herself. Part of the reader's desire to know whether "Mr Pamuk" really lived "all this" stems from a desire to compare their impression of the author with the author's self-perception.
And Pamuk semi-humorously closes with an admonition to stay away from two kinds of readers: the purely naïve, who reads everything as though it were literal truth and does not realize the fictionality of the novel, and the purely sentimental, who reads everything not for what it says but for what he thinks the author may have intended to say or to conceal in it [and in this category he would probably lump all those who read literature as flawed instantiations of their pet literary theory]. Neither group knows the real pleasure of reading the novel, he says, which is to simultaneously hold in tension real and imaginary, truth and fiction.
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