"6 Norton Lectures by Orhan Pamuk," say the posters plastered throughout Harvard Yard. And, judging by the crowds lining up to get into Sanders Theater today, plastered throughout New England. I would have never forgiven myself had I missed this, the very first in the sequence of six Charles Eliot Norton lectures to be delivered by Pamuk this year at Harvard, and so I made sure I got there about two hours in advance. I didn't take notes at the time, not wanting to disturb the solemn silence of the attentive audience with the sound of a keyboard being tapped away, and not being able to see my notepad clearly enough in the dim light to actually write anything down. As soon as the talk ended, I rushed to the nearest café with a power outlet to get online and pour out my memories onto paper (of a sort, at least)—to capture the image painted by Pamuk's words in my own before it faded away into the dim halls of memory; to recreate, with my own words, the painting I saw with my own ears (a metaphor for the appreciation of poetry that I borrow from Prof. Steven Hopkins's work on the Haṃsa-saṃdeśa of Vedānta Deśika). If what follows is garbled, it is because of the difficulties of translation: from Pamuk's mind to Turkish words to English words to my ears to my mental image to my words online, it is a long and tenuous chain and no doubt much is lost, much more is corrupt. And yet I do hope that some of what he was trying to say comes through in this hastily written, unedited, stream-of-consciousness entry.
The title of Pamuk's lecture series is borrowed from Friedrich Schiller's Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, described by Thomas Mann as one of the most beautiful essays in German, in which Schiller argues that there are two kinds of poetry that he terms (surprise surprise!) the naïve and the sentimental. This is, in a manner of speaking, the distinction between unselfconscious and self-conscious artistic creation; one other contrast that comes to mind that may not in fact be a good example is the distinction between poetry as art and poetry as craft. Pamuk reads Schiller as saying that, while naïve poets record immediately, effortlessly, and without intermediary what they perceive in nature, sentimental poets are acutely aware of their own thoughts and emotions, perhaps even feeling a sense of alienation from nature, and bring this acute self-reflection to the fore in their work. Noting the importance of this work in his own thinking and writing, Pamuk argued that although he considered the naïve to be inferior to the sentimental in his youth, he has now moved to what he believes is a honest balance between these two poles of poetic excellence.
But I digress. Using the mandate of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures to study Poetry "interpreted in the broadest sense," Pamuk is trying to apply Schiller's poetic insight to the novel in particular, and this first lecture in the series was titled "What Happens to Us as We Read Novels."
Drawing from his own obsessive reading of novels in his youth, Pamuk painted a picture of reading as studying and entering a landscape painting. (His artistic inclination towards "naïve" painting, as he put it, comes out most vividly in his use of words as a paintbrush, but also through his powerful use of such metaphors throughout both his writing and this lecture.) We may read lightly, from a distance; we may read intensely, immersing ourselves into the narrative; we may read logically, seeking a single continuous path through the landscape; we may read reflectively, always standing outside the picture—regardless, we paint for ourselves a picture as we read, and it is this act of recreating a landscape using the novelist's words that, it seems to me, constitutes reading for Pamuk.
Pamuk argues for balance here between these two extremes of naïveté and sentimentality, and he offers the analogy of reading a Chinese shanshui painting, where a mountainous landscape is represented as if through a fog, often with a solitary figure in the foothills climbing up a tortuous path. The landscape is to be seen not as a faithful depiction of an actual natural scene, but as an object in the painter's mind, as seen through the eyes of the solitary figure. (I'm not entirely making sense here, I know.) The heart of reading, then, is to be able to recreate such a landscape, holding more than one contradictory thought in our minds simultaneously.
Pamuk then outlines a nine-step process of reading that, he claims, happens every single time a reader reads a book attentively. Furthermore, he argues that each of these stages occurs either naïvely or sentimentally, depending on the reader, and that some stages can occur simultaneously or even out of order. This is where I am most likely to have deviated from the actual content of the lecture, so, gentle reader, I humbly seek your forgiveness.
1) Following the narrative
When one gets into a novel, one really has to follow the plot to see what is happening. Now this is most obvious in cheap detective or spy novels, but it holds true for the best literary works too, and while it may not entirely hold for sophisticated, fancy, atmospheric novels where "nothing" really happens, even there the reader must follow the chain of descriptions to build a progressively sophisticated picture of the work.
2) Going from word to image
That metaphor takes us to the second stage, where the reader sees "beyond" the words, in a sense, and begins to (re)create, slowly, painstakingly, piece by piece the mental landscape of the novel. This includes not just the physical setting, but also the characters, their exteriors and their interiors, and their own miniature mental landscapes of (what is to them) their reality. Here the naïve reader really gets into this mental landscape, perhaps seeing themselves a participant in it (even if just a voyeur), whereas the sentimental reader constructs it while remaining aware of its fictionality.
3) "How much of this is fantasy?"
4) "How much of this is reality?"
The question of fictionality raises the question of how much of the work is fantasy. This is particular true for those landscapes that the author claims are representations of a fictionalized history (as Pamuk himself has done on multiple occasions). Similarly, the question of how much of the setting and the interiors of the characters is taken from reality also eats away at the reader. Both of these questions work together, and Pamuk posits that the very fact that the reader poses these questions says something about why we read novels: it is because we expect to find some element of reality in them, something that, although occurring within a fictional, imagined landscape, is nevertheless acutely relevant to life as we live it. (Pamuk drew a sharper distinction between the two, but my memory fades and I can no longer be sure how much of this is his and how much of it is mine.)
5) Enjoying the beauty of the novel
Notwithstanding the reader's (un?)self-conscious immersion in the mental landscape created by the novel, the fact remains that the novel is a text, made up of sentences made up of words. Part of the pleasure of reading lies in the discovery and appreciation of these textual, linguistic elements: word-play, unexpected rhymes or other aural figures of speech, powerful themes or evocative juxtapositions of images.
6) Judging the characters and the Author
As the reader gets deeper and deeper into the novel, (s)he begins not just to create interiors for the characters but also to reflect upon them as (s)he reads along, it being irrelevant to Pamuk at this point whether the reader does so consciously or not. We readers judge characters for their actions and emotions, and we judge the author too for inducing the characters to act in particular ways and for fashioning situations in which the characters cannot help but carry out certain actions. Such immersive critique, Pamuk avers, is not always helpful in appreciating the text for itself, but I think he would concede that it is extremely difficult to restrain oneself from engaging in it.
7) Complicity
One of the common "dangers" of reading is, in effect, a form of Stockholm Syndrome. The reader grows to trust the narrator, and more often than not invests part of their own self into the narrator, and gradually paints a rather more sympathetic figure of the narrator than would have been the case had the narrator's character not been the narrator. This may lead the reader to forget, whether consciously or not, important pieces of the landscape that would otherwise color the narrator more darkly. Pamuk mentions that this makes the choice of narrator a very powerful instrument in the hands of the author. And although he doesn't say it, I took this sense of complicity to imply something else about the act of creating a mental landscape: no two readers paint exactly the same landscape from reading the same novel.
8) Self-congratulation
Another emotion that we commonly experience is one of self-congratulation, particularly upon completing hard texts or portions of texts. We set ourselves the challenge of understanding something, and upon doing so, rejoice and celebrate our achievement. This emotion may be one of our inducements for reading; conversely, the fear of failing to attain this state may discourage us from reading. (Pamuk said more here that I can't remember.)
9) The "center" of the novel
And that self-congratulation occurs because we all take every novel we read to be a nut that needs cracking, whether we consciously think so or not. For Pamuk, this is at the very heart of reading: the quest for the center of the novel, that core of the text that may or may not exist in fact, but which we all seek nevertheless. We may meditate on one word, one sentence, one passage, or the novel as a whole as we seek to discover that which we think imparts all meaning to the novel. Whether or not such meaning exists, and whether it exists in the surface arrangement of the words or in the mental landscape invoked in the reader's mind by the words, or whether it exists beyond any landscape, it is the quest to find such meaning that motivates us to go on reading.
As is his wont, Pamuk self-referentially uses the Bildungsroman as a metaphor for the act of reading itself: the journey of a youth through the trials and tribulations of life, all the while facing new challenges and learning to master them, and all the while growing in inner strength and maturity. The character's quest for maturity mirrors our quest for the center of the novel, which in turn is a manifestation of our striving to understand the meaning of life.
And that's all I remember at this point. More next time!
<UPDATE>
One thing I forgot to mention earlier: why the novel in particular? Pamuk claims that it is the novel, unlike, say, epic verse or medieval romance, which truly fleshes out the interiors of characters; to return to his shanshui analogy I would say that only a novel has the power to create such a three-dimensional landscape in the reader's mind. It is this three-dimensionality, this creation of perspective [in both the literary and the visual sense] that gives the novel (the illusion of) a center.
</UPDATE>
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