Apologies for not getting this post up earlier, but this has been a busy week for me. As a result of my schedule and of the time that has elapsed between now and the lecture, this post is likely to be shorter than the two earlier ones. (Is that a cheer I hear going up from the empty stands? :-) )
Pamuk's third lecture went against many of the prevailing assumptions on how to read a novel or what to look for in the novel, and it seemed to me that a number of people in the audience dissented from his opinion. (I couldn't stay for the Q&A at the end, so I don't know if anything particular came up then.) I'm going to try to keep this post as neutral as possible, so as not to inject too many of my ideas and thus obscure his point. [As always, square brackets indicate my observations or opinions, meant to be seen as verbalizations of my reactions to his words.]
Pamuk begins with the observation that although the novel aims to depict life with the utmost realism, it is nevertheless a piece of fiction, and moreover one that "takes life seriously." The lives depicted within even the most realistic novel are fundamentally different from our lives, for the reason that it's not often in real life that our actions or our thoughts or our decisions have the meaning [I almost want to say "weight"] they would have had we been characters in a novel.
Within the particular context of a closed society, this exaggerated importance given to every small detail or thought takes on an acutely political significance. Pamuk says [and given what little I know of the manner in which literature functioned in the Soviet bloc, I broadly agree with him] that in those closed societies where the novel does in fact arise, it becomes a tool of emancipation or, less poetically, an escape hatch for people trying to invest their lives with meaning. In such societies, by reading oneself into a different person or a different life, the reader really does feel the need to treat the novel as something even more important, even more meaningful than everyday life.
And it is precisely this use of the novel as "escape hatch" that terrified government censors. For the act of reading oneself into a different life, of deferring moral judgment and instead empathizing with another person as a human being, is a deeply political act that can and does undermine the authority of the state.
Pamuk insists that this particular feature is unique to the novel [which I don't entirely buy]. The great difference between the novel and the "epic" [to use the Bakhtinian distinction] is that the novel elevates the human being as a human being while the epic is concerned with the deeds of particular kings or heroes or saints. The novel fleshes out its characters much more fully than the epic (for Homer, "character" is a constant that a personage possesses, and it's not until after Shakespeare that Western literature focuses on a person's emotional complex as something that evolves over time), and as a result the reader is able to identify more or less fully with particular characters in the novel. After over two hundred years of reading the novel, this attitude comes more or less naturally to us.
And here is where Pamuk really gets up and grabs us, saying that this in fact makes the novel unrealistic. In real life, we do care about people's interiors, but certainly not in the manner and not to the extent that this happens in the novels. If we are to make the novel realistic, Pamuk argues, then what we should really care about in the novel is the landscape, the world as seen through the eyes of the personages in the novel. Character, as seen in the novel, is an element of fiction, and it is supremely naïve to think that such a complex entity exists in real life in a form that we can detect or comprehend the way we do in the novel. [You can see why some people were not very comfortable with the lecture at this point!]
What are the implications of this understanding for the author? Pamuk says that, from his personal experience as an author, that the common understanding—often perpetuated by authors themselves—that the author creates the protagonist of the novel who then "takes charge" of the story is highly unlikely. He claims that this idea, that the author "must learn from this character [the protagonist] what to narrate," is but a rhetorical turn.
Instead, Pamuk argues, the author takes events that she wants to write about, with personages she wants to write about, and writes about them :-) (He makes it sound so simple!) The art of writing the novel then lies in fitting all these pieces together—people, feelings, events, places—into a trajectory that does not seem artificial. This trajectory that connecting all these situations the author wants to write about is the plot of the novel.
Consciously borrowing from the Russian Formalists, Pamuk considers these situations to be built up from irreducible elements of narrative. Each situation is (re)told from the perspective of one of the personages of the novel who is near it in some way—the remote historic past or the epic-style absolute past are absent. The personage in turn must have the right sort of emotional make-up to justify his / her proximity to the particular situation, in order to maintain the realism of the novel. (This can go so far, Pamuk says, that people often project features or even entire characters for personages who are in proximity to a situation onto what was intended by the author to be a purely factual description of this situation.)
The best authors, just like the best readers, are both naïve and sentimental at the same time. One half of the author's brain engages in an almost child-like exploration of situations through the perspectives of different characters, while the other half analyzes the novel being written, often from the perspective of the ideal reader, and shapes the manner in which this exploration is written about. Consequently, we as readers should strive to read in the same manner, with part of us exploring the world of the novel through the eyes of the personages, and part of us reflecting on our manner of exploration.
Pamuk then returns to his analogy of Chinese shanshui landscape paintings to make the point that there is seldom an actual center from which the author surveys her verbal landscape in a Godlike manner, just as the painter who depict a complex landscape seldom does so after having climbed up a high peak and surveyed a landscape. Instead, we see theAn landscape through the eyes of the personages, and piece the pieces together. For Pamuk, the way to think about a book like Anna Karenina is to think of it not as an exploration of Anna's character (for there isn't in fact such a thing), but as a perspective onto a particular landscape, a particular world through the eyes of a personage whose name is Anna. For Pamuk, "the characters have been constructed to reveal the details of the landscape."
Time too plays an important role in this landscape. Here the shanshui analogy fails because the novel, as a textual structure, is linear in a way a painting is not. Regardless, Pamuk claims that just as the ideal author will prompt the ideal reader to seek an imaginary center for the novel, so too will the ideal author try to create the impression of an objective flow of time within the novel even though there is in fact no such thing. The perception of the passage of time comes from the reader's identification with personages, and from the narration of situations from the perspective of these personages.
I've tried to present as much as I can as neutrally as I can, without distorting Pamuk's ideas too much. My sense is that Pamuk was trying to push back against the idea (prevalent in the 19th century) that the novel is a realistic depiction of people's lives and interiors, for the simple reason that the extent to which such depiction took place in the early novels was itself unrealistic. Perspective seems to matter more to Pamuk than personality; the way the landscape holds itself together seems to be privileged over the portrayal of one individual's "interior".
