And Yet... (6 page)

In contrast, the Muslim fanatics are generally presented in a favorable or lenient light. A shadowy “insurgent” leader, incongruously named Blue, is a man of bravery and charm, who may or may not have played a heroic role in the fighting in Chechnya and Bosnia. (Among these and many other contemporary references, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are never mentioned.) The girls who immolate themselves for the right to wear head-covering are shown as if they had been pushed by the pitiless state, or by their gruesome menfolk, to the limits of endurance. They are, in other words, veiled quasi-feminists. The militant boys of their age are tormented souls seeking the good life in the spiritual sense. The Islamist ranks have their share of fools and knaves, but these tend to be ex-leftists who have switched sides in an ingratiating manner. Ka himself is boiling with guilt, about the “European” character that he has acquired in exile in Frankfurt, and about the realization that the Istanbul bourgeoisie, from which he originates, generally welcomes military coups without asking too many questions. The posturing Sunay at least phrases this well:

No one who's even slightly westernized can breathe free in this country unless they have a secular army protecting them, and no one needs this protection more than intellectuals who think they're better than everyone else and look down on other people. If it weren't for the army, the fanatics would be turning their rusty knives on the lot of them and their painted women and chopping them all into little pieces. But what do these upstarts do in return? They cling to their little European ways and turn up their affected little noses at the very soldiers who guarantee their freedom.

A continuous theme of the novel, indeed, is the rancor felt by the local inhabitants against anyone who has bettered himself—let alone herself—by emigrating to an undifferentiated “Europe” or by aping
European manners and attitudes. A secondary version of this bitterness, familiar to those who study small-town versus big-city attitudes the world over, is the suspicion of those left behind that they are somehow not good enough. But this mutates into the more consoling belief that they are despised by the urbane. Only one character—unnamed—has the nerve to point out that if free visas were distributed, every hypocrite in town would leave right away and Kars would be deserted.

As for the past tense in which Kars is also frozen, I have to rely on a certain amount of guesswork. Although Ka's acronym could ostensibly have been drawn from any pair of consonant/vowel first and last names, I presume from Pamuk's demonstrated interest in codes and texts that K and A were chosen deliberately. There seem to be two possibilities here: one is “Kemal Atatürk,” the military founder of modern secular Turkey; the other is “Kurdistan and Armenia,” standing in for the national subtexts of the tale.

Pamuk supplies no reason for his selection, but the setting of Kars means that he might intend elements of both of the above. The city was lost by Ottoman Turkey to Russia in 1878, regained in 1918, and then briefly lost again to an alliance of Bolsheviks and Armenians until, in late 1920, it became the scene of a Turkish nationalist victory that fixed the boundary between Turkey and then-Soviet Armenia that endures to the present day. (This event was among the many negations of Woodrow Wilson's postwar diplomacy, which had “awarded” the region to the Armenians.) From Kars, also in 1920, the legendary Turkish Communist leader Mustafa Suphi set out along the frontier region, dotted with magically evocative place-names like Erzurum and Trebizond, and was murdered with twelve of his comrades by right-wing “Young Turks.” This killing was immortalized by Nâzim Hikmet in a poem that is still canonical in Turkey. (Hikmet himself, the nation's unofficial laureate, was to spend decades in jail and in exile because of his Communist loyalties.) The outright victor in all those discrepant struggles was Mustafa Kemal, who had helped defeat two “Christian” invasions of Turkish soil in his capacity as a soldier, and who went on to assume absolute political power and to supervise and
direct the only lasting secular revolution that a Muslim society has ever undergone. His later change of name to Kemal Atatürk was only part of his driving will to “westernize” Turkey, Latinize its script, abolish male and female religious headgear, adopt surnames, and in general erase the Islamic caliphate that today's fundamentalists hope to restore.

Pamuk is at his best in depicting the layers of the past that are still on view in Kars—in particular the Armenian houses and churches and schools whose ghostly reminder of a scattered and desecrated civilization is enhanced in its eeriness by the veil of snow. Nor does he omit the sullen and disaffected Kurdish population. The price of Kemalism was the imposition of a uniform national identity on Turkey, where ethnic and religious variety was heavily repressed, and where the standard-issue unsmiling bust of Atatürk—pervasive in Pamuk's account of the scenery and most often described as the target of terrorism or vandalism—became the symbol of military rule. (Atatürk was a lifelong admirer of the French Revolution, but Turkey, as was once said of Prussia, is not so much a country that has an army as an army that has a country.) In these circumstances it takes a certain amount of courage for any Turkish citizen to challenge the authorized version of modern statehood.

However, courage is an element that this novel lacks. Some important Turkish scholarship has recently attempted an honest admission of the Armenian genocide and a critique of the official rationalizations for it. The principal author in this respect is Taner Akçam, who, as Pamuk is certainly aware, was initially forced to publish his findings as one of those despised leftist exiles in Germany—whereas from reading
Snow
one might easily conclude that all the Armenians of Anatolia had decided for some reason to pick up and depart en masse, leaving their ancestral properties for tourists to gawk at. As for the Kurds, Pamuk tends to represent them as rather primitive objects of sympathy.

Ka's poetic rebirth involves him, and us, in a comparable fatalism and passivity. Early in the story he is quite baldly described as feeling a predetermined poem coming on, and is prevented from completion of the closing lines only by a sudden knock at the door. I managed
to assimilate the implied allusion to Coleridge's “Kubla Khan.” But about fifty pages later, when another poem was successfully delivered from Ka's subconscious, I was confronted with a full-out deadpan account of the person from Porlock who had interrupted Coleridge at the critical moment. Pamuk's literalism and pedantry are probably his greatest enemies as a writer of fiction; he doesn't trust the reader until he has hit him over the head with dialogue and explanation of the most didactic kind. Throughout the remainder of the novel, though, we are invited to believe in the miraculous rather than the mundane: Ka quite simply sits himself down at odd moments and sets out near faultless poems (never quoted) on whatever paper is handy. The necessary cliché about “automatic writing” is eventually employed, somewhat heavily, to account for this. But I was inevitably put in mind of the Koran, or “recitation,” by which the Prophet Muhammad came to be the supposed medium of the divine.

Ka is presented to us as a man who has assumed or affected his atheism as a kind of protective epidermis. His unbelief is of a piece with his attempt to deaden his emotions and decrease his vulnerability. His psyche is on a knife edge, and he is always ready to be overwhelmed by the last person he has spoken to. Yet he can watch an educator being shot in cold blood by a Muslim zealot and feel nothing. Only when in the company of beaming Dervishes and Sufis—those Islamic sects that survived Atatürk's dissolution of clerical power—does he become moist and trusting and openhearted. Yet “rising up inside him was that feeling he had always known as a child and as a young man at moments of extraordinary happiness: a prospect of future misery and hopelessness.” Like the Danish prince who had a version of the same difficulty, Ka finds a form of cathartic relief in helping to produce the violent stage play that expresses his own fears and dreads. Pamuk drops in many loud references to Chekhov, and the gun that is on the mantelpiece from the beginning of the action is at last duly and lethally discharged. (It is described as a “Canakkale” rifle, Canakkale being the Turkish name for the Dardanelle Straits and the site of Gallipoli—the battle that was Atatürk's baptism as a leader.) The handgun
that goes off later, and extinguishes Ka's life, is heard only offstage. But it is clear that Islamist revenge has followed him to the heart of Europe and punished him for his ambivalence.

Prolix and often clumsy as it is, Pamuk's new novel should be taken as a cultural warning. So weighty was the impression of Atatürk that ever since his death, in 1938, Western statecraft has been searching for an emulator or successor. Nasser was thought for a while to be the needful charismatic, secularizing strongman. So was Sadat. So, for a while, was the Shah of Iran. And so was Saddam Hussein . . . Eager above all to have a modern yet “Muslim” state within the tent, the United States and the European Union have lately been taking Turkey's claims to modernity more and more at face value. The attentive reader of
Snow
will not be so swift to embrace this consoling conclusion.

(
The Atlantic
, October 2004)

I
N HIS CLASSIC
post–World War I novel
The Good Soldier Schweik
, the Czech writer Jaroslav HaÅ¡ek makes mention of “The Party for Moderate Progress within the Boundaries of Law,” the very sort of political formation the powers-that-be have always dreamed of. With such respectful parties, there's no danger of any want of decorum, or challenge to the consensus, or spreading of misgiving about authority or institutions. Instead, or rather: “There's much to be said on both sides of the case.” “The truth lies somewhere in between.” “Lurid black and white must perforce give way to reputable gray.”

Satire defeats itself, as usual. A political formation that could readily be considered absurd by intelligent readers in the stultified Austro-Hungarian Empire is now considered the beau ideal by the larger part of the American commentating class. What's the most reprehensible thing a politician can be these days? Why, “partisan,” of course. What's the most disapproving thing that can be said of a “partisan” remark? That it's “divisive
.”
What's to be deplored most at election time? “Going negative” or, worse, “mudslinging.” That sort of behavior “generates more heat than light” (as if there were any source of light apart from heat).

The selection of these pejoratives tells us a good deal, as does the near-universal acceptance by the mass media of the associated
vernacular. To illustrate what I mean, consider a celebrated recent instance. Senator John Kerry was not adopting any “issue” when he proposed himself for the presidency by laying heavy stress on his record as a warrior. (That is to say, he clearly could not have intended to assert that Democrats had been more gung-ho than Republicans during the Vietnam War.) The “issue” was his own record, and ostensibly no more. But when that record was challenged, with varying degrees of rancor and differing levels of accuracy, the response was immediate. I have in front of me as I write a full-page ad in the
New York Times
of August 27, 2004, attacking the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” who challenged Kerry. This costly proclamation states, and then demands: “It can be stopped. All it takes is leadership. Denounce the smear. Let's get back to the issues.”

Never mind the truth or falsehood of the allegations for now. What's worth notice is that the ad does not deny their truth so much as say that nobody has the right to make the allegations in the first place. Thus, having himself raised a subject, the candidate is presumed to enjoy the right to have his own account of it taken at face value. Anything else would be indecorous. The slight plaintiveness of this is underscored by the call to “get back to the issues.” But surely Kerry had made his military service an “issue.” At the bottom of the ad appear the legend “Paid for by the Democratic National Committee” and the accompanying assurance that “this communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.” Even the law requires us to believe these days that, for purposes of fund-raising, the organs of a party are independent of its nominee (which is why the members of the “Swift Boat” group had to pretend to be above politics in the first place, thereby leaving themselves vulnerable to the charge of being sinister proxies).

But is there any place “above politics”? Is there a subject that can avoid becoming “a political football” or a resource out of which “political capital” cannot be made? The banality of the automatic rhetoric is again suggestive here. Since every other electoral metaphor is sports oriented, from the top of the ninth to the ten-yard line to the playing
of “offense” and “defense,” why should there not be a ball or two in play? (Surely, to move to a market image, it's short-term dividends rather than actual capital that one hopes to accrue.)