Secular Blasphemies: Orhan Pamuk and The Turkish Novel

Novel
Secular Blasphemies:
Orhan Pamuk and the Turkish Novel
ERDAĞ GÖKNAR
I don’t want to be a mangy Turk.
Ömer, in Orhan Pamuk’s Cevdet Bey ve oğulları
A person who publicly denigrates Turkishness [Türklük], the Republic, or the Grand
National Assembly of Turkey, shall be sentenced a penalty of imprisonment for a term
of six months to three years.
Turkish Penal Code, Article 301–1,

before its amendment on May 8, 2008
In 2005 Orhan Pamuk was charged with “insulting Turkishness” under Article
301–1 of the Turkish Penal Code.1 Eighteen months later he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature. After decades of criticism for wielding an apolitical
pen, Pamuk was cast as a dissident through his prosecution and trial, events that
simultaneously underscored his transformation from national litterateur to global
author. What triggered this clash between state and author? What was meant by
“Turkishness,” exactly? The charges, centered on Pamuk’s references to the ethnic
cleansing of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 and Turkish Kurds in the 1990s, emerged
out of a secular state tradition of policing national identity. Contrary to the domi-
nant notion that Pamuk had been an apolitical author, his novels, in both content
and form, had transgressed official versions of Turkish history and identity for
decades; so what had suddenly changed to make Turkey’s best-selling novelist an
object lesson for state determinations of Turkishness?2
I would like to expresses my gratitude to Nancy Armstrong, miriam cooke, Banu Gökarıksel,
Bruce Lawrence, Rebecca Stein, and Leonard Tennenhouse for their insightful comments and
suggestions on earlier versions of this essay. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this
article are my own.
1
The translation used in the epigraph is quoted in Bülent Algan 2238. For more on Article 301,
see Algan.
2
“Turkishness” is an indeterminate site of national identification. In its historical construction,
it emerged when a late Ottoman Muslim community was reimagined as ethnically determined
through World War I and the Turkish War of Independence. The slippage between religion and
ethnicity imbues secular Turkish national identity with the sacredness of its Sunni religious
underpinnings. By evoking Armenians and Kurds, Pamuk, in the first instance, is conjuring
an imagined community based on religious distinction (Muslim/Christian) and, in the sec-
ond, one based on ethnic distinction (Turk/Kurd). The perceived insult is thus politicized as
doubled: secular and sacred.
Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45:2 DOI 10.1215/00295132-1573985 © 2012 by Novel, Inc.
Published by Duke University Press

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302 NOVEL | SUMMER 2012
Another cultural logic was at play. Turkey was emerging as a transnational

power between Europe and the Middle East. In the same year as Pamuk’s trial, the
European Union officially opened accession talks with Turkey (October 3, 2005);
the start of Pamuk’s trial would coincide with the EU summit in December. Pamuk
had become the target of a secular establishment that had been marginalized by
the 2002 election of the conservative, Islamic AK Party and its spearheading of
the EU accession process. (The AK Party was easily reelected in 2007 and 2011.)
A secular republican dream of European integration had been appropriated by
an Islamic-oriented government. Pamuk’s trial, though later dismissed, assumed
greater significance in the context of Turkey’s EU accession process, construed by
some secularists as a threat to national sovereignty. Though secular himself, and
an advocate of Turkey’s EU accession, the cosmopolitan Pamuk personified every-
thing the national-secularists despised. His novels, which challenged official nar-
ratives of national identity, reinforced this fact. I argue that it is the dissidence of
Pamuk’s novels rather than his media statements that manifests a political argu-
ment. For these are novels that expose the indeterminacy of Turkishness itself at a
critical moment in republican history.
Pamuk as Dissident
Shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize, Pamuk accepted an invitation to serve for
one day as editor in chief of the left-leaning Istanbul daily Radikal. In this capac-
ity, he ran a front-page piece in the January 7, 2007, edition featuring the work of
Turkish writers and artists who had been persecuted by the state, just as Pamuk
had been before the Nobel. The headline, “let ’em spit in his face all they want”
(“Doya doya yüzüne tükürsünler”), was taken from a 1951 article that origi-
nally ran in the secularist newspaper Cumhuriyet (The Republic) about dissident
poet Nâzım Hikmet. Though fifty-six years had intervened, now the phrase also
referred to Pamuk, who had been labeled a vatan haini (traitor to the nation). The
group that Pamuk assembled included dissident socialist authors Hikmet, Yaşar
Kemal, and Sabahattin Ali. Pamuk also included poet and singer Ahmet Kaya,
who was prosecuted for a pro-Kurdish political stance.3
Pamuk’s day as editor reveals an instructive discrepancy. The dissident status of
the author in the international arena, which was sealed through his 2005 prosecu-
tion under Article 301 for insulting Turkishness, proceeded in direct contradiction
3
Prominent critics and reviewers reinforce the assumption that it is unnecessary to know the
Turkish literary context to comprehend Pamuk’s work and that comparison with writers of
world literature is sufficient. This essay argues that this assumption gives rise to persistent mis-
readings of the author’s work. As one example of Pamuk’s placement in an international canon,
John Updike makes a novel-by-novel comparison between Pamuk and the following writers:
Thomas Mann (as reflected in Cevdet Bey and Sons), Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner (Sessiz
ev), Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino (The White Castle), James Joyce (The Black Book), Franz
Kafka (The New Life), A. S. Byatt and Umberto Eco (My Name Is Red). One might add Fyodor
Dostoyevsky (Snow). Updike relies on a genealogy that disregards the local cultural context
entirely.

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GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 303
to his authorial past.4 Pamuk’s new political positioning as a dissident was ironic,
for he had spent the early part of his literary career attracting criticism for his
social and political disengagement. He was often attacked as a figure of the depo-
liticized literature of the post-1980 military coup. In Turkey postmodernism was
considered to be a heresy against the Left, and the label “postmodern” was hurled
like a slur at Pamuk. An Istanbul author from a privileged, bourgeois background,
he freely admitted that he had sequestered himself in an ivory tower. In a 2004 New
York Times interview, he insists:
I was not a political person when I began writing 20 years ago. The previous gen-
eration of Turkish authors were too political, morally too much involved. They were
essentially writing what Nabokov would call social commentary. I used to believe,
and still believe, that that kind of politics only damages your art. Twenty years ago,
25 years ago, I had a radical belief only in what Henry James would call the grand
art of the novel. (Star)
Given that Pamuk as editor later associates himself with the very generation of
Turkish leftist authors he here disavows, how are we to interpret his statement that
“that kind of politics [engaged literature] only damages your art”? What should
we make of the further fact that since his Nobel award he has explicitly refused to
comment on or engage publicly in matters of politics?
I consider Pamuk’s assembly of the dissident group in his issue of Radikal (meant
for a Turkish audience) to be based on a fantasy about solidarity with a socially
engaged tradition of modern Turkish literature.5 Granted, his first novel, Cevdet Bey
4
The statement that led to Pamuk’s prosecution under Article 301–1 was made in a tense inter-
view with Peer Teuwsen, the title of which translates as “The Most Hated Turk.” The interview
was timed to promote the German translation of Kar (Snow). Teuwsen’s editorial angle was
a provocative inquiry into Pamuk as an object of hatred in Turkey. In the interview, Pamuk,
openly disturbed by Teuwsen’s approach, states that Teuwsen is conveying a resurgent Turk-
ish nationalist perspective. Pamuk’s now infamous comment toward the end of the interview
effectively redirects the focus of the interview from tabloid controversies surrounding him and
his literature toward an indictment of the ideology of Turkish nationalism. This reinforces his
status as a dissident author-intellectual. Pamuk states: “30,000 Kurds were killed here. And a
million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to talk about it. But I do. And that’s why they
hate me.” It originally appeared in German in the February 5, 2005, Das Magazin weekend
newspaper supplement. An excerpt from the interview, including this quote, appeared in the
Turkish press days later. The comment led to a hate campaign, the burning of his books, and
Pamuk’s appearance in a television interview on CNN-Turk in which he said he stood by his
statement, but he clarified it, emphasizing that he had been the victim of the interviewer’s
provocation, that he had not identified “Turks” as perpetrators, and that he had not used the
word “genocide.” The affair culminated in an unsuccessful attempt by the state to try him
under Article 301–1 and a foiled assassination plot by ultranationalists.
5
In 1997 I witnessed a leftist Turkish professor asking Pamuk two questions after Pamuk had
given a lecture that touched on human rights in Turkey (“Human Rights in Turkey”). In the
lecture, Pamuk referred to sixteenth-century Ottoman archival sources that served as the back-
ground for his forthcoming novel, Benim adım kırmızı (My Name Is Red). One of Pamuk’s p
olitical

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ve oğulları (Cevdet Bey and Sons), does bear the influence of the social realism that
was characteristic of the literature of the second republic between 1960 and 1980.
However, Pamuk quickly rejected and was soon excluded by the practitioners of
this variety of literature. In Turkey, a nation-state whose identity has been con-
structed on the unstable nexus of modernity, secularism, and Islam, the signifi-
cance of innovations in literature—or literary modernity—stems from its often
negative relationship to secular state power. Literary modernity in the Turkish
novel is not merely innovation in form and content, but also a foundational means
of political critique of what cultural anthropologist Talal Asad terms the “forma-
tions of the secular.” I argue that the concept of literary modernity can function to
contest narratives of “Westernization” and enlightenment backed by republican
state power. By narrowing my focus to innovative Turkish novels (like Pamuk’s)
whose form and content function to revise discourses of Turkishness, I read liter-
ary modernity not merely as innovation but as an arena for political engagement.6
That is, Turkish literary modernity describes a persistent conflict between author-
ship and the secular authority of modernization, one that can be traced not only
in Pamuk’s oeuvre but in much of the modern Turkish novel canon. In this essay,
I read literary modernity as the contestation and revision of authoritarian secular-
ism that both politicizes the tropes of the Turkish novel and redefines Turkishness
by liberating it from the authorizing discourses of the state.
Pamuk’s own ambivalence toward the Turkish national literary tradition is a
clue to the fact that Pamuk-as-editor is doing much more than expressing belated
solidarity with the literary left. He is consciously negotiating the contestations of
his first and second readerships, national on one hand and international on the
other.7 Additionally, in this instance, he is attempting to reconcile his disengaged
Turkish literary past with his dissident international identity confirmed and vali-
conclusions was simply, “There are no human rights in Turkey.” The subsequent questions
directed to him were: “Do you know the Ottoman language?” (Pamuk: “No”); “Have you ever
spent time in jail?” (Pamuk: “No”). This exchange summarizes Pamuk’s attempt to gain politi-
cal legitimacy outside Turkey as well as his lack of legitimacy as a writer from the perspective
of the socially engaged Turkish Left.
6
Paul de Man makes an early theorization of the term literary modernity in a way that is illumi-
nating to the Turkish context. In opposing “modernity” to “history” and then to “literature,”
de Man postulates a triangulated critique: “Modernity and history seem condemned to being
linked together in a self-destroying union that threatens the survival of both. If we see in this
paradoxical condition a diagnosis of our own modernity, then literature has always been essen-
tially modern” (391). For my purposes here, literary modernity maintains an ongoing tension
with the secular modern and its authoritarian history as represented by Turkish republican
nationalism.
7
A juxtaposition of Pamuk’s translated works against his untranslated works reveals important
insights into the differences between his national and international positioning. The body of
his untranslated works includes his first two novels, Cevdet Bey ve oğulları and Sessiz ev (The
Silent House), his screenplay Gizli yüz (The Hidden Face), and large sections of the nonfiction col-
lection Öteki renkler (parts were translated in an abridged and edited version as Other Colors). To
this could be added his unpublished works: about two hundred pages of an incomplete early
novel of bourgeois Marxism. As of this writing, these works remain untranslated.

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dated by the Nobel Prize.8 In this sense, he demonstrates the type of mediation
between national and world literatures that is a hallmark of his novels. But this is
still only half the story.
A critical examination of the discrepancy between Pamuk’s disengagement
and his dissidence also provides a measure of his literary modernity. He experi-
ments with fictional forms from social realism to modernism and from traditional
narratives to postmodernism before settling confidently into complex contexts
of Istanbul cosmopolitanism that synthesize internal and external influences.
These transformations in literary form make Turkishness contingent on various
unreconciled contexts, including secular nationalism, European orientalism (or
Turkology), Islamic mysticism (or Sufism), and the historical legacy of the Ottoman
Empire. Pamuk uses the novel form, I am suggesting, to pose political challenges
to the legacies of Turkism (the ideology of Turkish nationalism) that advocated the
dismissal of Istanbul cosmopolitanism and the denigration of the Ottoman Islamic
past. In so doing, he pits city against nation, championing the multifaceted cultural
history of Istanbul over Anatolian nationalism.
The politics of Pamuk’s novels emerges not from ideological disputes but from
his literary interrogation of the so-called secularization thesis of modernity,
according to which social progress requires an ever increasing commitment to
rationality and a corresponding reduction in the influence of religion. What first
made Pamuk suspect in Turkish leftist and nationalist critical circles is not his
resemblance to dissidents like Hikmet but his gradual revision of the literary forms
and contexts of historical and social realism as understood by a previous genera-
tion of writers. Novels that turned away from the projects of Anatolian social and
national liberation to recoup the cosmopolitan cultural history of Istanbul’s Otto-
man and Islamic past were read as incongruent with 1980s Turkish modernity. In
the wake of Pamuk’s work, however, novels of Turkish cultural redefinition have
become the norm. In transforming the Turkish literary field, his novels themselves
make an often overlooked political argument against secular modernity and the
republican state.
Understanding Pamuk’s literary modernity as a form of political engagement
(apart from and beyond the dissidence of the author) is vital to understanding
how his novels function. A general lack of knowledge about the modern Turkish
contexts of Pamuk’s work has led to half-formed interpretations, misconceptions,
and misreadings of his literature. Even worse, the lack of Turkish cultural legibility
in Euro-American literary studies has resulted in a critical silence that reveals the
acceptance of essentialized orientalist and nationalist knowledge about Turkey.
Pamuk’s fiction does demonstrate faithfulness to the modern Turkish novel even
as it transgresses its traditions. That said, his work certainly does not correspond
to the social realism with which he identifies as editor in chief. Elsewhere, Pamuk
8
This gesture of reconciliation—if not outright apology—can also be traced in Pamuk’s Nobel
lecture (“My Father’s Suitcase”), which plays on the tensions of traditional father-and-son
tropes with the “father” representing national tradition and the “son” mediating between
paternal respect and global cultural change. The lecture was rather self-consciously delivered
in Turkish, an indication of the target audience.

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does not hide his ambivalence and even animosity toward the Turkish novel, which
nonetheless has profoundly influenced him.9 Thus Pamuk’s edition of Radikal
could be read as a post-trial, post-Nobel fantasy of a “return to origins” after being
labeled a national traitor. This might be Pamuk’s attempt to resituate himself in the
literary canon, as if to say, “I am still one of you!” or it might even be something
of an apology for his radical transformations of the secular Turkish novel and the
dominant discourses of Turkishness. Interestingly, this very transformation has
placed the Turkish novel, to borrow Pascale Casanova’s phrase, within the “world
republic of letters.” Meanwhile, Pamuk himself has been banished to the margins
of Turkish national culture and is frequently misread as a native informant or an
exotic exile in international circles. For a time, like his poet-protagonist Ka in Kar
(Snow), Pamuk had to hire bodyguards, and he was forced to leave Turkey under
death threats from ultranationalists. This paradoxical cultural displacement of the
Turkish Nobel laureate, his perceived inauthenticity, and the silence of his critical
reception serve as additional background contexts for my argument.
Though Pamuk’s work belongs to the post-1980 third republic, a period charac-
terized by Turkey’s gradual neoliberal integration into global networks, he began
writing in the early 1970s, during the heyday of social realism and political unrest
between the 1960 and 1980 military coups. This is a period known as the second
republic.10 Pamuk’s novels develop through a catalog of genres and literary styles
from the realism of Cevdet Bey to the multiperspectival modernism of Sessiz ev (The
Silent House); from the Ottoman historical allegory of Beyaz kale (The White Castle)
to the metaphysical detective story of Kara kitap (The Black Book); from the mystical
Sufi metafiction of Yeni hayat (The New Life) to the historiographic postmodernism
of Benim adım kırmızı (My Name Is Red); and from the literature of conspiracy and
coup in Snow to the unrequited love and Istanbul material culture of Masumiyet
müzesi (The Museum of Innocence). These eight novels, published between 1982 and
2008 (in Turkish), rehistoricize dominant literary tropes, revise Turkish literary
modernity, and redefine Turkishness while in the process putting the Turkish
novel into an international constellation.11
The Secular Masterplot of the Republican Novel
In Turkey, the legacy of the Kemalist cultural revolution persists into the pres-
ent. The origins of the cultural revolution rest in a series of events beginning in
9
See Pamuk’s Other Colors. The Turkish version of this collection of belles-lettres, Öteki renkler:
Seçme yazılar ve bir hikaye, is vastly different in its content and in many respects should be
treated as a separate work. The discrepancy between these versions, published eight years
apart, is telling: the Turkish text acknowledges a debt to the Turkish novelistic past with
detailed commentary on authors such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Kemal Tâhir, Orhan Kemal,
Aziz Nesin, Yaşar Kemal, and Oğuz Atay, whereas the English version contains no mention of
these authors at all. The absence reveals a profound anxiety of influence and reception.
10
For more on the division of twentieth-century Turkish history into first, second, and third
republics, see Erik J. Zürcher 231–342.
11
In English translation, this periodization is slightly shorter, lasting from 1990 until 2010, as
Pamuk’s first two novels have not been translated.

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1920 with the establishment of the Turkish national parliament and the subse-
quent military victories against the Allied occupations of Anatolia and Istanbul.
These events were followed by the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate in 1922, the
establishment of the republic in 1923, and the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate in
1924. The cultural revolution was an authoritarian social-engineering project that
affected all areas of public and private life, including law, language, politics, dress,
and culture. The stated aims were modernization and secularization. The impedi-
ments were deemed to be Islamic tradition, culture, and law, including Sufism. The
revolution was also part of a process of individual and collective identity forma-
tion, or “Turkification,” with the goal of reintroducing the identity marker Turk
in a positive, progressive way. That is to say, the cultural revolution appropriated
the ambivalent ethnoreligious term used by outsiders, made it a secular ideal, and
nationalized it as an insider site of identification in the scope of a wholesale conver-
sion to modernity. The greater goals of this secular identification function included
societal progress and elevation of local Anatolian folk (halk) culture. The cultural
revolution placed emphasis on Turkic peoples before the adoption of Islam, thereby
also giving secularism an ancient Eastern historical precedent.12 Literary and his-
torical narratives justified and promoted this social-engineering project, and the
novel became a vehicle for promoting its aims.
Scholars such as Evin, Berna Moran, and Finn have established that the novel
in Turkish functioned as a vehicle of social modernization, one in which, I empha-
size, secularism is centrally located. Early republican novels often espoused an
empire-to-republic historical periodization and a masterplot that supported the
secularization thesis of the cultural revolution. As formulated in republican histo-
riography and literature, what I term the secular masterplot consists of four dra-
matic contexts: colonial occupation, Anatolian turn, imagined Turkishness, and
cultural revolution.13 Together, the four dominant scenes of this narrative trace the
development of secular Turks out of Ottoman Muslims in a conversion to moder-
nity whose Muslim underpinnings were repressed and elided. In other words, for
the first time in Turkish history, the secular masterplot divorced the authority of
Islam from that of the state, a separation that was symptomatic of modernization
and “Westernization.” Providing the emplotment for historical and literary texts,
this secular masterplot became one of the dominant discourses of Turkishness. The
secular masterplot encouraged Sunni Muslims to actively begin thinking of them-
selves as modern Turks. This redefined and regenerated national identity chal-
lenged anti-Muslim, racist, and orientalized notions of Turkish backwardness then
current in Europe and Russia. The scholarly discipline of Turkology and the threat
of European colonization played a formative role in the construction of Turkish-
ness, as a noble and newly nationalized Turk emerged through engagement with,
12
On the premodern precedent for Turkish secularism, see, for example, H. Poulton.
13
The development of a national master narrative was the focus my doctoral dissertation,
“Between ‘Ottoman’ and ‘Turk’: Literary Narrative and the Transition from Empire to Repub-
lic” (Göknar).

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and in opposition to, stereotypical discourses of the “terrible,” “unspeakable,” and

“lustful” Turk.14 Shedding a defeated Ottoman Islamic worldview, the new Turk
aspired to European modernity while embracing the folk essence of ethnic authen-
ticity. The message of republican state modernization might be paraphrased in the
following contradictory sentiments: Be proud of being Turkish; change everything
about yourselves.
As a part of republican modernization, novelists during the cultural revolution
and afterward were charged with representing a literary modernity that supported
the separation of the political spheres of Islam and state. However, the entwined
cultural legacies of both religious and secular authority (now opposed) persisted
as a subtext in the social spaces of the modern Turkish novel. In his fiction, for
example, Pamuk rearticulates tropes of religion and secularism that sometimes
overlap. Indeed, the Turkish literary canon contains frequent examples of this dual
articulation, summarized by the antinomy of din (religion) and devlet (state).
The Political Tropes of Islam and State
In contrast to local critics of Pamuk who characterize his fiction as apolitical post-
modern play, I argue that the intersection of politics and literature is one of the
hallmarks of his fiction (not just Snow). The politics of Pamuk’s literary modernity
rests in the subversions that his various innovations in form articulate in the coer-
cive context of secular modernity. In order to convey the political stakes of Pamuk’s
revision of republican literary tradition, I rely on a well-known concept in Turkish
political history and introduce it into the literary field as a vehicle for cultural anal-
ysis. Historians describe the political formula din ü devlet (the religion of Islam and
the secular state tradition) in terms of the mutual dependency of Islam and state as
an authorizing discourse.15 In making this comparison, I am intentionally bringing
political authority into dialogue with the discursive power of literary tropes. This
is the very juxtaposition and confrontation that Pamuk’s fiction enables.
As I argue, Pamuk’s fiction both rehistoricizes and revises the major tropes of
the modern Turkish novel. These tropes repeatedly appear in a symbolic complex
that maps republican literary culture through an inscription of contexts of devlet
(such as revolution, empire-to-republic history, secularism, modernity, Kemalism,
14
In his popular history on the Ottomans, Andrew Wheatcroft writes,
By the late nineteenth century, after seventy-five years of ever-closer contact [with Europe], the
Ottomans were stereotyped by the West under two attitudes. The first is as ‘the Lustful Turk’, which
is the title of a widely circulated pornographic novel first published in 1828 and which remained
popular throughout the nineteenth century. It stands for the prurient imagination which invested the
Ottomans with such vices as enabled Westerners to dismiss them as worthless. The second stereotype
is of ‘the Terrible Turk’—a story of perverted valour, or how, in an evil society, even virtuous quali-
ties are demeaned. Thus, the Turk can be courageous and honourable, but at heart he is a beast, which
outweighs all else. (xxix)
It should also be emphasized that the term Turk was used within the Ottoman Empire to refer
pejoratively to peasants and rurals.
15
For one commentary on the post-1980 resurgence of this political script, see Sam Kaplan.

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or coup); of din (such as Sufism, Islam, the Ottoman past, conversion, or veiling);
or of a combination of the secular and sacred, including ideological conversion,
secular Sufism, and redemptive authorship. Constructed over the cartography of
these conflicted cultural contexts, I argue, Pamuk’s novels establish culturally pro-
ductive relations between din and devlet that function as literary-political critiques
of the secularization thesis.
In other words, in the Turkish literary field, tropes of Islam and/or state carry
political force, as is attested by their long and contentious history since the found-
ing of the republic. My claim is that din ü devlet not only describes a legacy of Turk-
ish political authority but also unleashes a major force in Turkish cultural produc-
tion. Pamuk’s innovation is to place various representations of the religious culture
of din in productive tension with the secular formations of devlet in what Ottoman
historian Karen Barkey has referred to as a “lived duality” (14).16 This rearticula-
tion brings manifestations of din and devlet, segregated by the republican secular
masterplot, back into productive parity. For example, Pamuk’s repeated invocation
of the Ottoman-Islamic past, Istanbul, and Sufism asserts religious tropes against
the figures and figurations of secularism. In doing so, Pamuk calls the reader’s
attention to an opposition that occurs so frequently in the literary sphere that argu-
ably Turkish literary modernity is defined by the positive or negative relation of
representations of din to devlet. As such, Pamuk’s novels work to correct the imbal-
ance of secularism that favors devlet, or the concerns of the secular state, by show-
ing din and devlet to be legitimate elements of a mutually defining antinomy.17
By applying din ü devlet to modern literary culture as an interpretive lens, I am
simply reenacting in scholarship the kind of intertextual innovation that Pamuk
has been performing in the field of literature. My model of interpretation is based
on one of Pamuk’s own techniques of updating Turkish literary modernity. In
reading his novels together, I show that the antinomy of Islam and state simul-
taneously identifies the limits of the republican literary tradition and reorients
the Turkish novel by invading the secular novel form with tropes of din, broadly
construed, that have been abjected as the legacy of the Kemalist cultural revolu-
tion. Furthermore, secularization, which removed visible traces and symbols of
Islam from the public sphere, did not banish so much as repress them, forcing
them underground and/or relegating them to the private sphere. While permitting
tropes of din to persist as an unacknowledged cultural subtext, literature—and
the novel in particular—harbored the excisions and epistemic violence of secular
social engineering. Until Pamuk began revitalizing the novel’s textual relationship
to din, the cultural context of devlet largely determined what could be said and
done in a Turkish novel without losing claim to the real.
16
Barkey describes dualities such as the secular and the religious, Islam and Sufism, orthodoxy
and heterodoxy, and Christianity and Islam.
17
One subtext of this essay is the threat posed by canonized Turkish authors and texts to a mod-
ern state that denies the political authority represented by both din and devlet. This denial pits
the state against authors who are engaged in various reinscriptions of Turkishess that do not
reflect the identity, history, or ideology of secular Turkism. Authoring Turkishness (secular and
religious both) gives rise to dilemmas that are cultural and literary as well as political and legal.

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Beginning with The White Castle, Pamuk’s third novel and the first to be trans-
lated into English, his fiction dismantles the narrative force of devlet by situating
it within a narrative that moves from the republican present back to seventeenth-
century Ottoman Istanbul and a Muslim protagonist named Abdullah (“slave of
God”) who is a hoja (scholar of Islam) with an Islamic medrese education. Simply
put, all of Pamuk’s subsequent novels establish new literary chronotopes through
various articulations of din and devlet. This allows him to imagine a literary space,
an imaginary Istanbul, in which Islam, Sufism, Turkism, the Ottoman legacy, cul-
tural revolution, coup, and even conspiracy coexist. The paradigmatic Pamuk novel
dismisses the entrenched secularist teleology according to which, with exposure
to or emulation of Europe, a “Muslim” nation might develop into a “modern” one.
Rather, literary articulations of din and devlet transform the discourses of Turk-
ishness so that they no longer represent authenticity, self, otherness, or absolute
difference in terms of modernity, nationalism, or orientalism.18 Pamuk redefines
Turkishness as a secular and sacred formation. By challenging what are essentially
neocolonial and anti-Islamic premises, Pamuk places himself within a literary-
political field of intellectuals who, in other traditions, would be described as post-
colonial. I would argue, however, that this term is not appropriate for the modern
Turkish novel. To read Pamuk as a postcolonial author would reconstitute the very
opposition to Europe that his work successfully overcomes.
Even though Turkey was never colonized, the official discourses of the republic
fabricated a clear distinction between the new national formation and what had
come before, casting the Ottoman state centered in Istanbul as the “colonizer”
of Anatolia and Turks. Because Pamuk reintroduces urban Ottoman, Sufi, and
Islamic forms into the republican novel, his work is sometimes read as retrograde,
regressive, or even orientalist by his contemporaries in Turkey.19 These readings
miss the real substance of his project. Pamuk’s novels do not just write back to
Europe, they identify Istanbul as a viable site of literary modernity on its own.
Once we see how Pamuk’s fiction excavates and rearticulates the undervalued
cultural spaces of din, we can clarify the distortions of his self-association with the
authors of socialist engagement in Radikal. What makes his work so problematic in
political terms is not that Pamuk poses a threat to the state on ideological grounds
but that he denies secular authority and challenges definitions of Turkishness by
authoring novels of cultural redefinition predicated on the descriptive spaces of
both din and devlet. Nor, I emphasize, does he invoke these terms literally; the
reintroduction of din into literature is his means of reenchanting a modern Turkish
18
The critique asserting that din and devlet simply replace well-worn oppositions such as East and
West or secularism and Islam misses the point that din and devlet are neither opposed dialecti-
cally in anticipation of a resolution in favor of one pole nor combined in synthesis. Rather, both
in their political-historical usage and in their present literary articulation in this study, din and
devlet represent productive tension within a structural unity.
19
Such readings of Pamuk are suggested, for example, by mainstream literary critics such as
Hilmi Yavuz, Tahsin Yücel, and Ahmet Oktay and even by extreme conspiracy theorists such
as Yalçın Küçük and Nihat Genç.

Novel
novel disenchanted by secular modernization. Pamuk brings the realist, economic,

and material conditions of devlet, with their focus on enlightenment and progress,
into contact with a rearticulated literary mysticism that allows for the possibility
of redemption through authorship and textual production.
Mapping Pamuk’s Literary Modernity
This argument is not one that can be made by analyzing Pamuk’s novels alone.
As points of comparison, I have identified a constellation of six modern Turkish
novels, each of which is considered a milestone in the literary canon.20 To this con-
stellation, I will add Pamuk’s novels to contextualize his work, and through his
work, illuminate the Turkish literary tradition. Each canonical novel offers a way
of rethinking literary modernity that deepens our theoretical understanding of
politics and literature. Moreover, each mobilizes tropes of din and devlet.21 Finally,
in discussing these novels, I will be referring to yet another context—the long-held
tradition of mystical Islam, or Sufism, in Middle Eastern and Islamic literatures,
to which Turkish authors, including Pamuk, are deeply indebted. Sufism tolerates
paradoxes, which in the twentieth-century context of Turkish literary modernity
allowed a “secular Sufism” to emerge. This is a definitive characteristic of the Turk-
ish novel that allows the reenchantment, by means of Sufi tropes and intertextual-
ity, of a literature disenchanted by the secular masterplot. Sufism thus provides
a useful counternarrative to the dialectical logic of modernization, and Pamuk
makes innovative use of this tradition in constructing his novels.
20
These include two novels of Istanbul cosmopolitan culture: Sinekli bakkal (1936; trans. The Clown
and His Daughter [1935]), by Halide Edib Adıvar (1884–1964), and Huzur (1949; trans. A Mind at
Peace [2011]), by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–62); two socialist texts focusing on Anatolia:
Memleketimden insan manzaraları (1938–50; trans. Human Landscapes from My Country [2009]), by
Nâzım Hikmet (1902–63), and Yer demir, gök bakır (1963; trans. Iron Earth, Copper Sky [1997]), by
Yaşar Kemal (born 1923); and two existential novels of parody and protest: Anayurt oteli (Moth-
erland Hotel; 1973), by Yusuf Atılgan (1921–89), and Tutunamayanlar (Misfits; 1972), by Oğuz Atay
(1934–77). Except for Tanpınar and Atay, these authors were either persecuted by the state or
considered to be vatan haini (traitors to the nation). Except for Atılgan and Atay, these authors
have represented Turkish literature in the world literary system and are widely available in
translation.
21
Hikmet and Kemal appeared in Pamuk’s edition of Radikal, but they are included here by
nature of their aesthetic innovations in literary form rather than their socialist engagement. If
what was advocated through the republican cultural revolution was state-sponsored conver-
sion to modernity, novels of Turkish literary modernity question and qualify such conversion
by reinscribing suppressed or peripheralized cultural forms. Edib and Tanpınar, though stylis-
tically different from Pamuk, effectively describe the half-measures of secular modernity when
they acknowledge the formative influences of Ottoman Islamic cosmopolitanism. Hikmet and
Kemal, on the other hand, foreground the folk (halk) as their most important literary concern
and influence. They take the plight of Anatolian villagers as an object of literature and poli-
tics. Atılgan and Atay see in the authoritarian legacy of Ottoman-republican modernization
(as manifested through the military coup) a profound alienation and existentialism, one that
destroys characters or allows them a limited subversive outlet through parody.

Novel
Empire to Republic
Pamuk’s first two untranslated novels exhibit a historical, or more accurately, his-
toriographic focus. In keeping with the republican modernizing imperative of dev-
let, these novels are informed by an empire-to-republic periodization that traces a
bildungsroman. The empire-to-republic bildungsroman is a genre of the Turkish
novel that narrates the transition from Ottoman Empire to Republic of Turkey as
an articulation of the secularization thesis. Pamuk’s first two novels, Cevdet Bey,
written in 1979 and published in 1982, and Sessiz ev (1983), are grounded in the
Turkish literary tradition and follow the established pattern of the bildungsroman.
Drawing on narratives of Ottoman and republican modernization, these novels
offer multigenerational treatments of social and political history, written at a time
when Pamuk described himself as a leftist. (Between these two novels, Pamuk
began writing a novel of “bourgeois Marxism” that he never finished because of
publishing restrictions enacted after the 1980 military coup [personal conversation
1].)22 In these novels, it is fair to say, the author maintained his proximity to secular
iterations of literary modernity by relying on narratives of political and social his-
tory that he gradually modified, sometimes to the point of parody.
Cevdet Bey, whose original title is Karanlık ve ışık (Darkness and Light), represents
the dialectic of enlightened forces of revolutionary progress versus the “dark”
forces of Muslim tradition.23 This Istanbul family novel tells the story of Cevdet
Işıkçı (literally, light-seller or proponent of light), a Muslim business pioneer in a
sector dominated by Levantines, Greeks, and Armenians. In describing three gen-
erations of his family, the novel summarizes twentieth-century Turkish social his-
tory according to an empire-to-republic narrative from 1905 to 1970 and concludes
just months before the 1971 military coup. The novel features scenes of Anatolia
(Erzincan and Ankara) that address the conflict between elite Istanbul cosmopoli-
tanism and Anatolian regional culture.24
Pamuk’s historiographical framing and emphasis on the trope of revolution is a
direct influence of the Turkish literary canon. The historical and social realist tra-
dition in Turkey can be traced back to the early republic and persists through the
work of socialist authors Kemal Tâhir and Hikmet. Hikmet’s iconic Memleketimden
22
Pamuk read to me from his notes on this incomplete political novel a scene that describes the
thoughts and feelings of the bourgeois protagonist who has decided to “liberate” (that is, steal)
a book from an Istanbul bookstore. The novel focuses on youths with Marxist convictions who
want to engage in acts of civil unrest (stealing property or tossing a bomb at the prime min-
ister), yet they come from well-to-do Istanbul families. About 250 pages of this novel exist in
longhand.
23
Cevdet Bey was awarded the Orhan Kemal Novel Award in 1983. Orhan Kemal (1914–70) was
one of the main proponents of social realism along with Kemal Tâhir and Yaşar Kemal. The
guidelines of the award explicitly state that it recognizes novels “written with realist and
socialist intent and under the condition that they do not oppose or counter Orhan Kemal’s
artistic vision and worldview” (“Orhan Kemal”).
24
Pamuk revisits Anatolia in his fourth and sixth novels, New Life and Snow. Both novels take
place mostly outside Istanbul and contain strong parodies of modernization history and
national ideology.

Novel
insan manzaraları (Human Landscapes from My Country), written in 1938–1950 and

published in 1966–67 (with the full English translation published in 2002),25 identi-
fied Anatolia as a site of Turkish modernization and the appropriate setting for
literature with a socialist orientation. A novel in free verse, Human Landscapes cap-
tures the multidimensionality of Anatolia as experienced on a train journey from
Istanbul into the Anatolian heartland. The novel is organized around historical
vignettes that follow the transition from empire to republic during the crucial
period between 1908 and 1950, as it follows the main character, an intellectual,
author, and political prisoner named Hilmi (a surrogate for Hikmet himself),
through his struggle against impending blindness, both literal and figurative.26
Sessiz ev, Pamuk’s second novel, maintains a similar three-generation, empire-
to-republic periodization between 1910 and 1980 but introduces an important
innovation. In this novel, Pamuk makes use of a high modernist style of multiple
first-person narrators, stream-of-consciousness narration, and black humor. As
opposed to the republican success story of the Işıkçı family, Sessiz ev describes
the dysfunctions of the Darvınoğlus. The novel focuses on three grandchildren
who during a period of 1970s political unrest make a weeklong summer’s visit to
their grandmother’s house near Istanbul, which proves to be the empty abode of
the imagined community. The oldest, Faruk, is a history professor, while the mid-
dle sibling, Nilgün, studies sociology at the university, and the youngest, Metin,
aspires to amass a fortune in the United States. Fatma, the family’s matron and
grandmother, stews in bitter memories of her husband, Selahattin, a European-
educated modernizer and atheist who had aspired to write an encyclopedia that
would close the gap between “East” and “West.” Sessiz ev irreversibly breaks down
the omniscient voice of republican social history into multiple first-person narra-
tors. (This first instance of Pamuk’s use of multiperspectival style, variations of
which appear in My Name Is Red, has clear political import.) Pamuk’s parody of
the republican intellectual through the historian Faruk Darvınoğlu (Truth-Seeker
Son-of-Darwin) is only the first indication of the derisive humor that will dominate
his later novels.27 Sessiz ev ends only weeks away from the 1980 military coup, in
25
Yılmaz Güney’s Cannes Palme d’Or–winning film Yol (1982), directed by proxy while he was
in prison, is largely a cinematic adaptation of the main themes, form, and content of book 1 of
Hikmet’s Human Landscapes.
26
Hikmet situates the history of republican anti-imperial and anticolonial nation building into
an international history of socialist revolution. This historiographical revision is part of an
established pattern in the early republican novel in its dominant technique of revising histori-
cal events in literary representation. By juxtaposing nationalist and socialist epics in Human
Landscapes, Hikmet allows us to reread distinct ideological and historical discourses together.
27
The nuances of irony and parody present in Pamuk’s novels often do not convey well in trans-
lation. This is another cause of misinterpretation, especially when satire is combined with
physical or verbal scenes of violence: the violence translates; the satirical nuance does not. On
reading Pamuk as parody, see Sibel Erol. During a personal conversation I had with Pamuk, he
repeatedly interrupted himself with bouts of laughter while reading a draft of the theater coup
scene from Snow (personal conversation 1). The humor in this scene is clearly lost on Anglo-
phone readers, judging from reviews of the novel and personal experiences teaching the novel.

Novel
personal alienation and community fragmentation. Of the three grandchildren,

Faruk has become a lonely alcoholic, the leftist Nilg��
ün��
dies after a politically moti-
vated attack by ultranationalists, and Metin still dreams of leaving for the United
States in pursuit of the American dream. Unmistakably, Pamuk’s second novel
declares the bankruptcy of any unified vision of national or social progress. This
existential crisis of secularism will increasingly lead to Pamuk’s literary explora-
tions of religious and mystical themes.
During the second and third republican generations, Anatolian authors began
to speak back to the cosmopolitan Istanbul authors who had “gone to the people”
to fulfill their utopian ideals of a new society. The voice of the people (halk) was
heard through the pages of village novels that saw Anatolia not as the landscape of
modernization but as testimony to its failure. Yaşar Kemal’s 1963 Yer demir, gök bakır
(Iron Earth, Copper Sky) replaces the Eurocentric narrative of secular moderniza-
tion with alternatives: regional myths, legends, and traditional cultural forms as
guiding literary and social scripts. In the novel, peasants in an isolated mountain
village struggle for survival in winter by using gossip and hearsay to elevate one
of their members to the status of a mystical folk saint who then begins to work
miracles. The emergence of mysticism out of stark material circumstances thus
describes one intersection of the material and the mystical, a theme that Pamuk
further develops in later works. The saint is in turn imprisoned by the secular state
for engaging in religious exploitation as a healer. Here the novel confronts Hikmet’s
historical materialism with an alternative history of mysticism constructed from
local oral narratives. Both works are informed by the vexed relationships between
Istanbul cosmopolitanism, the secular state, and Anatolian society. Like Hikmet,
Kemal moves away from the nationalist and socialist narratives of Istanbul intel-
lectuals to regional narratives about the everyday plight of Anatolian villagers.
Thus Pamuk’s two early novels—the first in a realist and the second in a mod-
ernist style—can be regarded as faithful appropriations of empire-to-republic bil-
dungsroman. They cannot be called politically engaged in any obvious way. But
his modifications in form and introduction of parody in Sessiz ev begin to amount
to sweeping arguments for recuperating the elisions and repressions of republican
modernization. Pamuk further develops this argumentation through form in sub-
sequent novels by making literary excavations in the Ottoman archive.
The Ottoman Archive
In Beyaz kale (1985; trans. The White Castle [1990]), his first novel to appear in English
translation, Pamuk introduces new narrative techniques into Turkish literature.
The novel is structured around a manuscript discovered in a forgotten Ottoman
archive by Faruk Darvınoğlu, the historian of Sessiz ev, who has lost his faith in the
discipline of history. The plot relies on the production of the (literary) manuscript
as a device, creating Pamuk’s first use of a metafictional technique that he uses in
all subsequent novels. Darvınoğlu’s translation and publication of the manuscript
in the wake of the 1980 coup functions as a metaphor for the reintroduction of
Ottoman cultural memory into the republican present. In so doing, Pamuk argues,

Novel
against official republican history, that the Ottoman past is not just a denigrated
backdrop for the emergence of secular nationalism.
The manuscript transports the reader into a seventeenth-century captive’s tale,
where a master-slave relationship unfolds between a Muslim Ottoman Turk (a
hoja) and a Christian Venetian captive who fakes being a physician. The Turkish
master’s desire to learn everything the Venetian knows about Renaissance knowl-
edge quickly turns into sadomasochistic obsession. The characters have ties to
the Ottoman court and gain the patronage of the sultan. On the periphery of the
Renaissance and in an Islamic context, together they begin quasi-scientific experi-
mentation with gunpowder, fireworks, astrology, divination, military weapons,
and autobiographical writing. Their increasing similarity in character and appear-
ance eventually allows them to pass for each other. Demonstrating a narrative
technique that parallels the characters’ switching of places, Pamuk begins to cast
doubt on the identity of the first-person narrator—who actually might be either
character—concluding the novel in an intended indeterminacy. This manipula-
tion of narrative perspective establishes the novel’s metafictional level of a “story
about creating a story” and the documentation of the writing process. Further-
more, the innovative structure functions to critique the binary logic of orientalism,
nationalism, and modernity as well as the dialectical thought that requires and
produces such oppositions. Pamuk’s layered allegory about the instability of self
and other (Muslim and Christian or European and Turk) demonstrates, among
other things, that the archival text can become the basis for literary transforma-
tion in the present—a direct rebuke to the claims of a secular republican vision
advocating the wholesale abandonment of Ottoman Islamic tradition. Importantly,
the discovery of the Ottoman manuscript within the plot reveals an obfuscated
Ottoman Istanbul cosmopolitanism, a setting wherein two distinct literary genres
are able to merge: the European captive’s tale and the Islamic mystical Sufi quest
(of self-discovery). In the process of textual convergence in the space of the novel,
a third account emerges, one of conversion.
Pamuk’s recuperation of traditional Sufi themes and other Ottoman “archival”
material reflects the influence of the Turkish modernist author Ahmet Hamdi
Tanpınar. Treating the neglected city of Istanbul itself as an archive, Tanpınar
takes matters one step further by confronting secular Turkism with the Ottoman
cultural legacy. Indeed, the secular cultural revolution seems to have completely
bypassed Tanpınar’s Istanbul settings. In critiquing the secularization thesis, he
uses Ottoman material culture as a means to qualify revolutionary modernization.
In Huzur (A Mind at Peace), published in 1949, Tanpinar transforms the historical
traumas that led to the establishment of the republic into psychological dilem-
mas that afflict the fallen bourgeois of Istanbul. The protagonist Mümtaz is beset
by personal and political crises, including the illness of his cousin and surrogate
father İhsan, the rejection by his beloved Nuran, the stark revolutionary nihilism
of his nemesis Suad, and the impending Second World War. The novel’s excavation
of an Islamic cultural past exposes the excesses of national and social modern-
ization. From Ottoman architecture to traditional Turkish and Islamic music and
the relics and ruins of Istanbul, material culture holds the secret to r eimagining
the Ottoman legacy in an innovative way. In this respect, the Istanbul cosmopoli-

Novel
tanism and unrequited love of Tanpınar’s Huzur provides Pamuk with a secular-
sacred model of form from which to fashion his own fictions of literary modernity.
Pamuk further develops the Ottoman theme in the 1998 Benim adım kırmızı (My
Name Is Red). With its English publication in 2001, Pamuk’s name was mentioned
speculatively in conjunction with the Nobel Prize for the first time.28 Here, he
combines many of the techniques, forms, and genres used in his previous work.
The novel includes the autobiographical mode of Cevdet Bey, reintroduces the first-
person multiperspectival narration of Sessiz ev, maintains the Ottoman/republican
allegory of identity from The White Castle, incorporates the detective story framing
of The Black Book, and replaces with reunion the mystical theme of unrequited love
developed in New Life. Set in the sixteenth century, My Name Is Red resurrects the
Ottoman cultural history contained in illuminated manuscripts once produced
in Istanbul. The sultan, embodying the authority of din and devlet, commissions
a secret manuscript to celebrate the glories of the empire on the Islamic millen-
nial anniversary of the Hegira, the Prophet Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to
Medina. However, he orders the book’s images to be rendered in Renaissance
styles of perspective and portraiture under the guidance of art aficionado Enishte
Effendi. The sultan maintains the secrecy of the book project because it threatens
Islamic orthodoxy through its potentially sacrilegious figural representations. An
orthodox cleric, Nusret Hoja, targets the book on grounds of blasphemy. When
first one of the artists, a guilder, and then Enishte Effendi himself is murdered,
an investigation is triggered that breaks up the account of the project into the
disparate genres of a murder mystery, a philosophical treatise on Islamic book
arts, a romance, an autobiography, and an allegorical tale of modern Turkey. In
My Name Is Red, the most insignificant things—from a coin to a tree or a dog—
consequently become metonyms for alternative or forgotten cultural histories.29
Objects and images speak their memories. Operating much like characters, items
from an Ottoman coin to the color red tell their stories. Meanwhile, the search
for the culprit continues in earnest through detective work based on clues hid-
den in illuminations. The characters must negotiate the contradictions posed by
two poles of authority—secular and religious—in order to discover the murderer’s
identity and complete the production of the book. In a signature gesture of cultural
translation, Pamuk adopts the flat two-dimensionality of the Islamic miniature as
his formal model for the contemporary novel. By doing so, he inverts the formula
of “European” form versus “local” content that dominates some literary under-
standings of national traditions.
The early republican feminist and author Halide Edib acknowledged the impor-
tance of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ottoman modernism and sought to
include cultural legacies of tradition and religion as part of her literary argument
for modernization. Written in exile from the Kemalist state, Adıvar’s 1935 Sinekli
bakkal (The Clown and His Daughter) is set in Istanbul during the late nineteenth-
28
See, for example, reviews by Richard Eder and Maureen Freely.
29
Republican material culture is also represented in Pamuk’s work, most prominently in New Life
and Museum of Innocence.

Novel
century reign of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II.30 The novel is an early and thinly
veiled literary-political critique of Kemalism. It tells a three-generation story focus-
ing on Rabia, an imam’s granddaughter and hafız (a Qur’an chanter), who supports
herself through recitations of the Qur’an and Mevlit (a Turkish epic of the Prophet’s
birth). Like Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, Adıvar’s novel relies on traditional religious
culture and the Karagöz shadow play, including its stock characters, as a model
for republican literary modernity. The novel’s storyline comes to a climax with
the 1908 “Young Turk” constitutional revolution that reinstated the 1876 Ottoman
constitution and reopened parliament. Like Pamuk’s early novels, Adıvar’s work
accepts modernization but levels sobering critiques at Kemalist authoritarianism,
qualifying it through reimagined aspects of Ottoman history. Additionally, she
introduces into the modern Turkish novel cosmopolitan issues of the position of
women, Islamic tradition, Sufism, conversion, and the traditional mahalle neighbor-
hood. While all of these elements play a part in Pamuk’s fiction as well, the compari-
son between them is both revealing and unorthodox: Pamuk, unlike Adıvar, has no
interest in constructing Turkishness as a site of national identification. Indeed, it is
Pamuk’s literary deconstructions of Turkishness that politicize his novels.
Coups and Conspiracies
Before he had turned thirty, Pamuk experienced three military coups—in 1960,
1971, and 1980—that supported and maintained an authoritarian legacy of Turk-
ish secularism. This, then, was also the political context of his development as an
author. Just as the excesses of the Kemalist cultural revolution pushed early novel-
ists to reassess the recent Ottoman past, so the political dysfunction of republican
coups forced Pamuk to find alternative modes with which to question Turkishness
using parody and satire. The trope of the impending coup d’état and the theme of
continuous political conspiracy shape the plots of most of his novels. Cevdet Bey is
set over the 1908–9, 1922–23, and 1960 political upheavals, and it ends just before
the 1971 coup. Sessiz ev is set during the 1970s social polarization of right and left
and ends just before the 1980 coup. The White Castle begins in its wake. The Black
Book and The New Life unfold under the oppression of conspiracy and imminent
coup. My Name Is Red pits the Ottoman sultan against a conservative Islamic resur-
gence, and Snow treats the Turkish coup as a melodrama and literary trope all
its own. In 1997, the military (with the mass media assisting by sounding alarm
bells) forced the resignation of Prime Minister Erbakan of the Islamicist Welfare
Party in order to assuage public fears of a politically enfranchised Islam. This
30
The novel appeared in an English version in 1935. In the same year it was serialized in Turkish
in the newspaper Haber. The first Turkish publication in book form was in 1936. Though Turkish
literary histories exclusively claim that the novel was written in English first, a careful read-
ing and comparison reveals that the Turkish text was likely the template for the English, not
vice versa. The English version reads obviously as “translationese,” in marked distinction to
Adıvar’s other work in English. There is also a 1967 film adaptation (dir. Mehmet Dinler) and a
more recent (2007) adaptation as a short-lived television miniseries (dir. Gülçin Gülbahçe).

Novel
so‑called postmodern coup inspired Pamuk’s Snow.31 As a trope evoking devlet, the
“coup” consequently came to represent a compulsive and paranoid reenactment
of the establishment of the nation-state and a metonym for cultural revolution. In
Pamuk’s novels, the coup emerges as the natural outcome of the logic of conspiracy.
In The New Life (Yeni hayat), published in 1994, Pamuk’s display of conspiratorial
logic functions as a parody of nationalist thought. The New Life describes shadowy
networks surrounding a mysterious book of immense influence that draws read-
ers under its sway. An absent text within the novel, the book is a device that func-
tions to establish a metafictional structure. This structure enables Pamuk to escape
the existential crises of secularism through open reflexivity about the constructed
nature of identity in ideological narratives. The mysterious, absent text in the plot
and Pamuk’s novel are both titled The New Life. Pamuk’s version serves as a surro-
gate text of witness, testimony, and confession. Furthermore, the novel evokes the
“new life” of Turkish nationalism as espoused by the Turkist social engineer Ziya
Gökalp.32 The novel reveals the mysterious book to the characters while conceal-
ing it from the reader, putting the reader in a situation parallel to that of the main
character Osman as he sets out in quest of its secrets, a quest obstructed by the con-
servative Dr. Fine and his network of spies working against the great conspiracy of
the book’s influence. By creating this milieu of conspiracy and counterconspiracy,
Pamuk makes the point that the new life (or the national condition) can be mystical
and redemptive as well as material and existential.
For Pamuk, the coup symbolizes an existential crisis that is a symptom of secu-
lar modernity. This crisis finds its iconic example in Yusuf Atılgan’s 1973 Anayurt
oteli (Motherland Hotel), a novel that stresses the alienation effect of the secular state.
Anayurt oteli is a bleak, minimalist portrayal of pathological alienation that traces
the monotonous routine of an antihero, Zebercet, a hotel clerk in an Anatolian
town. Zebercet, emptied of an emotional life, is defined by external factors such as
his clothes, his job, his daily routine, and his bodily needs of food, sleep, shelter,
and sex (with the indentured villager who cleans the hotel). This is a godless world
reduced to material relations. The occupants of the hotel are similarly defined by
occupation: a military officer, a teacher, cattle dealers, and so on. Ironically, the
gaping absence in the edifice called “motherland” is human exchange and emo-
tion. A night’s visit to the hotel by a young woman with no apparent occupation
disrupts this scenario by filling Zebercet with obsessive fantasies, leading to his
gradual self-destruction, act of murder, and suicide. At��
ı��
lgan portrays an existen-
tial national space without any hope of grace or redemption. The only option left
31
The most recent and ongoing manifestation of this phenomenon is the development of a
“countercoup” by the religious-leaning government. Known as “Ergenekon,” in this inversion
the secular-military establishment has been targeted as masterminding a conspiracy to topple
the governing Muslim-based AK Party. As such, widespread arrests also double as an oppor-
tunity for silencing secular political opposition in the press.
32
Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) is the influential forefather of cultural Turkism based in Durkheim-
influenced social engineering. His notion of the “new life” was a new Turkish national life,
somewhat less severe than Kemalism. He wrote a book of poems titled The New Life, and his
ideas were influential in Turkish modernization.

Novel
to its occupants is self-sacrifice, establishing the connection between suicide and

secularism that becomes a recurring theme in the Turkish novel.
Pamuk’s parody of coups and conspiracy finds its fullest development in his
seventh novel, Snow (2002). Here, characters occupy such unstable ideological posi-
tions that the republican “coup” becomes what can only be called a melodrama
with real consequences. This Kafkaesque novel follows the leftist journalist and
poet Ka to the remote Anatolian town of Kars near the Armenian border, where
soon after his arrival the performance of an early republican play advocating the
unveiling of women as a part of modernization erupts into a military coup. In
Kars, Ka finds poetic inspiration and the love of an acquaintance, İpek, and gets
mixed up in political intrigues that pit leftists, Islamicists, Kurds, and secular
nationalists against one another. Under the constantly falling whiteness, his expe-
riences approach the mystical as he is tempted by faith in God. In the quasi-surreal
world of coup and conspiracy, characters comically misread the politics depicted
in theater, newspapers, and television as reality. In Kars, Ka writes a collection of
poems titled Snow that the novel withholds from the reader in Pamuk’s character-
istic technique of the absent text. When arrested, Ka divulges the hideout of Blue,
a leader of the Islamic resistance, and is forced to flee. Snow choreographs the nar-
rative strategies associated with parody as an indictment of political coups fueled
by conspiracy. But the novel plays these parodic elements off the literary conven-
tions of one of the oldest traditions of Eastern literature: the mystical romance of
attempted reunion with a beloved—who also represents the divine. The result is a
new idiom in Turkish fiction that marries the material and the mystical, the secular
and the sacred.
Just as Pamuk’s Snow parodies the logic of coup and conspiracy, Oğuz Atay’s
1972 Tutunamayanlar (Misfits) parodies the attempts of republican intellectuals to
belong to a socially engineered society fraught by the ideological confinements
of Turkism. Tutunamayanlar was the first modern Turkish novel to display those
features we now associate with metafiction, such as a plot in which a writer writes
a text or one in which a reader reads a text, or a novel that features itself as an
object. Such formal literary techniques assume profound political importance in
the context of Turkish secular nationalism. Metafiction—often misread as literary
depoliticization—is arguably a method of repoliticizing the Turkish novel whose
political standard was a moribund social realism. Tutunamayanlar is a key text
in the development of this literary-political technique adopted by Pamuk. The
plot focuses on the engineer Turgut Özben, a character researching the suicide
of his close friend Selim Işık by reading and gathering various forms of writing
the friend has left behind. (This suicide recalls the existential crises of Atılgan’s
work, yet Atay allows for redemption through writing, a technique that Pamuk
borrows.) Özben’s efforts lead to reconstructing the life of a social “misfit”—much
as the author-figure Orhan does for his friend Ka in Snow. In the process, as with
many Pamuk protagonists, Özben becomes an author, and his story becomes the
novel we are reading. During his efforts, he begins to distance himself from his
customary middle-class routines, family, and associations, accepting that he, too,
is a national misfit. Özben also begins to assemble an “Encyclopedia of Misfits,”
among whose pages he includes himself. Thus the trope of the encyclopedia, the

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symbol of secular enlightenment ideals, finds its latest iteration as a self-reflexive

parody.
Secular Sufism
Another major way in which Pamuk’s fiction challenges the secularization thesis
of the republican state is by reenchanting realist, materialist contexts. What might
be termed secular Sufism appears early in the modern Turkish novel and can be
traced through every period of its development.33 We encounter it in the works
of Adıvar, Tanpınar, Hikmet, Kemal—and we detect it as a palpable absence in
Atılgan and Atay. In adapting a form of the Sufi quest that equates the seeker with
the sought, Pamuk makes frequent and extended reference to prominent Sufi fig-
ures from Rumi and Ibn Arabi to Şeyh Galip and Fazlallah Astarabadi. The emer-
gence of the mystical quest out of the dilemmas of everyday Istanbul life begins in
Pamuk’s The White Castle and reappears in all of his later novels, which experiment
with the possibility of mystical transcendence and redemption through writing.
Furthermore, Pamuk relies on the traditional genre of the mystical romance to
recast unrequited love as knowledge of the self (the writing subject). The mate-
rial and the spiritual are reunited in his fiction through an absent beloved. The
tradition, as updated by Pamuk, observes this scenario: the beloved is the object
of the protagonist’s desire for reunion. Reunion with the beloved (for example,
the Venetian slave in The White Castle, Rüya in The Black Book, Canan in The New
Life, İpek in Snow, and Füsun in The Museum of Innocence) fails at the level of plot,
giving rise to a state of unrequited love. In place of the reunion, the Sufi-inspired
narrative gives the seeker what he needs rather than what he wants. For Pamuk, the
surrogate object of desire is always textual. The secular-Sufi “gift” materializes as
authorial agency in Turkish literary modernity. Secular Sufism allows Pamuk to
construct the hybridity of self and other in The White Castle, to create the intertext
of Eastern and Western genres in The Black Book, to use absent text to formulate the
metafiction of The New Life, to mount literary critiques of political ideology in Snow,
and to emphasize the mysticism of material objects in The Museum of Innocence.34
In The Black Book (1990), Pamuk reimagines the peripheralized Istanbul of the
late 1970s as a secular-sacred site of literary production. Though buried under
complex literary digressions, the core story is again essentially Pamuk’s semiauto-
biographical account of becoming an author. The Black Book is a multigenre palimp-
sest that layers the detective story, editorial journalism, the Sufi quest, mystical
33
The recuperation of Sufism in literature is a topic that demands further study. Maligned dur-
ing the era of Turkist modernism in novels such as Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu’s Nur Baba
and Reşat Nuri Güntekin’s Yeşil Gece, Sufism as a cultural influence has made a resurgence in
Turkish literature since 1980 through the influence of Pamuk’s work. This aspect of din is now
commonplace.
34
My Name Is Red is also structured by a lover-and-beloved frame between Black and Shekure.
The trials Black withstands in order to unite with Shekure enable the plot to delve into the
cultural history of Ottoman miniatures. This, however, is a story of requited love, as the lovers
do reunite in the end. As a result, Pamuk describes this novel as his most optimistic.

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romance, existential angst, conspiracies, coup, and pop culture. The protagonist,
a lawyer named Galip (representing the disciple), searches the streets of Istanbul
for his missing wife, Rüya (“dream”), whom he suspects of hiding out with the
renowned journalist Celal (representing the pir, or master). The characters allude to
the famous Mevlevi Sufis Şeyh Galip and Celaleddin Rumi, conjuring a subtext of
the mystical quest. Through the process of ghostwriting the absent Celal’s Borge-
sian newspaper columns, Galip experiences a spiritual reunion of sorts with both
Celal and his beloved Rüya, establishing that writing is a form of redemption for
one sunken in abandonment and depression.35 Scenes set in Istanbul—from the
Bosporus to whorehouses, from mannequin museums to editorial offices—supply
digressions that create a novel out of the textual exhaustion of self and nation.
What results is a contemporary One Thousand and One Nights in which Galip writes
stories to stay alive in the midst of political assassinations and impending military
coups. A tour de force in Pamuk’s oeuvre, The Black Book is a hybrid novel of East-
ern and Western forms emerging out of the loss of a beloved for which nothing but
writing itself can compensate.
Pamuk’s eighth novel, The Museum of Innocence (2008), again returns to the
period of his formation as an author in the second republic. The novel is set in the
bourgeois circles of 1970s Istanbul and merges the objects of everyday material
culture with mystical redemption in the creation of a novel that is a museum (and a
museum that is a novel). The melodramatic story focuses on the narcissistic obses-
sions of a wealthy, spurned lover, Kemal. Kemal gradually drops out of Istanbul
bourgeois society to create a museum with the everyday objects that are relics of
his illicit romance with his poorer cousin, Füsun. The objects, from cigarette butts
to the Chevrolet in which Füsun dies, are extremely personal yet evoke the social
and political memories of family, society, and nation. The museum is contained
in Füsun’s girlhood house, which Kemal has purchased. Furthermore, the novel
is a metafiction written by the writing subject “Orhan Pamuk,” who is hired by
Kemal, and it consequently takes the form of the museum catalog that invento-
ries used or discarded objects—an archive that Pamuk actually reproduced in
Istanbul and opened to the public in 2012. The museum allows Pamuk’s readers
to see for themselves the objects listed in the novel and to purchase mementos
from the museum store. This actual reproduction of a literary representation of
a museum—an erstwhile storehouse of national-cultural memory—is an inver-
sion of the relationship between object and text used by Pamuk in earlier novels.
While the museum offers a surrogate for obsessive (because unrequited) love, it
also evokes the ghostly beloved as an absent object of desire. Thus Pamuk’s silent
house of memory and imagined community has, over the course of five novels,
transformed into a museum that speaks through a repository of mystified objects
signifying both pathos and pathology. The museum/novel repeats the pattern
35
Pamuk’s screenplay Gizli yüz (The Hidden Face), produced in 1991 (dir. Ömer Kavur), follows the
same pattern of secular Sufisim: an account of unrequited love out of which self-realization
(and the ability to tell one’s own story) emerges. The screenplay was published in 1992 but was
never translated into English.

Novel
of secular Sufism established in Pamuk’s earlier fiction. In this respect, however,

Pamuk has inverted the logic of his earlier novels by offering material recuperation
for spiritual loss.
Pamuk’s Secular Blasphemies
How should one reconcile what I have described as Pamuk’s adoration of Turkish
cultural history with the fact that in interviews and essays he routinely dismisses
the influence of the Turkish literary tradition on his work? He is on record as refer-
ring to that tradition as the “piddling Turkish novel” (Other Colors 132). He is also
obviously well versed in this literature, even something of a scholar, and, as I have
shown, his novels work through the conventions of the republican novel, forging
new novelistic idioms and new understandings of Turkish literature as a secular-
sacred cosmopolitan form emanating from Istanbul. We might surmise that his
determination to situate himself as the culmination of a tradition that he had to
learn and study, to emulate, and to surpass, generated something like a love-hate
relationship. Begrudgingly, when pressed, Pamuk names only a few authors who
have influenced him: Tâhir, Atılgan, Atay, Tanpınar. But he is far more likely to
be represented as a dissident victim of the state (the experience of many Turk-
ish authors of his generation) or as a student and practitioner of an international
canon—as in the edited and abridged 2007 English (not Turkish) version of the
belles-lettres collection Other Colors (originally Öteki renkler, published 1999) and in
his parochial Norton lectures published as The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist (2010).
It is my contention that Pamuk’s novels tell a third story that relocates the source
of his revision of Turkish literary modernity in the cosmopolitan literature of a
reimagined and reenchanted Istanbul characterized as both secular and sacred.
Pamuk’s edition of Radikal contains another clue to his negotiation of national
and international logics. In a metafictional twist, the issue includes a column by
the famous journalist Celal Salik. Salik (his name means “one who is on a mysti-
cal path”) is a köşe yazarı, an editorial writer and critic of popular culture with a
large, devoted readership, a writer who weighs in on all imaginable topics and
is something of a public intellectual. Fans of Pamuk know Salik well as one of
Pamuk’s creations, a character from The Black Book. This novel, one of his most
challenging, represents the height of Pamuk’s authorship as an Istanbul novelist in
the Turkish national tradition. Some readers claim that he began writing simpler
sentences about sexier topics and for outside audiences in subsequent novels. In
his rogue column (a fiction masquerading as nonfiction), Salik speaks to us from
beyond the grave twenty-five years after he was assassinated in the conclusion to
The Black Book. As a figure cherished by Pamuk’s most devoted Turkish fans, Salik
represents nostalgia for the Pamuk who was a Turkish cultural icon. In the column,
Salik explains that the daily practice of reading a particular köşe yazarı (something
Turks do religiously) is a process of determining who among them is “guilty” of
what, or who can serve as a national scapegoat:
In our newspaper reading habits, we harbor a persistent obsession for finding the ones
to blame for what we lack in life, for our poverty, for our personal troubles, for our

Novel
grief, for our helplessness, and for our political misery. But if I were alive today, this
is what I’d want to tell my readers: We ourselves are to blame as well. . . .
But the gist of a good column doesn’t rest in uncovering the guilty party or the
fault it finds; rather, it rests in the deliberation of the writer, in what the words reveal
without simply pointing them out, and also, in the bridge of affection and friendship
between reader and writer. (Salik)
Pamuk is talking about a number of things at once here: his trial for insulting
Turkishness, his transformation as an author (once national, now global), and the
bond between a Turkish writer and his Turkish readers, which he believes, perhaps
naively, to be a bridge of trust.
Uncharacteristically, Pamuk/Salik uses the pronoun we, evoking the imagined
community of Turks. In a culturally appropriate idiom of indirectness, he chastises
his readership, saying that they share in the “blame”; the offense, though unstated,
is the destruction of the “bridge” that makes possible transformations in literary
production like those Pamuk has wrought over eight novels. Through his alter
ego, Salik, Pamuk blames his readership in part for the position of displacement
and alienation in which he now finds himself. That is, he is both an insider and an
outsider, a best-selling author who is loved and hated, a contested writer who is
responsible for changing the Turkish novel and making Turkishness perplexingly
contingent on a variety of recuperated contexts. Pamuk no longer lives only in
Istanbul but in New York City, where he teaches a semester each fall at Columbia
University. He also spends time in India, with his partner and fellow author Kiran
Desai. In all these respects, he has connected Istanbul to world literature and poli-
tics by redefining what Turkishness means to readers in sixty languages.
The distortions of Pamuk’s self-association with authors of socialist engage-
ment in his edition of Radikal can now be clarified. It is not that Pamuk poses a
threat to the state for straightforward political reasons but that he denies secular
authority and challenges definitions of “Turkishness” by authoring novels of cul-
tural redefinition that rely on din and devlet both. The realist and material condi-
tions of devlet with their positivist focus on enlightenment and progress thus meet
with a rearticulated cosmopolitanism, mysticism, Ottoman heritage, and literary
enchantment that allows for the possibility of redemption from secular impasses.
Contrary to the impression of Pamuk’s edition of Radikal, his dissidence, as I have
argued, rests not in his person or the polemics of the author, but in the “secu-
lar blasphemies” of his literature. Thus it is by analyzing the dominant tropes of
his novels that we can better understand how Pamuk’s interventions in literary
modernity have forever altered the culture and politics of Turkey. His work not
only redefines Turkish literary modernity, it narrates the transformation of homo
secularis, a product of secular modernity, through various unacknowledged tradi-
tions of the sacred.

Novel
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Novel

I don’t want to be a mangy Turk.

Ömer, in Orhan Pamuk’s Cevdet Bey ve oğulları

Turkish Penal Code, Article 301–1,

Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45:2 DOI 10.1215/00295132-1573985 © 2012 by Novel, Inc.

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302 NOVEL | SUMMER 2012

Another cultural logic was at play. Turkey was emerging as a transnational

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GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 303

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The Secular Masterplot of the Republican Novel

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GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 307

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and in opposition to, stereotypical ­discourses of the “terrible,” “unspeakable,” and

The Political Tropes of Islam and State

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GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 309

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novel disenchanted by secular modernization. Pamuk brings the realist, economic,

Mapping Pamuk’s Literary Modernity

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GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 313

insan manzaraları (Human Landscapes from My Country), written in 1938–1950 and

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personal alienation and community fragmentation. Of the three grandchildren,

The Ottoman Archive

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GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 315

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Coups and Conspiracies

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to its occupants is self-sacrifice, establishing the connection between suicide and

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symbol of secular enlightenment ideals, finds its latest iteration as a self-reflexive

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GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 321

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322 NOVEL | SUMMER 2012

of secular Sufism established in Pamuk’s earlier fiction. In this respect, however,

Pamuk’s Secular Blasphemies

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GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 303

GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 305

GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 307

and in opposition to, stereotypical discourses of the “terrible,” “unspeakable,” and

GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 309

GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 311

GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 313

GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 315

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GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 319

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GÖKNAR | SECULAR BLASPHEMIES 325

———. “‘Doya doya yüzüne tükürsünler.’” Radikal 7 Jan. 2007 <http://www.radikal.com

———, ed. Radikal, Internet Baskısı 7 Jan. 2007 <http://www.radikal.com.tr/index.php?tarih