Unpacking Orhan Pamuk’s Library: On the Making of a “Great” World Text

1. Snow in Wisconsin Unpacking OrhanPamuk’s Library: On the Making of a “Great” World Text B. Venkat Mani Associate Professor Department of German bvmani@wisc.edu

2. World Literature as Our Pact with Books • http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-21272322 • http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110122/jsp/frontpage/story_13478268.jsp • http://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/ • http://www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2009-09/roberto-bolano • http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/30/iq84-proof-literature-hari-murakami

4. World Literature: Multiple Meanings • philosophical ideal • mode of reading • a process of exchange • pedagogical strategy • a mode of arrangement of literature • a strategy of affiliation • a process of creation and interpretation • a unit of aesthetic evaluation • a system of classification

5. Johann P. Eckermann. Gesprächemit Goethe in den leztenJahren seines Lebens(1836) Ich sehe immer mehr, fuhr Goethe fort, daß die Poesie ein Gemeingut der Menschheit ist und daß sie überall und zu allen Zeiten in Hunderten aber Hunderten von Menschen hervortritt. […] Aber freilich, wenn wir deutschen nicht aus dem engen Kreise unserer eigenen Umgebung hinausblicken, so kommen wir gar zu leicht in diesen pedantischen dünkel. Ich sehe mich daher gerne bei fremden Nationen um und rate jedem, es auch seinerseits zu tun. Nationalliteratur will jetzt nicht viel sagen, die Epoche der Weltliteratur ist an der Zeit, und jeder muß jetzt dazu wirken, diese Epoche zu beschleunigen. I am more and more convinced, that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times […] But of course,if we Germans do not look beyond the narrow circle of our own environment, we all too easily fall into this kind of pedantic arrogance. I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations and advise everyone else to do so. National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach. • Conversations with Goethe Trans. Giesela O’ Brian (1964

6. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Das kommunistische Manifest (1848) Die Bourgeoisie hat durch ihre Exploitation des Weltmarkts die Produktion und Konsumption aller Länder kosmopolitisch gestattet. […]An die Stelle der alten lokalen und nationalen Selbstgenügsamkeit und Abgeschlossenheit tritt ein allseitiger Verkehr, eine allseitige Abhängigkeit der Nationen von einander. Und wie in den materiellen, so auch in der geistigen Produktion. Die geistigen Erzeugnisse der einzelnen Nationen werden zum Gemeingut. Die nationale Einseitigkeit und Beschränktheit wird mehr und mehr unmöglich, und aus den vielen nationalen und lokalen Literaturen bildet sich eine Weltliteratur. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the World Market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. […] In the place of old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises world literature.

7. MahadeviVarma(1907-1987) • History tells us that whenever a nation speaks to another in the roar of power, one becomes slave, the other the master. One becomes triumphant, the other triumphed. But whenever a nation speaks to another in the language of literature, the hearts of the two nations cross the gaps of seven seas and high mountains to come close to each other. They become in tandem with the joys and sorrows of each other

8. “Literature is Freedom” (2003) • To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. (Sontag 2007: 209, emphasis added)

9. OrhanPamuk, ÖtekiRenkler(1999) • Literature is as much a delicately constructed memory as it is a subtly constructed forgetting.

10. OrhanPamuk, Snow (2004) • “All I’d want them to print in that Frankfurt paper is this: We’re not stupid, we’re just poor! And we have a right to want to insist on this distinction.”

11. OrhanPamuk, Snow (2004) • “When they write poems or sing songs in the West, they speak for all humanity. They’re human beings—but we’re just Muslims. When we write something, it’s called ethnic poetry.”

12. CevdetBeyveOğulları(CevdetBey and his Sons, 1979)

13. Beyaz Kale (TheWhite Castle, 1991)

14. Kara Kitap(The Black Book, 1994)

15. Yeni Hayat (The New Life, 1997)

16. Frankfurter Stadtbibliothek

17. Snow (2004) • “Please listen to what I have to say […] I won’t speak long. […] when an entire nation is poor, the rest of the world assumes that its people must be brainless, lazy, dirty, clumsy fools. Instead of pity, the people provoke laughter. It’s all a joke: their culture, their customs, their practices. In time the rest of the world may, some of them, begin to feel ashamed for having thought this way, and when they look around and see immigrants from that poor country mopping their floors and doing all the other lowest paying jobs, naturally they worry about what might happen if these workers one day rose up against them. So, to keep things sweet, they start taking interest in the immigrant’s culture and sometimes even pretend that they think of them as equals.” (276)

18. Snow (2004) • “If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away. • But no one believes in that way in what he reads in a novel,” I said. • Oh yes, they do, he cried. “If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny […] But if you would put in what I have just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.”