Orhan Pamuk has been one of Turkey’s most acclaimed and best-selling novelists for decades. His reputation outside Turkey has been bolstered by a progression of prestigious international prizes for his work, which has been translated into more than 30 languages, starting with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his novel The White Castle (Beyaz Kale).

This progression culminated in the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, which has catapulted Pamuk into elite company. But Pamuk had already become a cause celebre in 2005, not so much for his work but for a statement he made in February of that year in an interview for a Swiss magazine: “Thirty thousand Kurds, and a million Armenians were killed in these lands,” Pamuk said, “and nobody dares to talk about it.”

The brutal, tense and complicated historical relationship between Turkey and its Armenians and Kurds has underpinned recent news coverage of the Turkish military’s incursions into the Kurdish-controlled regions of northern Iraq, as well as the public debate of a controversial Congressional resolution to recognize and condemn as genocide the systematic slaughter and displacement of Turkey’s Armenian population nearly 100 years ago. But, perhaps unless one is of Turkish, Armenian or Kurdish descent, an American might easily fail to apprehend the fury with which Armenians insist on recognition and retribution for that crime; the fervor with which Kurds pursue an independent state; and the ferocity with which the Turkish government battles Kurdish separatism and protects its history against accusations of genocide against the Armenians.

For his statements, Pamuk was charged retroactively by the Turkish government for violations of Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code, enacted in June 2005, which states, “A person who, being a Turk, explicitly insults the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months to three years.” The charges of promoting anti-Turkish sentiments leveled against Pamuk provoked an international furor—as well as a hate campaign directed at the author within Turkey—as a result of which Pamuk became a symbol for free expression and the charges against him became ammunition for those opposed to Turkey’s application to join the European Union. In January 2006, the government found a technicality to justify dropping the charges. By that time Pamuk had left his native Istanbul and taken a post as professor of comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City, where he lives now.

That Pamuk has become a political symbol is perhaps ironic: He claims to have distanced himself from politics through most of his career. His only overtly political novel, Snow, is also, he says, his last political novel. From 1982’s Mr. Cevdet and His Sons (Cevdet Bey ve Ogullari), the story of three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family living in Nisantasi, the district of Istanbul where Pamuk grew up, to 2000’s My Name Is Red (Benim Adim Kirmizi), a story about the tensions between East and West set in 16th-century Istanbul, Pamuk has evinced more interest in the individual than in the political.

To be sure, some of Pamuk’s overarching themes—the tension between the traditional and the modern, the divide between (and definitions of) “East” and “West”—tend to draw a reader’s political inclinations into the reading. But he treats these subjects, more often than not, as internal matters, complications in the relationships between his characters and within themselves. He has not tended to advocate in his novels, even if he has entered into political conversations in his public life, most notably as a supporter of Kurdish rights.

Those subjects and his nuanced, human approach to talking about them makes Pamuk a perfect choice to inaugurate Just Buffalo Literary Society’s ambitious new reading series, Babel. Named for the biblical tower in whose ruin humanity, once united in language and purpose, is driven apart and divided by language, the series aims to offer audiences a glimpse of the world through the eyes of artists from other cultures. “The idea of the series is really to bring global perspective to the literary discussion in Buffalo,” explains Michael Kelleher, artistic director for Just Buffalo. Pamuk—who, as he explains in the following interview, believes novels are the single best means by which the world’s cultures can talk to themselves and to one another—speaks at 8pm on Thursday, November 8, at Asbury Hall at Babeville, 341 Delaware Avenue. The series continues with Ariel Dorfman on December 7, Derek Walcott on March 13 and Kiran Desai on April 24. (Tickets and season subscriptions can be purchased by calling 832-5400 or visiting www.justbuffalo.org/babel.)

Artvoice spoke with Pamuk early this week, after he’d delivered an address at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Artvoice: You were the inaugural speaker at PEN’s new Arthur Miller Freedom to Write series, and you talked about the military crackdown on writers’ freedoms in Turkey. I wondered what sort of hardships you see American writers facing in comparison.

Orhan Pamuk: The things that I described two years ago, in 2005, were things that I have witnessed almost—let’s see, 1985—it’s 22 years ago. But at that time the international community did not pay much attention to Turkey so it was easier to suppress people to silence, to act as horribly as possible…things were much harsher and more cruel than they are today. Not that we are free to talk about everything today; we still have Article 301 in the penal codes. But my impression is that things were even much more terrible then.

AV: Many Americans feel that there’s a crackdown now on civil liberties in this country, on freedom of expression and freedom to dissent.

OP: Yes. I think of course there are. Even in the brief period of time that I’ve been living here, there are major and grave problems of communication, representing, talking about severe issues, and this is alarming. But in America the problem is not essentially, I think, about freedom of expression, but about the control and manipulation of the media. For example, that all Islamic civilization, my part of the world, peoples of my part of the world, are represented as almost foolish and evil people is acceptable. But I think most of the time this is not a matter of free speech. But there is very little possibility of getting your words out.

AV: You mean here.

OP: Yes, yes.

AV: Despite this flourishing of the blogosphere and a world in which ostensibly it’s easier—

OP: Excuse me?

AV: Computers have certainly freed up people to get information out.

OP: I’m not referring to that.

AV: You are sold on the printed word?

OP: Sorry?

AV: You love the printed word?

OP: Yeah, but no, no, that’s a different subject now. I mean, you’re asking about Internet and printed newspapers; that’s a different subject. Let’s not combine with freedom of speech; that will be messy. Are you offering a new subject? Let me think. Are you?

AV: No. I’ll change the subject.

OP: Okay.

AV: Many people in the audiences you speak to in the United States don’t share either a European or internationalist standpoint. For example, they don’t understand concern over Turkey’s joining the European Union; maybe they don’t understand why the European Union is a big deal; maybe they’ve never heard of the European Union.

OP: Yes, you’re right. But on the other hand, I’m not addressing these issues. I did a book tour in America, say almost 11 cities? I read from my [new essay collection] Other Colors, and I read some of the lectures there, say, my essay on Kars and Frankfort, and I read some about what I think about the nature of the art of the novel; then I have read some little vignettes about daily life, my friendship with my daughter, also some little selections from my daily life, strange things that I observe…these are the things that I wanted to read, so I didn’t need to come to Turkey and the European Union or more local Turkish affairs. And the selections I’ve read from Other Colors were not necessarily—and the whole book, in fact, is not necessarily—about Turkey’s problems.

In fact, the strange thing about being a Turk in the last 10 years, all Turkey’s problems this or that way were dramatized a bit, especially after 9/11. These problems are not in fact limited to Turkey. The essential problems Other Colors and perhaps my earlier books address are: how to combine that weight of tradition, our attachment to old values, and combine this with this new global idiom, problems of globalization or modernity. My novels are about trying to represent these issues through human suffering, human heart and human desire, both attached to tradition and modernity.

AV: How does then it feel to be a spokesperson, as you often end up being—

OP: I refuse that! I’m not a spokesperson for anyone! I am not. I never said that I’m a spokesman for anything.

AV: You’re not proposing that you are, no. But for many people who listen to you speak, or who—

OP: I make a point to say in Other Colors that I’m not a spokesperson for any cause. In fact, yes, I’ve found myself in political situations, defended myself. But I don’t have a well-defined and developed political instinct. My basics are very, very simple and moral things that even a child can say: Just don’t be cruel to people, understand people. And I consider myself mostly not as a person with a cause but a playful and a responsible novelist. And I argue in Other Colors that is how the art of the novel essentially operates.

AV: Well, I know that you are very intently a literary writer and not a political writer. You’ve made that quite clear.

OP: Yes.

AV: Do you sense then that you are closer then to other artists than to political activists?

OP: Well, obviously, yes. In my youth I refused to go into politics, when everyone, all my intellectual friends, were heavily political, because it’s not in my character, and I still have these instincts…

Sometimes I think that maybe the real only punishment that the Turkish establishment and the state gave me was all this—the way I am unfortunately, contrary to my desire, being represented as a political person, a person with an agenda, and a person who is representing something. I am only representing, most of the time, I think, possibilities of the art of the novel. Even if Snow is a very political novel as the subject matter goes, it is about how to find happiness in this world, our right to happiness in a troubled world. What is our right? How moral is it if we ask for our personal happiness in a heavily troubled world where the community is suffering from so many problems? It is, I think [Snow’s protagonist] Ka’s problem, rather than which party is the right party, which people are the good guys, who are the bad guys, what will he do—these are not questions Snow is trying to answer. In this issue I’m close to my character Ka’s point of view.

AV: He’s very romantic, Ka is. It’s a very intimate character.

OP: What do you mean by that?

AV: I don’t know the word for it. One feels very intimately about him. His heart is very open, not just open to experiences but you have a real sense of his sense of what’s going on, of his feelings about love, of his very body.

OP: Thank you. Look, the interesting thing about writing a character like that, is that perhaps he’s like me because all the people of Kars [the remote Turkish town in which the novel is set] first notice his political persona, which he doesn’t have, and everyone misses his private life; that everyone thinks that he is a sort of a stranger operating with some hidden agenda, while actually he is not like that; his hidden agenda is to get married to a beautiful [woman named] Ipek. And in fact he falls in love; in the beginning he is more interested in the idea of marriage than the idea of Ipek herself.

AV: He hardly knows her.

OP: But then let’s not hold this against him too heavily.

AV: No, no, no—well, also she is so exceedingly beautiful.

OP: Obviously.

AV: Well, then I will ask you nonpolitical questions, or less political questions. You said that in your youth you were what you called a “radical reader,” that you expected books would change your world, and then you wrote a book, The New Life, about that. Are most people who love reading radical readers? Is there something about reading that lends itself to insistence and hope?

OP: Yes, I think so. Especially in my part of the world, I would say, in [the] non-Western world where intellectuals, where book readers are more intellectually oriented, are looking for clues for a troubled world…I think in non-Western world, where there are more social and political problems, books are read with a more radical bent. Not that all books are read radically all over the world. Our desire for fantasy, our desire to invent a second world is, I think, the most radical thing we can wish, actually. In the long run reading itself suggests a sort of an unease; the desire to read also suggests an unease with the existing world, I think. I mean here fiction.

AV: Meaning an escapism?

OP: Escapism is, I think, a negative word. It doesn’t cover all the delights and benefits of things that imagination can give us. Some beautiful science fiction books can be for all the escapists, and I won’t condemn them for being so. And even the desire to escape, and to express this through reading, is a gesture of unease about the world. I think that reading novels and writing novels is about being unhappy…a sort of unease, unhappiness and anger about the present state of affairs in the world.

AV: I didn’t hear your talk at Georgetown on Monday, but I read about it in the paper this morning…

OP: Most of these representations are inaccurate, but let me hear.

AV: I’m interested in the notion of your insistence on the power of fiction above other media to make intellectual change, to make political change, to see the other—

OP: Political change, no…I said that novels are the greatest instruments we have, all humanity, to communicate among ourselves.

I also argued that the art of the novel is actually the global literary form now. We are now talking about economic and political globalization of the world. I also said the globalization of the world was completed in fact almost a hundred years ago. Now a person—say in China, say in Latin America or in India or in Turkey—who has literary aspirations, 90 percent of these people begin writing novels and they don’t even question the form. The novel, which was invented in the mid 19th century by the French and then towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century by the whole of Europe, is the most popular common art form we all have in the world right now, and no one questions its authenticity, and its status as a natural thing. That means it’s globalized, and humanity is in fact communicating about its problems, what interests them, what makes them happy. We see our human situation, I think, at least in literature, best expressed, shared, communicated, relived, evaluated and interpreted, and also, of course, to be found to be beautiful in novels. These are the things that I addressed.

And I also said in Georgetown, in fact, that part of the novel is about the human capacity to identify with people, what we call “others”—it’s based on human capacity to identify with people who are not like ourselves. Once a person begins to write a novel, he or she identifies with not only the novel—it doesn’t only tell his story or her story, but stories of people who are not like himself, herself, and thus in fact invents a frame in which all sorts of personas communicate. This kind of frame, I think, constitutes a certain central text in which the community, the nation, the tribe, whatever, more so the whole globe, communicates through itself, with itself.

AV: Do you sense—when you’re in New York or the United States or, for that matter, in Istanbul—that there is an anti-intellectualism? Beyond the anti-intellectualism of religious thought?

OP: There was always anti-intellectualism, but then people don’t pay much attention to it. It’s, yes, a political thing. The old word for it was populism, that whatever the establishment, the government, the state, the ruling elite, whoever, whatever the new idea or suggestion or criticism they had to face, they say, “Well, people, don’t believe in it, this is an intellectual idea,” and dismiss it. But then all the intellectual ideas in so many centuries that have been dismissed as intellectual in the end were legalized, so I think anti-intellectualism most of the time is only rhetoric of speech, and I don’t take it seriously. There will always be intellectuals—not that I am heavily underlining the fact that intellectuals are good people, but then that’s how it is.

AV: You’re in the comparative literature department at Columbia University; it would be hard for you not to embrace some sort of intellectualism, yes?

OP: Here is my answer to that: Yes, that’s true. Please don’t tell anyone.

AV: When you were a young man, you were going to be a painter, yes? Do you feel a faith in the power of the novel in terms of this global communication and conjuring up the other that you think is not available through music or through painting?

OP: No, look. As I wrote so many times, between the ages of 17 and 22 I wanted to be a painter, and then I suddenly stopped and began writing novels and after I managed to establish myself as a successful novelist in Turkey, so many people asked me, “Why, why did you quit painting?” I didn’t have an answer for that; I didn’t have one single-line, one-paragraph, one-page answer for that; there are so many answers for that. My Istanbul book is in itself an answer. But I can’t say that “Oh, you cannot represent the other in painting or music.” No, I can’t say that, and that would be unfair. I never thought of these things in that light. I stopped painting because I felt an urge to do so, but I still cannot explain with one single reason, and especially not an intellectual and sophisticated reason like that. It may be something related to what you said, but I never felt it so.

AV: When you come to speak in Buffalo, you’ll be speaking to a lot of aspiring or acting writers, and I wonder what advice you have for them.

OP: Well, of course all the aspiring writers of Buffalo, some part of their heart will tell them that they are much more intelligent and radical than me, and they don’t need advice from the likes of me. And some part of their mind or their heart will also tell them maybe it was interesting to meet this guy. I’ve just begun teaching at Columbia two years ago, so still I consider myself a little baby professor. So I will come to Buffalo with joy to address my readers, but not to teach anything to young, would-be writers. I respect their radicalism. I was like them. And I wouldn’t care about anyone teaching me anything; I would want to learn everything by myself. So I will be there only to talk about my novel, and enjoy having engaging conversation with readers who have read my books.