Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel By Erdağ Göknar London: Routledge, 2013, 314 pages, ISBN 9780415505376. Reviewed by Michael McGaha

In this book, Erdağ Göknar, the what Göknar refers to as its “in- award-winning translator of Orhan ternalized orientalism.” By this he Pamuk’s novel, My Name Is Red, has means that the Kemalists accept- set himself the task of explaining ed Western views of their culture why Pamuk’s novels have received and religion as inherently inferior. comparatively little critical attention They therefore sought to suppress both in his native Turkey and else- all connections with the Ottoman where. According to Göknar, most past. Furthermore, although they of the educated reading public in denigrated Islam, the Kemalists Turkey disdains Pamuk because they believe paradoxically defined being Muslim as a con- he has betrayed Kemalism (the combination dition of Turkishness. Due to patriotism and of French-style secularism and nationalism respect for the truth, Pamuk includes posi- that has become a sort of state “religion” in tive portrayals of Islam—especially Sufism— the Turkish Republic) in order to curry favor and Ottoman art and literature in his novels. with foreign readers. This is the “blasphemy” This constitutes blasphemy against the official to which the book’s title refers. At the same Kemalist narrative, according to which the time, foreign readers have generally misun- movement from Empire to Republic was sim- derstood Pamuk’s work because they are un- ply a matter of choosing enlightenment and familiar with Turkish literary and the politi- progress over ignorance and backwardness. cal context from which it emerged. Göknar’s As a native of Istanbul, a city which he deeply burden is therefore the dual one of clarifying loves, Pamuk particularly resents the decline Pamuk’s real political views for Turkish read- and neglect the city has suffered under the ers and educating foreign readers about his Republic and the loss of its former cosmopol- indebtedness to earlier Turkish writers. itanism, finding that the more or less forced departure of the city’s Greek, Armenian, and Göknar explains that Pamuk himself, far from Jewish populations has seriously impover- being some sort of obscurantist reactionary, ished its cultural life. is in fact a member of Turkey’s secular élite and a supporter of Turkey’s modernization, I believe that Göknar overstates the political from which he and his family have benefited nature of Pamuk’s novels. Pamuk himself has greatly. He has been an ardent proponent of described Snow as his first and only political Turkey’s admission to the EU. What Pamuk novel and has often pointed out that his po- objects to is the “epistemic violence” with litical problems in Turkey—most notorious- which Atatürk’s cultural revolution was car- ly his aborted trial on charges of “insulting ried out—its violations of human rights—and Turkishness”—have resulted from his inter-

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views rather than his novels. Orhan Pamuk Kemal, Kemal Tâhir, Aziz Nesin, Yaşar Ke- is no ideologue and has never been publicly mal, and Oğuz Atay. Göknar tries to correct identified with any political party or move- this omission by pointing out similarities in ment. He is opposed to all sorts of extremism, theme and/or style between Pamuk’s novels and hypersensitive, humorless extremists of and works by Halide Edib, Tanpınar (whose both the right and left may therefore be of- novel, A Mind at Peace, Göknar translated fended by the amused irony with which they in 2011), Nâzım Hikmet, Yaşar Kemal, Yu- are often depicted in his novels. suf Atılgan, and Oğuz Atay. Some of these comparisons work better than others. I found As Göknar rightly points out, Pamuk himself Göknar’s comments on Halide Edib’s The is partly to blame for foreign critics’ misun- Clown and His Daughter particularly enlight- derstandings about his work. They have been ening and thought-provoking. prevented from properly analyzing his de- velopment as a writer by the fact that he re- Göknar states in the preface to this book that fused to allow the translation of his first two “…the dominant discourses with which the published novels. Cevdet Bey and his sons US Academy approaches fields like Turkish remains unpublished in any language other and Middle Eastern studies…required the than the original Turkish and an English ver- use of conceptual terms and framing that are sion of The Silent House came out only last legible to my colleagues in the US, but not year. Furthermore, in his interviews with necessarily current in the Turkish context, foreign journalists, Pamuk emphasized his which is more strictly disciplinarily bound… indebtedness to canonized Western writers The book foregrounds a theoretical fram- such as Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Woolf, Borges, ing that is cross-disciplinary and is meant to and Calvino, rarely even bothering to men- signify to other fields in the humanities and tion Turkish authors who have influenced social sciences (religion, literature, cultural him. anthropology, history, and area studies)” (p. xiii). This book may be “legible” to Göknar’s When an English version of his essay collec- colleagues, but non-specialized readers are tion, Other Colors, was published in 2007, he likely to find the esoteric jargon he employs omitted his articles on Turkish novels and au- daunting, if not incomprehensible. Further- thors such as Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, Orhan more, the book is maddeningly repetitious.

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