By the Way • February 3, 2014

From the Archives: Orhan Pamuk and his Museum

On the way to Herbie Hancock’s opening Norton lecture at Harvard, “The Wisdom of Miles Davis,” we’re remembering Norton feasts of old, a series that has included luminaries like John Cage, e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Leonard ...

Orhan PamukOn the way to Herbie Hancock’s opening Norton lecture at Harvard, “The Wisdom of Miles Davis,” we’re remembering Norton feasts of old, a series that has included luminaries like John Cage, e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Leonard Bernstein, Daniel Barenboim, and Orhan Pamuk, who spoke with us in 2009 after giving his six Norton Lectures, which filled the air with ideas about fiction. “The novel is not about the characters but about their world,” for example, part of the reason that Pamuk has never titled a book with a character’s name. (No disrespect to David Copperfield, Jane Eyre or the Karamazov brothers, either; but Pamuk is more in tune with Thackeray, who called his masterpiece not “Becky Sharp” but Vanity Fair.)

Two recurrent images in those talks will stick forever: first, the scene, endlessly revisited, of Anna Karenina on the train to Petersburg from Moscow after she first danced with Vronsky — “with a novel in her hand and a window that reflected her mood.” This is for Pamuk the most perfectly saturated picture in the greatest of all novels. And then there was the portrait Orhan Pamuk painted of himself, an insatiable teenaged reader, in his family’s grand apartment in Istanbul in the late Sixties into the Seventies, expanding his character, forming his soul, confronting his great teachers: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Thomas Mann, Dickens and Melville, among others. So the conversation begins:

I argue that for the last 150 years novels have been the global literary form… It is a very democratic form. You can talk about the biggest issues of history, life, ethics, things that until recently only philosophers or religion addressed… In my youth, that’s why I think I took novels seriously and read lots of classics. Not only as entertainment but also as guides to understand the world, examples for my spirit, variations on the colors and shades of human spirit. You read Dostoyevsky, you understand something about human spirit. You read Stendhal, you understand something not only about mid-19th century French culture, but the adventuring human spirit and freedom versus community.

Novels taught me not only to understand life, but also how to see and understand myself. I am not a Freudian in the sense that I do not believe that human spirit is formed only in childhood. I argue that although some part of us may have been formed in our childhood, we continue to re-form, to progress, to make ourselves adapt to new conditions, and in fact radically change even in our twenties and thirties.

And I think naively that I did this through reading novels… Perhaps because I felt that I was at the edge of Europe, for me, novels represented the best of European culture. I wanted to acquire that. I read novels in my teenage years and early twenties just as someone gets essential liquid for life.

Orhan Pamuk with Chris Lydon at Columbia University in New York, 12.12.09.

By now Orhan Pamuk is in the front rank of global novelists for My Name is Red and Snow, books about not so much the clash as the interlacing of cultures, in the terms of his Nobel Prize citation. His new one, The Museum of Innocence, is stuffed with the collectible evidence – the earrings, the cigarette stubs, the views out the bedroom window – of a blissful love affair going bad. In his Norton Lectures, that’s what Pamuk said most novels are: they’re word museums stuffed with the human details of a period and a place. “No ideas but in things,” as William Carlos Williams put it. In our conversation Orhan Pamuk is inviting me and all his readers to see the real museum he’s building now, in Istanbul, to show off the substance, the real stuff of this book. Think of the novel, he says, as an annotated catalog of that Museum of Istanbul in the last quarter of the 20th Century.

 

Podcast • May 17, 2011

Teju Cole: A “Seething Intelligence” on a Long Journey

Teju Cole and Open City, his marvel of a first novel, pull you into a peculiarly contemporary stream of consciousness — of a global mind in motion, coming home to see himself and us, as if for the first time. Born in Michigan of Nigerian parents, Cole was raised in Lagos to the age of 17, then got his college and graduate education (briefly in medicine, then in art history) in the States.

 

Teju Cole and Open City, his marvel of a first novel, pull you into a peculiarly contemporary stream of consciousness — of a global mind in motion, coming home to see himself and us, as if for the first time. Born in Michigan of Nigerian parents, Cole was raised in Lagos to the age of 17, then got his college and graduate education (briefly in medicine, then in art history) in the States. It’s not just the quick resumé that reminds you of Rana Dasgupta — who was born and educated in England, then returned to his father’s country, India, to write stories and the novel Solo, set in the everywhere/nowhere of Bulgaria. Both writers — friends and mutual admirers, both in their mid-thirties — seem to have undertaken a project without borders. Cole tells me he likes to see himself evaluating a scene, he says, like an detective in a cop show: “What have we got here?” First, he looks; then he starts digging. History is the new geography, even at Ground Zero in Manhattan:

This was not the first erasure on the site… The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased and rewritten. There had been communities here before Columbus ever set sail, before Verrazano anchored his ships in the narrows, or the black Portugese slave trader Esteban Gomez sailed up the Hudson; human beings had lived here, built homes, and quarreled with their neighbors long before the Dutch ever saw a business opportunity in the rich furst and timber of the island and its calm bay. Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of the still legible crowd, entered the subway. I wanted to find the line that connected me to my own part in these stories…

The narrator “Julius” at the World Trade Center site, in Open City by Teju Cole. Random House, 2011. p. 59

Teju Cole in conversation is sprightly, almost ecstatically musical, well-read and warm. He spins, riffs, notices and links — much as he does on the page. On an effulgent May afternoon in New York we are sitting on the grass, as it happens, before the brick row houses around Henry James’s Washington Square Park. Talk about palimpsests! And Teju Cole, feeling “more alive than on other days,” is peering through the layers and disguises of the scene, picking out evidences of his “open city” transformed.

What we see is an apparently uncomplicated scene of urban leisure on a Thursday afternoon, but all of this is happening in a historical context, and in the shadow of economic uncertainty… Some of the people are here because they’re out of work. You could say to yourself: New York City is an astonishingly diverse place, but we see around us all kinds of evidence of segregation: white students from NYU, and black women of a certain age working as nannies for white babies. We are looking at the American reality under an overlay of innocence…

This city, like many others, is a space that has been pre-inhabited, that contains the stories of people who are gone, who are vanished. We look at their inscriptions and we engage with their monuments, and we walk along their paths: every time you walk down Broadway, you’re walking along an ancient cattle path that was put down by Native Americans who then had an appalling encounter with European invaders and were more or less wiped out. But we still walk down their roads. And those roads themselves, and many of those buildings, were built by slave labor in this city, by people not only whose lives have been erased from the record, but whose deaths, in a way, have been erased from the record. Only recently was the burial grounds of the slaves rediscovered. And even then, most of that burial ground is covered with office buildings now. There’s this essential mystery of life in the city: it contains others who are not us in the present time — I’m not you and you’re not me, maybe we don’t live in the same neighborhood — but it also contains others who are not us, in the sense that so much of it was made by those others.

Teju Cole with Chris Lydon in Washington Square Park, New York City, May 12, 2011.

Teju Cole is opening up, too, about the music that’s written into Open City — for example, the pattern of “doublings” (as in instrumental voices) of characters and cities, themes and phrases (like the air of a man “who had undertaken long journeys”) that recur in different rhythms and harmonies, so to speak. In particular, Gustav Mahler is another of those “vanished” who inhabit Teju Cole’s present and obsess his character Julius, a psychiatry resident about to start his clinical practice. Mahler (death centennial next year) was himself drawn to the “open city” of New York in a tormented late act of a great composing-conducting career. He was, Cole writes, “the genius of prolonged farewells,” in a long series of “final statements,” up to his unfinished Tenth Symphony.

Mahler’s music flows somewhere under Cole’s elegiac novel — “a story,” he calls it, “of mourning, for the feeling this city carried with itself after 9.11.” But what is it, I wonder, we are still bidding farewell? “It’s as if,” Cole says, “after 9.11 we entered a new phase in the life of this civilization. But I think it was also clear that it was the end of something… There’s a strong goodbye element in this novel, too.” The last chapter of the book, we’re noting, has three endings: one at Carnegie Hall, in a Simon Rattle performance of Mahler’s Ninth; another in a view of the stars over Manhattan; the last in a harbor-cruise view of the Statue of Liberty.

There are two “open cities,” it turns out, in Teju Cole’s novel. Julius travels in search of his German mother to Belgium. Brussels is the city which gave Hitler’s troops free passage in World War II and preserved its medieval design but which, by 2006, is half-paralyzed by dread of Muslim immigrants. Brussels is where Julius meets his own double, a Moroccan Islamist of “seething intelligence,” a phone-store clerk who wants to be Edward Said when he grows up. And then there is Brussels’ “double,” New York, open to the deadbeat and the driven, thriving on perpetual renewal, and “saturated with the ominous energies” of its inherited past.

But then a student delighted Teju Cole on a school visit with the thought that his invention Julius — a solitary walker and cool, catalytic conversationalist with a stunning variety of New Yorkers — is himself the Open City.

Teju Cole’s last word with us — very much in that Open City spirit — was about the work ahead: first, a non-fiction account of Lagos (another “doubling,” it seems, of Rana Dasgupta’s work in progress on New Delhi) and then another novel:

“It’s simmering very softly below the surface. I don’t know what it’ll be. I don’t know where it’ll go. But I am going to have to confront Ulysses. We can’t keep pretending it didn’t happen. We can’t keep writing 19th Century novels, you know. We can’t pretend that that amazing unexploded ordnance of a book did not happen.” On the other side of Washington Square Park we hear sounds of kids cheering. “And in the far distance,” Teju Cole closed, as if on cue, “people applaud that idea. So I take it as a sign from the gods.”

Podcast • April 11, 2008

Pico Iyer: the "Transcendentalist" Dalai Lama

In Tibet the Dalai Lama was an embodiment of an old culture that, cut off from the world, spoke for an ancient, even lost traditionalism; now, in exile, he is an avatar of the new, ...

In Tibet the Dalai Lama was an embodiment of an old culture that, cut off from the world, spoke for an ancient, even lost traditionalism; now, in exile, he is an avatar of the new, as if having traveled eight centuries in just five decades, he is increasingly, with characteristic directness, leaning in, toward tomorrow.

Pico Iyer, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, page 203.

pico iyerPico Iyer:’open road’ Transcendentalism

The Dalai Lama becomes the best sort of New England Transcendentalist in Pico Iyer’s crystalline meditation on the family friend he’s been watching and interviewing for 40 years — that is, almost all his life. The book opens with an epigraph from Henry David Thoreau (“So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real…), closes with Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit…”) and is brim-full of William James’s wisdom on science, psychology and religion. The title comes from D. H. Lawrence’s paraphrase of Emerson’s child, Walt Whitman: “The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not ‘above.'”

Pico Iyer is himself a man of that open road — born of Hindu parents, both from Bombay; schooled at Oxford; long an American citizen; now based at TIME magazine and in Nara, the ancient capital of Japan. In journalism’s upper reaches these days Pico Iyer’s pieces from Havana, Phnom Penh, Damascus and Delhi set the standard of global curiosity and confidence — of the child-like eye and Old Masterly prose. But there is a home inside this traveler. The joy of our conversation was finding that he has vital roots not far from my own, in those beloved New Englanders. “I would like to call myself a Transcendentalist,” he says. “The higher form of globalism, I’ve always thought, is Emerson. That’s why I chose to write a book about the Dalai Lama: because he’s talking globalism but not at the level of Microsoft, McDonalds or Britney Spears, but at the level of conscience, imagination and the heart.”

Take this conversation with Pico Iyer as a first crack at the Tibet questions that will not go away in this year of the Chinese Olympics. This book, The Open Road, is a brief for the Dalai Lama’s brand of urgent patience (“Speak out, not lash out,” as Pico Iyer puts it) which many Tibetans and others find hard to hear. The hope in the Dalai Lama’s circle seems to be that under constant world pressure the Chinese leadership would deign finally to meet with the exiled holy man. “He doesn’t expect the Chinese leadership to come to its senses overnight,” says Pico Iyer, but neither does he see fruits in militancy. “He knows that to prick their pride is to bring down even greater hardships on Tibet.”

Tell us, Open Sourcerers: who has a better take on responsibility, compassion and possibility with respect to Tibet?