Comentario asesino del Wall Street Journal sobre el oportunismo político del premio Nobel.

Oportunismo que tiene otras muchas máscaras, incluidas la del escritor camaleón y los miembros de la orquesta que distrae al personal con sus encantadoras intrigas de salón, con las que se alimentan las hogueras del más implacable marketing mercantilista, maquillado con deliciosas afeites poéticos, culturales, etc.

Frases escogidas:

The Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2006

COMMENTARY

Pamuk’s ‘Reality’

By MELIK KAYLAN

When the Turkish controversialist (and novelist) Orhan Pamuk won the
Nobel Prize for literature, no doubt the awarding committee felt the
usual frisson of delight as they watched the world quarrel, yet again,
about their choice. They certainly know how to push buttons. Last year,
they chose Harold Pinter, who had written nothing of consequence for
decades. Instead he’d turned his life into an extended political rant
against the U.S., and that clearly appealed to the Swedes. The award
itself, one might conclude, became an act of agitprop. Still, in his
heyday, Mr. Pinter did do great things for the language and literature
of theater, no matter how long ago. So what has Orhan Pamuk done?

If the Nobel jurists, in awarding their prize, droned rather opaquely
about Mr. Pamuk’s qualities — he has «discovered new symbols for the
clash and interlacing of cultures» — who can blame the committee? I
have read Mr. Pamuk’s novels in both English and Turkish and I couldn’t
tell you now, or even while reading, what happens in most of them. Mine
is scarcely a unique reaction. Maureen Freely, one of his translators,
cheerfully avowed in a recent interview that you need a good memory to
follow the plot of «The Black Book.» Or did she mean «My Name Is Red,»
in which a coin, a tree, a dog and a dead man (among others)
internarrate an impenetrable mystery over hundreds of pages? She could
equally have meant «The White Castle» — Kafka, anyone? — where the
Sultan’s chief engineer tries, with Sisyphean longueurs, to relocate a
giant cannon up a hill for an entire book. I believe that’s what
happens. You’re not really supposed to know. You are only the reader.

The text refers to itself and to other texts; we are merely
eavesdroppers. Horace Engdahl, the Nobel Committee’s chairman, has
commented fearlessly about his own preferred criterion for selection,
namely, «literature that has witnessed reality.» Reality?

All of which, one might say, adds up to the literary equivalent of Enron
syndrome: Nobody knows what’s going on but they’re in the temple of
smartness and too ashamed to admit their stupidity before the next guy.
Mr. Pamuk’s obscuration is the more impressive for being utterly beyond
one’s ken; the percipient Nobel selector compliments himself by
discerning the «reality» we cannot.

The pity of it all is that Turkey desperately lacks a writer to explain
itself to the world. Deplored by other Muslims for being too Western,
and by the West for being neither Iran nor Switzerland, Turks remain a
worrisome mystery to others. In «Snow,» his last fiction work, Mr. Pamuk
talks most clearly about contemporary Turkey, with its
religious-secular-ethnic rifts, but he does so with so much
Kafka/Borges/post-Theory tomfoolery that it reveals more his literary
ambitions than his country.

Which is why his political adventures ring so false. Some months ago, he
was prosecuted and subsequently acquitted of the crime of «insulting
Turkishness» for talking publicly about the mass deaths of Armenians and
Kurds in years past — something that, as he sees it, nobody else in
Turkey dares to do. Here then is Mr. Engdahl’s «witnessed reality»: It
has nothing to do with literary quality, everything to do with politics.

Trouble is, all Turks already know and talk about these issues; and for
many Americans, that’s all they know about Turkey. (One wonders how well
Mr. Pamuk would be tolerated if he «insulted» Iraqis, or Russians, or
Syrians, or Iranians, as an inhabitant of those neighboring countries.)
So, many Turks long ago realized that Orhan Pamuk writes in Turkish for
foreign plaudits. He hasn’t taught anyone anything they didn’t already
know, but he has made precisely the right noises that the «progressive»
arbiters of taste in Europe like to hear. And it flatters their own
semi-informed sense of activism to reward him for it.

● Mr. Kaylan, born in Istanbul, is a writer in New York.