The postsecular imaginaries of Orhan Pamuk’s novels

Abstract

“The concept of the secular cannot do without the idea of religion.”¹

Scholars have long established that the novel in Turkish functioned as a vehicle of social modernization, in which secularism is centrally located.² Ottoman and Turkish modernization is often represented through an ideological opposition between religious and secular realms, which however does not manifest as a reductive binary in the literary sphere. The Turkish novel has developed as a space of social change, subject-formation, and dissent in which tropes of Ottoman and Islamic culture exist in productive tension with secularism.

Pamuk, an author of the post-1980 military coup era, introduced innovations in the novel that opened spaces of Ottoman and Islamic cultural history as well as ambivalence toward Turkish secular modernity.³ Pamuk’s cultural critique of the secular modern enables a form of postsecular literary modernity in which narratives of the Turkish nation-state, bound to secularization, are often imbricated with Islamic tradition and Ottoman legacies, including cultural practices of Sufism. That is, the tensions between the (at times overlapping) secular narratives of “state” (devlet) and the Islamic narratives of “religion” (din) are productive of contemporary postsecularism in the modern Turkish novel.⁴ Furthermore, Pamuk’s novels exemplify the re-imagination of secularism that considers Ottoman legacies and cultural practices of Islam to be formative elements of what might be termed a Turkish postcolonial condition, one in which Eurocentric “colonialism” is disseminated in post-Ottoman Turkey through cultural manifestations of Republican secular nationalism, or Kemalism.⁵ The reassessment of Kemalist cultural legacies through lenses of postsecularism, as represented in Pamuk’s novels, also suggests that postcolonial theory does provide revealing insights on the ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions inherent to Ottoman and Turkish modernity.

To wit, the political import of Pamuk’s work emerges through innovations in literary content and form that function to destabilize received understandings of Turkish secularism. His eleven novels published between 1982 and 2022 (in Turkish) redefine and subvert the experiences and formations of secular modernity through literary techniques of hybridity, genre-switching, parody, self-reference, metafiction, intertextuality, and multiperspectivalism (all common techniques of postcolonial literature). What I term Pamuk’s “postsecular imaginaries”⁶ function to critically rethink the legacies of a purportedly sui generis Turkish secular nationalism that is nevertheless constructed through European (British, French, and German) and Ottoman imperialisms.

1. 1Secularism and the modern Turkish novel

Secularization is a coercive process and practices of secularism reproduce political subjects that embody the secularization thesis.⁷ The process relies on the legal powers of the state, the disciplinary powers of family and school, and the persuasive powers of government and the media, including literature. In Turkey, the abolishment of the Ottoman Sultanate in 1922 initiated a secularizing cultural revolution (1923–38) that defined the ideology of the Republic of Turkey during much of the twentieth century.

The Kemalist cultural revolution embodied the basic tenets of what is known as the European “secularization thesis.” The secularization thesis argued that modernity entails the separation of religion from politics and art; its relegation to the private sphere; and, the declining social significance of religious belief.⁸ In keeping with this thesis, a series of laws and decrees, based on European models, permanently reordered Turkish culture and politics. A discursive, performative/sartorial, and legal revolt against Ottoman and Islamic traditions, the cultural revolution affected all aspects of public and private life. The dominance of this local authoritarian “civilizing mission” lasted until 1950, which marked the end of the single party era of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party and the election of Adnan Menderes’s conservative Democrat Party. In the Turkish literary sphere, the social engineering of secular modernity is inescapable, not least of all due to linguistic corpus planning that included the alphabet reform, which introduced Latin letters to replace Ottoman script, and the language reform, which replaced Persian and Arabic vocabulary with neologisms. Through their engagements with social issues, novels became a social space of cultural and political contestation through which Pamuk developed a literature of postsecularism.

The Republic of Turkey was established as an ethno-religious nation-state whose Sunni Muslim and Turkish secular identities presented something of a dilemma. It bears emphasis that in its creation the Republic of Turkey was established and recognized in law as a Muslim state as emphasized by even socialist-secular historians such as Niyazi Berkes.⁹ Also, interpreters of the history of laicism (laiklik) have argued that, in Turkey, there is de jure no clear secular separation between mosque and state.¹⁰ When the Republic was declared, Turkey still housed the caliphate of Sunni Islam (though abolished in 1924), the constitution declared Islam to be the religion of state (until 1928), Muslim refugees were de facto accepted as citizens, and population exchanges based on religion (as stipulated in the Treaty of Lausanne) further established the Muslim purity of the nation. As such, the ethnogenesis of “Turkishness” cannot be separated from social and political manifestations of Sunni Islam. This is a significant point for interpretive approaches that dismiss the interrelation of religion and secularism in the early Republican era. The Kemalist cultural revolution established a discursive and performative separation between the two, one that often contradicted on-the-ground realities.¹¹ Arguably a form of epistemic violence against the ancien régime, the cultural revolution functioned effectively to conceal the material violence of recent wars, the loss of empire, and the traumas of civilian displacement, exile, and ethnic cleansing. Literature, in turn, became the arena for excavating the silences of nation-state formation and uncovering the multicultural potentialities of postsecularism.

Theoretical debates around the “postsecular turn” in the Western interpretive social sciences began with contestations of the secularization thesis made by José Casanova, Jurgen Habermas and Charles Taylor and have become an interdisciplinary polemic fed by scholars from political science to international relations and from religious studies to cultural anthropology.¹² In Turkey, however, related debates around post-Kemalism began earlier, after the 1980 coup, and coincided with Pamuk’s development as an author. Works by political scientists and sociologists Mete Tunçay, Şerif Mardin, Nilüfer Göle, Büşra Ersanlı Behar, Fuat Keyman, and others developed and sustained the intervention to foreground Turkish postsecularism as a primary comparative case.¹³ As late as December 2022, a Special Issue of the European Journal of Turkish Studies was dedicated to “Post-Kemalism.”¹⁴ Pamuk’s fiction developed in corollary with this broader scholarly reassessment of secular formation and of the nation form as he experimented with postsecular idioms in innovative multi-perspectival, multi-genre novels. Thus, the emerging complexity of what was once treated as a straightforward trajectory from (Ottoman) Muslim tradition to (European) Kemalist secular modernity has placed renewed emphasis not just on social and historical phenomena, but on new forms of literary production as well. In short, novels serve as laboratories, repositories, and mini-archives for contestations of Turkish secularization.

The “postsecular turn” also acknowledges the dependency on secular forms and secular critique.¹⁵ In this regard, the work of cultural anthropologist Talal Asad is revelatory for its insights into representations of religion and formations of the secular. Asad states, “The question of secularism has emerged as an object of academic argument and of practical dispute. If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable.”¹⁶ Asad argues that the category of “secularism” is implicated by “religion” and that they are mutually determining in projects of modernity. He states that “The secular … is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor simply a break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred)” and adds, “the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ are not essentially fixed categories” concluding that “the sacred and the secular depend on each other.”¹⁷

Asad acknowledges (and Pamuk dramatizes) that “secularism” and “religion” do not exist in distinct spheres. Furthermore, they question the belief that modernity must be imbedded in the secular alone. Turkish literary modernity has reflected similar qualifications and claims, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s when Pamuk began to develop works of intertextual metafiction in which techniques of social and historical realism failed to fully represent postsecular temporalities and subjectivities.

More recently, literary scholar Manav Ratti has updated notions of “postsecularism” in postcolonial contexts, an approach that resonates with the Ottoman/Turkish case.¹⁸ Late Ottoman history reveals a long nineteenth-century European colonial encounter. Recent scholarship has even recast the late Ottoman state as a borrowed colonizing project of its own, further implying that the Republican state sustains this project through state secularism.¹⁹ In Pamuk’s work, the “posting” of Turkish secularism allows for the synchronic reemergence of Ottoman and Islamic temporalities while offering representational alternatives to Kemalism.

Relying on Ratti’s notion of “postcolonial postsecularism,” I argue that Pamuk’s literary innovations include a rearticulation predicated on bringing cultural formations segregated by the cultural revolution, the secularization thesis, and Republican modernization into productive parity. An insistence on the relationality of religious and secular temporalities reflects the postsecularism of Pamuk’s fiction. His invocations of the Ottoman-Islamic past and its legacies, including its material culture, everyday practices, and the themes of Sufism, assert mystical and religious forms and contexts against the figures and figurations of the Republican state, national modernization, the secularization thesis, and military coups. In doing so, Pamuk calls the reader’s attention to a temporal relation that has come to define postsecularism in Turkish literature as an operative realm of representation and engagement.

By reading for mutually constructive chronotopes of din and devlet in contemporary literature, I am in turn simply re-enacting in scholarship the kind of intertextual innovation Pamuk has been performing in the field of literature. My model of interpretation is based on one of Pamuk’s own techniques. Pamuk’s work reintroduces tropes of din into the secular novel form that have been repressed, devalorized, and abjected as a legacy of the Kemalist cultural revolution. Among other things, this reveals that the secularization process, which removed visible traces and symbols of Islamic tradition and practice from the public sphere, did not do away with them, but repressed or relegated them to the margins. The novel harbored the traces of this social engineering while permitting the traces of din to persist. This is not to say that Pamuk embraces Islam, Islamic formations, or abandons the secular completely, but rather subjects them to a dialectical mediation by characters that are negotiating secular and sacred conditions of being. In this regard, we can also point to the relevance of A.H. Tanpınar’s conceptual understanding of terkip (synthesis or hybridity), which has had a profound influence on Pamuk and his work.²⁰ As might be expected, devlet asserts its presence in Pamuk’s early fiction through references to modernization history, revolution, Kemalism, and the military coup. However, beginning with Pamuk’s third novel, The White Castle (and the first to be translated into English), the narrative force of devlet is broken by means of an allegorical frame narrative that moves synchronically from the Republican present to seventeenth-century Ottoman Istanbul to focus on an Ottoman protagonist, Abdullah Effendi, who is a hoja with an Islamic medrese education.

In short, the paradigmatic Pamuk novel questions the entrenched secularization teleology that with exposure to or emulation of Europe, a “Muslim” nation might develop into a “modern” one. Rather, literary articulations of din and devlet establish parity between Turkish secular and religious cultures and revise, redefine, and rehistoricize Turkishness as a site of postsecular identification. The official discourses of the Republic fabricated a clear distinction between the Ottoman-Islamic past and the modern nation. One subtle irony is that Republican historiography recast the Ottoman state, centered in Istanbul, as a colonizer of Anatolia and Turks. This is one of the paradoxes of Turkish modernization that Pamuk’s novels rethink and rewrite. As such, Pamuk’s postsecular literary revisions also enter into the critical spaces of Turkish postcolonialism.

By challenging what are essentially colonial, orientalist and anti-Islamic premises, Pamuk places himself within a literary-political field of intellectuals who, in other traditions, would be described as “postcolonial.” However, Ottoman Turkey’s relationship to European colonialism is complicated: though the Ottoman state experienced a sustained colonial encounter over the nineteenth century and lost financial control to European powers (1881) who had capitulatory legal rights, it was never formally colonized. Nevertheless, its long-Orientalized and subordinated status, as well as the pattern of anti-imperial and anti-colonial national resistance to establish the nation-state, makes interpretations of postcolonial theory particularly relevant. It is also revelatory to read Pamuk as a “postcolonial” author, an approach that points to the formative influence of European colonialism, the traces of an Ottoman legacy, and the ideologies of Kemalist secularism as a state-sponsored, internalized “civilizing mission.” In this sense, the postsecular and the postcolonial intersect, with the former emphasizing a critical reconsideration of the public sphere to allow for Islamic (political) representation and practice, and the latter, engaging a post-Kemalist reassessment of state formation in the shadow of European imperialism. Both approaches are concerned with expanding the scope of decolonial subject-formation vis-à-vis parochial Eurocentrisms. What I have been referring to as Turkish postcolonialism emerges as a dual formation in that it revises the Ottoman imperial legacy and criticizes the excesses of secular Republican state power, overly bound to European Enlightenment epistemologies. Pamuk’s work, in this regard, manifests as both postsecular and postcolonial.

2. The Pamuk novel from Kemalism to postsecularism

Tracing four of Pamuk’s novels, published between the 1980 military coup and the continuing authoritarian rule of the AKP (in 2022), exemplifies the author’s increasing emphasis on postsecular representations of Turkish literary modernity that do not however fully abandon Kemalist modernity, but introduce figures and figurations of Ottoman and Islamic cultural history as gestures of secular critique.

Pamuk’s first novel Cevdet Bey and Sons (1982, no English translation as of this writing), is a novel of secular formation, a paradigmatic novel of Kemalist cultural modernity that follows the rise of the Republican secular bourgeoisie. The novel tells a three-generation family saga of Cevdet Işıkçı, his children and grandchildren. Işıkçı is an Ottoman Muslim business pioneer in a sector dominated by Levantines, Greeks, and Armenians. In describing three-generations of his family, the novel summarizes twentieth-century Turkish social history according to a dominant declining Muslim Empire to modern secular Republic narrative from 1905 to 1970 and concludes just months before the 1971 military coup. Cevdet Bey functions as a literary social history that traces the Ottoman-to-Republic transition in the genre of what I elsewhere term an “Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman,” a genre with the telos of secular formation.²¹

However, beginning with his third novel, The White Castle (1991 in English), Pamuk begins to work in secular and mystical, if not fully religious, idioms simultaneously, with a focus on deconstructing binary logic through techniques of metafiction and hybridity in form and content. The story of The White Castle emerges out of an Ottoman manuscript discovered in a forgotten archive by Faruk Darvınoğlu (lit. “son of Darwin”), the selfsame historian of Pamuk’s previous novel, Silent House, who has “lost his faith” in the secular discipline of history. The novel’s intertextuality involves bringing together the historical legacy of the 1980 coup (prima facie a neo-Kemalist military intervention) with a seventeenth-century Enlightenment-era captive’s tale and account of “conversion.” As such, the novel relies on Ottoman contexts to make a redemptive critique of the confinements of Republican secular modernity represented by the coup. As a framing device, Darvınoğlu’s translation and publication of the manuscript in the wake of the coup functions as a metaphor for the reintroduction of Ottoman cultural memory into the Republican present. The reader is transported into a seventeenth-century captive’s tale. A master-and-slave relationship unfolds between an Ottoman captor (a Hoja, that is, a scholar of Islam) and a Venetian captive who fakes being a physician. The Ottoman master’s desire to learn everything the Venetian knows about Enlightenment Europe turns into a sadomasochistic obsession. The characters have ties to the Ottoman court and gain the patronage of the Sultan (Murad IV). Dependent on one another, they begin to experiment with gunpowder, fireworks, astrology, divination, military weapons, and autobiographical writing.

Eventually, the increasing similarity in character of the “master” and “slave” (in addition to their close appearance) allows them to pass for each other (“I was he and he was me”).²² But the narrative point-of-view also becomes unstable, as Pamuk concludes the story by introducing the unnamed referent “Him,” thus rendering the identity of the first-person narrator (ostensibly the slave) indeterminate. The master “Turk” in this story proves to have a narrative voice only in conjunction with his Venetian slave. Their joint narration consequently performs a critique of binary oppositions such as self/other and us/them that undergird nationalism, modernity, and/or orientalism.

What emerges in Pamuk’s positioning is a double consciousness: one focused on the Turkish secular present and the other on the seventeenth-century archival manuscript that excavates Ottoman-Islamic cultural history in the (peripheral) Enlightenment context of imperial Istanbul. Two temporalities (“pre-” and “post-” secular), deployed synchronically, inflect each other to create a new literary idiom. With The White Castle, Pamuk no longer permits the Ottoman Islamic past to be read as the denigrated backdrop for the emergence of secular modern subjectivities. This novel is an allegory of formations of “third space” that evokes the deconstructive ambivalence of postcolonial theory. It is through embodying hybridity in character that Pamuk is first able to reach multiple international audiences. The White Castle rewrites the Republican secular historiographic mode and transgresses its narrow ideological and discursive conventions. With a metafictional twist, the novel points to the constructed nature of identity and marks an end to Pamuk’s uncritical concern with Turkish secularization and the Empire-to-Republic bildungsroman. From here on, Pamuk authors more complex and layered narratives that incorporate contexts of Ottoman Islamic culture, Sufism, and Istanbul cosmopolitanism that had been denigrated as antimodern or comprador during and after the Kemalist cultural revolution.

As a layered allegory of the unstable boundaries of self/other (Muslim/Christian and Turk/European), The White Castle demonstrates that the archival Ottoman (ostensibly “pre-modern”) text can become the basis for transformations in literary modernity in the present. The discovery of the Ottoman manuscript within the plot reveals the perspective of a neglected Ottoman Istanbul cosmopolitanism, a setting wherein two distinct literary genres are able to merge: The captive’s tale and the first-person narrative of religious and cultural “conversion.” In terms of form, the novel is innovative for its techniques of intertextuality, metafiction, and metahistory that together function to alter understandings of Turkish literary and secular modernity. The White Castle places readers into a postsecular realm of critique that Pamuk develops in subsequent work, notably the political novel Snow.

The Kafkaesque novel Snow (2004 in English), set in the mid-1990s during the rise of the Islamist Welfare Party,²³ follows the leftist journalist, exile, and poet “Ka” to the remote Anatolian town of Kars near the Armenian border, where soon after his arrival, the performance of an early Republican play advocating the unveiling of women as a part of the cultural revolution (now meant to dissuade a rise in politically motivated veiling) erupts into a Kemalist military “coup”.²⁴ Here, political violence is embedded in the secularist theatrical representation itself. In Kars, Ka finds poetic inspiration, the love of an acquaintance, İpek, and gets mixed up in political intrigues that pit leftists, Islamists, Kurds, and secular nationalists against one another. İpek’s sister Kadife veils as a statement of protest and dissent against the secular political order. Under the constantly falling whiteness (evoking the racial order of Kemalist modernity), his experiences approach the mystical as Ka is enticed by faith in Allah (“It is God who is sending me [Ka] the poems”).²⁵ In the quasi-surreal world of coup and conspiracy, characters misread the representations depicted in theater, newspapers, and television as political reality.

In Snow, Pamuk introduces a postsecular poetics of sort. While in Kars, Ka writes a collection of poems entitled Snow that the novel withholds from the reader. Mediating between poetic inspiration and divine revelation, the poems trace Ka’s subjective experiences as a leftist liberal coming to God. His fragile existence as a subject of exile and return, of leftism and Islamism, and of Turkey and Europe is represented by the (white) snowflake icon depicted in the novel. It is both a symbolic map of Ka’s fragmented self and a table of contents for Ka’s poetry, representing a postsecular narrative consciousness. When arrested by coup leaders, Ka divulges the hideout of Blue, a leader of the Islamist resistance and is forced to flee Kars and Turkey. The postsecular drama that emerges describes Turkish, Kurdish, and Islamic, as well as gendered and classed, identity politics that can no longer be represented or repressed by the force of a secular nationalist coup.

Snow choreographs an indictment of secularist coups and uncovers discourses of conspiracy. But the novel plays these elements off the literary conventions of one of the oldest traditions of Islamic Sufi literature—the mystical romance of attempted reunion with a beloved—who also represents the divine. The tradition, as updated by Pamuk, often observes this scenario: a “beloved” is the object of the protagonist’s desire for reunion. Reunion with the “beloved” fails on the level of plot, giving rise to a state of unrequited love. In place of the reunion (vuslat), the mystical narrative and quest provides the seeker with what he needs rather than what he wants. For Pamuk, the surrogate object of desire is always textual. The quest leads to the emergence of a “writing subject” or author and results in the production of a redemptive literary text. The result is Pamuk’s opening of postsecular spaces in Turkish fiction that marry the material and the mystical and the secular and the sacred. In Kars, Ka’s experiences and poetry manifest as what might be termed “secular Sufism.” Secular Sufism materializes in the plot as redemptive postsecular agency: the representational agency (of Ka and the author-figure Orhan) to “write back” to sites of Turkish secular ideology. In the process, the sacredness of the literary text is reaffirmed as the redemptive space of productive paradox and complicit critique.

Pamuk’s literary interventions into the cultural history of a long twentieth century (from the late Ottoman era to the present) develop a postsecular reassessment of Turkish secular modernization that excavates cultural history, Ottoman legacies, and nation-state formation. These social forces intersect in literary revisions of secular knowledge and culminate in his most recent novel Nights of Plague (2022 in English).

3. Secular afflictions and plagues of fatalism

In what ways can the literary text itself perform postsecularism beyond the exercise of applications of theory to text? Can the novel itself theorize a concept? Pamuk’s most recent novel, Nights of Plague, unfolds at the intersection of scientific positivism, blind faith, and heresy. Nights of Plague is an outbreak narrative, set during a plague epidemic in the late Ottoman Hamidian era. What is known in history as the “third major plague pandemic” has killed millions as it spread over the world and arrives in 1901 to the imaginary Mediterranean island of Mingheria, which is half-Muslim and half-Christian. The Ottoman Sultan and Caliph Abdülhamid II (r. 1878–1909) sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island. (Bonkowski Pasha looms in the novel as something of an early twentieth-century Anthony Fauci.) Some of the Muslims, including followers of a Sufi religious sect and its leader Sheikh Hamdullah, refuse to respect the quarantine. At the same time, Nights of Plague tells a story of national self-determination in the context of what might be termed colonial quarantine measures, tracing the rise of one Atatürk-like Kamil Pasha as founding president of the independent island-nation of Mingheria: soon to be freed from Ottoman rule and to embark on a quirky secularizing cultural revolution reminiscent of Turkey’s own post-Ottoman modernization. Though a historical novel, Nights of Plague allegorizes the spread of two “contagions”: the ideological epidemic of secular nationalism and the fatalism (kader) of Islamic belief.

The Ottoman state’s liminal position is captured by the fact that the reigning Sultan Abdülhamid II, Caliph of Islam, is depicted with historical accuracy as both an autocrat as well as a modernizer: even an avid reader of Sherlock Holmes and a fan of his deductive reasoning. Pamuk’s novel is a nuanced take on the end-of-empire legacy of Abdülhamid II, who is often denigrated by secularists but championed by Islamist groups, including the ruling AKP, as the forefather of the Turkish political Islam that rules Turkey today.

Nights of Plague places the reader at the intersection of epidemiology and nation-state formation. As such, it dramatizes a variety of what might be termed postcolonial biopolitics. If we can speak of the nation as an “imagined community” (in Benedict Anderson’s formulation), then we can also consider its “imagined immunities” as Priscilla Wald argues.²⁶ “While emerging infections are inextricable from global interdependence in all versions of these [outbreak] accounts,” she writes, “the threat they pose requires a national response. The community to be protected is thereby configured in cultural and political as well as biological terms: the nation as immunological ecosystem.”²⁷ Readers understand that the modern state “inoculates” against political others who are relegated to a lethal precarity.

Of course, the plague in the novel is not just the plague, it is a force of historical transformation like colonialism, nationalism, or secularism. The presence of the contagion turns people into others, transforms them forever; it demands, at a minimum, some degree of “conversion” to another way of life or worldview. As such, it teaches us about the excesses of secular state power and opens narrative spaces of postsecular reassessment.

4. Conclusion

Pamuk’s (historiographic) fictions interrogate a long twentieth century in which postsecular critique, in turn, plays a role in literary formations of Turkish postcolonialism, exposing the coercive forces of imperialist, comprador, and nationalist ideologies. Ratti argues that “the postcolonial is postsecular”,²⁸ a notion that helps frame a Turkish postcolonial condition implicating European and Ottoman imperial legacies. The literary representations summarized above politicize Turkish secular characters as postcolonial subjects. Pamuk’s novels teach us that secularism and Islamism function like a Möbius strip, a nonorientable plane constructed out of “twists” that subvert the binary. His novels generate accounts of religio-secular, racialized, gendered and classed subjectivities that extend beyond their own normativities into new temporalities of postsecularism.

Footnotes