Who Do You Write For?

Orhan Pamuk Who do you write for? Over the last thirty-odd yearssince I first became a writer this has been the question Ive heard most often from both readers and journalists. The motives depend on the time and the place, as does the extent of their curiosity, but they all ask in the same suspicious, supercilious tone of voice. In the mid-seventies, when I first decided to become a novelist, the question reflected the widely held philistine view that art and literature were luxuries that a poor nonWestern country struggling to join the modern age could ill afford. There was also the suggestion that someone as educated and cultivated as yourself might serve the nation more usefully as a doctor fighting epidemics or an engineer building bridges. (Jean-Paul Sartre gave credence to this view in the early 1970s when he said he would not be in the business of writing novels if he were a Biafran intellectual.) In later years, those questioners were more interested in finding out which sector of society I hoped might read and admire my work. I knew this to be a trick question, for if I did not answer, I write for the poorest and most downtrodden members of society! I would be accused of protecting the interests of Turkeys landowners and its bourgeoisieeven as I was reminded that any pure-minded, good-hearted writer who claimed to be writing for peasants, workers, and the indigent would be writing for people who were barely literate. In the 1970s, when my mother asked who I was writing for, her mournful and concerned tone told me she was really asking, How are you planning to support yourself? And when friends asked me who I wrote for, the tinge of mockery in their voices was enough to suggest that no one would ever want to read a book by someone like me. Thirty years on, I hear this question more frequently than ever. This has more to do with the fact that my novels have been translated into forty languages. Especially during the past ten years, my ever more numerous interviewers seem worried that I might take their words the wrong way, so they are inclined to add, You write in Turkish, so do you write just for Turks or do you now also have in mind the wider audience you reach through your translations? Whether we are speaking inside Turkey or outside it, the question is always accompanied by that same suspicious, supercilious smile, leaving me to conclude that, if I wish my works to be accepted as true and authentic, I must answer, I write only for Turks. Before we examine the question itselffor it is neither honest nor humanewe must remember that the rise of the novel coincided with the emergence of the nation-state. When the great novels of the nineteenth century were being written, the art of the novel was in every sense a national art. Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy wrote for an emerging middle class, who could in the books of its respective national author recognize every city, street, house, room, and chair; it could indulge in the same pleasures as it did in the real world and discuss the same ideas. In the nineteenth century, novels by important authors appeared first in the art and culture supplements of national newspapers, for their authors were speaking to the nation. In their narrative voices we can sense the disquiet of the concerned patriot whose deepest

wish is for his country to prosper. By the end of the nineteenth century, to read and write novels was to join a national discussion on matters of national importance. But today the writing of novels carries an entirely different meaning, as does the reading of literary novels. The first change came in the first half of the twentieth century, when the literary novels engagement with modernism won it the status of high art. Just as significant have been the changes in communication that weve seen over the past thirty years: In the age of global media, literary writers are no longer people who speak first and only to the middle classes of their own countries but are people who can speak, and speak immediately, to readers of literary novels all the world over. Todays literary readers await a new book by Garca Mrquez, Coetzee, or Paul Auster the same way their predecessors awaited the new Dickensas the latest news. The world audience for literary novelists of this cohort is far larger than the audience their books reach in their countries of origin. If we generalize the questionFor whom do writers write?we might say they write for their ideal reader, their loved ones, themselves, or no one. This is the truth, but not the whole truth. For todays literary writers also write for those who read them. From this we might infer that todays literary writers are gradually writing less for their own national majorities (who do not read them) than for the small minority of literary readers in the world who do. So there we have it: The needling questions, and the suspicions about these writers true intentions, reflect an uneasiness about this new cultural order that has come into being over the past thirty years. The people who find it most disturbing are the opinion makers and cultural institutions of non-Western nations. Uncertain as they are about their standing in the world, unwilling as they are to discuss current national crises or the black marks in their history in international arenas, such constituencies are necessarily suspicious of novelists who view history and nationalism from a nonnationalist perspective. In their view, novelists who do not write for national audiences are exoticizing their country for foreign consumption and inventing problems that have no basis in reality. There is a parallel suspicion in the West, where many readers believe that local literatures should remain local, pure, and true to their national roots; their secret fear is that becoming a world writer who draws from traditions outside his own culture will cause one to lose ones authenticity. The one who most acutely feels this fear is a reader who longs to open a book and enter a foreign country that is cut off from the world, who longs to watch that countrys internal wrangling, much as one might witness a family argument next door. If a writer is addressing an audience that includes readers in other cultures speaking other languages, then this fantasy dies too. It is because all writers have a deep desire to be authentic thateven after all these yearsI still love to be asked for whom I write. But while a writers authenticity does depend on his ability to engage with the world in which he lives, it depends just as much on his ability to understand his own changing position in that world. There is no such thing as an ideal reader unencumbered by social prohibitions and national myths, just as there no such thing as an ideal novelist. Butbe he national or international it is the ideal reader for whom all novelists write, first by imagining him into being, and then by writing books with him in mind.