The Sunday Salon: The Implied Author by Orhan Pamuk

The Implied Author is a speech Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk gave when he received the Puterbaugh literary prize in 2006, a few months before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In this text he discusses how writing is a habit, a need even, for him. The only online English text of this speech I could find is in some places slightly different from the Dutch text I read. I took the quotes from the English version, which you can find here. Other than that, it is also printed in Pamuk’s collection of essays Other Colors.

In order to be happy, Pamuk begins, he needs a daily dose of literature, like other people need a daily dose of medication. This daily dose must meet certain criteria:

First, the medicine must be good. Its goodness is what tells me how true and strong it is. To read a dense, deep passage in a novel, to enter into that world and believe it to be true – nothing makes me happier, nothing binds me more to life. I also prefer it if the writer is dead, because then there is no little cloud of jealousy to darken my admiration.

However, it is different when Pamuk himself is writing. In that case, “the best cure of all, and the greatest source of happiness, is to write a good half page every day.”

If Pamuk hasn’t had his daily fix of literature, either through writing or reading, he becomes deeply unhappy and the world becomes a deeply unhappy place with him. So, Pamuk concludes, “the real hunger (…) is not for literature, but for a room where I can be alone and dream”, a place where he can isolate himself from the distractions and the busyness of the world. To be able to be a good writer, Pamuk needs to be bored, and to be bored he must participate in life, he must get out of this room. Because when he is out in the world he realizes he is watching it all from the sidelines. And that’s when he gets bored and begins to dream.

So the real ingredients of the medicine he has to take every day are “boredom, real life and the life of the imagination.” This is one of the places where my Dutch text differs from the English. The quote I just used, comes from the English version, the Dutch translation omits boredom.

Orhan Pamuk now goes on to ponder how writing is a way to use those daily daydreams, to let them run free: “we choose our subjects, and shape our novels, to suit our daily daydream requirements.”

To write a novel is to be open to these desires, winds and inspirations, to the dark recesses of our minds and their moments of mist and stillness.

For what is a novel but a story that fills its sails with these winds, that answers and builds upon inspirations that blow in from unknown quarters and seizes upon all the daydreams we’ve invented for our diversion, bringing them together into a meaningful whole? Above all, a novel is a basket that carries inside it a dreamworld we wish to keep forever alive, and forever ready. Novels are held together by the little pieces of daydreams that help us, from the moment we enter them, forget the tedious world we long to escape.

Through writing a writer creates a whole new world that grows and expands the more he writes. Pamuk loves to escape to this world and is always reluctant to move back to the ‘real’ world.

As Pamuk stated at the beginning of his speech, his daily dose of literature can be taken by writing or by reading. This implies that a writer’s daydreams and fantasy imaginations, which were initially produced to feed the writer’s own needs, can be a medicine not only to their creator, the writer, but also to their ‘consumers’, the readers:

An imaginative novelist’s greatest virtue is his ability to forget the world in the way a child does, to be irresponsible and delight in it, to play around with the rules of the known world – but at the same time to see through his freewheeling flights of fancy to the deep responsibility that will later allow readers to lose themselves entirely in his novel. He might be spending the whole day playing, but at the same time he carries the deepest conviction that he is more serious than others. This is because he can be looking directly into the centre of things the way that only children can. Having found the courage to set rules for the games he once played freely, he senses that his readers will also allow themselves to be drawn into the same rules, the same language, the same sentences, and therefore the story. To write well is to allow the reader to say, “I was going to say the same thing myself, but I couldn’t allow myself to be that childish.”

Pamuk ends his lecture by adapting Wolfgang Iser’s principle of the ‘implied reader’ to express something he learned in a period when he was being driven out of his own room to ‘participate in life’ and didn’t have time or opportunity to get his daily fix of writing (or daydreaming). He refers to the court-case against him in Turkey in 2006 because he had referred to the Armenian genocide and mass killings of Kurds in the Ottoman Empire.

Iser created a brilliant reader-oriented literary theory. He said that a novel’s meaning resides not in the text, nor in its context, but somewhere between the two. He argues that a novel’s meaning emerges only as it is read, and so when he speaks of the implied reader, he is assigning him or her a special role.

When I was dreaming up the scenes, sentences and details of another book, instead of continuing the novel I was already writing, it was this theory that came back into my mind, and what it suggested to me was this: for every unwritten but dreamed and planned novel (in other words, my own unfinished novel), there must be an implied author. So I would only be able to finish that book when I’d become that book’s implied author. But when I was immersed in political affairs, or – as happens so often in the course of normal life – my thoughts were interrupted by unpaid gas bills, ringing telephones and family gatherings, I was unable to become the author implied by the book in my dreams.(…)But having come through this experience, I have understood why, for 30 years, I have devoted all my strength to becoming the implied author of the books I long to write. This may be important to me because I only want to write big, thick, ambitious novels, and because I write so very slowly. It is not difficult to dream a book. I do this a lot, just as I spend a great deal of time imagining myself as someone else. The difficult thing is to be your dream book’s implied author.

You can read this speech in its entirety here. My post about Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel speech is here.