Why Jean Meslier matters

You’ve probably heard the aphorism about freedom coming only when the last priest’s entrails are used to strangle the last king. If you’re particularly familiar with it, you might think that it was written by a French Enlightenment-era philosopher named Denis Diderot. You’d be wrong, but it’s far from the only time that history has failed to properly record the contributions of its real author, which in this instance was a 17th century Catholic priest named Jean Meslier who is perhaps the most overlooked and misunderstood intellectual figure in modern history.

Meslier is barely a footnote to that history today, but he deserves better than that. As British journalist Colin Brewer wrote in a 2007 article in the New Humanist, “Meslier was arguably the first to put his name to an incontrovertibly atheist document.” What makes that document even more interesting, and the cultural obscurity of its author all the more confounding, is the fact that Meslier spent most of his life serving as a Catholic priest.

Meslier was born in Mazerny, France, a small village in the Ardennes region of the country, in 1664. He joined the seminary as a young man, and on January 7, 1689, he became the priest at Étrépigny, in nearby Champagne. Except for a running dispute with a local nobleman that lived in his parish over the treatment of the poor, Meslier lived the same life of worship, public service and penury as other Catholic priests of his era. But there was one crucial difference between Meslier and other men of God: he spent the last ten years of his life producing a 633-page treatise against organized religion. “All the laws and orders that are issued in the name and authority of God or the gods are really only human inventions,” he wrote, “invented by shrewd and crafty politicians, afterward cultivated and multiplied by the false seducers and charlatans, then accepted blindly by the ignorant, and finally supported and authorized by the laws of the princes and rulers of the earth who used these human inventions to keep a tight rein on the community of men and do with them what they wanted.” Even the eternally caustic Christopher Hitchens would struggle to do better than that.

Meslier was well aware of the conflict between his private views on religion and his public duties. “I have had the displeasure of seeing myself in this annoying obligation of acting and speaking entirely against my own sentiments,” he wrote. “I have had the displeasure of keeping you in the stupid errors, the vain superstitions, and the idolatries that I hated, condemned, and detested to the core.” But, as he noted in his testament, the Church had recourse to the pyre, and he didn’t particularly feel like dying for his beliefs. Instead, he transcribed three copies of his testament and left them by his death bed, where they quickly made their way into what Brewer describes as “the lively world of illicit reproductions.”

His testament eventually found its way into other hands, and many of the ideas contained within it were borrowed – some have said plagiarized – by Voltaire some fifty years later in his own writings on the subject. Yet today, aside from the work of French scholar Michel Onfray, who wrote about Meslier in his 2007 book In Defence of Atheism, Meslier’s life remains a mystery to most of us. This is perplexing. By virtue of its ironic value alone, the story of a Catholic priest who made a convincing case against faith ought to be more widely told. But what makes Meslier’s anonymity most confounding is the fact that he is precisely what is missing from the stories that have been told by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and other prominent atheist authors in recent years: a hero.

***

I went in search of that hero, or at least some trace of his existence, this past summer. I suppose if I were a Christian or a Muslim or a member of another monotheistic faith I’d describe my trip as a pilgrimage. It was, after all, sufficiently excessive (and obsessive) to qualify as one, given that I had voluntarily left Paris – in June, no less – so that I could spend five hours navigating the treacherous French autoroutes on my way into the Ardennes in order to pay a visit to Mazerny, a village that had once been the home of a man I’d only read about.

My ambitions for the trip were modest. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to find Meslier’s grave, since he was buried in an unmarked plot on the property of descendents of a nobleman that he had quarreled with repeatedly during the course of his life – more irony – and I knew better than to expect any grand monuments to his existence in the town itself. But I had expected to at least find some trace of his existence, some thread to pull on. I was wrong. There was no Musee de Jean Meslier, no Rue Jean Meslier, and no mention of his existence on or near the town’s only church.  This struck me as more than just an historical oversight. But even if his heresy had offended the town’s religious sensibilities, and they had decided to deliberately ignore his existence, it still didn’t add up. In a town with 78 official residents according to the most recent French census and a local economy that depended entirely on what the surrounding fields could provide, how could they afford to ignore him?

They weren’t ignoring me, though. Children stared from the second floor windows of their two-story brick houses, while the adults working in their gardens or trying to fix some thing or another in their garages looked up and monitored my rented Peugeot’s slow progress past their property. It was no wonder, given that it had probably been a long time since the people of Mazerny had seen a tourist in their town, much less one that wasn’t there in search of a restroom. I thought about trying to explain what I was there for but my French wasn’t nearly good enough to communicate my interest in the atheist who had lived in their village three centuries ago. After making three complete loops of the town and with dusk already on the horizon, I decided that it was time to look somewhere else for some clues.

I retreated to the commune of Poix-Terron, a town of a few hundred residents a few kilometers north that felt like New York City by comparison. I also needed to eat something, so I stopped in at what appeared to be the only restaurant on the town’s main drag, a family tavern that curiously advertised the fact that it sold pizza. Here, at least, I was more welcome, and the kindness of the family that ran the joint was sufficiently heartening and friendly that I decided to abuse them with my defective French. Had they heard of Jean Meslier, I asked? Did they know anything of this atheist priest that had lived just a few kilometres up the road from them? They huddled in order to translate both the meaning and intent of my unusual request. Eventually, the woman who ran the place came back to me with their answer. “Non,” she said. “Jamais.”

***

Meslier hasn’t always been invisible. In the early 20th century his legacy was conscripted by the Soviets, who saw it as a useful counterpoint to organized religion. They engraved his name on an obelisk that was erected in Moscow’s Red Square in 1919 along with other leading communist thinkers like Lenin, Engels, Charles Fourier and Jean Jaures, and treated him, for a time, as a significant philosopher. But they stopped talking about Meslier when it became clear that his could just as easily be seen as a role model for insurrectionary behaviour and anti-establishment thinking, values that conflicted with the unthinking servitude that the Soviet leadership demanded of its people. The obelisk was quietly moved to the Alexandrovsky Gardens, near the Middle Arsenal Tower of the Kremlin, in 1967 to make way for a timelier piece of propaganda, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

If his value to communist propagandists was obvious, his appeal to contemporary atheists ought to be even more so. Yet somehow, in spite of all the ink that’s been spilled in recent years on the subject, today’s atheists have all but ignored Jean Meslier. Colin Brewer, a British writer and dramatist who played Meslier in 2007’s The Last Priest, noted in a 2007 article that Meslier was even absent from two high-profile television documentaries on atheism, one of which was produced by Richard Dawkins. Brewer thinks this has a great deal to do with the fact that his work was both poorly circulated and widely borrowed against by atheist intellectuals who followed Meslier. There is Voltaire’s famous “Extract,” which Brewer says inaccurately described Meslier as “a fellow-deist and entirely suppressed Meslier’s anti-monarchist, proto-communist opinions.” Meanwhile, the definitive, annotated French edition of his testament did not appear until 1970, and until the 2009 publication of Michael Shreve’s Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier only fragmentary English translations could be found. Shreve’s translation, meanwhile, is ranked number 355,280 on Amazon’s best-sellers list. By way of comparison, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” checks in at number 700.

I had assumed that Meslier’s invisibility was an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, and that in France I would find a more receptive environment for his message. Sure, I hadn’t found any pamphlets at Charles De Gaulle about Mazerny and Meslier, and there were no signs on the highway near the town indicating that a point of historical interest was nearby. But I had assumed that I would have been able to find some trace of his influence, some thread to tug on. How could somebody who ought to be so important remain so consistently invisible?

I spent most of the three-plus hour drive back towards Paris that same day – well, that evening – preoccupied with trying to resist the temptation to just close my eyes for a few seconds and keep my little Peugeot between the yellow lines. But in those moments where I wasn’t fighting to stay awake, I was trying to figure out what had just taken place in Mazerny. Okay, I thought, a small, rural French village probably isn’t the most appropriate environment for a shrine to an atheist apostate, but shouldn’t there have been something? Surely, some enterprising local resident would have realized that there was considerable monetary potential in branding the town as the home of Europe’s most outspoken atheist? But maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a case of their ignoring him. Maybe they just didn’t need to remember. Life in Mazerny may not have been what I would want, but it was a pleasant, civilized town, in an undeniably beautiful part of the world. Maybe that was enough.

Contemporary atheist thinkers have no such excuse. Almost by the day, it seems, another unfathomably foul-smelling layer of the onion that is organized religion gets peeled back, and for all the notoriety that writers like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have earned with their atheist treatises, the project to which they’re dedicated hasn’t made any detectable progress. In this environment, the story of a 17th century Catholic priest who quarreled with the church, stuck up for those being abused by the rich and powerful and eventually committed his ideas about the failure of religion and the promise of atheism to writing ought to be tremendously attractive.

So, too, should the testimony that this most unusual priest left behind, one that is at once more convincing and more inspirational than anything written on the subject in recent years. Meslier’s testimony aims at something greater than merely rejecting religion or describing its faults, the subjects to which today’s atheist writers seem to restrict themselves. Instead, it is a declaration of the moral and ethical virtues of a Godless existence: an atheist manifesto, in the best sense of the term. As Meslier wrote in his testament, “It has been long enough that the poor people have been so miserably abused by all kinds of idolatries and superstitions. It has been long enough that the rich and the rulers of the death have pillaged and oppressed the poor. It is time to deliver them from their miserable slavery. It is time to open their eyes everywhere and make them know the truth of things.”

***

There are some curious similarities between the approach taken by people like Dawkins and Hitchens and that of the Soviets a few generations back. It was the Soviets, after all, who set up museums of atheism in old eastern orthodox churches in an effort to undermine organized religion, and it’s clear that today’s secular spokespeople would do the same if they could get away with it. While the aims of today’s atheists are both more moderate and more moderating than those of their Soviet predecessors, they share the same basic conceit in thinking that if they accumulated enough evidence of organized religion’s misdeeds the faithful would eventually awaken and realize the error of their ways. But nobody will exchange something for nothing, even if that something is demonstrably flawed.

That’s where Jean Meslier ought to come in. For all the good work that professional atheists have done in highlighting the flaws of organized religion, they have done almost nothing to present an affirmative case for atheism. According to Michel Onfray, a French scholar who has worked diligently to revive Meslier’s legacy, he didn’t write his manifesto in the hopes of destroying Christianity but instead of replacing it. “Atheism does not constitute an end in itself but a beginning, a necessary base, an ethical foundation. Meslier negates the principle of God in order to arrive at a caring morality of a joyful body, of happy existence, of peaceful relations between beings and between sexes.”

Atheists, of course, are no more a monolith than any other cultural or religious group, but they do share some common beliefs. They respect the rights of individuals, freedom of thought and inquiry, the equality of all people, and an appreciation of natural and man-made wonders. Atheists don’t discriminate, they don’t withhold rights from particular groups, they don’t fear scientific progress and the frequently baffling explanations of the world it provides, they don’t wish for the end of the world, and they don’t insist upon imposing feelings of guilt and failure onto the thoughts and actions of others. Perhaps most importantly, atheists are engaged in the one life that they’re given rather than simply enduring it in anticipation of something better to come.

Meslier articulated all of this in his manifesto almost 300 years ago. His philosophy of “social hedonism,” Michel Onfray writes, “proposes the happiness of all and of each individual. Not an ideal happiness, but a real one, concrete, pragmatic: to work, by which people can eat healthfully and sufficiently all the time, live and sleep in a decent and heated house, be nourished, be clothed, have the means to educate their children, and be cared for in illness.”

Most atheists would resist the term, but it’s tempting all the same to describe Meslier as a prophet. In the same way that Jesus Christ’s apostles articulated the values and beliefs that form the foundation of contemporary Christianity, so too does Meslier’s manifesto serve as a template for all atheist thought that has followed. And like Christ himself, Meslier serves as a role model for those who share his beliefs, his life an example of how to be good and decent in a world that often isn’t. The key difference, of course, was that Meslier was completely, and contentedly, of this world.

Maybe that’s why Meslier continues to languish in obscurity. Atheists aren’t prone to idolatry, after all, and the idea of placing someone at the spiritual forefront of the movement would be anathema to many of them. Still, maybe it’s time for them – for us – to take a different approach, given the pitiful returns of our efforts so far.  In a world where atheism ought to be making significant cultural inroads, it is instead barely able to hold its own. The odds of an openly atheist candidate getting elected to the highest office in the land in North America are about the same as those of an openly gay communist with a penchant for flag burning. With that in mind, maybe it’s time we found somebody to worship, to lead by example, to serve as an archetype for everything that’s good and decent about the non-religious life. I can’t think of a better candidate than Jean Meslier.

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Edmonton – November 9, 2011 – 2,782 words

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Snowflake from the Snow

1.

A man is riding on a bus across Turkey, more than a thousand kilometres, from Istanbul in the west, to Kars, a provincial city in the far northeastern corner of the country near the Armenian-Georgian borders. It’s wet and snowy. He’s a Turkish poet, in his early 40s, known as Ka, the acronym of his given and family names, Kerim Alakusoglu. For the past dozen years he’s lived in political exile in Frankfurt, Germany (“even though he had never been much of an activist”), but was permitted to return to Istanbul for his mother’s funeral, and now, a few days later, he’s on his way to Kars, ostensibly as a journalist sent to cover the municipal election (which the local Islamist party is poised to win) and to investigate a rash of mysterious teen suicides by what are known as “headscarf girls.” His editor in Istanbul also mentioned in passing that a former university classmate of Ka’s, the beautiful Ipek, divorced from her husband Muhtar, was living in Kars at the old family hotel, the Snow Palace, with her father and sister.

Three-quarters of the way across the country, Ka has to change buses at Erzurum for the local one to Kars. It begins to snow. “It was heavier and thicker than the snow he’d seen between Istanbul and Erzurum. If he hadn’t been so tired, if he’d paid more attention to the snowflakes swirling out of the sky like feathers, he might have realized that he was travelling straight into a blizzard; he might have seen from the start that he had set out on a journey that would change his life for ever.” The word for “snow” in Turkish, kar, can be seen as snugly nesting between the names of Ka and Kars; and perhaps even K., the protagonist of Kafka’s The Castle is lurking somewhere in the shadows of these alphabetical affinities. Ka might have turned back, says the narrator of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow (2002; translated into English by Maureen Freeley, 2004), which I re-read recently.

Instead, Ka is thinking only about the weather and poetry. “The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the busdriver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called what he felt inside him ‘the silence of snow’.” He sees the “snowflakes whirling ever more wildly in the wind” not as portents of a blizzard, but as “a sign pointing back to the happiness and purity he had once known as a child,” as a memory of innocence that allows him to momentarily “believe himself at home in the world.” Ka, wrapped in an elegant charcoal-grey overcoat bought in Frankfurt, slips from revery into long-sought sleep.

While he dozes, the narrator, who is named “Orhan Pamuk,” takes a moment to quickly fill us in on Ka’s background. “But I don’t wish to deceive you,” says the narrator, “I’m an old friend of Ka’s and I begin this story knowing everything that will happen to him during his time in Kars.” With that, we’re on our way into a fairy tale for adults in which the snow never stops falling, into A Thousand and One Turkish Nights where the magic of the magic realism is real, into a book about politics, God, love, and poetry. Snow, by the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, is also, I’m pretty certain, one of the great novels of the decade.

Once in snowbound Kars, after a night’s sleep at the Snow Palace, Ka notices on an early morning walk that the snow, “veiling as it did the dirt, mud and the darkness,” continues to speak to him of purity,

but after his first day in Kars, it no longer promised innocence. The snow here was tiring, irritating, terrorising. It had snowed all night. It continued snowing all morning, while Ka walked the streets playing the intrepid reporter — visiting coffee-houses packed with unemployed Kurds, interviewing the voters, taking notes — and later, when he climbed the steep and frozen streets to interview the former mayor, the governor’s assistant, and the families of the girls who committed suicide. But it no longer took him back to the snowy streets of his childhood… Instead, it spoke to him of hopelessness and misery.

In the poorest part of Kars, the Kaleati district,

The scenes he saw as he hurried under the ice-covered branches of the plane trees and the oleasters — the old, decrepit Russian buildings with stovepipes sticking out of every window, the thousand-year-old Armenian church towering over the wood depots and the electric generators, the pack of dogs barking at every passer-by from a five-hundred-year-old stone bridge as snow fell into the half-frozen black waters of the river below, the thin ribbons of smoke rising out of the tiny shanty houses of Kaleati sitting lifeless under their blanket of snow — made him feel so sad that tears came to his eyes… These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten; as if it were snowing at the end of the world.

Within a few pages, Pamuk has immersed us in a world that is at once like a children’s snowglobe, and yet simultaneously presents a grimly realistic panorama of the various contradictions and circumstances — secularism versus faith, ethnic minorities, poverty and backwardness, a society of surveillance, gossip and violence  — that engulf contemporary Turkey and beyond, the whole played out in a remote crossroads of the world’s troubles.

On that first morning in Kars, Ka checks in with his eastern Anatolian journalistic colleague, Serdar, editor of the Border City News (circulation: 320, most of which are government agency subscriptions). The journalist takes the poet through the snowy city, with its architectural vestiges of the Russian-Armenian-Ottoman past, for requisite visits to the police, the deputy governor, and the families of the dead girls. Kasim, the beer-bellied assistant chief of police offers Ka “protection” in the form of a plainclothes tail, which will be provided whether or not it’s wanted, and despite Ka’s protestation, “If Kars is a peaceful place, then I don’t need protection.” But, then, Kars is not a peaceful place; rather, it’s a nexus of suspicion where all strangers, and much of the citizenry, are under constant and mutual scrutiny. The deputy governor, “a squirrel-faced man with a brush mustache,” is primarily concerned with damage control in the presence of a journalist from Istanbul who might spread bad news about the suicide girls and make the local authorities look bad; or worse, news that might be picked up by the European press, thus further humiliating tension-ridden Turkey. Then there are the homes and families of the girls who committed suicide:

The two men were shown to old divans and crooked chairs in tiny, icy rooms, with bare earthen floors or cheap carpets. Sitting next to stoves that gave out no warmth unless stirred continuously or electric heaters that ran on illegal power lines, and silent televisions that no one ever turned off, they heard the never-ending woes of Kars…

Among those woes is the intractable and puzzling epidemic of self-murder, as suicide is known in some languages. The girls are inspired by the Islamic revival to don headscarves, but in secular Turkey, the authorities, backed by the ever-present spectre of the coup-prone army, ban the wearing of head coverings in public institutions, such as the schools the girls attend. Unaccountably, some of the girls kill themselves. But why? As declarations of belief, or for more mundane reasons, like boyfriend trouble? The government’s anti-suicide posters, proclaiming “Human beings are God’s masterpieces and suicide is blasphemy,” seconded even by the local Islamic establishment, appear to have little effect, and may only inflame the situation. It is a mystery unlikely to be solved, but one that ominously pulsates within the snow-blanketed city.

Back at the Snow Palace for a brief mid-day pause of warmth and rest in his room, Ka receives a message from Serdar to return to the newspaper office. Just as he’s about to exit the lobby,

he was stopped dead in his tracks; for just at that moment, coming through the doors behind the reception desk, was Ipek, even more beautiful than in Ka’s memory… His heart began to pound. Yes, exactly — that’s how beautiful she was. First they shook hands in the manner of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeoisie, but after a moment’s hesitation they moved their heads forward, embracing without quite letting their bodies touch, and kissed on the cheeks. “I knew you were coming,” Ipek said as she stepped back.

All of this — the first morning’s walkabout in Kars, the initial forays into the themes of Pamuk’s novel, the encounter with Ipek (they agree to meet at a nearby pastry shop in an hour) –  is but a curtain-raiser to a plot of Byzantine complexity and velocity. It’s an  entangled narrative made more dense by the propensity of the characters to tell further tales, parables and premonitions of their own, and by the appearance of transcripts, manuscripts and descriptions of inspired poems. Finally, there’s the sub-textual principle of the text, a continuous suggestion of the half-hidden symmetry, or doubling of characters and events.

“Pamuk” the narrator turns out to be a kind of Doppelganger or mirror of Ka the poet, and is fated to retrace much of Ka’s own odyssey. Ka’s beloved Ipek has a refracting sister, Kadife; both of the sisters will turn out to be involved with an alleged Islamic terrorist who bears the curious moniker, “Blue”; Blue has a counterpart in a revolution-minded actor named Sunay; a fundamentalist student from the local religious high school, Necip, whom Ka shortly meets, has a best friend, Fazil, who is his psychological twin; and the mirror-like pairings extend to the novel’s horizons. Pamuk’s characters are persuasive as people, but they are also a schematic of possibilities. Yet the resultant pattern, woven as elaborately as a Turkish carpet, is surprisingly easy to follow in the hands of its skilled storyteller. As the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, one of many enthusiastic reviewers of Snow, aptly puts it, Pamuk is “narrating his country into being,” providing an “in-depth tour of the divided, hopeful, desolate, mystifying Turkish soul.”

2.

Back at Serdar’s office, where his two sons are running off tomorrow’s edition on an ancient German press, Ka reads an item headed, “Night of Triumph for the Sunay Zaim Players at the National Theatre.” When Ka arrived in Kars the night before, he had briefly glimpsed, among the travellers waiting for their luggage, the faintly familiar faces of Sunay Zaim and his touring theatre company, formerly “leading lights of the revolutionary theatre world” back in the 1970s, now reduced to down-at-the-heels shows in the remote provinces.

But in Serdar’s Border City News, that night’s performance, which has yet to occur, is reviewed with lavish praise in a journalese of cliches and press release puffery. The show was received with “thunderous applause,” the paper reports. “The people of Kars, who have long been yearning for an artistic feast of this calibre were able to watch not just from the packed auditorium but from the surrounding houses,” thanks to Kars Border Television’s first live broadcast. The story describes the station’s “tireless” efforts to string cable from their transmission headquarters through the city’s snow-clogged streets to the theatre, and salutes the civic spirit of citizens who allowed the cable to pass through their open front windows into their apartments and out through their back gardens “to avoid snow damage.”

At the bottom of the item, the article records that the show “included republican vignettes, the most beautiful scenes from the most important works of the Western Enlightenment and… poems in praise of Ataturk and the nation. Ka, the celebrated poet, who is now visiting our city, recited his latest poem, entitled ‘Snow.’ The crowning event of the evening was a performance of My Fatherland or My Scarf, the Enlightenment masterwork from the early years of the republic, in a new interpretation entitled My Fatherland or My Headscarf.”

Ka looks up from the freshly-inked sheet. “I don’t have a poem called ‘Snow,’ and I’m not going to the theatre this evening. Your newspaper will look like it’s made a mistake,” he says.

“Don’t be so sure,” Serdar tells him. “There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens… You should see how amazed they are when things turn out exactly as we’ve written them. And quite a few things do happen only because we’ve written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about.”

The newspaper that reports on the future, and the clunky running of cables through people’s living rooms for the first live TV broadcast in Kars, is Pamuk’s neat bit of satiric (and oddly plausible) magic realism, both about the nature of the media and the quest for modernization. “I know you won’t want to stand in the way of our being modern,” Serdar adds, “you don’t want to break our hearts, and that is why I am sure you will write a poem called ‘Snow’ and then come to the theatre to read it.”

So, the story about to unfold will include a real theatre, and its real curtain is about to go up on the “former leading lights of the revolutionary theatre world,” except that their concern with be less with “revolutionary theatre,” and more with a revolution in a theatre. The famous gun that always hangs on the mantlepiece in the first act, will not only be fired in the last act, but will contain real bullets, and be aimed at the audience. By now we have enough of an idea of what’s in store for us, that a scene-by-scene reprise is unnecessary. The concluding symmetry that awaits us, one that we can anticipate and has already been prepared in the narrator’s opening remarks, will be the mirror-journey to Kars by “Orhan Pamuk” some four years later to gather the details of the story he’s telling.

Although there are frequent passing references to Turkish history, Pamuk doesn’t need to dwell on them, because he can take it that his Turkish readers will be familiar with details they absorbed in their tattered schoolbooks. For those of us outside such ingrained knowledge, about the only Wikipedia-level bit of potted history that’s helpful is the story of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938), the founder and first president of the modern Turkish republic that emerged from World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. During the approximately decade-and-a-half reign by Turkey’s most prominent former military leader-turned-politician something happened in Turkey that didn’t really occur in any of the neighbouring Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries. Ataturk, who was familiar with the European democracies, emerged in his native land garbed in a Panama hat and suit rather than the traditional fez, rode in touring motorcars, and offered a thorough-going program of 20th century political, religious, economic and social modernization.

The program is wreathed in historical debate and details that need not detain us here, but its primary broad strokes included: the separation of mosque and state, with the secularism of the latter clearly predominant; the formal liberation of women; an attempt at multi-party, multi-ethnic democracy (albeit a democracy guaranteed by military force prepared to step in to prevent religious or tribal backsliding); and a sweeping array of social reforms. Ataturk even called in U.S. philosopher John Dewey in the early 1920s to help set up a modern educational system in Turkey. The Arabic script in which Turkish was written was changed to Latin letters.

The variable successes and failures of those efforts can be left to interested readers willing to pursue the topic. Rather, the point here is a recognition that the republic straddling the Bosphorous Straits that link the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara (and ultimately the Mediterranean) can claim legitimacy as a genuine gateway between East and West (as its romantic tourist advertising incessently proclaims). As Pamuk says elsewhere, in “In Kars and Frankfurt,” his acceptance speech in October 2005 for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Association, “Of course there is an East-West question, and it is not simply a malicious formulation invented and imposed by the West,” even though “most of the time it carries an assumption that the poor countries of the East should defer to everything” proposed by the West. Rather, Pamuk insists, “The East-West question is about wealth and poverty and about peace.” In addressing his listeners, members of a European Union in which Turkey seeks membership, Pamuk reminds them that “those who believe in the European Union must see at once that the real choice we have to make is between peace and nationalism. Either we have peace, or we have nationalism.”

By contrast, much of the rest of the region has retained or returned to many of its traditional institutions. Monarchic and/or authoritarian rule, religious sectarianism, patriarchal tribalism, theocracy and near civil war, replete with terrorism, continued to be the source of much of the turbulence in places like Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan throughout the first decade of the present century. This is not to claim that Turkey is without a repressed history (of the Armenian genocide of World War I), or a history of repression (against the minority Kurds). The country of the mid- and late-1990s portrayed by Pamuk in Snow is tensely poised between its amibitions for membership in the European Union and its own Islamic “revival,” but its political and social strains are recognizably modern in ways that make nearby national entities appear entrapped in feudal backwardness, not withstanding their penchant for modernized technology, up to and including nuclear weapons. If the claim that Pamuk is “narrating his country into being” is a bit grandiose, his tour of the convoluted and divided national “soul” succeeds in making Turkey interesting far beyond the tourist attractions of beautiful, melancholy Istanbul.

In Kars, Ka falls in love, meets all the local Islamist politicos, imams, and on-the-lam terrorists, becomes inadvertently involved in a local revolution which occurs in the town theatre, and most important of all, is unexpectedly visited by his long-absent poetic muse and is impelled to write an extraordinary serial poem, whose structure is based on the shape of, what else?, a snowflake.

Snow is a book of conversions and apostasies. The thematic that I somehow missed in my first reading of Pamuk and found most poignant when I re-read it a few years later is the longing for God that afflicts so many of the characters in this snowstorm of a novel, including Ka himself. Of the dozen or more scenes in which spiritual yearning is thrashed out, Ka’s visit to Ipek’s ex-husband, Muhtar, epitomizes the lure of the Islamic revival, a subject not only central to Snow, but one that of necessity has become a preoccupation of the West in the present decade.

Ka, Ipek and Muhtar were all university classmates in Istanbul a dozen years before, in the early 1980s. Typical of their generation, Ka and Muhtar were secularists, aspiring poets, young Marxists. When Ka visits his former school acquaintance at the headquarters of the Prosperity Party in Kars, “now here was Muhtar running on the Islamic fundamentalist ticket” as its mayoral candidate, “something he would have found despicable ten years earlier…”

Muhtar relates the story of his conversion, how he was transformed from an unhappy, raki-inebriated, failed poet with a failed marriage, into a believer, through his fateful meetings with a local religious teacher, the Kurdish sheikh, Saadettin Efendi. “I was accepted into the group and taken into this bright and warm little house,” Muhtar recalls.

Inside, the people were nothing like the hopeless and downtrodden folk who populate Kars: they were happy… Something was happening that I had secretly dreaded for a long time and that in my atheist years I would have denounced as weakness and backwardness: I was returning to Islam… A feeling of peace spread through me. I had not felt that way for years and immediately understood that I could talk to [the sheikh] about anything, tell him all about my life. And he would bring me back to the path I had always believed in, deep down inside, even as an atheist: the road to God Almighty. Just the promise of salvation brought me joy.

Yet the conversions are attended by inevitable doubts. Already Ka hears “not serenity but disillusionment in Muhtar’s voice.” But the longing for meaning is mutual. Ka tells Muhtar, “I live a very solitary life in Germany. When I look over the rooftops of Frankfurt in the middle of the night, I sense that the world and my life are not without purpose. I hear all sorts of sounds inside me.” What sorts of sounds, Muhtar wants to know. “It may just have to do with fear of getting old and dying,” Ka says, then adds, “If I were an author and Ka were a character in a book, I’d say, ‘Snow reminds Ka of God.’ But I’m not sure that would be accurate. What brings me close to God is the silence of snow.”

“The religious right, this country’s Muslim conservatives . . .” Muhtar was speaking rapidly, as though willing himself to be carried away by a false hope. “After my years as a leftist atheist, these people come as such a great relief. You should go and meet them. I’m sure you’ll warm to them, too.”

Pamuk takes seriously the possibility of God as one of the paths to happiness, and “happiness,” that seemingly banal notion, is one of the recurrent, constant themes of Snow. For all its shopworn quality, the incessent desire for happiness is one of the dimensions that makes Pamuk’s novel a “large” work. Certainly, it’s a motivation for “love,” but in the tempest-tossed relationship Ka has with Ipek, the certainties of mutual possession and boundless happiness spill over just as suddenly into agonies of waiting, doubt, and intimations of betrayal.

If the belief in God or love resembles a storm that alternately rages and subsides, one source of happiness that at least leaves an artifactual remainder on the page is the poem. At one point, fairly early on in the story, Ka is in the town’s bleak railway station disputing theology with three boys from the religious high school. One of them, brasher than the others, sneers, “Mr. Poet, Mr. Ka, you’ve made no secret of the fact that you were once an atheist. Maybe you still are one. So tell us, who is it who makes the snow fall from the sky? What is the snow’s secret?”

For a moment they all looked across the empty concourse to watch the snow falling on the tracks.

What am I doing in this world? Ka asked himself. How miserable these snowflakes look from this perspective; how miserable my life is. A man lives his life, and then he falls apart and soon there is nothing left… Like a snowflake, he would fall as he was meant to fall; he would devote himself heart and soul to the melancholy course on which his life was set. His father had a certain smell after shaving, and this came back to him now. Then he thought of his mother making breakfast, her feet aching inside her slippers on the cold kitchen floor. He had a vision of a hairbrush; he remembered his mother giving him sugary pink syrup when he woke up coughing in the middle of the night; he felt the spoon in his mouth.

Notice there is no ellipsis between the gloomy ruminations in the middle of a seemingly inconsequential debate with the schoolboys and a sudden avalanche of childhood memories.

As he gave his mind over to all such little things that make up a life, as he thought how they all added up to a unified whole, he saw a snowflake.

And so it was that Ka heard the call from deep inside him, the call he heard at moments of inspiration, the only sound that could make him happy: the sound of his muse. For the first time in four years, a poem was coming to him. Although he had yet to hear the words, he knew that it was already written… He told the three youths that he was in a hurry and left the deserted, filthy station. He hurried through the snow, thinking all the while of the poem he would write when he was back in the hotel.

Ka threw off his coat the moment he entered his room. He opened the green notebook he’d brought with him from Frankfurt and wrote down the poem as it came to him, word by word. It was as easy as following dictation whispered into his ear, but nevertheless he gave the words on the page his full attention…

The poem comprised many of the thoughts that had come to him in a rush a short while earlier: the falling snow, cemeteries, the black dog that had been frolicking happily around the station, an assortment of childhood memories, and the image that had lured him back to the hotel, Ipek –  how happy it made him just to imagine her face. But also how terrified! He called the poem “Snow.”

The prediction of Serdar, the publisher-editor of the Border City News, is fulfilled, and Ka will recite his poem at the theatre that evening. What’s more, in addition to recording extensive notes in his journal about what he saw in Kars, Ka will write 18 more interlinked poems in his green notebook that together add up to a book-length work bearing the name of its first poem. It’s the quest for that missing book that will provoke the narrator Orhan Pamuk’s own journey to Kars and Frankfurt, and eventuate in a novel about that search, titled Snow. Like Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis, a story about a story, Pamuk’s Snow is a novel about, amid much else, a book of poems called Snow.

In modern English-language poetry, the sort of interlinked poems that Ka writes in Kars was discovered or invented by the mid-20th century San Francisco poet Jack Spicer in his book After Lorca (1957). Spicer and his poet colleague Robin Blaser dubbed this form the “serial” poem, a form whose unit of composition is the “book” (using that word in a way slightly different from its conventional reference).

Distinguishable from the modern “epic” and other “long” verse forms, in the serial poem each poem stands on its own, and yet integrally connects to the other poems that make up the “book.” As Spicer once described it, “It’s as if you go into a room, a dark room, and the light is turned on for a minute, then it’s turned off again, and then you go into a different room where a light is turned on and off.” Sometimes that succession of briefly lighted rooms becomes a house, or a book. Furthermore, as is the case with Ka’s Snow, Spicer conjoins to the serial poem an Orphic theory that the poem is transmitted, from an unknown outside source, by a process of “dictation.” The source of the poem, whether muse or Martians or whatever, of necessity makes use of the poet’s own biographical details, memories, and ideas (what Spicer called “the furniture in the room”), but the poem that eventuates is not an “expression” of the poet’s life so much as it is a message transmitted from “outside,” even if the outside is not outside ourselves, but is something more like our collective linguistic consciousness.

By happenstance, I was raised among poets, and perhaps it is the familiarity with the poetic process that I acquired there that so convinces me of the authenticity of Pamuk’s account of writing poems, which in turn tends to reinforce my trust of the other aspects of the novel, from its ambivalent politics to its recreation of the streets, buildings and people of distant Kars. Of the various books that have attempted to describe or include works of art, Pamuk’s Snow, among its other virtues, is perhaps the most accurate in its account of making art. It compares favourably to such novels as Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (which includes an appendix of the poems referred to in the fiction) and to Joyce Cary’s persuasive description of making paintings in The Horse’s Mouth. In Snow, the act of writing the poems is described, as are their contents, and even theorised (by Ka) as being structured by the axes of a hexagonal snowflake. Of course, the poems never appear, but dissolve like those self-same snowflakes, serving as one of the powerful enticements that draw us into Pamuk’s snowy labyrinth of desire, spiritual yearning, politics, and art.

3.

Pamuk recurrently describes himself as a man “who shuts himself up in a room.” In his Nobel Prize speech of December 2006, “My Father’s Suitcase,” he says, “When I speak of writing, what first comes to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid the shadows, he builds a new world with words.” In “The Implied Author,” a talk given at an American university in spring 2006, Pamuk reiterates this image: “For thirty years I’ve spent an average of ten hours a day alone in a room, sitting at my desk.” He adds, “Literature does not allow such a writer to pretend to save the world; rather it gives him a chance to save the day. And all days are difficult. Days are especially difficult when you don’t do any writing. When you cannot do any writing. The point is to find enough hope to get through the day…” In any case, as Pamuk told his Nobel audience, “The starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in a room with his books.”

However, Pamuk admits that “once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other’s people’s stories, other’s people’s books… the thing we call tradition.” Pamuk affirms literature “as the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself.” Societies flourish insofar as “they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us.” The writer who shuts himself up in a room has the possibility of discovering “literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own.”

For English-language readers, Pamuk emerged from the room in which he had shut himself up only in the first decade of this century. Though he had written a half dozen novels since the early 1980s, it was only with his sixth novel, My Name Is Red (1999; translated into English, 2001), which won the 2003 Impac Dublin prize, that he achieved broader literary recognition. That was the impetus for further translations, honours, and life as a sometimes reluctant public figure which followed in quick succession. Snow, published in Turkey in 2002 where it was a 100,000-copy bestseller, was translated into English in 2004 to wide acclaim; in 2005 Pamuk was awarded the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Association; Istanbul: Memories of a City appeared in 2005 in multiple translations, including English.

In the same year, 2005, Pamuk rather unwillingly became the focus of political debate when he was charged with uttering remarks, about the Armenian genocide and the situation of Turkish Kurdish people, that allegedly violated certain nationalist laws against insulting Turkey, charges that were eventually dropped on the eve of the trial, in the wake of international protest. The following year, 2006, Pamuk was named the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. There was, as often occurs with the Swedish Academy’s choices, some grumbling that Pamuk had been selected for political reasons. Sometimes, the complaints about the Nobel Prize winner are justified. But in this instance, the body of Pamuk’s work suggested that he was a worthy companion to such other 21st century Nobel recipients as Doris Lessing, Harold Pinter, J.M. Coetzee and V.S. Naipaul. In 2007, Pamuk published Other Colors, a volume of essays, talks and interviews that had been significantly expanded from an earlier volume of the same title that appeared in his native tongue in 1999; and a new novel, The Museum of Innocence, already published in Turkish, was slated for publication in English translation in 2009. Apart from his requisite but sporadic public appearances, Pamuk, as he told a Paris Review interviewer in 2005, remains shut up in a room in a “flat overlooking the Bosphorus with a view of the old city. It has, perhaps, one of the best views of Istanbul.” It also has within it one of the best observers of Istanbul, and points East and West.

The near-unanimous chorus of acclaim elicited by the publication of Pamuk’s Snow is such as to require some reprise of the book’s reception among English-language reviewers. John Updike immediately picked up on the novel’s abundance of “modernist tracer genes. Like Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, it bares its inner gears of reconstituted memory and ends by promising its own composition.” Its setting echoes “the mountainous, debate-prone microcosm of Thomas Mann’s sanitorium in The Magic Mountain… Like Italo Calvino, Pamuk has a passion for pattern-making; he maps Kars as obsessively as Joyce did Dublin…” Updike presciently suggests that “Pamuk, young as he is [born in 1951], qualifies as [Turkey's] most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize… To produce a major work so frankly troubled and provocatively bemused… entirely contemporary in its settings and subjects, took the courage that art sometimes visits upon even its most detached practitioners.” (John Updike, “Anatolian Arabesques,” The New Yorker, Aug. 30, 2004.)

Margaret Atwood, as noted, credits Pamuk with “narrating his country into being,” and also finds Snow “not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times.” She says, “Kars is finely drawn, in all its touching squalor, but its inhabitants resist ‘Orhan’s’ novelizing of them. One of them asks him to tell the reader not to believe anything he says about them, because ‘no one could understand us from so far away.’ This is a challenge to Pamuk and his considerable art, but it is also a challenge to us.” (Margaret Atwood, “Headscarves to Die For,” The New York Times, Aug. 15, 2004.) Veteran literary critic Richard Eder calls Pamuk “the great and almost irresistibly beguiling Turkish novelist.” The snow, he says, “is of surpassing beauty and hauntingly rendered. For Pamuk, beauty does not redeem the tragic horrors begotten by human passions and obstinate memory. Neither do the horrors diminish it.” (Richard Eder, “A Blizzard of Contradictions in Modern Turkey,” The New York Times, Aug. 10, 2004.)

Christian Caryl identifies Dostoyevsky as “the literary forebear whose spirit haunts this book most palpably… The Possessed, driven by moral quandaries posed by terrorism and political extremism is a particularly strong influence… Where Pamuk really excels in this novel is in the deftness with which he allows these forces to tug at one another.” Unsurprisingly, Pamuk is the author of the introduction to the Turkish translation of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, which he declares to be “the greatest political novel of all time.” Says Caryl, “Pamuk the novelist illuminates his country’s quandaries of identity, and the crisis of confidence between Islam and the West, with an imaginative depth we had not known before.” (Christian Caryl, “The Schizophrenic Sufi,” The New York Review of Books, May 12, 2005.)

One significant voice of dissent from the general praise bestowed on Pamuk is that of the self-professed “contrarian” critic Christopher Hitchens, who is suspicious of the search “for a novelist in the Muslim world who could act the part of dragoman, an interpretive guide to the East,” a role into which he sees Pamuk as being too-conveniently cast. Hitchens finds the novel’s characterizations “disappointing, precisely because its figures lack the crystalline integrity of individuals,” the work as a whole “prolix and often clumsy,” and he’s not at all happy that “the author leaves no room for doubt that he finds the Islamists the most persuasive and courageous.” This last is a curiously skewed reading of Pamuk’s refusal to demonize the book’s religious characters. But at the time he was reviewing Snow, Hitchens was embroiled in an acrimonious debate regarding both Islamists and his own support for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, which might have warped his perception of other writers’ treatment of similar issues. (Christopher Hitchens, “Mind the Gap,” The Atlantic, October 2004.)

The occasional dissent aside, Snow was the novel that made readers ask what Pamuk calls “the question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question: Why do you write?” In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Pamuk replies,

I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey… I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else… I write to be happy.

Even the dissenting Hitchens grants that Pamuk’s Ka moves between “visions of snow in its macrocosmic form — the chilly and hostile masses — and its microcosmic: the individual beauty and uniqueness of each flake. Along the scrutinized axes that every flake manifests he rediscovers his vocation and inspiration as a poet.” It was Yeats, in “Among School Children,” who famously asked, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Among the lengthy list of reasons to write, Pamuk might add that he writes to distinguish the snowflake from the snow.

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Berlin, June 16, 2009