On a New Yorker panel nearly a dozen years ago, in the wake of the publication of his novel Snow, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk set forth an emphatic credo. “Our moral duty,” he said, “is to pay attention to the humanity of everybody.” And since the subject of the panel was “Literature and Politics,” this comment was altogether in keeping with Pamuk’s remarks elsewhere, on the responsibility of the novelist: “I strongly feel that the art of the novel is based on the human capacity, though it is a limited capacity, to be able to identify with the ‘other.’ . . . It requires imagination, a sort of morality, a self-imposed goal of understanding this person who is different from us.”
But in 2004, this anodyne and conventional literary conviction, addressed to the New Yorker’s loyal audience, rang out with an unexpectedly unsettling force. The motivations and influences and inmost desires and doubts and dreams and fevered schemes of invented characters in a novel, however pleasing or villainous, make up the very essence of what we derive from storytelling. We want to understand Isabel Archer and Mr. Kurtz (who are so different from us), we want to know them to the deeps of their marrow. The glory of literary modernism especially— the revelatory dazzle of Joyce and Proust and Woolf — turns precisely on this psychological probing into hidden consciousness. It was a shock, then, to learn that Pamuk’s “everybody,” his requirement of imagination, his “goal of understanding this person who is different from us,” his vaunted “humanity” — all this was meant to reach well beyond his primary literary argument. It was meant to include terrorists. Are not terrorists a portion of humanity? A challenge came from a fellow panelist: What about suicide bombers, are they to be similarly understood by the humanely embracing imagination? Pamuk’s response was quick and sharp and dismissive: “We have to base our judgment on moral essential things rather than on what we see on TV the other night.”
