I have been reading novels for forty years. I know there are many stances we can adopt toward the novel, many ways in which we commit our soul and mind to it, treating it lightly or seriously. And just in the same manner, I have learned by experience that there are many ways to read a novel. We read sometimes logically, sometimes with our eyes, sometimes with our imagination, sometimes with a small part of our mind, sometimes the way we want to, sometimes the way the book wants us to, and sometimes with every fiber of our being.
— Orhan Pamuk: The Naïve and the Sentimentalist Novelist
Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s The Naïve and the Sentimentalist Novelist (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India, Special Indian Price Rs 450), a collection of the 2009 Norton lectures delivered at Harvard, is described as “a celebration of our journey in this world, the lives we spend in cities, streets, houses, rooms, and nature (that) consists of nothing but a search for meaning which may or may not exist”. It is the art of the novel that Pamuk talks about, “for each sentence of a good novel evokes in us a sense of the profound, essential knowledge of what it means to exist in the world, and the nature of that sense”. Put another way, a novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel, the philosophy has disappeared into the images of everyday life. For a work to endure, it cannot do without ideas that express the fusion of experience and thought, of life and reflection on the meaning of life. For Pamuk who has been deeply influenced by European writers —Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Proust, Flaubert and Mann, and so many others — it is no philosophy, no novel.
Pamuk’s lecture is a take from the German philosopher Friedrich Schiller’s essay (1795-1796) On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry in which he had divided poets into two categories: naïve and sentimental poets which became essentially an essay on “human types”. The former wrote “spontaneously, almost without thinking, not bothering to consider the intellectual or ethical consequences of their words”; the sentimentalist poet is “emotional, reflective… unsure whether his words would encompass reality, whether they will attain it, whether his utterances would convey the meaning he intends”.
What Pamuk is saying is that the naïve novelist never doubts that the words he uses describes his fictional world because meaning is immediate and incontrovertible for him; the sentimentalist-reflective novelist is a brooder, who doubts the validity of the meaning of the world he describes. Pamuk is a “sentimentalist-reflective” who constantly thinks of the three-way relationship between the author, the main protagonist and the reader. How does this three-way “street” reflect is examined in the first three lectures: What our Minds Do When We Read Novels: Mr Pamuk, Did This Really Happen to You?: Literary Character, Plot and Time. While the details of the novel’s universe are the product of the protagonist’s psychology, the way the details are presented is the author’s own creation based on his experiences and his own imagination. But different readers have different experiences of the same book because each one is made differently with our own unique experiences and ways of seeing.
But for all the subjectivity, every novel must have a running subtext that is the core of the novel, which Pamuk calls the novel’s “centre”. This centre is created by our ways of seeing which is the subject of his fourth lecture, Words, Pictures and Objects or representations of visual art-paintings, sculptures etc.
But the question that springs immediately is whether it is possible to translate visual experience into words. How accurately do words reflect the scene and its underlying meanings? Isn’t something lost in the “visual-verbal-visual transmission”? Something is always lost in the transmission even with all the sophisticated technology available.
Pamuk doesn’t give a straight answer to these questions except by giving primacy to the visual. He argues that visual writers, writers who “impress us by filling our mind with indelible images, visions, landscapes and objects”, influence and affect us more than verbal writers, writers who impress us with “words, with the course of the dialogue, with paradoxes and thoughts the narrator is exploring”. This idea of the primacy of the visual is fleshed out in his fifth lecture, The Museum of Innocence — Pamuk’s fascination with objects and their descriptions. The sixth and final lecture, The Center, describes the mysterious meaning of a novel. “The center of the novel is a profound opinion or insight about life, a deeply embedded point of mystery, whether real or imagined.” This is as difficult to describe as it is to find and comes through “intuition, thought or knowledge”. Or, it comes as Forster said, “How can I know what I think until I say it?”
Full of literary examples and written with a real love for the power of books, The Naive and Sentimental Novelist will take its place with other classics like E M Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and James Wood’s How Fiction Works.
