Itineraries of Affect

Erdağ Göknar reviews Orhan Pamuk’s “Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009–2022.”

By Erdağ GöknarNovember 21, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

WITH SUBTLE SUCCESS, Orhan Pamuk’s Memories of Distant Mountains, a new selection of text-images from the Nobel Prize–winning author, documents experiences of travel while tracing secondary itineraries of affect related to novel writing. These two registers of experience intersect in profound and unexpected ways in Distant Mountains and are further reflected through color—what Pamuk describes as “colors-emotions.” Text and image combine to provide a reflection of the writer’s state of mind in various moments of work, contemplation, or sightseeing at locales throughout the world.

Pamuk explains that the organizing principle of the volume is emotion linked to color: “I have arranged the illustrated pages of this book not in CHRONOLOGICAL but in EMOTIONAL order.” This method can, however, be more fully understood as Pamuk’s mapping of affective landscapes of visceral mood that broker the entanglements of novel writing, giving rise to a spectrum of emotions (and colors). The notebooks represent Pamuk in the dual capacity of author and painter conveying his experience of feelings that reflect a literary consciousness. Distant Mountains maps an affective topography of the writer at work while opening windows of visual detail onto Turkey, India, Europe, and the United States.

The intersection of place and affect appears in Pamuk’s earlier work and can be best explained through reference to his memoir-cum–cultural history, Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003). In that volume, Pamuk describes place through an affective experience that emanates from the architecture, ruins, and relics of the former Ottoman capital. A form of melancholia contingent on location, “hüzün” manifests as an affective complex of emotions, including pride, honor, and pious suffering. The urban landscape—reflected in the chiaroscuro of Ara Güler’s photographs accompanying the text—does not merely imbue the author with hüzün but also conveys an overriding affective experience of the city, from which writing also emerges. Distant Mountains functions in a similar way by presenting contextual views and vistas, producing affective reactions ranging from fear to inspiration, from futility to elation, indexed to the writing process. What emerges is a spectrum of the author’s textual practices, contingent on place, where not just emotion but also “memory is often a color.”

The combined effect of these colors-emotions is striking. Pamuk describes it as an affective mode of knowing: “So many things remained unexplained and unspoken. I could grasp them not through logic, but through my emotions,” which he also describes through a transposition to color: “An emotion had turned to color, and spread all over.” There is an oneiric quality to the illustrations, in which place, memory, time, and color intersect to document sites of literary inspiration. For example, in his depiction of the Mantua Ducal Palace in Northern Italy, Pamuk senses that the built environment emerges from a dreamscape, what he terms a “template-dream” for the setting of his 2021 novel Nights of Plague.

People have left this uninhabited urban space, which conveys a sense of quietude. The contemplative feeling is emphasized by muted mauves and turmeric yellows, and the entire scene is explicated by poetic lines that adorn the sky, the rooftops, and the ground. Text and image together can be read as a visual-poetic whole, with the text broken into free verse, creating what Pamuk calls “an imaginary conversation between the painter and the writer within me.” The viewer-reader’s perception of the architectural space is enhanced through color and poetry to articulate the affective state of sustained inspiration for the novel Pamuk is currently writing. As if to further explain this process, on another page Pamuk writes, “When I draw in my journals, the poetry of the world seeps into my day-to-day life.”

The “distant mountains” of the title, which appear as recurring images and in writing (at times in all caps) throughout the notebooks, literally and figuratively represent Pamuk’s desired site of creativity and curation. They become variously a place of exile, of novel writing, of nightmare and epiphany, a place where (narrative) time emerges, and where words and image are one. He stares out at these peaks, which call to him and harbor creative possibility but are also the setting in which words rain down or in which he confronts his own death. At times, he considers the distant mountains from a remove, from an uninspired, quotidian place: “Am I experiencing some kind of intellectual depression?” This state alternates with an ideal feeling of satisfaction represented by novel writing, giving rise to the overarching dramatic tension between worldly and writerly concerns in Distant Mountains.

While poetry often erupts spontaneously in Pamuk’s notebooks (in scenes of Blakean inspiration), politics disrupts his sacrosanct realm of writing, creating feelings of unease. When workaday tasks become bothersome, Pamuk states, “[A]ll the great scenes I’ve pictured for the novel start to lose their color, and my mind is poisoned.” Politics impinges negatively on his writing, as becomes clear when he mentions Nuri, the state-appointed bodyguard who protects him in Istanbul, or when events such as the Arab Spring unfold, or during the Gezi protests or the failed 2016 Gülenist coup (which he follows from Büyükada in the Princes’ Islands). There are instances when Pamuk stops following current events because they are too upsetting or distracting, pulling him away from his writing. All the while, the notebooks constitute Pamuk’s portable studio, putting distance between himself and the banality of the political world. At one point, he even states, “This notebook seems to be protecting me.”

As we see and read the sequence of text-images, we learn that the apparent artistic focus reflected on the notebook page can actually be ancillary to, or a vehicle for, attaining the creative engagement of writing. For example, the bifold image of an iconic white Istanbul ferry (one of many) is both rendered against the meditative hues of a blue-green sea and accompanied by text, again broken into poetic lines. The Istanbul ferry, a leitmotif in Pamuk’s writing, waits as if to transport the author. On the right-hand side, the horizon line is marked by the phrase “distant mountains,” a mnemonic of sorts for Pamuk’s process of writing/illustrating.

Titled “The LAST Pier,” this text-image strikes the viewer-reader as a visual and poetic reverie about the anticipation of travel in a volume that is also a travelogue.

In Distant Mountains, Pamuk describes his peak affective state as “inhabiting the novel.” In these ecstatic moments, he ceases to be himself, transforms, and even becomes his character; for example, he might declare “I am Mevlut” (the protagonist of his 2014 novel A Strangeness in My Mind). In these moments, he approaches a state of elation, the affective experience of which surprises him: “Very strange to feel so deep inside the novel. It’s like the novel is me. And I’m a landscape.” At times, he experiences a self-described “mania” while writing. “I’ve started writing Nights of Plague in a state of remarkable, almost bizarre euphoria.” It would be reasonable to conclude that he is experiencing a dissolution of the self in the process of aesthetic actualization.

The island appears in Distant Mountains as an important site of novel writing. Not only does Pamuk set up shop every summer on islands like Büyükada in Istanbul, but places like Goa in India also become surrogate “islands” where he can distance himself from the distraction of real-world concerns and politics to “inhabit the novel.” Here, again, we read that, through a rhythm of engaged writing, Pamuk experiences something he terms “Goan bliss,” which he conveys in his notebook through reddish-orange hues and detailed expository writing about his daily life and routine.

In the sections from India, Pamuk is traveling with his partner at the time, the author Kiran Desai. As two global authors, they navigate historic sites, deal with their fame (including appearances in the press), and work on writing together. In a text-image titled “The HOUSE AND DAILY LIFE in GOA,” Pamuk explains that “the strength of this drawing is that it portrays our life both in a documentary style (by showing what we do at home), and through colors and emotions.” The archival and affective registers of his daily routine are evident as he works, at this juncture, on A Strangeness in My Mind.

India, with its Mughal past, holds great interest for Pamuk, who also relishes literary explorations of the Ottoman Empire and its legacy. The palaces of Mughal India serve as the inspiration for the Mingherian fortress in the novel Nights of Plague, which is set in the late Ottoman era. The conflation of the two imperial settings is revealed in the notebooks as part of his writing process. As Pamuk meticulously documents all he sees while traveling, not just through notebooks but also via photography, the dual image-text infrastructure of his literary practice comes into clearer focus. So, too, and just as revealingly, do the affective states of his novel writing in global contexts.

As stated, in Distant Mountains, apocalyptic nightmares sit in contrast to ecstatic visions of literary inspiration. The poet-painter William Blake had visions of hallelujah sunrises in which angels appeared, and he claimed to have first seen God at the age of four. Pamuk’s notebooks allude to Blake, who conceived of an elaborate four-fold imagination, as an author who has influenced Pamuk’s own aesthetic practice: “The writer most adept at inscribing words over images, at thinking about WORDS and IMAGES simultaneously, is of course William Blake.” (We learn elsewhere that “Ka,” the poet-protagonist of Pamuk’s 2002 novel Snow, is also the name of the protagonist-painter in his unfinished novel The Tale of the Painter.) The ecstatic and apocalyptic visions of the poet-painter inform Pamuk’s notebooks, such as the depiction of his own “hallelujah sunrise.”

Here Pamuk details why he identifies with Blake, concluding his illustrated homage with the lines “Once upon a time words / and images were one […] words were images and images were words.” It is the only illustration in which Pamuk depicts himself from the outside sitting at a desk, absorbed in the act of writing.

When focused on novel writing, Pamuk’s goal is four pages per day, and his notebooks reflect the remarkable literary output of eight books over the dozen-year timespan captured by the volume. His publications during this period included the novel A Strangeness in My Mind; a work of literary criticism, The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist: Understanding What Happens When We Write and Read Novels (2010); the Istanbul Museum of Innocence catalog The Innocence of Objects (2012) and a related documentary screenplay, The Innocence of Memories (2016); the novel The Red-Haired Woman (2016); two photography books, Balkon (2018) and Orange (2020); and the novel Nights of Plague. All the while, he continued to teach each fall as a professor of literature at Columbia University.

The final image in Distant Mountains depicts an exhausted Pamuk napping on a couch, dreaming (we can be certain) of an affective landscape of distant mountains. This reflects a central methodological concern of his novel writing:

I start by visualizing my books as if they were paintings or scenes. I can’t begin to picture a novel any other way … I need to visit places and landscapes that will assist my imagination. When I am faced with this kind of landscape, my mind begins of its own accord to merge the novel I want to write with what I see before me—that is to say, with the landscape.

At the intersection of visual and textual registers of expression, Distant Mountains reveals that the Pamuk novel is curated through global itineraries of affect.

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All images from Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009–2022 © 2024 by Orhan Pamuk. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.