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Candidate no.

R 0 1 9 8 3

Module Title: The World Novel

Module Code: (e.g. 5AABC123 )

7AAYCL25

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DECLARATION BY STUDENT

This assignment is entirely my own work. Quotations from secondary literature are indicated by the use of inverted commas around ALL such quotations AND by reference in the text or notes to the author concerned. ALL primary and secondary literature used in this piece of work is indicated in the bibliography placed at the end, and dependence upon ANY source used is indicated at the appropriate point in the text. I confirm that no sources have been used other than those stated.

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Essay no: (e.g. 1 or 2)

1

Essay Title: (may be abbreviated)

Memories and the myth of the past

Assignment tutor/group: Dr Anna Bernard

Deadline: 01 – 05 – 13

Date Submitted: 01 – 05 – 13

Word Count: 5135

1

Fig. 1 'State of Denial’

‗Journeys to Silence: Memory and Myth in Kokoro and Snow‘

One of the most striking submissions to an online poster

project commemorating the Armenian Genocide is a piece by Var

Amayakyan titled ‗State of Denial‘ (Fig. 1), which features a man

with a plaster over his mouth, signifying Ankara‘s continued denial

of the Mets Yeghern, an ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by

the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923 which resulted in the

massacre of approximately 1.5 million Armenians.1 The point is

made even more forcefully by the superimposition of poster‘s accusatory title on top of the

image‘s red background, lettered in the same white hue as the crescent and star of the

Turkish flag. The implication here is damning: modern Turkey is a ‗state of denial‘, its

national identity shaped by its refusal to acknowledge the crimes of its past.

A similar situation can be observed in Japan. Unlike Turkey, Japan has never

officially denied its war crimes. Nonetheless, various high-ranking politicians have been

quoted in the media downplaying atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army,

especially during World War II. In 2012, then-South Korean President Lee Myung-bak

made a thinly-veiled reference to these denials in 2012, saying that ‗the perpetrator country

should first make a candid admission of its human rights infringement [as] it behooves a

mature democracy to transcend its own national interests in addressing human values‘.2

Like Amayakyan‘s poster, responses such as Lee‘s suggest that a failure to adequately come

to terms with the sins of the past has a profoundly negative effect on the conception of the

modern nation as a ‗mature democracy‘.

1 Var Amayakyan, „State of Denial‟, Armenian Genocide of 1915 in Contemporary Graphic and Art Posters 2001 -2011

<http://armeniangenocideposters.org/2011/> [accessed 14 April 2013]. 2 Yonhap, „Lee urges Japan to repent for wartime sexual slavery‟, Korea Times, 8 November 2012 <http://www.

koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2012/11/116_124222.html> [accessed 23 April 2013].

2

For Pierre Macherey, ‗what is important in [a literary] work is what it does not

say…what the work cannot say is important, because the elaboration of the utterance is

acted out, in a sort of journey to silence‘.3 In this essay, I explore the ‗journey to silence‘ in

two novels from Japan and Turkey. Both Natsume Sōseki‘s Kokoro and Orhan Pamuk‘s

Snow feature a distinct lack of explicit engagement with issues of aggressive colonial

behaviour and genocide respectively.4 Following Macherey, however, I argue that these

silences can reveal the ideological boundaries hidden at the ‗edge of the text‘.5 I trace the

experience of modernity in Japan and Turkey, reading the temporal rupture with the past as

traumatic. I then examine the ways in which this traumatic energy is harnessed in the

creation of a national identity, which in its homogenising gaze erases the other in order to

construct the self. Finally, I consider how the novels represent the complications involved in

the use of print media in order to propagate these national myths in their respective

countries.

Most of Kokoro’s critical history has focused on the individual‘s position between the

traditional and the modern in Meiji Japan. Writing in 1965, Etō Jun concludes that ‗Sōseki

wrote Kokoro to make it clear that he was on the side of the ghost of the traditional, but

somehow universal ethics‘ against a ‗new age‘ which celebrates ‗the unrestrained assertion

of the ego‘.6 This tension between old and new in Japan is linked to the introduction of

bourgeois capitalism following the end of economic isolation during the Meiji Restoration,

as apparent in Sensei‘s claim that ‗the most moral of men will turn bad when they see

money‘, a response that the narrator (watakushi) dismisses as ‗tiresomely obvious‘. (p. 62)

3 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 87.

4 Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro, trans. Meredith McKinney (London: Penguin, 2010); Orhan Pamuk, Snow, trans. Maureen

Freely (London: Faber & Faber, 2004). My essay will refer to these editions, with page numbers cited in-text in

parentheses. 5 Macherey, p. 60.

6 Etō Jun, „Natsume Sōseki, A Japanese Meiji Intellectual‟ in The American Scholar, 34:4 (Autumn 1965), 603 – 619 ( p.

619).

3

This argument echoes Sōseki‘s lecture on individualism at the Gakushūin school in 1914,

where he warns his student audience on the need for financial responsibility, telling them

that ‗the most frightening thing money can do is buy men‘s minds‘.7 As such Kokoro, on one

level at least, expresses an anxiety over the repercussions of Japan‘s transition into

modernity on individual morality.

Sensei views the alienating effects of this transition as a natural result of modernity,

telling watakushi that ‗we who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the

self must undergo this loneliness. It‘s the price we pay for these times of ours‘. (p. 30)

Fukuchi Isamu has argued that ‗the modern ideals of freedom and independence alone may

not have had to cause Sensei‘s egotism, loneliness and isolation. But when they were placed

in the particular context of Meiji Japan, the mixture produced egotism, loneliness and

isolation. They were caused by the confusion and conflict involved in modern ideals and

traditional morality‘.8 This ‗confusion and conflict‘ can be read as a traumatic experience,

leading to the shocking suicide of Sensei near the end of the novel. Sensei‘s death is

prompted partly by his wife‘s joking reference to junshi, an ancient samurai custom of not

outliving one‘s lord. In his testament, he writes that ‗as the spirit of the Meiji era had begun

with him [the Emperor], so it had ended with his death. I was struck with an overwhelming

sense that my generation, we who had felt Meiji‘s influence most deeply, were doomed to

linger on simply as anachronisms as long as we remained alive‘. (p. 231) Sensei‘s reference

to being an ‗anachronism‘ is intriguing, considering the act of junshi itself was considered

anachronistic, a point he acknowledges by alluding to how its name is ‗not used in normal

life these days‘. (p. 232) In fact, the antiquated nature of the practice goes even further back

than the Meiji Restoration. Carol Gluck notes of the suicide of General Nogi Maresuke

7 Natsume Sōseki, ‘My Individualism‟, trans. Jay Rubin, in Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, eds.

Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 242 –

264 (p. 257). 8 Fukuchi Isamu, „Kokoro and “the Spirit of Meiji” in Monumenta Nipponica, 48:4 (Winter, 1993), 469 – 488 (p. 488).

4

which Sōseki incorporates within his narrative as having ‗followed a custom that had been

outlawed by the Tokugawa shogunate as antiquated in 1663‘.9 Despite this, with the passing

of the ‗spirit of Meiji‘ Sensei reflects that ‗this old disused expression had somehow gained a

new meaning‘. (p. 232)

The question that follows is what exactly is it about the ‗spirit of Meiji‘ that becomes

so powerful as to drive men such as Nogi and Sensei to kill themselves in such an outdated

fashion. Doris Bargen rejects a political reading, suggesting that ‗junshi figures centrally as a

metaphor in that both men‘s violent deaths, so differently executed, are motivated by a

desire to join those for whose deaths they feel responsible. For Nogi, this is not Emperor

Meiji; for Sensei, this is not Nogi.‘10 While Bargen‘s argument is compelling, I believe it can

be taken even further than a simple (albeit extreme) expression of guilt. Nogi‘s shame stems

not only from losing the imperial standard during the Satsuma Rebellion, an act which

Kokoro alludes to, but also his incompetence when commanding the Third Army at Port

Arthur against the Russians. As Edward Drea notes, the result of this was that ‗irate citizens

denounced him as a butcher, stoned his home, and threatened his wife. Nor could the

government‘s upbeat official version of events conceal the grievous losses from the Japanese

public‘.11 Sensei is haunted similarly by his guilt over the death of his friend K, whose

suicide he feels responsible for.

Walter Benjamin has theorised that ‗the past can be seized only as an image which

flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again‘.12 The ‗spirit of

9 Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985),

p. 221. 10

Doris G. Bargen, Suicidal Honour: General Nogi and the Writings of Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki (Honolulu:

University of Hawaii Press, 2006), p. 164. 11

Edward J. Drea, Japan’s Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall 1853 − 1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009),

p. 115. 12

Walter Benjamin, „Theses on the Philosophy of History‟, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New

York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 253 - 264 (p. 255).

5

Meiji‘ is based on such historical ‗flashes‘, which signal moments of traumatic rupture

between the traditional and the modern. In the cases of Nogi, Sensei and Sensei‘s friend K,

these traumatic moments manifest themselves in the form of an ‗unbearable loneliness‘

caused by ‗a fatal collision between reality and ideals‘. (p. 227) The ‗spirit of Meiji‘, as such,

emerges between the clash of ‗modern ideals and traditional morality‘, thereby

‗embod[ying] two contradictory aspects‘.13 Thus, I believe junshi‘s metaphorical possibilities

lie in its status as an anachronism, in that its displacement of time allows it to become a

fitting symbol for the trauma associated with the temporal ‗confusion and conflict‘ caused

by modernity.

Turkey‘s transition into modernity can be read in similarly traumatic terms. Emin

Fuat Keyman notes that in the early 20th century ‗Atatürk and the Kemalist elite set out the

process of making modern Turkey by attempting to establish necessary political and

cultural institutions both to break with the Ottoman past and to reach the contemporary

level of (Western) civilisation‘.14 Kars, the Anatolian border city where Snow is set,

symbolises this historical transition. Just as Turkey is popularly conceived as being in

between East and West due to its geographic location, so too is Kars a similarly contested

space, characterised by ‗endless wars, rebellions, massacres and atrocities…occupied

alternately by Armenian and Russian armies, and even, briefly, by the British‘. (p. 20) It is

during ‗the city‘s Westernising years‘ of the 1920s that ‗civic centres‘, ‗lycées‘, and theatres

are set up, only for Kars to ‗plunge into destitution, depression and decay‘ afterwards. (p.

21)

13

Fukuchi, p. 488. 14

Emin Fuat Keyman, „Modernity, Secularism and Islam: The Case of Turkey‟ in Theory Culture Society, 24:2 (2007),

215 - 234 (p. 220).

6

Part of this decline is due to the multiplicity of competing interests diverging from

Atatürk‘s original ideals. Hakan Yavuz, invoking Edward Said, argues that ‗although Turkey

was never colonised, Kemalism‘s uncritical modernisation project was effectively a

voluntary internal colonisation of Turkish society by the imposition of certain simple-

minded premises of Orientalism on Islam and Ottoman society‘.15 Snow, however, shows

that this worldview is untenable in contemporary Turkey, especially in its depiction of the

revival of an old republican play, My Fatherland or My Scarf. In the 1930s, under the

simple binarism in which Orientalist discourses such as Kemalism are constructed, the play

could have ‗the same remarkable effect on lycée girls and state officials alike - it had moved

them to tears and standing ovations wherever it was performed‘. (p. 155) Justin Neuman

notes, however, that ‗after eighty years of secular rule, the scarf has ceased to function as the

symbol of religious and patriarchal traditionalism for which it stood in Kemalist

discourse‘.16 Thus, the citizens of Kars, upon hearing the play‘s title, ‗assume it would be a

consideration of contemporary politics‘ with no one ‗expect[ing] to see an actual woman on

stage wearing a headscarf‘. (p. 150)

The performance itself is marked by widely divergent responses from the audience.

Neuman observes that ‗[the] revival of the play occurs in a political landscape in which the

cultural coordinates of the headscarf are far more complicated, however, and a diverse array

of cosmopolitical affiliations interrupt the binary modalities of Kemalism‘.17 The headscarf

itself defies easy characterisation, at once embodying oppression and freedom. In the

Kemalist paradigm, ‗the scarf, the turban and the headdress were all symbols of reactionary

darkness within our souls, from which we should all liberate ourselves and run to join the

15

Hakan Yavus, „Islam and Europeanisation in Turkish Muslim Socio-Political Movements‟, in Religion in an

Expanding Europe, eds. Timothy A. Byrnes and Peter J. Katzenstein (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006),

pp. 225 – 256 (p. 231). 16

Justin Neuman, „Religious Cosmpolitanism? Orhan Pamuk, the Headscarf Debate, and the Problem with Pluralism‟ in

The Minnesota Review, 77 (2011), 143 - 161 (p. 158). 17

Neuman, pp. 156 – 157.

7

modern nations of the West. (p. 155) As James Buchan points out, however, ‗liberty in Islam

is the liberty to be a Muslim, democracy likewise, individualism likewise‘.18 Thus for Kadife,

the chief ‗headscarf girl‘, the act of wearing a headscarf is an important expression of

freedom, where ‗to play the rebel heroine in Turkey, you don‘t pull off your scarf, you put it

on‘. (p. 319) Like junshi in Kokoro, the headscarf stands outside time as a symbol of the

clash between the traditional and modern.

Underpinning this clash are the traumatic experiences of Kars‘ different ethnic

groups during the transition into modernity, especially the Armenian community who are

‗now gone‘ although ‗its thousand-year-old churches still stood in all its splendour‘. (p. 20)

In his review for Atlantic Monthly, Christopher Hitchens cites Snow‘s failure to engage fully

with the Mets Yeghern in his complaint that ‗courage is an element that this novel lacks‘,

lamenting that ‗from reading Snow one might easily conclude that all the Armenians of

Anatolia had decided for some reason to pick up and depart en masse‘.19 It is within these

empty Armenian spaces, however, that the tense confrontations between traditional and

modern, religious and secular are played out. For instance, Ka walks past the governor‘s

residence, which is ‗just across the street‘ from an ‗old Armenian building‘ which used to

house the president of the separatist republic of Kars after the First World War. (p. 167)

This reference to a specific historical time is significant, coinciding roughly with the

genocide, and therefore reflects the obliteration of minority ethnic cultures in Turkey‘s

journey into modernity.

An equally notable example is the depiction of the basement of a ‗fine building‘ which

‗housed an Armenian hospital‘ which metamorphoses into ‗a corridor and four cells‘ after

18

James Buchan, „Frozen Assets‟, Guardian, 29 May 2004 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/may/29/shopping.

fiction> [accessed 25 April 2013]. 19

Christopher Hitchens, „Mind the Gap‟, Atlantic Monthly, October 1 2004 <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/

archive/2004/10/mind-the-gap/303487/> [accessed 21 April 2013].

8

the coup to imprison political Islamists, turning a place of healing into one of terror. (p.

183) This decadence further manifests itself in Ka‘s poem ‗Dream Streets‘. The work ‗opens

with the snowy streets of Kars, but its thirty-six lines also contain numerous references to

the streets of old Istanbul, the Armenian ghost town of Ani and the wondrous, fearsome,

empty cities Ka had seen in his dreams‘. (p. 185) The reference to Ani is intriguing,

considering its status as a ‗disputed city‘ between Turkey and Armenia.20 In linking Kars to

Ani, ‗Dream Streets‘ imagines a commonality between the traumas of the Armenians and of

the current political Islamists. As Grant Farred asks, ‗how does one live in the presence of a

haunted house? How can one not be traumatised by the presence of that ghostly historical

absence?‘21 By placing the poem on the ‗memory‘ axis of his taxonomic snowflake, Ka

gestures towards the traumatic conflicts of the past which continue to plague the nation in

the present. (p. 267)

It is this historical trauma, however, that becomes used as the basis for the

construction of a national identity. Bernhard Giesen, in his study of post-Holocaust

Germany, suggests that ‗the traumatic memory reaches back to an act of violence that

breaks down and reconstructs the social bond‘.22 Similarly, memories of ‗acts of violence‘

are crucial in the creation of a Turkish identity. This is demonstrated in Snow by its

reference to how ‗for a short time, when the Russian and Ottoman forces had left the city

following the First World War, Kars was an independent state; then in October 1920, the

Turkish army entered under the command of Kâzım Karabekir, the general whose statue

now stood in Station Square‘. (p. 20) Karabekir‘s statue is simultaneously a monument to

the violent incursions suffered by Kars throughout its history and a symbol of the uniting

20

„Ani, a disputed city: Haunted by history‟, Economist, June 15 2006 < http://www.economist.com/node/7066270>

[accessed 21 April 2013]. 21

Grant Farred, „“To Dig a Well with a Needle”: Orhan Pamuk‟s Poem of Comparative Globalisation‟ in The Global

South, 1:2 (Fall, 2007), 81 - 89 (p. 92). 22

Bernhard Giesen, „The Trauma of Perpetrators‟ in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander

and others (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 112 - 154 (p. 113).

9

force of the new Turkish Republic. The traumatic legacy of external occupation, that of the

‗grand plan initiated by the Tsar‘s architects‘, becomes re-fashioned into a nationalist

‗Westernising project‘ where ‗the five great Russian avenues‘ are renamed ‗after five great

pashas‘. (pp. 20-21)

The making of a modern Japanese identity is similarly predicated on a response to a

traumatic experience with the West. The age that Sensei refers to as one of ‗freedom and

independence‘ is inextricably bound up with issues of colonial aggression. (p. 30) Sōseki, in

his Gakushūin lecture, articulates that ‗each man‘s share of freedom rises and falls like a

thermometer in accordance with the relative security or insecurity of the nation‘.23 This

conception of ‗security‘, however, needs to be read in terms of Japan‘s hostile imperialism

towards its neighbours. Matsusaka Yoshihisa points out that ‗deeply impressed by their

experience at the receiving end of gunboat diplomacy and the stinging humiliation of the

unequal treaties imposed in the 1850s, Meiji reformers dedicated themselves to eradicate

the weakness that had made their country vulnerable to foreign encroachment…bas[ing]

their reconstruction programme on contemporary Western models of power and

prosperity‘.24 The traumatic memory of being forced to open up to the West functions as a

‗mythomoteur of national identity‘, which manifests itself in the replication of Western

imperialism in Asia.25 This process in turn further reinforces a belief in Japan‘s

predominance in the region. For example, Drea writes of the massacre of Chinese civilians

at Port Arthur during the Sino-Japanese War that

expecting a rich and cultured civilisation, Japanese soldiers were

disillusioned when they first-hand the filthy conditions and

23

Sōseki, „My Individualism‟, p. 261. 24

Matsusaka Yoshihisa Tak, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904 − 1932 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

2001), p. 20. 25

Giesen, p. 112.

10

hardscrabble existence of impoverished Chinese. Admiration turned

to contempt and debasement. These perceptions dovetailed with

notions of Japan‘s uniqueness and superiority to produce popular

racial stereotypes of the Chinese and China as a decaying civilisation.26

Kokoro does not contain any overt references to this colonial activity. Nonetheless, as

Edward Said argues about Mansfield Park, good novels should ‘encode experiences‘ and

‗not simply repeat them‘.27 Just as Austen ‗encodes‘ slavery in early 19th-century England, so

too does Sōseki ‗encode‘ the experience of colonialism in Kokoro. One such moment of

encoding occurs when Sensei first arrives at Okusan‘s house and claims that he ‗did not care

for either‘ the flowers or the koto in the alcove, as ‗since childhood my own tastes had also

tended toward the Chinese‘ (p. 141). By the end of the chapter, however, having met Ojōsan,

he begins to ‗gaze in delight at those clumsy flower arrangements, and listen with pleasure

at the koto‘s awkward twang‘. (p. 143) J. Keith Vincent suggests that because ‗the koto and

the flower arrangement are also associated with a ―Japaneseness‖, Sensei‘s awakening to

Ojōsan‘s charms may also be seen as an awakening to modern national identity‘.28 This

awakening, however, involves a disavowal of an ‗outdated‘ Chinese culture in favour of more

overtly nationalistic Japanese symbols. Embedded within this are the same troubling

discourses of racial superiority that underscored the atrocities committed at Port Arthur in

1894.

The conception of a Turkish national identity in Snow is marked by similar racialised

tensions between self and other. During a meeting at the Hotel Asia between various

community groups, a ‗defeatist in the crowd‘ asks ‗whatever happened to the millions of

26

Drea, p. 87. 27

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 96 − 97. 28

J. Keith Vincent, Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 128.

11

Armenians who once lived all across Anatolia, including Kars‘, which only invokes ‗pity‘ in

the secretary who ‗[does] not write down his name‘. (pp. 285 − 286) An article in the Border

City Gazette, meanwhile, reflects that ‗although the people of Kars once lived side by side in

happy harmony, in recent years outside forces have turned brother against brother, with

disputes between the Islamists and the secularists, the Kurds, the Turks and the Azeris

driving us asunder for specious reasons and reawakening old accusations about the

Armenian massacre that should have been buried long ago‘. (p. 301) The erasure of the

Armenians that Hitchens takes such issue with points towards a conception of identity that

refuses to acknowledge those that exist in its margins, even as the groups that the Gazette

refers to all perceive themselves as marginal and persecuted against in some way. As Ülker

Gökberk suggests, ‗Snow challenges, at a metanarrative level, the official homogenising

identity discourse of the Republican era, inviting to a rethinking of ―Turkish identity‖‘.29

Gokberk points specifically to the suppression of the Armenians and the political Islamists.

There is an equally significant group she does not mention, however. During Ka‘s first visit

to the interrogation centre, he notices an immigrant Georgian couple, who are shown to be

universally despised: ‗the unemployed youths whose identity cards the MIT agent had

checked earlier were full of complaints‘ about them, they ‗depriv[e] Turkish citizens of job

opportunities at a time when work was already scarce‘, and are derided as ‗parasites‘

leeching off the city. (pp. 186 − 187) The presence of these Georgians is as troubling as the

absence of the Armenians, demarcating the narrow boundaries of identity in Kemalist myth.

This creation of a national myth can be further considered in terms of Benedict

Anderson‘s well-known formulation of the nation as an ‗imagined community‘, aided by

‗two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe in the 18th century: the novel and the

29

Ülker Gökberk, „Beyond Secularism: Orhan Pamuk‟s Snow and the Contestation of “Turkish Identity” in the

Borderland” in Konturen, 1 (2008), 1 – 25 (p. 15).

12

newspaper‘.30 Newspapers feature prominently in Kokoro, with news of the illness of

Emperor Meiji, for example, described as having ‗spread quickly around Japan via the

newspapers‘. (p. 84) The rise of print culture in Japan, as such, allows for the nation to be

characterised by a ‗steady, solid simultaneity through time‘.31 The conception of the

Emperor as a divine figure significant to the lives of every Japanese citizen is disseminated

through newspapers, with this image proving so strong that even in watakushi‘s provincial

home far from Tokyo the news of his illness ‗scatter[s] those plans [of having a celebratory

graduation party] like so much dust upon the wind‘. (p. 84) Indeed, the response of

watakushi‘s father in ‗thinking also of his own illness‘ and of watakushi himself in

‗recall[ing] the sight of the emperor when he had so recently come to the university, as was

the custom, for our graduation ceremony‘, demonstrate how such a remote figure can, with

the help of print culture, provoke such strong emotions among the populace. (p. 84)

In Snow, newspapers are equally influential, ranging from tiny religious papers ‗with

a circulation of seventy-five‘; to the national Republican that Ka ostensibly works for; and

the German Frankfurter Rundschau, for which a proposed ‗Announcement to All Humanity

on the Events in Kars‘ provokes a debate that functions as a microcosm of identity politics

in contemporary Turkey. (p. 205; p. 14; p. 278) The Border City Gazette, in particular,

shows an uncanny knack for ‗predict[ing] the future‘, with ‗quite a few things‘ occurring

only ‗because we‘ve written them up first‘. (p. 29) The actor Sunay recognises the power that

even small newspapers like the Gazette have in promulgating ideas, claiming of a report he

dictates to Ka about his death that ‗what I am trying to do is push the truths of art to their

outer limits, to become one with myth‘. (p. 344) This effectiveness is emphasised by how

‗most Kars residents who‘d watch the events unfold on stage would discover for certain that

30

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,

1983), pp. 24 − 25. 31

Anderson, p. 65.

13

Sunay had died after his theatrical death throes only when they read the Border City

Gazette the next morning‘. (p. 414)

Yet the representations of the media in both novels certainly bear closer scrutiny.

James Fujii argues that the term ‗―modern‖ almost always erases Japan‘s own reproduction

of imperialist behaviour and instead signifies the introduction of Western thought and

material goods‘.32 Fujii‘s critique is especially applicable to the news industry of Kokoro‘s

Japan, in that its rapid expansion following the Meiji Restoration was abetted by Tokyo‘s

overseas colonial activities. Eleanor Westney notes that ‗by the time of the Sino-Japanese

War in 1894, newspaper enterprises had expanded to the point where 66 newspapers sent a

total of 114 reporters, 11 artists and 4 photographers to China‘.33 This included the Asahi

Shimbun, where Sōseki had worked for a period following his early literary success. For

Fujii, Nogi‘s failures during the initial phase of Japanese imperialism ‗are replaced by a

―media‖-creation general whose final image has been imprinted by his suicide‘. (p 205)

Bargen points out that Nogi uses the term jisatsu (suicide) rather than junshi in his final

letter, thereby ‗abstain[ing] from claiming to follow the emperor into death and instead

emphasis[ing] his military disgrace at Kunamoto in 1877‘.34 This transformation

demonstrates Nogi‘s appropriation by the media from incompetent buffoon to tragic figure.

In Kokoro, the news report includes a ‗photograph of General Nogi in his military uniform,

and his wife, who had died with him, dressed in what looked like the clothing of an imperial

lady-in-waiting‘ that ‗stayed with [watakushi] for a long time‘. (p. 102) The lasting

impression of this photograph on watakushi is testament to the power of print culture.

32

James A. Fujii, „Writing Out Asia: Modernity, Canon and Natsume Sōseki‟s Kokoro‟, in Positions, 1:1 (1993), 194 –

223 (p. 204). 33

D. Eleanor Westney, Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer of Western Organisation Patterns to Meiji Japan

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 192. 34

Bargen, pp. 163 – 164.

14

The actual response of the newspapers to Nogi‘s suicide, however, was far more

ambivalent than Fujii suggests it to be. Gluck observes that editorials in papers such as the

Asahi were characterised by a ‗masterful ambivalence [which] was typical of the immediate

response. Commentators tried to separate Nogi‘s junshi, which they found unacceptable in a

modern state, from his samurai loyalty and bushido, which might serve as an ―unintentional

moral lesson‖‘.35 Thus newspapers function not only as a uniting force in the ‗imagined

community‘, but are also a platform on which questions about the nature of identity can be

staged, even if the answers are not readily available. Indeed, no matter how in-depth the

coverage of Nogi‘s suicide is in the papers, even Sensei finds that it is ‗hard‘ to ‗fully grasp‘

exactly why the General killed himself. (pp. 232 − 233)

Similarly, debates about Turkish identity are enacted in the media in Snow. For

example, Sunay carefully coordinates a media campaign in the 1980s to play the role of

Atatürk in a film, which slowly unravels with an ‗offhand remark‘ expressing the possibility

of playing the Prophet Mohammed which causes ‗the small Islamist periodicals [to go] on

the rampage‘. (p. 195) His attempts to ‗assuage their fears‘ by ‗carrying around a copy of the

Holy Koran‘ backfires, however, with the Kemalist press complaining that ‗never once…had

Atatürk tried to curry favour with religious fanatics‘. (p. 195) The sheer proliferation of

media outlets reflects the difficulties in conceptualising a uniting Turkish national identity,

as evidenced by the long debate that takes place in the Hotel Asia on the statement to the

Frankfurter Rundschau. Pamuk emphasises the conflicting nature of the various demands

made by interrupting his prose and using a bulleted list, highlighting the problems inherent

in uniting the different factions that make up modern Turkey. (p. 276) The problem that

emerges, therefore, is that of how differing collective memories complicate the formation of

a national identity that can accommodate divergent agendas and interests.

35

Gluck, p. 222.

15

The complex representations of Japan and Turkey in the two novels can be further

considered in light of the concept of ‗ontological security‘, a term coined by the psychiatrist

R.D. Laing but defined in a sociological context by Anthony Giddens, who described it as

‗the confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of their self-identity and in

the constancy of the surrounding social and material environments of action‘.36 In both

Kokoro and Snow, the nation lacks this constancy of surrounding in its journey into

modernity, resulting in profound feelings of ontological insecurity. Ayşe Zarakol suggests

that it is ‗shame and the ontological insecurity associated with it that is at the root of the

national identities of countries such as Japan and Turkey. The pressures to apologise for

past crimes, instead of inducing shame about the acts in question, recall this earlier, greater

shame associated with being ―Eastern‖, ―Asian‖, ―barbaric‖ and ―uncivilised‖‘.37 The lack of

explicit engagement with colonialism or with genocide in the novels, as such, reflects the

fragile construction of national identity against the historical pressures of incorporation

into Western ‗civilisation‘.

In Snow, there is a scene where Ka enters an Armenian church ‗to pay his respects‘

and ‗for some reason‘ feels ‗guilt‘. (p. 169) The novel‘s inability to fully articulate the reasons

behind this guilt demonstrates the ideological limits of a construction of identity that

necessarily erases the sins of the past in order to preserve its ontological security, as does

Kokoro‘s failure to engage with the discourse of colonialism that enables Japanese

modernity. Nonetheless, their silence should not be read as complicity. As Macherey notes,

‗by speech, silence becomes the centre and principle of expression, its vanishing point‘.38 In

not speaking, the novels undertake a ‗journey to silence‘ that ironically resonates much

36

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 92. 37

Ayşe Zarakol, „Ontological (In)security and State Denial of Historical Crimes: Turkey and Japan‟ in International

Relations, 24:3 (2010), 3 – 23, (p. 20). 38

Macherey, p. 86.

16

louder than an overt, polemical vocalisation of the complex identity politics of their

respective nations.

17

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