1

The Categories of Secular Time

Daniel Whistler (University of Liverpool)

1. Why literature can never be entirely religious

In a series of essays published in 2009 and 2010, Graham Ward has argued that ‘literature

can never be entirely secular’ or, more strongly still, that ‘literature resists secularity’.1

According to Ward, essential properties of literary production and reception are shared by

religious traditions. He points to a number of such properties. First and most prosaically, ‘the

Western imaginary has been shaped profoundly in the past by its Judeo-Christian institutions

and shaped equally by the gradual secularization of, or secular replacements for, those

institutions’2: the language, imagery and rhetoric we use can never fully escape its theological

past. Second, both reading and writing are forms of ‘poetic faith’ or ‘entrustment’ that

engages one affectively and also transformatively ‘as proto-evangelium performances’.3

Third, and this is the most pertinent piece of evidence for what follows, according to Ward,

narrative operates through fundamentally religious categories – that is, by means of

teleological ‘horizons of anticipation and expectation, fear and hope’.4 He writes,

It is important to recognize how literature is always and inevitably caught up with

notions of thaumaturgy, revelatory disclosure, providence and eschatology – however

much these notions are secularized into ‘aesthetic epiphanies’, ‘the omniscient

narrator’, and the ‘sense of an ending’.5

1 Graham Ward, ‘Why Literature can never be entirely Secular’ in Religion and Literature 41.2 (2009) and

‘How Literature resists Secularity’ in Literature and Theology 24.1 (2010). 2 Ward, ‘Why Literature can never be entirely Secular’, 25.

3 Ibid, 26.

4 Ibid, 23.

5 Ibid.

2

As we know from all secularization narratives: secular existence (and so secular literature)

never escapes its religious inheritance. It is doomed to repeat religion ad infinitum,

imprisoned within a cage of theological categories. Hence, Ward sums up his overall

argument as follows,

Literature will always resist such a secularising process, resist the erasure of religion,

because intrinsic to its nature, even when handling the most mundane (and ‘secular’

in the older understanding of the term) matters, it points towards a horizon of

transcendence.6

In what follows, I want to begin to think about what it might mean for literature to be

framed by categories that are not religious in nature; how, that is, one might envisage an

escape from the religious, however partial. I take three examples to argue that the modes of

temporality they perform are constituted by categories that are indifferent to religion –

categories that are indeed to be understood in line with the secular’s break from the religious.

This is of course not to oppose Ward’s thesis, for literature can obviously both never be

entirely religious and never be entirely secular at the same time, without contradiction or

incoherence; nevertheless, it is to dispute his emphasis on the need to frame literary time

eschatologically. Some literature works differently; indeed, I will argue that Hölderlin’s last

poems, Tournier’s Friday and Pamuk’s narrators resist the temporalization of narrative as

such, at least on any ordinary conception of time.

Nevertheless, the very idea of a conception of the secular that is independent of the

religious is often seen as problematic, and this is indeed an issue that bubbles away beneath

the surface of Ward’s articles. There are two ways of framing this critique of a distinctive

6 Ward, ‘How Literature resists Secularity’, 74.

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secular: either by defining the secular as a redeployment, or perversion, of religious

categories, or by defining it as a mere negation of them. On both counts, according to these

critics, to speak of a secular characteristic that does not depend in some way on a prior

positing of the religious cannot be countenanced, and so my project in this essay would

collapse. Hence, on the first account, any secular space within modernity is merely a

perversion or inadequate repetition of the structure of religious traditions, i.e. Christianity; so

on this view, there is nothing substantially distinctive – and certainly nothing innovative –

about the categories that frame secular productions.7 On the second account, the secular is

merely that which fails (or succeeds) in ‘no longer being religious’; to define the secular,

then, is to define it merely as a space that negates eschatology, revelation or an embedded

sense of self.8 The two accounts are of course not mutually exclusive: both tend to portray the

genesis of the secular as a negative process – a loss of something, whether a feeling for the

transcendent, understandings of non-materialist values, a sense of non-homogenous

temporality, or community. Secularity constitutes a ‘Fall’ from religion.

Moreover, it is important to note that the above critiques of the autonomy of the

secular are usually ‘negative’ in two senses that it is important to distinguish: first, the secular

is defined by its lack of religious characteristics; second, this lack is articulated pejoratively

or critically. The former is a negative description, the latter is a negative evaluation – and it is

with the former that I am concerned in this essay. That is, my task is to provide a preliminary

account of secular time in categories that do not merely negate or deviate from the categories

of prior religious traditions. My task is to give a positive description that leaves questions of

evaluation, whether positive or negative, unanswered. I am not, therefore, interested in the

salvation of the secular: a distasteful task considering the oppression, conceptual and real, to

7 The classic example of this view is: John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason 2

nd ed

(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 8 On many of these claims, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2007).

4

which secularism has historically given rise to; nevertheless, neither do I wish to throw the

baby out with the bathwater: there are moments in becoming-secular that are worthy of

detailed description, at the very least.

In what follows, this positive description of the secular is framed around the

problematic of a secular time. The saeculum of in-between times as mediated through the

work of Tournier, Hölderlin and Pamuk gives rise to the question: is such an in-between

always reducible to the religious? Ward’s challenge above is presented primarily in terms of

the temporality of narrative – the idea that literary time is always a variant of religious times,

that literary time is always eschatological; my aim in what follows is to dispute this by

considering two variants of secular time as they are constructed in the works of Tournier,

Hölderlin and Pamuk: the human secular of Pamuk’s novel Snow and the inhuman secular

found most clearly in Hölderlin’s last poetry. I argue that the categories that generate these

forms of secular time are irreducibly areligious.

2. The inhuman secular: Tournier and Hölderlin

Tournier’s Friday and Hölderlin’s last poems resist divine time and they also both resist

human time. In their place, they attempt to perform a purely literary time that is indifferent to

both gods and man. It is to this extent that they must be read as manifestations of secular

time. In other words, they shift towards a time of the inhuman and in-divine moment, self-

contained and self-affirming. They enact, therefore, the possibility of a time without

transition, a time not governed by the interplay of presence and absence, a time independent

of difference.

Tournier’s Friday describes the passage of Robinson Crusoe from empty body-

without-organs wedded to the earth, through unstable periods of oscillation between

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cultivated reterritorialisation and deterritorialising lines of flight, to the point where – under

the unconscious tutelage of Friday – he becomes an aerial, solar surface through which

intensities pass and momentarily express themselves. On the threshold of this final

transformation, Robinson reflects,

What has most changed in my life is the passing of time, its speed and even its

direction. Formerly every day, hour and minute leaned in a sense toward the day,

hour and minute that was to follow, and all were drawn into the pattern of the

moment, whose transience created a kind of vacuum. So time passed rapidly and

usefully, the more quickly because it was usefully employed, leaving behind an

accumulation of achievement and wastage which was my history. Perhaps the sweep

of time of which I was a part, after winding through millennia, would have ‘coiled’

and returned to its beginning. But the circularity of time remained the secret of the

gods, and my own short life was no more than a segment, a straight line between two

points aimed absurdly toward infinity… Yet there are portents which offer us keys to

eternity. There is the calendar, wherein the seasons eternally complete their cycle on a

human scale, and even the modest circle of the hours.

For me the cycle has now shrunk until it is merged in the moment. The

circular movement has become so swift that it cannot be distinguished from

immobility. And it is as though, in consequence, my days had rearranged themselves.

No longer do they jostle on each other’s heels. Each stands separate and upright,

proudly affirming its own worth. And since they are no longer to be distinguished as

the stages of a plan in process of execution, they so resemble each other as to be

superimposed in my memory, so that I seem to be ceaselessly reliving the same day.9

9 Michel Tournier, Friday, trans. Norman Denny (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1969), 203-4.

6

Robinson here identifies three structures of temporality: first, a human form of linear time in

which moment follows on moment in a ‘straight line’ that recurs ad infinitum; second, a

divine time which is circular, the end coiling back to the beginning and recommencing; third,

a post-human time of the moment, in which circular time compresses itself to the limit of the

infinitely small, so that it seems almost immobile: each one of these moments becomes self-

contained and self-affirming (ab-solute). It is worth noting the relation between divine and

post-human time: the former consists in cycles that exceed all possible human experience; the

latter shrinks these cycles into the very atoms of experience. One might even speak of the

latter as a secularization of divine time to the extent that it repeats the cycle immanently.

Moreover, Friday also describes a fourth time which Robinson momentarily forgets

(although he returns to it a paragraph later), this is ‘escap[e] into timelessness’ or ‘eternity’:

the forgetting of time associated in the novel with the pigs of the swamp (ancestors of

Nietzsche’s forgetful cows).10

This timelessness is of course not only the preserve of semi-

conscious beasts, but also a deity who exists outside of time. The divine has two times:

everlasting cycles and atemporal stasis.

Robinson goes on to critique the neuroses associated with human time ticking on and

on without end; he also rejects the longing for eternity as illusory. Rather, at this late stage in

the novel Robinson finds himself whole-heartedly affirming the post-human time of the

moment. He describes the new form of comportment that has come over him as he

experiences this ‘revolutionary’11

temporal structure:

10

Ibid, 204. 11

Ibid, 205.

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[The island and Friday] call for my attention, a watchful and marvelling vigilance, for

it seems to me – nay, I know it – that at every moment I am seeing them for the first

time, and that nothing will ever dull their magical freshness.12

* *

A similar form of revolutionary naivety emerges out of a reading of Hölderlin’s last poems.

While his ‘late’ poems – ambitious hymns and elegies marked by their complexity,

disjointedness and their technically fiendish verse forms – are most often celebrated, it is

those that come after 1806 that form my subject matter here. 1806 marks a break in

Hölderlin’s poetic production: he abandoned the mythic content and eschatological

temporality characteristic of his pre-1806 work to produce in his 47 final poems something

very different.13

Something similar to Tournier’s description of a time of the self-contained moment

informs the temporal structure of Hölderlin’s last poems. Bertaux’s comments can serve as a

guiding motif: ‘The fifty or so poems which remain of [Hölderlin’s] productions from the era

of the tower are of a style and tone totally different from the high style of the preceding

phase: infinitely simple and sparse, almost naïve and intemporal.’14

He goes on to expand on

this notion of intemporality: ‘What is at issue is another temporal dimension than that of

human agitation, the historical dimension of dates; [Hölderlin] rediscovers the cyclic time of

agrarian civilisations.’15

Earlier comments also shed light on the notion:

12

Ibid. 13

For a full contrast between the phases of Hölderlin’s thought, as well as a more detailed justification of my

reading of the last poems, see Daniel Whistler, ‘Hölderlin’s Atheisms’ in Literature and Theology 23.4 (2009). 14

Pierre Bertaux, Hölderlin, ou le temps d’un poète (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 331. 15

Ibid.

8

[During this phase, Hölderlin] shuts up… he integrates himself into the landscape,

while his body is reduced to the earth. It lives the rhythm of the seasons. Duration is

abolished. Around him exist solely the elements, the breath of air, light and water…

Around him, life is renewed.16

Bertaux’s identification of the intemporal closely maps Tournier’s description of a post-

human time. There is the same refusal to think time as passing away, a refusal to think it in

terms of a series of linear presents: ‘Duration is abolished’. This is a time of perpetual

beginning, but simultaneously a time of perpetual perfection. Every new moment stands

alone, complete and radically new. Böschenstein calls this a ‘despotism of the present’ in

Hölderlin’s last poetry17

; Miles similarly writes that the poems are ‘lived out in the naked

present, free from all tensions in time’18

; and Ryan also provides a helpful gloss,

[Noteworthy are] the monotony of form and theme, the lack of a sense of historical

time, the almost exclusive use of present tense, the tensionlessness [in these

poems]… It is above all in the total absence of historical consciousness that this

transformation [from the hymns to the last poems] is most apparent. The same poet

who once attempted to contain in his words a sweeping vision of the plan of history…

[now] reflects the condition of ataraxia, a nearly complete acceptance of, and

contentment with, the dispensation of things as the poet observes them.19

Hölderlin’s experience of time is that of the intemporal. Intemporality has no progress or

decline, but merely successive and repeated moments of consummation. Each consummation

16

Ibid, 324. 17

Bernhard Böschenstein, ‘Hölderlins späteste Gedichte’ in Hölderlin Jahrbuch 14 (1966), 39. 18

David H. Miles, ‘The Past as Future: Pfad and Bahn as Images of Temporal Conflict in Hölderlin’ in

Germanic Review 46.2 (1971), 115. 19

Thomas Ryan, Hölderlin’s Silence (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 345-6.

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may well be qualitatively different (for example, the four seasons are all complete in

incomparable ways), but each is, on its own terms, equally consummate.

An example will shed further light on intemporality:

Der Frühling

Wenn aus der Tiefe kommt der Frühling in das Leben,

Es wundert sich der Mensch, und neue Worte streben

Aus Geistigkeit, die Freude kehrt wieder

Und festlich machen sich Gesang und Lieder.

Das Leben findet sich aus Harmonie der Zeiten,

Daß immerdar den Sinn Natur und Geist geleiten,

Und die Vollkommenheit ist Eines in dem Geiste,

So findet vieles sich, und aus Natur das Meiste.20

Only the present indicative tense is here used: whereas Hölderlin’s earlier hymns and elegies

had drawn on a Schillerian eschatology in which the present is constituted both by its

nostalgia for a classical arcadia and also expectation of the end-times to come, this is

completely absent after 1806. The present exists on its own terms, independent of

comparisons to happy origins or destinies. It is described for its own sake. What takes place is

an absolutization of the present.

Fenves’ ‘Measure for Measure: Hölderlin and the Place of Philosophy’ reads into the

hymns prior to 1806 precisely this epiphanic structure. Fenves focuses on a line from Der

20

Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe [henceforth, FA], vol. 7, ed. D.E. Sattler

(Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld Verlag, 1999), 207; translation: When springtime from the depth returns to

life, / Men are amazed, and from their minds aspire / New words, and happiness once more is rife, / And festive

music rings from house to choir. / Life finds itself in seasonal harmonies, / That ever Nature, Spirit might attend

our thought, / And one within our minds perfection is; / So, most of all from Nature, much to itself is brought.

(Translation in Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments 4th

ed, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil,

2004), 787.)

10

Rhein, ‘Nur hat ein jeder sein Maas’21

contrasting it with (what he sees as) the self-defeating

plea of Brot und Wein that measure is ‘allen gemein’22

. By means of this idea of each alone

having its measure that is not common to anything else, Fenves develops a version of the

incomparability of the affirmative moment found in Hölderlin’s last poems:

‘Only each one’ has its own criteria, which means that the criteria for something

being what it is cannot be found in anything but the thing itself… The only place to

seek the measure of each one is in ‘onliness’ itself: in aloneness, in singularity.23

Just like the post-human time of the last poems, singularity of measure gives rise to an

autarchy of the moment. Each is perfect on its own terms. Moreover, Fenves links this new

experience of poetic time to the singularity of the poem itself: each poem is an affirmative,

self-contained moment; each poem not only represents but performs its own completeness.

The time of Hölderlin’s last poems should be named poetic time itself.24

And, as such, it is

poetic time that needs to be distinguished from the human time of linearity and the divine

time of cycles. Or, as Fenves concludes his piece, ‘the other measure, the non-human one, is

a measure of language’s contraction from the human-divine interplay.’25

The time of

language is neither the time of men nor the time of the gods; it is an inhuman saeculum.

3. The human secular: Pamuk

The stakes of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow are clearly presented in a central passage from the novel:

21

Hölderlin 8/637, line 203; translation: Only each has its measure. 22

Hölderlin 6/243, line 45; translation: common to all. 23

Peter Fenves, ‘Measure for Measure: Hölderlin and the Place of Philosophy’ in Philosophy Today 37.4

(1993), 375-6. 24

See Bart Philipsen, Die List der Einfalt: Nachlese zu Hölderlins spätester Dichtung (München: Wilhelm Fink

Verlag, 1992), 72. 25

Fenves 380.

11

Here, perhaps, we have arrived at the heart of our story. How much can we ever know

about the love and pain in another’s heart? How much can we hope to understand

those who have suffered deep anguish, greater deprivation and more crushing

disappointments than we ourselves have known?… So it is when Orhan the novelist

peers into the dark corners of his poet friend’s difficult and painful life: how much

can he really see?26

The anxiety eating away at the narrator here emanates from the possibility of represention,

the difficulty involved in putting individual lives on display in their singularity – ‘to recreate

the world of single human beings’.27

It is in this vein Pamuk has styled himself as a

spokesman for the Other28

, a mediator through which any voiceless individual might speak.

And what is more Pamuk’s imperative to represent all voices forms, as we shall see, the basis

of his commitment to secularity: he remains explicitly indifferent to the religious positioning

of a subject, thereby allowing all voices to speak equally and without discrimination.

Pamuk’s secularism is born from an adherence to equal representation.

Discourse on Turkey often oscillates between two extremes: a violent Kemalist

laicism (or ‘Westernization’) enforced by the army and state apparatus on the one hand and

upsurges of ‘Eastern’ Islamic unrest on the other. Kemalist secularism is paradigmatic of the

violent, identity-erasing secular attacked in the name of postsecularity by Asad, Mahmood

and others, whereas Islamic resistance occasionally finds itself – and particularly during the

early ‘90s when Pamuk’s Snow is set – constructed in terms of the Western fantasy of

26

Orhan Pamuk, Snow, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 266. 27

Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul, trans. Ekin Oklap (New York:

Abrams, 2012), 56. 28

See Nergis Ertürk, ‘Those Outside the Scene: Snow in the World Republic of Letters’ in New Literary History

41.3 (2010), 646.

12

fundamentalism. It is in this cultural landscape that Pamuk’s novels are to be situated through

a complex operation involving at least five moves:

1. First and foremost, Pamuk identifies himself as a secularist: ‘I am a secularist, but a

liberal secularist’29

, and all that follows, I want to contend, must be understood as

some form of manifestation of this commitment to the secular plane.

2. Nevertheless, Pamuk is most celebrated (and denigrated) for his sustained, on-going

criticism of the Kemalist laicism that forms the official ideology of the Turkish state.

In Snow, the narrator is remorseless in his attacks on the Kemalist characters (Sunay

Zaim and Z Demirkol) who confuse life with its ideological representation.30

These

characters refuse to give the Other a voice: ‘Those who seek to meddle with the

republic, with freedom, with enlightenment will see their hands crushed.’31

Hence, the

narrator, Orhan, speaks of the ‘merciless violence visited upon [the people of Kars] in

the name of republicanism’, and the ‘terror’ this gives rise to.32

As Santesso points

out, Pamuk transforms Kemalist laicism into a form of fundamentalist violence,

indistinguishable in effect from its religious variants.33

3. Furthermore, Pamuk is equally committed to the destruction of the East/West binary

that informs so much of this discourse on Turkey, as well as the reception of his own

novels. He explicitly frames the aims of Snow in these terms: as the novel proceeds,

all binaries are deconstructed so as to give way to a tangled web of complex subject-

positions and mutual dependencies.34

Indeed, as Pamuk has put it more generally, ‘I

29

Pamuk, quoted in Alver Ahmet, ‘The Hegemony of the Liberal-Secular Master Narrative in Orhan Pamuk’s

Snow’ in Journal of European Studies 43 (2013), 246. 30

The confusion of Kemalist revolution with its theatrical performance is a recurrent trope. See Pamuk, Snow,

309, 341, 415 and passim. 31

Ibid, 158. 32

Ibid, 416. 33

Esra Mirze Santesso, ‘Silence, Secularism and Fundamentalism in Snow’ in Mehnaz Afridi and David M.

Buyze (eds), Global Perspectives on Orhan Pamuk: Existentialism and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave-

Macmillan, 2012), 127-8. 34

See Justin Neuman, ‘Religious Cosmopolitanism? Orhan Pamuk, the Headscarf Debate, and the Problem with

Pluralism’ in The Minnesota Review 77 (2011), 153.

13

want to destroy the clichés cultivated by both sides. This is what I perceive as the task

of a political novel.’35

And what results from this destruction is a form of anarchy, or

at least mixture: ‘Culture is mix.’36

4. Part of the way in which Pamuk goes about achieving this project consists in an

avowed sensitivity to all forms of Islamic subjectivity, allowing them space to speak

in his fiction. Ka, Snow’s protagonist, ‘shed[s] tears for the Islamists’.37

Hence,

Snow’s Turkish reception in particular has been marked by nothing more than shock

at how an avowed secularist like Pamuk could represent the voices of ‘political Islam’

so sympathetically.38

5. Finally, Pamuk asserts that the above can only be achieved through cultivating a kind

of cosmopolitan homelessness. The novelist must despecify herself from particular

traditions and communities, whether religious or secular. Pamuk writes, ‘The novelist

is a person who doesn’t belong to a community, who doesn’t share the basic instincts

of a community, and who is thinking and judging with a different culture than the one

he is experiencing.’39

Much of what follows will be focused on the possibility and

legitimacy of such a form of fictional life.

It is no surprise then that, as a result of this complex series of operations, Snow – Pamuk’s

self-avowed political novel – has been received in diverse, even contradictory ways. It has

been adduced as evidence of Pamuk’s turn to political Islam and repudiation of secularity tout

court40

, as an attempt to sketch out a new form of religious cosmopolitanism41

, or as a covert

35

Orhan Pamuk, ‘The Turkish Trauma: An Interview.’ Sign and Sight, 18/04/2005;

http://www.signandsight.com/features/115.html; last accessed: 01/12/2013. 36

Orhan Pamuk, ‘Telephone Interview with Nobelprize.org.’ 12/10/2006;

http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=68; last accessed: 01/12/2013. 37

Pamuk, Snow, 210. 38

See Pamuk’s comments on the ‘fury’ of his ‘secular readers’ in ‘The Turkish Trauma’. 39

Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Vintage, 2008), 371. 40

Üner Daglier, ‘Orhan Pamuk on the Turkish Modernization Project: Is it a Farewell to the West?’ in

Humanitas 25.1 (2012), 148-50.

14

repetition of liberal-secular narratives42

. Pamuk’s representation of Islamic subjects has

likewise been seen as successful, a secular caricature or a self-conscious failure flagging up

the impossibility of all representations of the Other.43

Throughout the novel, both the protagonist, Ka, and his narrator (and doppelganger),

Orhan, are set up as figures of the secular. They both indiscriminately collect voices and

worldviews from across the spectrum of characters, whether secularist thugs, Islamic

fundamentalists in hiding, ‘headscarf girls’ or Kurdish nationalists. And, what is more, Ka

(and implicitly the narrator too) attempts to endorse them all equally. Ka exclaims, ‘Everyone

I’ve interviewed since coming here, everyone I’ve talked to. I agree with them all.’44

Ka, like

Pamuk himself, is resolutely committed to the ideal of polyphony, the active inclusion of all

voices in a ‘textual bazaar’45

or carnival. This is flagged up not only by the reference to

Bakhtin in the text of the novel itself46

, but also in the epigram from Dostoevsky47

. And the

‘heteroglossic spree’ underlying Pamuk’s novelistic practice has been discussed repeatedly in

the literature.48

Pamuk himself speaks of this component of Snow as follows,

My book has many voices, I do not comment on them individually. Dostoevsky was

the master of this form of writing. Many of my characters hold ideas which run

counter to my own. The challenge is to also make the voices representing opinions I

find repugnant sound convincing.’49

41

Neuman 143. 42

Ahmet 252-3. 43

See Ahmet and Ertürk in particular. 44

Pamuk, Snow, 131. 45

Barish Ali and Caroline Hagood, ‘Heteroglossic Sprees and Muderous Viewpoints in Orhan Pamuk’s My

Name is Red’ in Texas Studies in Literature and Language 54.4 (2012), 505. 46

Pamuk, Snow, 141. 47

Ibid, vii. 48

See Ali and Hagood 505-13, Ahmet 345, Santesso 127. One of the questions underlying my argument in this

essay concerns the possibility of secular polyphony. In other words, does this concept necessarily rest – as it

does in Bakhtin – on the model of the pre-modern religious carnival? 49

Pamuk, ‘The Turkish Trauma’.

15

That is, Ka collects characters and lets them speak, ‘gather[ing] the perspectives of a wide

array of people’.50

He acts as a mediator, or secular plane on which their identities are

discursively constructed. Indeed, towards the end of the novel, Ka is explicitly characterised

as such, ‘I am an impartial mediator.’51

And, of course, this gives rise to trenchant criticism

of such mediation within the novel itself, closely mirroring popular critiques of secularism as

covertly Westernizing and imperial.52

Ka and the narrator perform secularity in Snow, but it is not the strong Kemalist

secularism of the Turkish state. Theirs is not a laicism that refuses to hear or represent the

voices of the religious; rather, Ka actively seeks out minority religious subject-positions to

give them a chance to speak. On the other hand, the Kemalist secularism of Sunay Zaim and

Z Demirkol is remorselessly savaged throughout, as we have seen. Pamuk, therefore, does

seem to glimpse here some form of beneficent secularity that fleshes out his own stated

commitment to non-Kemalist secularism – and yet, as I will go on to argue in the conclusion,

it is a secularity that necessarily fails: a tragic secular. Before considering this, however, it is

necessary to elaborate on two of the categories by which such a soft or human secularity is

developed: active indifferentiation and spatialization.

* *

Secularity operates by indifferentiating religions; that is, the secular should be distinguished

from mere tolerance insofar as the latter consists in a passive letting-be of religious

particulars, whereas the former actively indifferentiates them. Thus in Snow, the human

50

David N. Coury, ‘“Torn Country”: Turkey and the West in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow’ in Critique 50.4 (2009),

342. 51

Pamuk, Snow, 331. See further ibid, 315-7. 52

Hence, characters respond to Ka: ‘You are not a mediator, you’re cooperating with the tyrants.’ (Ibid, 322);

‘Mediators… they’re just smart alecs who think they can stick their noses into your private business on the

pretext of being “impartial”.’ (Ibid, 326)

16

secularity of Ka and Orhan is achieved only by means of keeping religion at a distance (‘I

kept religion out of my life’53

), by refusing natural curiosity and interest (‘Ka refrained from

asking questions, as he would for the rest of his stay in Kars whenever anyone mentioned the

rise of political Islam or the headscarf question’54

), and by cultivating ‘selfish indifference’55

.

This refusal to identify with one particular tradition more than any other – actively

indifferentiating between them – may well be artificial, but it is, according to Pamuk, the very

form of life necessary to write: ‘Writing is sort of a philosophy of… identifying with

everyone with equal intensity and honesty.’56

The notion of active indifferentiation thus contributes to a positive description of the

secular, and one key site for its theoretical elaboration is Georges Bataille’s Manet. For

Bataille, Manet’s painting can be defined by means of this concept of active indifference:

Stripped to its essentials, Manet’s sober elegance almost immediately struck a note of

utter integrity by virtue not simply of its indifference to the subject, but of the active

self-assurance with which it expressed that indifference. Manet’s was supreme

indifference, effortless and stinging… His sobriety was the more complete and

effacious in moving from a passive to an active state. This active, resolute sobriety

was the source of Manet’s supreme elegance.57

Bataille picks on Manet’s Execution of Maximillian as an example of such indifferentiation: it

refuses to empathise or to take sides, or even to engender affects in the spectator. The

representation of murder is achieved as an affectless still life:

53

Ibid, 98. 54

Ibid, 22. 55

Ibid, 131. 56

Pamuk, quoted in Ali and Hagood 516. 57

Georges Bataille, Manet, trans. Austyn Wainhouse and James Emmons (New York: Skira, 1983), 73.

17

Manet deliberately rendered the condemned man’s death with the same indifference

as if he had chosen a fish or a flower for his subject… On the face of it, death, coldly,

methodically dealt out by a firing-squad, precludes an indifferent treatment; such a

subject is nothing if not charged with meaning for each one of us. But Manet

approached it with an almost callous indifference that the spectator, surprisingly

enough, shares to the full.58

Orhan’s depiction of the violence that follows the Kemalist coup in Snow59

works in a similar

fashion, practising a ‘glassy coolness’60

in the face of atrocity. The narrator (like the painter)

refuses to endorse any one particular tradition, instead remaining ‘detached from any

collective enterprise or prescribed system (even from individualism)’.61

The narrator

despecifies, to invoke the early Hallward.62

* *

The second category by which Pamuk’s human secular is constructed proceeds to the heart of

the question of secular time. Becoming-secular and novel writing – the two are synonymous

for Pamuk – both consist in the museumification of reality, or more precisely still, in the

conversion of time into space. In Snow, the novel becomes a museum of religions, and in the

process religious worldviews and traditions are ‘flattened out’, losing their diachronic

dimension, their eschatological promise and their historical situatedness. The novel places

religious subject-positions synchronically next to each other in an encyclopaedic panorama or

58

Ibid, 46-8. 59

See Pamuk, Snow, 161-3. 60

Bataille 22. 61

Ibid, 60. 62

Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2001), 248-9.

18

Wunderkammer.63

As Pamuk has himself put it, ‘I will build a museum, and its catalogue will

be a novel.’64

And what emerges is, in Xing’s words, ‘a new way of writing: writing as

archival collecting or even encyclopedia writing’.65

We have already encountered the collecting impulse that underlies Snow; what

requires adding is the extent to which such collecting is necessarily a form of spatialization

within the novel as well. Throughout Snow, Ka mimics the narrator in transforming the array

of voices he gathers into a series of aesthetic objects – in Ka’s case, poems. These poems are

precisely and obsessively mapped onto a two-dimensional diagram of a snowflake (hence, the

novel’s title).66

Ka ‘interpret[s], classif[ies] and organise[s]’67

voices across space,

transforming traditions into vectors, and thereby performing secularity as an archive. This is

first and foremost a practice of ‘transforming time into space’, as Pamuk writes elsewhere.68

Indeed, the transition ‘from narrative to description’69

, and the spatialization

consequent upon it, is a recurrent characteristic of Pamuk’s fiction as a whole. Most

obviously, this is true of the Museum of Innocence which was conceived, planned and

implemented in parallel to the construction of a physical museum in Istanbul. As Pamuk

notes, the concept of the novel which arises out of such a project is ‘different from… Western

novels… a sort of encyclopaedic dictionary’.70

Here ‘dialectics’ come to ‘a standstill’,

according to Xing71

, owing to the evacuation of temporal succession in the name of sheer co-

presence. For Pamuk, in the museum, ‘The whole world and the present are left behind. We

are in a different atmosphere, a different time; we are almost wrapped in a radically different

63

For Pamuk on novels as encyclopedias and Wunderkammern, see Innocence of Objects, 254. 64

Ibid, 21. 65

Yin Xing, ‘The Novel as Museum: Curating Memory in Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence’ in

Critique 54.2 (2013), 203. 66

See Pamuk, Snow, 382-3 and passim. 67

Ibid¸128. 68

Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber and Faber, 2009) 524. 69

Feride Çiçekoglu, ‘A Pedagogy of Two Ways of Seeing: A Confrontation of “Word and Image” in My Name

is Red’ in Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003), 14. 70

Pamuk, Innocence of Objects, 15. 71

Xing 209.

19

aura of almost being outside of time’72

– a claim that must remind us of the intemporality of

Tournier and Hölderlin. Similarly, Pamuk’s My Name is Red has caused critical anxiety

precisely because of its refusal of time for the sake of collecting the widest array of character-

voices synchronically. Göknar thus speaks of its ‘flat two-dimensionality’73

and Updike of

‘the brilliant stasis of the depictions themselves [which] seem to go nearly nowhere’.74

Here

too Pamuk’s human secular is premised on the erasure of time in the name of space.

4. The tragic secular

At the beginning of this essay I posed Graham Ward’s challenge to literary studies: literature

resists secularity. In particular, I focused on Ward’s contention that literary narrative

necessarily relies on the temporal categories of religious eschatology. All three writers

considered in this essay (Tournier, Hölderlin and Pamuk) belie such a claim. They construct

forms of literary temporality that are resolutely non-eschatological; that is, they construct

secular times. Hölderlin, for instance, breaks radically with his own earlier eschatological

conception of poetic time – with the act of writing suspended between the non-longer and the

not-yet – by embodying in his final poems a form of self-sufficient intemporality in which

reality is fulfilled at each moment. Similarly, Pamuk resists narrative time as such through a

thoroughgoing museumification of traditions and religious voices. In all three cases, it is a

matter of a formation of the secular that neither repeats nor perverts pre-established religious

forms, but which creatively generates its own sui generis categorial space.

Nevertheless, there are obvious problems here, and they revolve for the most part

around the issue of representation. Thus, for Hölderlin’s last poetry one could insist with

72

Pamuk, quoted in Açalya Allmer, ‘Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence: On Architecture, Narrative and the

Art of Collecting’ in Architectural Research Quarterly 13.2 (2009), 169. 73

Erdağ Göknar, ‘Secular Blasphemies: Orhan Pamuk and the Turkish Novel’ in Novel 45.2 (2012), 316. 74

John Updike, ‘Murder in Miniature’ in The New Yorker, 03/09/2001.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/09/03/010903crbo_books1; last accessed: 01/12/2013.

20

Constantine, ‘The world is not like that, and such harmony is only possible in poetry not

engaging with it.’75 Likewise, Pamuk puts into question his entire construction of the secular

in Snow by asking: how accurately does it portray the voices it claims to represent? That is,

Pamuk goes on to parody the insensitivity and blindness consequent on a thoroughgoing

practice of indifferentiation. During the revolutionary atrocities depicted in the novel, Ka

‘slept for exactly ten hours and twenty minutes without stirring once’76

and ‘awoke relaxed

and refreshed’77

. Moreover, when other characters attempt to relay these atrocities to him, Ka

responds, ‘I was very happy yesterday, you know. For the first time in years I was writing

poems… I can’t bear to hear these stories right now.’78

Indeed, this is later formed into a

more general aesthetic philosophy,

Many years earlier, Ka had explained to me that when a good poet was confronted

with difficult facts that he knew to be true but that were inimical to poetry, he had no

choice but to flee to the margins. It was, he said, this very retreat that allowed him to

hear the hidden music that was the source of all art.79

Such an aestheticization of reality and refusal to bear witness to violence is obviously

inadequate in the face of fundamentalism (whether secular or religious), but it is seemingly a

natural implication of the ‘glassy coolness’ and ‘callous’ apathy that active indifference

cultivates.

This is, moreover, a critique that goes right to the heart of the narrator’s practice, not

just Ka’s. Snow concludes with one of the characters, Faizal, contesting his own

representation within the pages of Snow itself. The novel collects voices, but what if in so

75

David Constantine, Hölderlin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 312. 76

Pamuk, Snow, 172. 77

Ibid, 175. 78

Ibid, 179. 79

Ibid, 232.

21

doing it falsifies them? What if the human secular does not represent the Other, but ultimately

effaces her? Such are the stakes of Faizal’s intervention:

I can tell from your face that you want to tell the people who read your novels how

poor we are, and how different we are from them. I don’t want you to put me into a

novel like that… Because you don’t even know me, that’s why!80

He continues,

If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to

believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could

understand us from so far away.81

In other words, even Pamuk’s human secular ends up repeating the mistakes of Kemalist

laicism: imposing identities from a surreptitiously privileged Western vantage point, failing

to allow the Other to speak. Snow, then, ultimately dramatizes ‘the impossibility of the

unmediated political representation’82

, and so the ineluctable failure of the weak form of

secularity Pamuk remains committed to. Snow is a tragedy in which representation plays

nemesis to the secular as protagonist.

And yet the failure of Pamuk’s secular is premised on his continuing adherence to the

category of representation. For Pamuk, the secular must but cannot represent the Other of

particular traditions. In other words, Pamuk’s secular is – as we have seen at length – a

resolutely human secular. This leaves open, however, the possibility of an arepresentational

secular, one indifferent to its own indifference – an inhuman secular as provisionally sketched

80

Ibid, 419. 81

Ibid, 435. 82

Ertürk 636.

22

in Tournier and Hölderlin. This is a form of secularity that does not fall with the failure of

secularity; it is a form which may in the end resist tragedy.

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