Orhan Pamuk's 'The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist' offers an insightful exploration of the art of reading and writing. The book unveils a fresh perspective that enriches the understanding.
Rereading this book is an experience; it is more like entering a world where naivety and sentimentality shape the creative process.
It can be your writing guide, redefining the boundaries of literary appreciation, making each encounter a discovery.
Orhan Pamuk writes:
What takes place in our mind, in our soul, when we read a novel? How do such interior sensations differ from what we feel when we watch a film, look at a painting, or listen to a poem, even an epic poem? A novel can, from time to time, provide the same pleasures that a biography, a film, a poem, a painting, or a fairy tale provides. Yet the true, unique effect of this art is fundamentally different from that of other literary genres, film, and painting.
The real pleasure of reading a novel starts with the ability to see the world not from the outside but through the eyes of the protagonists living in that world. When we read a novel, we oscillate between the long view and fleeting moments, general thoughts and specific events, at a speed which no other literary genre can offer. As we gaze at a landscape painting from afar, we suddenly find ourselves among the thoughts of the individual in the landscape and the nuances of the person’s mood.
We transform words into images in our mind. The novel tells a story, but the novel is not only a story. The story slowly emerges out of many objects, descriptions, sounds, conversations, fantasies, memories, bits of information, thoughts, events, scenes, and moments.
The strongest initial urges I feel when writing a novel are to make sure I can “see” in words some of the topics and themes, to explore an aspect of life that has never before been depicted, and to be the first to put into words the feelings, thoughts, and circumstances that people who live in the same universe as me are experiencing. In the beginning, there are patterns formed by people, objects, stories, images, situations, beliefs, history, and the juxtaposition of all these things—in other words, a texture—as well as situations I want to dramatize, emphasize, and delve into more deeply. Whether my literary figures have a strong character or a mild character (like mine), I need them to explore new realms and new ideas.
The knowledge or wisdom that Dostoyevsky provides us speaks not to our visual imagination, but to our verbal imagination. With regard to the power of the novel and an understanding of the human psyche, Tolstoy is sometimes equally profound; and because these two men wrote during the same period and within the same culture, they are invariably compared with each other. Yet the greater part of Tolstoy’s insights are different in kind from Dostoyevsky’s. Tolstoy addresses not just our verbal imagination, but—even more—our visual imagination.
Our efforts as readers include an important element of vanity, which I would now like to touch on. I have already said that when we read a novel, we do not encounter anything real, as we do when we look at a painting, and that it’s actually we ourselves who bring the world of the novel into existence by transforming words into mental images and employing our imagination. Every reader will remember a particular novel in his own unique way, with his own unique images. Of course, when it comes to using the imagination, some readers are rather lazy while others are quite diligent. A writer who caters to lazy imaginations will explicitly convey the feelings and thoughts that readers should feel when a particular image appears in the mind’s eye. Whereas the novelist who trusts in the reader’s power of imagination will merely describe and define with words the images that constitute the moments of the novel, and will leave the feelings and thoughts up to the reader. Sometimes—in fact, often—our imagination fails to form a picture or any corresponding feeling, and we end up telling ourselves that we “didn’t understand the novel.” Often, though, we work hard to set our imagination in motion, and make a real effort to visualize the images that the writer has suggested or that the text wants to create in our mind. And because of our efforts to understand and to visualize, a certain proud possessiveness toward the novel slowly arises within us. We begin to feel that the novel was written just for us, and that it is only we who truly understand it.
I do not refer to hope and optimism lightly: the act of reading a novel is the effort to believe that the world actually does have a center, and this takes all the confidence one can muster. The great literary novels—such as Anna Karenina, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain, and The Waves—are indispensable to us because they create the hope and the vivid illusion that the world has a center and a meaning, and because they give us joy by sustaining this impression as we turn their pages.
Our suspension of moral judgment enables us to understand novels most deeply.