Murders_by_Unknown_Assailants_and_Detective_Novels

Murders by Unknown Assailants and Detective Novels A large part of The Black Book consists of columns ostensibly printed in Milliyet, one of Turkey’s most important newspapers. In the novel they are presented as pieces written by a character who is a journalist. They appear at regular intervals, interrupting the novel’s straight narrative, and because they determine the shape of The Black Book, they caused me a great deal of difficulty. Because I was having such a good time writing in the voice of a columnist, balancing fake erudition with a subtle buffoonery, the columns kept getting longer, dominating the book in a way that destroyed the balance and composition of the whole. Even today, when readers say to me, “I read The Black Book; the columns are wonderful,” I am at the same time pleased and also troubled. Those who have read the book in translation are the ones who say this most often. The Western reader is entranced by the strangeness and facile narration of the columnists I parody, who belong to a tradition that stretches beyond Turkey to include many other countries living within the same cultural contradictions. They are a dying breed, but we can still find echoes of them in columnists I parody, who belong to a tradition that stretches beyond Turkey to include many other countries living within the same cultural contradictions. They are a dying breed, but we can still find echoes of them in columnists writing in Turkey today. In Turkey a real columnist will write four or five times a week. He will take his subjects from every aspect of life, geography, and history. He will deploy every narrative shape and strategy, whether drawing upon the most mundane daily news or philosophy or memoir or sociological observation. Everything, from the city council—the shape of the new streetlamps—to questions of civilization—Turkey’s place between East and West—are within the columnist’s purview. (He is most likely to gain the reader’s attention by linking something like the shape of streetlamps to the East-West question.) The most successful are the most quarrelsome and agile debaters; they make their names with their polemic, their courage, and their blunt language. Quite a few of them have spent parts of their lives in prisons and courthouses as a result of what they have written. Their readers admire and trust them, not for their ability to illuminate or explain but for their courage and intrusiveness. They are stars because they presume to be experts on everything, because they seem to have an answer to any question, because they discuss political enmities about which everyone has an opinion. At times when the country is politically polarized, they are the witnesses who can find their way into all parts of society: into the homes of the powerful; into coffeehouses, state offices, and everyday life. Because they enjoy the readers’ trust and affection, one day talking about love and the next giving their views on Clinton and the pope, writing about a corrupt mayor with the same ease as they write about Freud’s errors, they become “Professors of Everything.” Ten or fifteen years ago—before television changed the country’s newspaper-reading habits—Turkish readers considered newspaper columns to be the highest literary form. In those days, whenever I traveled by bus around Anatolia, anyone who found out I was a writer would ask me which newspaper I worked for. When I was creating Celâl Salik, the columnist of The Black Book, and even more when I was writing his columns, my main concern was to ensure he bore no resemblance to the famous columnists of the day—each one of whom was as well known as the most powerful politicians—and thereby to escape the shadow cast by these illustrious writers. The real columnist I was most afraid of resembling, the columnist whose controversial stands made him the most famous of the past half century—was Çetin Altan. Recently Çetin Altan was charged with “insulting the state,” after speaking openly about its links with the Mafia and about certain murders in which the government had a hand. In one interview at the time of his trial, he revealed that he’d had roughly three hundred cases lodged against him. Because he was one of my great literary and political heroes when I was young, I remember both the days when he was sentenced to prison and the days of his release as high drama. During the time when he was a deputy for the Turkish Workers Party, his brilliant speeches in the National Assembly and his powerful columns caused him to lose his immunity, whereupon deputies from the then ruling conservative party subjected him to a beating in the National Assembly. Much of the anger that the state and public opinion vented against Altan came, without a doubt, from his being a socialist in a country neighboring the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In any case, from the 1970s on, when Altan began to direct his criticisms at the state, the anger against him did not abate. My own view is that conservatives and nationalists on the right and the left hated him because he refused to blame Turkey’s poverty and political and administrative inadequacies on the political experiments and manipulations of foreign powers, seeing the national problems as rooted in national conditions. When he criticized his own country, Altan never presented the reader with devils upon whom to heap all the blame, and neither did he offer recipes that might change the country’s fate overnight. More than the regime his target was Turkey’s culture, and this Altan observed with a sharp and ironic eye—its everyday habits, its way of thinking, its assumptions—ascribing to it the nation’s ills. Not only could Altan write in the language of the very people he most infuriated, he could also count on those same people to read him every day, and in this sense he was a sort of Naipaul. But Çetin Altan never succumbed to the pain that makes Naipaul seem so loveless and pessimistic. He remained optimistic about Westernization and modernization. This is why the West was not for him a center that caused pain because it was being imitated, or that was imitated because it caused pain and was responsible for all imaginable ills. His childish optimism came in part from the fact that Turkey had never suffered colonialism, and this allowed him to see Western civilization as a center that could be approached, if in a slow and measured way. Whatever it might be that makes “us” different from those living in the West, it is something we ourselves lack. Because we are not like Westerners, we must first establish what it is we lack and then make up for it. History, our history, is the history of all our shortcomings. Like so many Ottoman and Turkish intellectuals, and so many of our polemical columnists, Çetin Altan was given to long lists of dismal shortcomings that distinguish us from the West; they range from democracy to modern capitalism, from the art of the novel to individuality and piano playing, from the visual arts to prose, from the hat to which Atatürk gave so much importance to the table I jokingly proposed in The Silent House. In the 1970s, when political terror had risen to its current furious levels, Çetin Altan noticed one other lack, and that is our subject today. ''The detective story in Turkey is not as highly developed as it is in England, America, and France. Set against the complexities of life in industrial societies, their finely plotted murders have had a strong influence on the novels, plays, and films of these same societies, and as a consequence a great variety of creative talents have emerged in the detective genre.'' ''But in our village-dominated society, there is nothing clever about murder. A husband whose judgment is clouded by jealousy takes out his knife and stabs his wife without further ado, and the business is over. Or a man who has entered into a blood feud will see his enemy and empty his bullets into his brain then and there. In the countryside, where there is a dispute about land or water rights, the custom is to take up a double-barreled shotgun and lie in wait. Everyone knows who was killed by whom, and why. If this sort of murder has failed to interest writers, it is due to the roughness of the execution, which calls to mind a man bludgeoning a pumpkin with an axe, and this is why the art of detective fiction is so undeveloped in our country.'' On first reading, we cannot help but delight in the directness of the reasoning, the sharp-tongued humor, and perhaps that is why we might be inclined to accept Altan’s reasoning, but what might we say to rebut it' Well, we might mention the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, who used murders of a similarly rural nature in his detective novels with great success. One could also point to the many Western murders that—though they were executed with the coarseness that “calls to mind a man bludgeoning a pumpkin with an axe”—went on to inspire, or indeed were inspired by—detective stories. Not long after this particular column appeared, Çetin Altan wrote a collection of short detective stories, of a type that was very common in the early years of detective fiction. With these stories, in the style of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown series, he gave up on the idea that society had not given the writer enough life experience to write detective fiction, discarding this view as excessively determinist. But now let us dwell on his other assertion: “Everyone knows who was killed by whom, and why.” If you bear in mind that many murders are committed in the hope that they will never be discovered, it is immediately evident that this statement cannot always be true. Four hundred years before Çetin Altan spoke of the dearth of murders by unknown assailants in our culture, the Ottoman state (then in the midst of what old-guard historians call the classical age) grew so concerned about murders by unknown assailants that it made an unprecedentedly serious effort to address it to the pertinent legalities. Today we know that Sheikh-ul-Islam Ebussuud Efendi (who was the highest legal authority in the time of Süleyman the Magnificent, and whose decisions took on the aura of classical landmark precedents in the Western sense and influence rulings to this day) was often asked about who should pay the reparations for murders by unknown assailants. ''QUESTION: When four villages are at war with one another and one man is killed by a club wielded by another man whose identity is unknown, who pays the blood money'" "ANSWER: The people of the nearest village." "QUESTION: If someone gets killed close to a particular town and the murderer cannot be found, who pays the blood money' Is it the entire town, or is it just the people whose houses were close enough to hear the dying man’s screams'" "ANSWER: Those living close enough to hear the dying man’s screams." "QUESTION: If a body is found in a religious establishment at a time when the nighttime tenants are not in the shop itself, but in their living quarters, and the murderer cannot be found, who is responsible for the blood money' " "ANSWER: Those living close enough to the shop to hear the dying man’s screams. If no one lives close by, then the Treasury—in other words, the state—is responsible." We can see from these examples that the Ottoman penal code was greatly concerned with murders by unknown assailants, and that the state was aware that it had to take responsibility for such crimes—in other words, pay the blood money—if unable to lay it off on individual citizens. If one of these persons did not wish to take the blame, he was obliged to solve the murder himself. This was to introduce a possibility that we might have to take the blame for every murder that happened around us—the exact opposite of what we see today. To avoid the responsibility for a murder in those days, a person had to be open and alert to every sound and movement around him, to the point of paranoia. Because everyone knew he might be forced to take responsibility for every murder committed in his neighborhood, it is not hard to anticipate the ardor with which the common man would chase after criminals and murderers. In my personal observation, this understanding of responsibility and the anxiety it evokes is still the rule in Istanbul, even with its present population of ten million. Perhaps you could see this as a carryover from the old anxieties about blood money, but the moral vision it suggests—a world in which everyone considers everyone else responsible for everything—is one that Dostoyevsky would have wholeheartedly approved. But let us not seek to mislead anyone: Today’s Istanbul—today’s Turkey—is a world leader in state-sponsored murder by unknown assailants, not to mention systematic torture, trammels on freedom of expression, and the merciless abuse of human rights. In contrast to Nigeria, Korea, and China, however, Turkey also has a democracy strong enough to allow voters to force the state to refrain from such practices. It is therefore very easy to infer that most electors have shockingly little interest in human rights. What is difficult is to explain why, after four hundred years of responsibility by proximity, and fear of paying the price as their neighbors’ keepers, they now take so little interest when the state is banning books and beating and torturing neighbors in the next building. I mean only to alert you to this situation. I am not particularly interested in exploring or explaining it. This is probably because I don’t wish to explain away one cultural shortcoming with another. There is in all such subjects something that kills the poet inside us. Sometimes the silence seems to suggest that, as Beckett once said, “There is nothing to be said,” and at other times that “there is far too much to be said.” is at times like this that I understand only too well why Turgenev wanted to forget everything to do with Russia, why he went to Baden-Baden and gave himself over to a life that was in every way divorced from her, why he would scold anyone who tried to discuss Russia’s problems with him (as in that famous story), telling such people that he was not in the least interested in Russia and inclined rather to put the place out of his mind forever. This despite the fact that there have been many other times when I have thought that the best thing to do would be to stay in Turkey, lock myself up in a room, and travel into my imagination with the vague intention of writing a book. In fact, I did just that from 1975 to 1982, when murder and political violence, state oppression, torture, and prohibition were at their height. To lock myself up in a room to write a new history—a new story with allegories, obscurities, silences, and never-heard sounds—is, of course, better than to write another history of defects that seeks to explain our defects by means of other defects. To embark on such a journey there is no need to know exactly where you are going; it is enough to know where you do not wish to be. Let us remain in that locked room I just mentioned, to look at the way in which I work with allegory and obscurity. There is a novel that was translated into Turkish as The Secret of the Yellow Room by the French author Gaston Leroux, best known in recent years for his Phantom of the Opera. The Secret is celebrated by devotees of detective fiction as the first and most brilliant example of the “murder in a locked room.” The door of the room where the murder has taken place is locked, and inside is a body with a set number of suspects. After the murder, someone with a flair for solving puzzles examines the clues and, having established the facts, determines the reasons for the murder. Seventy years after Gaston Leroux wrote The Secret of the Yellow Room, the Spanish author Manuel Vázquez Montalbán wrote a book entitled Murder in the Central Committee, proving that the possibilities afforded by the murder-in-a-locked-room template are not easily exhausted; the locked room in this political detective novel is a conference room for a party resembling the Spanish Communist Party, and when the lights go out the general secretary is killed. Whatever form it takes, murder in a locked room offers a clear understanding of crime, law, and punishment. After the murder, an outside investigator, usually an agent of the state, arrives to question each suspect individually. These interrogations confirm that we are solely responsible to the central authority outside us for the crimes we have committed. The locked room is the best way to convey the idea that we are neither responsible nor guilty as a group, a neighborhood, or a society. We are either guilty as individuals or we are not guilty at all. This world in which we are only responsible to the state for our crimes is a long way from the moral universe that Dostoyevsky dreamed of. I mentioned the locked room because I wanted to explain why, when we lack even the basic principles that might help us understand our history, we can only connect with it through allegory. What we need is a new variation on the murder-in-a-locked-room story, which I brought up only as an example. In the reworked version, the responsibility for the murder (this being an allegory, we might refer to it simply as the Crime) will attack the owner of the room in which it was committed, along with all those who live there and all those living close enough to hear the dying man’s screams. From the moment we accept this—at an early point in the story—we will proceed as if we are playing chess by new rules, and it will be possible for us to foresee how the murderer or the criminal will work with the knowledge of our system. It is clear that, to keep from being found, to avoid becoming the sole person responsible, the murderer must act on the assumption that everyone in the vicinity is responsible. This might bring us to Çetin Altan’s theory, that responsibility for the crime lies inside the culture itself. But if we begin instead with allegories, obscurities, and faint new voices that we don’t quite know how to use, we will at least be able to save ourselves from writing more histories of the defects and the differences that led us to defeat. In my youth, when I was curious to know and understand everything, and read columnists like Çetin Altan with a passion, I had the idea that I might one day become a writer. But I did not, like so many of those with similar dreams, think about what I might write; I thought instead about what stance I should take. My image of the writer drew less from the modernists, who used writing as a sort of vehicle of protection, than from the writers of the enlightenment, who wished to understand everything, show the reader everything. Now I know both approaches to be inadequate and overly derivative. In a society swarming with devils, the devil of modernism is not clever enough. To converse with the devils, the writers of the enlightenment too often accommodated state power and authority. Perhaps I am like most writers: Because I cannot deal in concepts, I look for allegories and tell stories. But I am not complaining, and I think myself lucky, because in my country allegories take the place of philosophy and people believe stories more than they do theories.