Authors Umberto Eco and Orhan Pamuk came together around "A Dialogue on Facts, Fiction and History" yesterday, a convivial chat dedicated to the 150th foundation anniversary of Boğaziçi University.
The convivial chat took place in Boğaziçi University's Albert Ling Hall, moderated by Prof. Patrizia Violi from Bologna University. Co-hosted by Italian Culture Center, Boğaziçi and Şehir Universities, the activity attracted a lively crowd.
Eco: “I happened to realize that most people are stupid"
Kicking off their chat with the comparison between two different approaches to authorship and readership; naive and emotional on one hand, intellectual and sophisticated on another, the two authors emphasized on how both approaches were essential to understand a novel.
Mentioning Schiller who praised Goethe as a romantic and naive author in one of his article on poetry, Pamuk said "a naive and emotional author is who writes without a route or technique; who doesn't consider political or moral consequences, symbols and codes. Modern sensitivity, however, requires the opposite. There are times that I cannot reach that naïveté even I try hard to. Sometimes I want to measure the effect of my writings on my readers by looking at them from their perspective," Pamuk said.
He continued that he condescended readers' emotional perspective, and said: "We find ourselves too sophisticated to cry for what happened to Anna Karenina. We read that novel not to cry about it, but to understand it. However contradictory it seems, we need both emotion and conception to fully understand a novel."
Eco, ın return, said he happened to realize that most people are indeed stupid. "This idea prepares me to death. There are two types of stupid people. First, the one who find themselves too smart to develop an emotional perspective on a fictional work. This is stupid because you can't understand the esthetics of a novel without feeling it emotionally. Second, the ones who read fiction only to weep or find out who the murderer was, without having any intellectual desire."
Pamuk: "I wanted to be a novelist first of all to be alone"
Towards the end of the conference, moderator asked Pamuk and Eco their motives to become a writer.
"I was raised in a family of engineers, but I was dreaming to be a painter. In the end, I made an arrangement with my family to go to a school of architecture. However, I always knew what kind of a life I wanted to pursue, another way was impossible. For some reason, I happened to realize that I couldn't become a painter. Then I said to myself, 'Why not an author?' A lot of people say they became authors because they had 'things to say'. It wasn't the case for me. First, I decided to write, then I had things to say," Pamuk said.
Eco, on the other hand, said: "Some people climb on Mont Blanc, some people rob banks, I became an author. There is nothing to explain about it.
Photo credit: Erhan Elaldı / AA
