"To dig a well with a needle": Orhan Pamuk's Poem of Comparative Globalization

No contemporary author has brought the questions of how to think the nation and comparative literature together as relentlessly as the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. No other author thinks the "internal globalization" of the nation or the nation in its many temporalities, in its several historic instantiations, as Pamuk. His work provides a distinct—we might even say historically unique, anxious and ambivalent—place from which to think comparison not only because of where he is writing from or about, but also because Pamuk thinks comparably from that most non-European of European locations: Istanbul. For Pamuk, his native city is, as he terms it in his Nobel Lecture, at once the "center of the world" and a place of "Chekhovian provinciality." Istanbul represents one of the major paradoxes of and for comparative literature. It is that space of the Other, a condition that is itself at once challenged, troubled, and reified in Pamuk's work, but which has made possible the salvation, at least in comparative literature terms, of the (Western) Self.