!�="justify">The Orhan Pamuk incident has gone on for too long, bringing to the surface yet again our perennial identity problem.

  Turkey has to reach a definite decision on freedom of thought and expression. When that freedom is limited, the public loses sight of the essence of the problems under discussion, with the focus of debate shifting to defending liberties in an unproductive manner. Furthermore, it creates the impression that we are not capable of refuting an idea -- if it can even be called an idea -- with another idea.

  Pamuk is undoubtedly a good writer. He might well win the Nobel Prize if he were not too eager and too impatient. Even if they fail to give him the Nobel Prize, he will still be a good writer. It is not right to say, “A good writer should be nationalist as a rule, defending the Turks, a nation that has suffered from gross injustice in the recent past,” or, “Such a writer should act as a spokesman for the oppressed peoples of the world.” Naturally, whether he will become a better writer or not by adopting these attitudes is a different question.

  The issue at hand is, in a way, related to the place the novel enjoys in contemporary society as a literary genre. Obviously, no modern novelists are on par with the world's great novelists of the past. One might conclude that the novel's function has diminished in the modern world.

  Generally speaking, in an era where psychoanalysis is being used extensively as a method of investigation, a novel's power of indirectly influencing readers works only on the masses who are not familiar with this subliminal method. Those who are aware, on the other hand, cannot help but analyze as they read along; they analyze the relationship between the personality of the novelist himself, the characters created by the author and the plot of the novel. As a result, the novel largely loses its attraction for them.

  Despite this, I believe that the novel has retained its importance as a genre. In the 1980s, discussions had taken place on the question of whether a great writer would emerge to ensure the transmutation of European integration into a new European identity. Those who advocated such a development claimed that Anglo-Saxon culture (even Anglo-Saxon civilization) was founded by Shakespeare.

  If one were to accept the concept of “culture/civilization-founding writer,” one could argue that Dante shaped Italian culture, Cervantes did the same for the Spanish and Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy for Russian culture. One could even look farther back into the past and consider Homer to be the creator of the Ionian culture and Sophocles as creator of the classical Greek culture -- at the risk of injustice to some others. (With the exception of the Russians, these writers can hardly be considered nationalists.)

  By displaying the darkest side of human nature under a thin literary veil, Shakespeare's “Hamlet” and Sophocles' “Oedipus the King” may well have unleashed a massive cultural energy in English and Greek societies, respectively. Western civilization has not managed to surpass ancient Greece probably because Sophocles had, in this respect, traveled far beyond where Shakespeare later did, and with greater skill.

  Our intellectuals finally managed to translate the book “La Violence et le Sacre,” published by Rene Girard in 1972, into Turkish. No more than few of them must have read his subsequent books related to that subject. According to Girard, people fight for the same thing. It is enough for one to fight if someone else wants the same thing. Girard calls it “mimetism.” In Greek tragedy, those who struggle to possess the same thing or to reach the same goal become “doubles.” Thanks to the positive qualities attributed to him just because he has won the struggle, the victor comes to be perceived as the founder of the social order that had been destroyed by the struggle. If Pamuk had known of Girard, he would have arranged the plot in “White Castle” in such a way that would have given the book a truly convincing “ending,” with which he has said he is dissatisfied.

  Pamuk could have discovered the goal and mechanism of Greek tragedy without studying the “System Girard.” But for that he would have to overcome his current state of psychology. The state that Pamuk is in is reminiscent of the first phase of Dostoyevsky's literary career. After analyzing himself via the unnamed character in his work “Notes from the Underground,” Dostoyevsky stepped into the second phase, that is, the order-founding or culture-founding phase, whereas Pamuk, just as the character in question, is still trying to compensate for his neurotic frailty by adopting a facade of spiritual firmness and courage.

  The problem has nothing to do with Pamuk's criticism of society. A writer cannot be a “founding” writer, anyway, if he sees the salvation of society in fleeing to another civilization -- that he deems to be superior -- rather than in the mobilization of strength inherent in the souls of its members. His mission would be limited to serving the pathological unconscious tendencies of certain circles in the EU, tendencies that aim to have the Turkish identity undermined by Turks themselves.

  And in that case his words, good and bad alike, would simply not matter.