Honor, Face, and Violence. Mine Krause
and, with a different temporal dynamic, in face cultures. We can understand the literature as these cultures’ imaginary, in terms of the “creative and symbolic dimension of the social world” (Thompson 6). Yet this corpus has hardly been studied; as far as we could see, until now none of the research contributions dealing with honor and face in the sciences includes a literary focus. Drawing on Sufi wisdom, Turkish writer Elif Shafak points out one of the related consequences: “The problem with today’s cultural ghettos is not lack of knowledge. We know a lot about each other, or so we think. But knowledge that takes us not beyond ourselves, it makes us elitist, distant and disconnected” (Shafak, “Politics”). Shafak tells us that, for fiction, the drawing compass is a desirable metaphor: while one leg is firmly grounded, the other “draws a wide circle, constantly moving” (“Politics”). With its presentation of temporality in the narration as well as in its content, narrative can qualify as a form of knowledge (see also Kreiswirth). Sociologist Mariano Longo explores literature in depth as a form of empirical material: his analysis considers fictional narratives as “tools that a sociologist may adopt to get in contact with dense representations of specific aspects of the social” (Longo 2). Since such narratives are capable of “organizing human experience in a meaningful temporal sequence,” they “may cast new light on human experience as such” (Longo 33). This emphasis also allows us to recognize that imaginative literature and phenomenology are not independent of each other; as Pol Vandevelde explains, literature is intrinsically phenomenological, just as phenomenology functions rather like literature. The social sciences, for their part, underline “the relevance of meaning as a structural element” in our relation with the social environment (Longo 34). Indeed, communication research indicates that phenomenology with a semiotic orientation ←4 | 5→can effectively engage complexities of “racial, ethnic, and cross-cultural difference” (Martinez 293). What is more, one can think of narratives as a process by which “the description of singular events and actions is useful to explain other contexts and actions” (Longo 50). Complementing sociology’s form of reality-understanding, they are able to give “a plausible representation of social reality and intercourse,” presenting events and themes as an “a-referential” representation of the referential world (Longo 137, 140, 147). We support this argumentation, especially seeing that the a-referential mode is elucidated further in the interpretive “shuttle” proposed by Harry Berger, to be explained further below.
Since the so-called ethical turn new attention has been given to Wayne Booth’s dictum that stories are “our major moral teachers” (241). Nie Zhenzhao argues that “[l];iterature teaches by giving illustrations of ethical choices” (Ross 7).11 As we turn our attention to the corpus, we should keep in mind Cao Shunqing’s call for taking into account not only the “homogeneity and affinity” but also “Variation and heterogeneity” (with a capital V) between cultures in studying comparability (xxx). Our chapters will give evidence of such heterogeneity. For these purposes, however, to offer literature as “authentic” material to explain or record a culture and by implication its mainstream would amount to a misunderstanding. It would mean essentializing the culture, treating a fictional artifact as a sociological and ethnographical document rather than as “a commentary on the culture” (Dalvai 282).12 From these considerations, we are encouraged by Pierre Bourdieu’s prominent attention to fiction’s lucid “ways of truth-telling” to analyze the masculinist experience of honor (Masculine 69).
←5 | 6→
Marginal or representative conditions? (I)
The composite story told by the fictional works we have found may perhaps appear somewhat marginal rather than representative, a) if one considers a dominant or hegemonic masculinity mainly as a societal ideal in Western advertisements, b) if one finds it theoretically awkward to focus on a gender bias in exploring stigma in non-Western populations, or c) if one foregrounds that women can damage a family’s honor in Western societies as well as elsewhere (see, for instance, Ermers 54, 76, and 192). Yet whether the supposedly marginal is less significant is a matter of perspective.
Thus we can suggest a first way of responding to the query about a representative character of the stories of honor. Fiction “takes the prevalent thought system or social system as its context, but does not reproduce the frame of reference which stabilizes these systems” (Iser 71). It “tends to take as its dominant ‘meaning’ those possibilities that have been neutralized or negated by that system” (Iser 72). Nobel Prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s work illuminates this: “[…] the focus of much of Pamuk’s work lies on transgressing the official narratives of Turkish identity enforced by Kemalism and challenging the uncompromising secularism of the republic” (Furlanetto 55). Hence we remain aware of the fact that literature sometimes represents “typical deficits, blind spots, imbalances, deformations, and contradictions within dominant systems of civilizatory power”; it stages and semiotically empowers what is “marginalized, neglected or repressed in the dominant cultural reality system” (Zapf 62–63). Esther Lezra argues in a similar direction, claiming that “[a];s critics, readers and writers, we contribute to the disordering of dominant discourses by recognizing, pointing to and pushing the limits that dominant narratives would impose. We contribute to the remembering of erased and forgotten experiences and voices by pointing to the traces and echoes left by these acts of violence and historical forgetting” (102). Turkish author Sema Kaygusuz justly celebrates writers for whom writing becomes “an existential act,” who have “turned their back on hardline sensitivities” and “attacked the official version of history” (“Literature”).
Marginal or representative conditions? (II)
Yet should we also bear in mind the intersecting possibility that a staged marginality is co-opted in the commodification culture of a profitable book market? This suggests a second response to the query about a representative character of the stories of honor. It reveals a flaw in some of the above arguments: they do not always understand discourse as a Foucaultian event, as one can gather from ←6 | 7→Archaeology of Knowledge (II.1), one which includes speaker, words, hearers, location, language, and dissemination channels. “Who is speaking to whom” is a vital element of meaning: a writer’s positionality, location, or context are always relevant to the represented content (Alcoff 12, 14).13 In our time and not only in Europe the so-called masses, those who are struggling, “know perfectly well, without illusion,” yet “there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge” – while the intellectual is “object and instrument” of the system (Foucault, “Intellectuals” 207–08).
Are writers instruments of a power system?
This question requires more attention, at least as a brief extension of our topic focus. Some authors whose works are part of our corpus comment quite explicitly on the experience, among them Turkish writer Ayfer Tunç. According to her own statement, she writes for “qualified readers” of her home country: “Turkey still has […] really powerful ‘qualified readers’ despite its population. In my opinion, this situation shows that our writers still can influence the readers in Turkey and their words create an effect into [sic] people even if they are not majority.”14 Yet what is especially significant in the present context is her experience that “Western writers expect us to write novels that show them more clearly as Westerners, and us more clearly as Easterners; they want us to make them feel happy and secure in this regard” (“Literature”). Western publishers, accordingly, “want stories of abject penury: about lives ruined under the weight of customs and traditions, about the unbreachable chasm between Muslim and Western lifestyles, and tales of ethnic strife” (“Literature”).15