Life and Beyond
Fuat Sevimay (Turkey)
When we talk about documentary, we expect it to be in touch with life and its effects on people. And when we talk about fiction, we should assume something beyond life. It could be either realistic or fantastic, whatever the base of fiction is, it derives from the imagination of a writer, thus we could call it “beyond life”.
Maybe some of you have read Orhan Pamuk’s novel “Museum of Innocence”. It tells us the love of Kemal and Füsun. Not to give spoiler to those who haven’t read it yet, I prevent myself to tell something more. However, I should mention at least that; Kemal is a passionate lover and crowns his love to Füsun with a museum which hosts several objects which have witnessed their love, such as cigarette butts, Füsun’s dresses, some banners of the films they have watched together, a fork stolen from Füsun’s house just because it has touched Füsun’s lips and so on. And we can call all those “imagination of Orhan Pamuk”, thus beyond life.
But we haven’t come to the striking point yet. The museum aforesaid within the novel, now takes place in ?stanbul, I mean in real life, not just in fiction, and you can visit it if you pay a visit to my beloved city. Furthermore, I would be happy to guide you for that. Orhan Pamuk has established a museum after the publication of the novel and thanks to that, you can visit a novel. I believe that it is the best literature museum all around the world, as of its idea. Because, life, fiction, reality, imagination all mix to each other there.
Fine, hopefully you liked the idea. But we have something more.
Couple of years after the museum’s establishment, Irish documentary film director Grant Gee made a film called “Innocence of Memories” where, Orhan Pamuk as the writer, one of the secondary characters of the novel as the story teller, the museum itself and besides Orhan Pamuk’s home, streets of Istanbul, the process of writing and the feeling of readers all took place.
So, depending on the story of the museum, as of either the museum itself or as of novel, and also your innocence and interest, I would request you to help me to find the answer for those question;
What are the limits of life when it becomes part of a fiction?
And what about this;
How does fiction go beyond life?
A final one;
Can documentary be fictitious?
This time, to have an answer for those questions or at least to wander around a reasonable answer, I would request help from Mr. James Joyce, the great Irish writer.
Besides my own novels and short story collections, I also do translations and have fulfilled the translation of Joyce’s whole volume, including Finnegans Wake which is said to be the hardest novel to be read or translated ever written, Ulysses which is also a masterpiece, moreover Portrait, Dubliners and so on.
After all that translation period, many readers demanded things like dictionary or annotation or guide for Joyce’s works from me, which would point out the references and under meaning of the novels, since that they had difficulty to read and understand this great writer. However, I never thought literature as something to be understood, explained or directly told. Rather we have to feel it. Even so, I did not want to upset those readers, credit with Joyce being a hardcore writer.
Finally, I decided to create a protagonist from James Joyce who would come and tell his own story. So he woke up from his sin, assuming that he was bored to lie there for dozens of years. He, I mean Joyce of my novel appears in Istanbul at 16th of June 2013. 16th of June because of Ulysses. 2013 because of Gezi Resistance in Turkey against the authoritarian government. Then he meets with the translator. On the one hand they talk about all Joyce novels, why he wrote that, why Bloom is such a man, why young Dedalus in portrait is a bit different than Dedalus of Joyce, who is HCE or ALP and many other things, and on the other hand, Joyce runs away from the police because of the riot, falls in love with a Turkish lady, misses Ireland but also does not want to leave his lover, happy with his memories from the beginning of the 20th century but also curious about our contemporary time at 21st century.
The title of the novel in Turkish is “Benden’iz James Joyce”. I would translate it to English as “Yours True’lie James Joyce”.
Afterwards, I mean following the publication of that novel, I had question marks about myself. Am I the translator of Joyce or writer of the translator. Is James Joyce truly happy to be a part of the fiction and furthermore, can we call this a fiction or a true-lie? Maybe I should call it a documentary novel (not a biography, no, never!) having a new and specific style of itself.
Now, if we move backwards within the scope of those two samples, I mean “Museum of Innocence” and “Yours True’lie James Joyce”, and remember the questions asked within this text beforehand, I should mention that if we have exact and strong answers, we would estrange ourselves from artistic point of view. That is to say; if a documentary is partially fictious, it would create questions, demand our thought and feeling, finally, would be more in the scope of art.
We must believe that Joyce could wake up. We must believe that museums in novels can turn out to be real. And reality could become documentary. And documentary must be beyond life and pure reality. This, I believe, what art is.
Believe in me. However even myself is dubious about it.
So, better of it; believe in yourself.
Through art.