Honor, Face, and Violence - Mine Krause Cross Cultural Communication

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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.

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      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”).

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