Orhan Pamuk: ‘My Name is Red’

 

The author’s gift for memorable openings is recalled in ‘The Museum of Innocence”, where the two lovers of the story are first introduced in the middle of the act of lovemaking, an extended erotic description that infuses the reader’s thoughts for the rest of the novel, in the expectation of when will this happen again. 

‘My Name is Red’ employs an equally remarkable device to take hold of the reader’s attention and keep it there: the reader listens to a story told by a dead person. And not just any dead person, but a fresh corpse, the murdered man at the centre of the story, speaking now from where his body has been thrown at the bottom of a well. 

The whole novel is spoken in the voices of different characters, living and dead, as well as unexpected voices like a dog, or a tree in a picture-book. Such variety of voices keeps the reader alert to what might happen next, while enabling a decameron of perspectives about the late 16^th century world of Constantinople.

 

Always Istanbul to the characters in this story. For, indeed, the Sultan is supreme in this society, his very titles, fabulous and unquestioned, intimating a world remote and absolute, far removed from ours. Whenever the Sultan is so much as mentioned, let alone appears before us, characters tremble, the atmosphere is at a loss for words, and the language-colour of the story becomes charged with awe and fear.

 

Although from the start a murder mystery, the story’s main concerns are only secondarily whodunnit. Above all else the concern is about ways of seeing, modes of representation, observed through the eyes of miniaturists, and the rendered ideally, those artists of the book who enjoyed highest status in the city. For indeed, it is such an artist who is found murdered, motive for his death bound up in some sort of in-house style wars.

 

The matter of how to represent a face in a miniature, and by extension then the whole scene according to the Persian style, fixates these artists of the Palace atelier. Or should they adopt, as requested by the Sultan, the Frankish (i.e. European) photorealist style all the rage in Italy and beyond? That one, and then another, miniaturist is found dead, their faces disfigured beyond recognition, seems related to this question.

 

The author speaks always through the first person I of each character, which means we meet the master miniaturists, their friends, rivals, and family, then even the matter of their art, memorably a horse in a painting, and even the colour red. Each of the 59 chapters, some short others engagingly lengthy, detail their individual world, as if we are gazing upon a Persian miniature in all its formality and intricacy. The reader is invited to gaze upon these marvels.

 

Orhan Pamuk has a celebrated gift of knowing the shape of the whole story before he commences writing. This means he can take time over characters’ gestures, responses, interactions down to the finest moments of connection, leaving the reader with an imprint that is both verbal and visual. His thrill with lists becomes ours, as he catalogues in vivid images the results of a riot in an all-hours coffee house or the contents of the forbidden Palace Treasury. Such writing makes rich and physical an Istanbul that has for centuries been out of reach.  

 

Fortunate is the reader with close access, in some form, to the Persian art of the decades previous to 1590, and to such concurrent artists as Holbein and Dürer. The contrast between these different and equally remarkable styles of art explains the crisis of confidence and purpose that besets the atelier, as artists trained to perfect the mastery of Bihzad of Herat are suddenly expected to produce something ‘Frankish’. As so often in Pamuk, East meets West in a conflict of desires sure to unsettle if not in fact to cause havoc or worse.   

 

While on the one hand the reader encounters Islam’s severe rulings on figurative art, such that Westerners are not just doctrinally but artistically heretical, she soon sees that the Sultan’s secret project, a book in the Frankish style, presents an expectation that is at seeming odds with the norms of Ottoman society. What to do when portraiture is thought the greatest of sins?

 

Time is moving on and everyone is caught in the changes. The legendary Islamic romance ‘Husrev and Shirin’ hovers around the edges of the story of Shekure, as well as literally in descriptions of miniatures. She is close to being the main character, though Pamuk has been quoted as saying that role is played by the storyteller of the whole sequence. Who exactly the storyteller is, is a surprise towards the end of the book even more surprising than the identity of the murderer.

 

Shekure experiences the attentions of all those around her. Her husband seems to have gone awol on a military expedition, leaving her with two young children. One of the miniaturists happens to be her childhood sweetheart and there are others as well hanging about with a love interest. Her main interest throughout, however, is on the welfare of her children, a fact that motivates her quick-witted behaviour in all sorts of situations.

 

She, like the other women in the story, shifts attention from the tensions of intercultural crisis to the daily decisions and actions that will realise a secure future in an uncertain environment. The milieu of creative ideas, epitomised in the rivalries and ambitions of the male world of rulers and artists, must meet the necessary and cunning plans of the women, for whom everything is secondary to proper living, harmony, and survival.

 

To read ‘My Name is Red’ for the first time, 27 years after the book first appeared in the original, is to wonder at the confidence of its scope; its gorgeous evocation of a lost world largely unknown to most readers outside Turkey; and the seeming easiness of Pamuk’s grand and yet intricate storytelling, almost Tolstoyan in its mastery.

 

Readers at the time of its English release (2001) were interested in its nostalgia, and though the author is entranced by the beauties of the historical period circa the 1590s in Istanbul, a peak period in the city’s cultural life, nostalgia is not his central concern. He is telling a sophisticated fable, one in which several contemporary concerns are being played out in another time.

 

Fundamentalism is one of his concerns, the conflict between hardline puritanical schools of Islam and more civilised schools. This social divide plays itself out not just in the arguments about high art, but permeates how people conduct themselves in different settings. The threat of fundamentalist preachers and their violent followers to the stability of the city is also a familiar reality today, influential on even secular states like Turkey.

 

Coupled with that is its fraught and unavoidable relationship with Europe. The Fall of Constantinople (1453) remains a profound global shift for characters in the book. The Turks have an always troubled relationship with Orthodoxy and a disturbingly ambiguous relationship with the Latin West, sparking envy, greed, but also flare-ups of hatred and rejection. Translate that to modern Turkey’s vexed efforts at accession to membership of the European Union, and the reader can quickly appreciate in the micro-drama of Orhan Pamuk’s story the conflicting allegiances of those living in Istanbul today.