Author: Jessica Tang

At first, I felt kind of awkward doing the ekphrasis exercise because I didn’t know how to start. The challenge was that the illumination in front of me (left part of Plate 59) was a cohesive, compact image that I needed to unravel the story of. It occurred to me that if given the opportunity and enough knowledge about the iconography and story of Christ, it was very possible that this one tiny illumination could be represented in pages of text that, like we discussed in class, both describes and tells a story. In reflection, I’m discovering a new meaning to “A picture is worth a thousand words.” I used to think of this saying mostly in the context of photographs. I thought it meant that a photo was one of the best ways to capture or eternalize an experience, to preserve whatever feelings you referred to when you told people they “had to be there” to understand. Now, I see how this saying would be applied to illustrations as well. Unlike photographs which are often limited by the frame of the camera, illustrations can be sprawling, busy, empty, borderless, composed however the artist wants. To use the Hüsrev and Shirin illumination from class as an example, illustrations can reveal the subtleties of the relationships between people, of the relationship between people and nature, and of traditions from the time period. I think the artist has more choice with illustrations versus photographs, which makes what is excluded and included in the image, and how it is composed, all the more intriguing.

It’s a big responsibility to put words down on a page and say that that’s what an image says or that’s the story it tells, especially if you don’t know the original artist. This was my case during the ekphrasis exercise, and I imagine Pamuk’s case writing My Name is Red, with all his weavings of Islamic stories based on the illuminations he’s studied. It’s kind of funny (maybe meta?) how Pamuk writes about miniaturists debating how they should portray religious concepts and what kinds of implications these representations will have for the future, because Pamuk is probably having a similar debate with himself. He is probably thinking about how to describe new and old Islamic illuminations in such a way that it shows Western influences seeping into Eastern, how there’s less clear distinguishing between the two, and how to position these works of art as representations of the real-life tensions at the time. The miniaturists’ doubts about the meaning of how they proceed with their craft might be echos of Pamuk’s own?

For the record, here is Maraina’s and my attempt at ekphrasis: “Engulfed in darkness, faces are lit by flaming torches lifted high above the heads. Men all turn to stare at Jesus’s haloed presence in awe. Surrounding this scene, a dragonfly flitters down a myriad of multicolored flowers.”

I appreciate how we studied European illuminated manuscripts before beginning My Name is Red. Learning about Western traditions of including personal touches, inside jokes, references to patrons, and many other individualistic qualities has provided me with strong points of comparison that help me better understand non-Western traditions. Consequently, I’ve been more able to feel the gravity of one of the main aspects of the novel’s plot — that is, why it was such a big deal to include a signature or use a certain style, such that the culprit felt the need to kill.

One line that does a good job of summing up the Turkish/non-Western style of illuminated manuscripts is, “I don’t want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning” (51). The tree looks frantically for the story or context that it belongs to. It doesn’t care about whether people can identify who it was drawn by. Thus, the tree’s sentiment reflects the non-Western emphasis on conceptual over visual/aesthetic representation, as it wants to show a meaning instead of a thing. Additionally, the tree also sort of reflects the symbolizing of the infinite and decentralized that we talked about in class, in that this meaning will be passed on from generation to generation (I think?). Hence, the tree is part of something bigger than itself, transcending time and space through its role in illuminating well-known stories and concepts.

I might be wrong on this, but I feel like in a few instances, Pamuk plays with the concept of mortality. I feel like some of the novel’s characters are very conscious of the fact that they are human and will die, and thus wonder about their legacy. (I don’t know what caused this concern, perhaps it’s from having more contact with European creators, who are heavily focused on the intimate, the personal, and the one-on-one worship?) In any case, I think Pamuk explores an interesting dilemma between our finite lives and the possibly infinite lives of the things we leave behind (the original artwork doesn’t even have to exist anymore for us to talk about, think about, or incorporate it). For example, the murderer believes that his skills were meant to be seen: “Allah wouldn’t have bestowed this favor upon us miniaturists” (19) (but I guess the rebuttal to that would be, the gift was meant not meant for you to show your identity through depiction of the sacred?). The Shah’s daughter rejects the man who won the painting competition with his faithfully traditional works, because they contained no essence of her. She wanted something that proved his love to her in their shared lifetime. Even the corpse questions his mark on the world: “But, [is my family] truly waiting? . . . Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I’d been living luminously between two eternities of darkness” (3). I wonder if the corpse’s thoughts are any indication that he might change his opinion on conceptual versus visual representation later in the novel (not that either one is better than the other). These questions of how we could deal with our mortalities as humans is one of the underlying issues behind the seemingly inconsequential decision (at least today) to include our own signatures, personal touches, styles, or flairs.

In addition to the rich illustrations and lovely music, I enjoyed The Secret of Kells because of its 1) depiction of the manuscript making process and 2) portrayal of what manuscripts meant to people at the time. For one, the film’s representation of the writing quill was really impressive to me. Before this course, I thought the shape of the quill tip was basically like that of a pen’s. However, the Getty Museum video demonstrated the intentionality of the tip shape, how it was carved and trimmed down depending on the type of writing needed. As I’m Googling “cartoon quill,” I see that many images leave out the unique quill tip shape. Thus, in retrospect, it was nice to have an accurate portrayal of the quill, and to see how it worked (i.e. how it held ink) when Brendan spilled some on the parchment. The representation of parchment also referenced facts in the Clemens Graham “Writing Supports” reading. The animated parchment carried a certain texture that was similar to that of real parchment, which varied based on the type of animal or animal part used. The film’s parchment was pulled taut on a wooden frame as well.

Several parts of the film reminded me of the labor that went into creating a manuscript, and thus how much people valued them and their potential. Brendan’s long and strenuous quest for gallnuts demonstrated the difficulty of finding materials to produce ink. More specifically, his journey helped me better grasp what scarcity meant when it came to bookmaking in the medieval ages, and thus better appreciate the significance of the use of rare colors. Perhaps my favorite mechanism used in the film was when the screen was divided into three sections with characters crossing over each one to show the laborious passage of time and across space. Also, just as we had discussed in class, Brendan and Aidan worked with dedication by candlelight. Given the Book of Kells’ ornateness, it is no surprise that it seemed to take more than the couple of years (i.e. Brendan went from child to adult) that we suggested would be needed to complete an illuminated manuscript. I also liked the scenes when Brendan leafed through the manuscript, experiencing its images and texts glow and leap off the page, and when Brendan and Aidan read the book huddled together in a hut with others. These were affecting visual representations of the two’s trust in the book to “light the way in [those] dark days.”