Images With(In) Books

I have a very small comment to make that isn’t particularly revolutionary, but I would still like to point it out. What I appreciated about this book the most was the formatting of each chapter as if it itself was an illumination. A single miniature is not capable of describing at length an entire story. What miniatures attempt to do is allude to the complicated nature of the scene with transcendent motifs including color and body language. What it can do well is depict a single scene in clarity and detail in order to present the fullest picture of a single event.

The book’s small chapters act as small vignettes into the story in a similar manner as the illuminated miniatures. Pamuk writes in a exorbitant amount of detail into his chapters, with each  chapter transforming into a miniature. As with a miniature, he provides only enough in each chapter that we as readers picture that which is being described in the image, but are reliant on the next chapter for another detailed image to weave into the one another. Motifs like the image of an unlucky dog transcend the boundaries of the chapter ends, binding the story together and grounding the plot and characters within a greater symbolic culture.

There’s no question as to the merit of My Name Is Red–the interweaving of narrators is masterful, the description is breathtaking, and the mystery creates a tense but subtle suspense throughout the work. However, I don’t think we’ve talked much about the fact that this is, of course, a translated work. And while it’s clear that Pamuk is writing for an international audience and consistently brings the audience into enough of a cultural understanding that the work doesn’t feel displaced, I still find myself wondering what was lost in translating the original Turkish to English.

But My Name is Red is a particularly interesting case study when it comes to translation, since it’s a book about art–and art supposedly ought to transcend cultural divides in ways that language can’t. But neither art nor language exist in a vacuum, and my personal lack of historical context and the book’s translation make me wonder if I’m reading this through a doubly refracted lens. Of course, this is a remarkably self-aware text, and it’s difficult to imagine that Pamuk failed to anticipate foreign rights sales.

The further I get in My Name Is Red the more am I struck by the multilayered nature of the relationship between Black and Shekure. To me, Black’s feelings aren’t love – rather, they’re indicative of powerful obsession. Since the start of the novel, Black’s words and actions concerning Shekure always kind of creeped me out, to be frank. He leaves for years and still cannot forget her, and when he comes back, he will stop at nothing to marry her. Their meeting in The Hanged Jew also shows that he cannot control his desire for her. Yes, Shekure too wants the marriage to happen, but to me it seems to be more out of fear of Hasan and want for protection for herself and children. I don’t feel that Pamuk is necessarily glorifying Black’s behavior – Shekure’s caution and discomfort with some of Black’s actions show that he isn’t – but the fact that it is viewed and portrayed as love is interesting.

In romance stories, obsession and love are often conflated. Movies and books like The Notebook, Fifty Shades of Grey, etc. all cross the line and portray unhealthy obsession disguised as healthy love. Again, I feel that Pamuk’s work is different, as it isn’t glorifying anything, but it is worthwhile to interrogate how we view Black and Shekure’s relationship.

The structure of “My Name Is Red” by Orhan Pamuk is ver interesting in that, with each chapter change, the narrator also transitions with it. Each chapter is relatively short, lending a hand to the fast pace of the novel. Furthermore, this frequent change in perspective presents the story in a fragmented way. They are like pieces of a puzzle that have to be added together in order to fully understand all sides of what is happening. In a sense, this separated narrative is almost like the making of an illuminated manuscript. There is a general, overarching idea. But each separate part has to be crafted with fine detail before the full picture can be seen; the letterings, the color, the images and the gold leaf all come before the final product. Each separate portion of the manuscript gives the viewer (or in this case, the reader) a glimpse into what the finished product will look like. It builds off of each piece.

Not only does this fragmented narrative style make reading the novel very fast-paced, it allows the reader to analyze multiple perspective. Other less typical narratives are used as well, such as a dead person and the color red. However, these lend a hand in helping shape the novel, as well as further intertwining all the separate narratives. But, these stories are not the only thing that this split narrative joins; various themes throughout the story are brought together through this literary usage.

We understand, at this point in the novel, that Elegant Effendi’s killer is one of the miniaturists commissioned to work on the Sultan’s book. Pamuk writes chapters from the murderer’s perspective that acknowledge the perpetrator’s identity as both a painter and a killer. In these chapters, the narrator refuses to reveal his identity; this is a device by which the author can develop tension and create suspense. However, presumably, the reader has also encountered chapters written from the perspective of the killer under his workshop name, Stork or Butterfly or Olive. Two sides of the same man have been presented, with neither publicly admitting knowledge of the other.

This textual separation of identity, beyond being creatively interesting, indicates a more profound divide. In the chapters narrated by the murderer, the speaker insinuates that the act of killing has made him into a new man – it has stripped him of naivety, heightened his senses, and removed his fear of his own primal nature. Having taken a life, he finds his own to be immutably changed.

When the same man decides to extinguish Enishte’s life, the reader is once again privy to the killer’s division of identity. However, at this moment, it is not the killer ruminating on his own moral turpitude; the miniaturist’s depravity has become so pronounced that Enishte himself is cognizant of it. The narrator writes, as he looks up into his killer’s eyes, that “he was no longer the master miniaturist [he] knew, but an unfamiliar and ill-willed stranger” (173). This passage is almost self-referential insofar as it verbalizes a motif that emerged in earlier pages. Enishte’s epiphany at this moment is a poignant nod to the personal consequences of murder.

Although we only touched on the ‘Book of Games’ briefly in class on Monday, it was one of the things I found most intriguing in class this week. Not only did it put into perspective the antiquity of some of the “classic” games we still play today, it also made me think that maybe we have not strayed that far from our ancestors even though so much time has passed. The act of playing games was clearly an essential human past-time, even at the time of the manuscript which dates to 1296. Can you imagine if the instruction manuals of our everyday boardgames looked as beautiful as an illuminated manuscript? I definitely would take the game far more seriously if a manual was adorned in a gorgeous glow. It would make me feel like I’m playing a game of worth with high stakes; an act not only of entertainment but importance. Maybe classic games should include a history section to enlighten players on the longevity of the simple game they are playing…

My Name is Red is a highly intertextual book, to the degree that some of Pamuk’s critics have accused him of plagiarism because of the extent to which his influences are traceable to other texts. Yet the idea of works of text being in relationship, perhaps even conversation, with one another is so central to the concept of My Name is Red that claims of plagiarism seem to ring hollow. The book is first of all conscious of itself as a book, a manipulable text-object. Furthermore, it is conscious of the fact that all the other books or manuscripts within the story are part of a historical continuation. Stories are encapsulated by stories, and because the old myths and histories are held in such high regard, all stories seem to lead into one another. The plagiarism issue also draws back to the question of style: one recognizes plagiarism by familiarity with the ‘original’ source and presumably part of that familiarity has to do with the style, the uniqueness, the memorability of that source. After all, the miniaturists in My Name is Red are all consciously trying to emulate, or more bluntly, copy the old masters, devoid of their own stylistic influences. But the old masters had to have been unique artistically in some regard; there was something that it was to be an old master, and that is what the mark of perfection has become. Of critical importance is the fact that emulation of the old traditions, whether in stories, texts, or miniatures, is an act of creating over what has already gone before.

A palimpsest is a manuscript page that has been cleared and written over, re-used as part of another document. In many ways, My Name is Red has the quality of a palimpsest. The murder of Elegant Effendi is covered up, yet the act of covering becomes part of the murderer’s new identity, new way of seeing. By ‘erasing’ one life, the murderer begins a new one and covers his transgression. To go further, the crux of the conflict in the text is the tension between old and new, a dialectic of ‘originality.’ The miniaturists struggle with the idea that breaking away from the old mode of depiction is sacrilegious and there is a constant veneration for the old methods and old masters. However, the act of copying or emulating is also a generative process and we see parts of the old being overwritten by what is new in the appropriated guise of the old. Enishte Effendi’s entire venture of creating a manuscript illuminated in the style of the Venetian painters is the most extreme example: his creation is something new because of the style but it doesn’t replace the old form of the illuminated manuscript, it re-uses and re-designs it. Pamuk’s intertextuality is another example of a palimpsest that functions on the meta-level. He too is grappling with the dialogue between old and new in the writing of My Name is Red. The constant reference to a kind of historical knowledge- old stories of lovers, old techniques of making dyes, perhaps even passages from old texts- is emulative and appropriative, the old histories serving as the raw material for new stories as the old manuscript pages did, the writing underneath just barely visible but still forever interlocked in conversation with what was written over it.

What I found most interesting about the Tres Riches Heures was the collaborative aspect. The idea of three men working as a single entity on a project was, to me, the most foreign and antiquated aspects of this particular Book of Hours. Since both writing and illustrating have overwhelmingly come to be seen as solitary activities, it’s difficult to imagine the Limbourg brothers’ process, and perhaps this is the heart of the reason that illuminated manuscripts seem almost outlandish to us today.

Orham Pamuk’s My Name is Red gets at this point as well, particularly in its method of narration. With myriad narrators from a corpse to a murderer to a tree, Pamuk paints the process of illumination–and by extent, creation–as a combined effort. Art and writing was less about individual focus than group determination, a deeply and intimately collaborative process that moved from the patron’s order to the sheep farmer to the parchment maker to the calligrapher to the illuminator (or illuminators) to the book binder and back to the patron. This is not to say that the modern book is of more or less value, but certainly it passes through far fewer hands before it’s sold.

The amazing thing about Persian manuscripts is the similarity it holds to Asian manuscripts. In particular what I was drawn to the the asymmetric play with void that appears to be a unique to the eastern manuscript aesthetic. For this comparison I will use the Persian illumination “Leila and Majnun in the Desert” , along with the Trés Riches Heures. 

If we look at the western aesthetic choices made for an illuminated page, the West preferred the perfectly symmetrical appearance. In the Trés Riches Heures the image is split down the middle even in the astrological chart above the scene. The symmetry continues in the mirror self-reference to the composition of the previous and alternative page. However, looking at the Persian illumination this is not the case. Balance in the image is accomplished by building a juxtaposition between the void on the left (the relatively big open plane of pale blue) and the weight of the detailed and protruding mass on the right. This one sided balance is not typical of Western art. The focus in this image is on the rhythmic movement of the forms that carry the eye upward. The Trés Riches Heures is static in comparison. Although the figures portray movement and action, the image on the whole does not guide the eye rhythmically, but rather randomly.