When Black visits Head Illuminator Osman, the great master tells him that there are three questions he would ask to find out how genuine a painter is. The last one is blindness: “Blindness is silence. If you combine what I’ve just now said, the first and the second questions, ‘blindness’ will emerge. It’s the farthest one can go in illustrating; it is seeing what appears out of Allah’s own blackness.” (pg. 60) I was fascinated by this quote but it reminded me of something in the beginning of the book, way back on page 26: “Near the ‘Burnt Column,’ I saw some bothersome beggars dressed in rags huddling together as the smell of offal coming from the chicken-sellers wafter over them. One of them who was blind smiled as he watched the falling snow.” (26) I remember re-reading that line several times at first to try to understand it, but I could not. Now I think I might – now I see the beggar as an illuminator. Because he only sees blackness, he must have to imagine everything he remembers seeing, and I think he smiles because he appreciates everything so much more. He no longer gains happiness from what he sees around him, so all his happiness has to come from within him and his own imagination. This is similar to a genuine painter in Osman’s eyes, who must be inspired from what appears in the blackness. It’s such a unique concept and makes Pamuk’s writing all the more stunning for me.
2 thoughts on “Blindness”
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Ellie, I think this a beautiful way to interpret blindness in the book. At first I thought true illuminators, who are blind, were able to draw their works from muscle memory, but it didn’t seem very profound. I couldn’t exactly explain but I think you have drawn it out very well. Their ability to draw from the darkness kind of reminds me of buddhist monks who achieve enlightenment. Their level of expertise takes them to a whole other level of understanding, just like a miniaturist who becomes blind.
The memory aspect of blindness Olivia brought up is really interesting because while he is examining the Sultan’s library, Master Osman proclaims that true painting, true illumination, comes from memory. Indeed, the great masters are regarded as great not because of their individual styles but basically because they are extremely good at memorization- they can hold in their mind all of the details of the world and reproduce them exactly each time they set brush to paper. The process of fixing something in memory is itself fascinating because we never really remember things exactly: there’s always a blending of the real and imaginative elements every time we conjure something up from memory, and often times this creation does not fully match up with what really happened. This play on memory seems really apt for a mystery novel, which requires the readers to keep clues and characters in mind and compare the knowledge they gain with every passing chapter to what they remember from previous chapters. It’s also interesting given that Pamuk ends his book by suggesting that the events that transpired were actually told to him by his mother, providing the ‘fictional’ Orhan with a tie to the ‘real’ author. (Side note, Orhan really does have an older brother called Sevket!) By including himself in the novel, collapsing the narrative and meta-narrative levels, Pamuk introduces a complication to the aspect of memory as it exists solely within the novel. My Name is Red then becomes a family history, a legacy, a collective memory.