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.”
The observation you make about My Name is Red being an extended, perhaps even pseudo-historical, ekphrastic exercise is a really interesting perspective on the text, particularly because the narrative is so centered on images but is told textually. So we have a textual object that describes not just one image but several, and then also creates new ‘images’ by describing illustrations and miniatures that do not exist and often giving them voice directly. To do all this, Pamuk draws on the historical traditions of Persian art as well as the famous myths and stories of that time and then relocates them to the context of the narrative, giving all of these historical elements a chance to be in conversation with one another. The tension between eastern and western art that emerges from this kind of ekphrastic exercise and intertextual blending definitely mirrors Pamuk’s own struggle between the narrative form (western mystery novel, albeit a postmodern one) and narrative/ekphrastic content (the art of ancient Persia).