“I don’t want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning” implores the tree, or the picture of the tree, that narrates chapter 10 of My Name is Red. Pamuk’s novel is full of imaginative postmodern identity-play, frequently calling attention to the book as an object, to all books as objects, to the artifice of narrative, and to the narrative of artifice.
The chapter I Am A Tree was particularly interesting not only because an ‘inanimate’ object is narrating, but because of the interplay between the image, the description, and the actual. “As a tree, I need not be part of a book. As the picture of a tree, however, I am disturbed that I’m not a page within some manuscript.” The tree raises in this passage a question of dual identity; it refers to itself as having two potential and perhaps coexisting self-concepts: that of a tree and that of a picture of a tree. The relationship between these is fraught because of the complicated nature of images and icons. Earlier in the novel, a character describes how he had to draw horses ceaselessly in order to figure out what a horse of his own imagining would be. The tree is a tree of our own imagining, but what is that? Do we draw upon an icon of ‘tree,’ a kind of mental stock image? if so, this is not ‘a tree’ but some general kind of tree-archetype that could possibly be one tree in nature but not every tree of our imagining. Yet the tree introduces itself as being both, or having the potential to be both a tree and a picture of a tree. As readers, we cannot know if there was ever a chain of identity leading from a ‘real tree’ to a depicted tree to the voice we read in the novel. Of course, the fact that we are reading the words ‘I am a tree’ means that there is a descriptive element, or perhaps more accurately and ekphrastic one, in our reading. The competing identities of the tree are a source of anguish because the tree has fallen from its story; it was meant to be part of a manuscript but does not know what part and therefore has no identity beyond its general tree-ness.
However, as the quote “I don’t want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning” indicates, the question of identity has an added transcendent layer. The narrating voice desires an identity beyond that of a symbol; it wants to be symbolic, it wants to be that which is indicated by the use of a form or image. In a novel as full of questions of the validity of iconography as My Name is Red, this plea is especially significant. We question whether the tree, isolated from its story, transposed into another story, with an identity that exists in a state between real, described, and depicted, can achieve this kind of status as ‘meaning.’ But then again, what is the ‘meaning’ of a tree? Is a physical tree a meaningful object? Is a description of a tree, or a drawing of a tree? Perhaps our connection of a tree with a meaning is arbitrary and not suggested by anything in the form or function of a tree, since those features change depending on whether the tree is physical or described or depicted. Images and descriptions both are tools for meaning in our typical usage. The narrating tree has no fixed identity precisely because the multiplicity of words and images, or the multiplicity of the levels on which words and images are operating, brings with it a multiplicity of meanings.
This is a very interesting and enlightening post. I agree that the tree in “My Name is Red” has a self-awareness to it that allows it to branch the gap between physical and imaginative. It is quite ironic, seeing as modern-day paper is made of trees. But parchment, however, was not. Yet a tree could still exist on the page if it was drawn in by the author. I also agree with you that the tree has lost its identity, seeing as it does not know what part of the manuscript it could and will fulfill. Furthermore, this notion you bring up of a “stock image” of a tree is very different in my mind of what a tree actually looks like. This could be detrimental to the tree; a stock image might not fulfill its sense of purpose seeing as the two are almost entirely different save for a few general details. Overall, this is a very interesting and thought-provoking post.