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.
