April 7, 2002

‘I AM nothing but a corpse, a body at the bottom of the well’, and so begins this stunning novel set in Istanbul during the reign of the Ottoman ruler Sultan Murat III. It is a time when the Ottoman confidence has been shaken by the Turkish defeat at Lepanto (1571) at the hands of the European powers. Sultan Murat III is a patron of the miniature artists whose art had arrived from Persia in the course of the previous hundred years. At the heart of the novel lies the dilemma faced by upholders of the Ottoman artistic traditions as they confront the intellectual and stylistic inroads being forced upon them by the pressure of the Renaissance in Europe.

Despite its large cast of characters, My name is Red is in essence the story of Black, an unsuccessful miniaturist, who has spent twelve years of self-exile in the Persian borderlands of the Ottoman Empire after falling in love with his beautiful cousin, Shekure, and being rejected by her. Returning to Istanbul he finds Shekure, married and then widowed in his absence, and once more looking for a husband. Her father, a former Ottoman ambassador to Venice, known to all and sundry as ‘Enishte’ (uncle), has embarked on his long-cherished project — the compilation of an illustrated book for the sultan in which the world will be portrayed ‘realistically’ and in perspective, using the methods adopted by the ‘Frankish’ Renaissance painters.

The very idea of depicting the Frankish notion of ‘what the eye sees just as the eye sees it’ was an anathema to many religious purists of the day. Eastern miniature paintings had been used simply to illustrate or adorn written stories of romance, war and festivities, and were by themselves not considered worthy of attention. Neither was the identity of an individual miniature artist considered important nor was he permitted by tradition to pursue his own unique style.

Instead, he was expected to painstakingly replicate what older masters had produced previously over time. Often in the very same illustration some figures were drawn by one artist and the rest by others. These miniatures were never representational and were drawn flat without any perspective; figures and objects were depicted in identical sizes as dimensional vagaries caused by distance were purposefully disregarded.

In comparing the two cultural art forms of the West and the East, Pamuk provides us with an allegory of the struggle between traditional and modern and the values and objectives of different civilizations. The Turkish miniaturist sacrificed individuality in order to conform to the mores of the group, while European art revelled in the individuality and ego of both the artist and the subject. Western art was in demand by ‘all the tailors, butchers, soldiers, priests and grocers in the Frankish lands’. Whereas in the East, artists could only produce what the sultan or his leading courtiers desired.

In the story four miniaturist masters are chosen by Enishte to complete the illustrated book and the work is carried on in secrecy because of the dread of being branded for heresy by the powerful Muslim clergy. As a result of these artistic and religious conflicts one of the miniaturists is murdered by one of his colleagues, and the search for the murderer begins. The story is told through a prism of twelve characters. Each of the characters provides his viewpoint under intriguing and oddly named chapters. The murdered man speaks to us in chapters entitled ‘I am a corpse’, his killer under ‘I will be called murderer’ and even death itself addresses us in ‘I am death’. A dog, a tree, a horse, a gold coin and the colour red — each speaking as part of an illustration of a miniature painting — complement some of the other chapters.

Calling My name is Red a literary whodunit would be akin to labelling Tolstoy’s War and peace as a tale about Napoleon’s war against Russia. Yes, it is a murder mystery, but the work so richly exceeds the predictable limitations of the genre that it makes such a definition seem quite irrelevant. In part it is also a romance as we follow Black’s passionate pursuit of his beloved Shekure, who remains by far the most captivating character in the book — determined, capricious, enigmatic and elusive.

Yet, when viewed in totality the book is a good deal more. Significantly, it is also a tale about the anguish of a nation that is gradually losing its identity to the growing enlightenment and scientific success of the ‘infidel’ West — symbolized by an enormous musical clock gifted to the sultan by Elizabeth I of England. Life-size statues dance to music and the clock chimes out the hours with the sound of a church-like bell. A few decades later a successor sultan smashes the clock to smithereens with his mace because he believes that its statues ‘mimicked mankind and thus competed with Allah’s creations’.

This cultural clash has clear echoes in contemporary Turkey — more particularly so in modern Istanbul, a city that uniquely straddles two continents, where geographically East meets West. In Pamuk’s book, one of Istanbul’s finest late sixteenth-century miniaturist painters, finding himself falling flat in his attempt to paint a self-portrait in the Italian Renaissance style, states:

“If we fall sway to the Devil and continue betraying everything that has come before in a futile attempt to attain a style and European character, we will still fail — just as I failed in making this self-portrait despite my proficiency and knowledge. This primitive picture I’ve made, without even achieving a fair resemblance of myself, revealed to me what we’ve known all along without admitting it: The proficiency of the Franks will take centuries to attain.”

Orhan Pamuk manages to imply that even now — exactly four hundred years afterwards — his modern countrymen have yet to attain this proficiency. Having junked seven centuries of Ottoman heritage to some forgotten attic, the present-day Turkish elite appears to be infatuated with the West. Pamuk alludes to them by suggesting that the answer does not lie with feeling ‘slavish awe towards the pictures of the Frankish masters’. Nor does he hold hope with the obdurate — like modern Turkey’s Islamicist political parties — who rigidly cling on to arcane old traditions, like the novel’s Master Osman, the head miniaturist, who following artistic custom blinds himself in both eyes with a golden needle.

Instead Pamuk puts forward a middle alternative. When one of his characters quotes from the Quran, “To God belongs the East and the West”, another responds, “An artist should never succumb to hubris of any kind...he should simply paint the way he sees fit rather than troubling over East or West”. In other words: one should choose all that is suitable for one’s need from divinely created diversity without having to forsake one culture for another.

My name is Red is a rare jewel of a book. It should therefore be nibbled and supped at gentle leisure rather than be read all at once. Orhan Pamuk has woven Eastern and the Western literary traditions together to create a style of remarkable grandeur — with all the richness, literary weft and detail of a sumptuous Hereke carpet — which succeeds in pushing modern fiction a little step further up the ladder. I was not surprised to discover that his name is already being widely discussed as a future winner of the Nobel Prize. Anyone who has a love of fine literature should most definitely read this book, which has been, it should be said, superbly translated.

 

My name is Red

By Orhan Pamuk

Translated by Erdag M. G’knar Faber & Faber

ISBN 0571200478

417pp. £10.99

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