Review of Orhan Pamuk's novel, My Name is Red

by Jenell Scherbel ©


“I’m a concoction of signs; I long to be seen, but then I lose my nerve. Would I be better off hiding myself away in the shadows, far away, protected from all eyes? That’s what I can’t decide . . . . Because the real problem is this: I tend to think I’m a picture, when really all I am is words. Because when I’m letters, I think I’m a picture, and when I’m a picture I think I’m letters. But this is not out of ambivalence—this is my life. Let’s see how long it takes for you to get used to it.” 1
--from the essay, “Meaning”

Orhan Pamuk speaks playfully of language located somewhere between words and pictures. His novel, My Name Is Red, is at once a love story, a fast-paced murder-mystery, and a slow elegy for the lost arts of Persian and Ottoman miniaturist painting. Behind love story and murder mystery, art destroys art as Western traditions of portraiture increasingly supplant the traditional miniaturist arts. Winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, Pamuk is equally at home in both East and West, distinctions he decries as artificial. He is deeply acqainted with the literatures and cultures of both East and West and makes his home Istanbul as well as in the United States.

Pamuk's novel undertakes a dialogue between past and present, words and pictures. According to Pamuk, My Name is Red is primarily “about art, life, marriage, and happiness”2 as well as the “arduous work of the miniaturist” and the work required to appreciate this ancient art.

The novel’s central stylistic purpose, according to Pamuk, is to "blend the more distilled and poetic style derived from Persian miniatures with the speed, power, and character-driven realism of the novel as we understand it today.”3 Most broadly, My Name IS Red is an extended celebration of Persian and Ottoman miniaturist arts at the height of their artistry in the 15th and 16th centuries. Miniaturist arts were themselves an extension of the art of illuminating. Decoratively bordered calligraphy manuscripts, inspired and influenced by a rich tradition of mainly Turk and Persian myth and histories, used design methods as well as inks from India and China following invasions from Alexander the Great in 336 B.C. to Genghis Kahn in 1206 A.D.

Miniaturist arts illuminate and permeate Pamuk’s novel as motif. They provide the central characters—miniaturist artisans Butterfly, Stork, and Olive—and master artisan, Osman, as well as the hapless hero, Black. Novelistic scenes often refer directly or indirectly to scenes in well-known miniatures—as when the novel's murderer "stops time" for an instant in the same way miniaturists “stopped time” with their art. In that moment, the murderer announces somewhat haughtily: “My leaving shall resemble [the miniature] Ibn Shakir’s flight from Baghdad under Mongol occupation.” 4

Miniaturist arts also provide a model for Pamuk’s intricately drawn tale. Scenes are depicted as stories-within-stories-within-stories, much as miniaturists portrayed myths and stories in multiple frames within their paintings. It is these storytelling traditions represented in the miniatures that most inspire Pamuk. Chief among them is the love story of Husrev and Sirin, which Pamuk calls attention to elsewhere as the “best-known and most frequently illustrated story in Islamic literature.” 5

In addition, Pamuk’s tale paints portraits of living animals and objects (and the occasional dead) who often speak directly in asides to the reader. Similarly, archetypal figures in miniatures were often shown turning one side of their faces toward the inside views within the frame, and another side toward the picture's viewer. Pamuk’s use of this conceit, drawn from a visual Eastern art, also revives a “dear Reader” style from Western novelistic traditions.
Elsewhere, Pamuk is at pains to say My Name is Red is not principally about past or present tensions between East and West, although these do very much "lurk in the background." Significantly, however, he indicates he does intend the novel as a rich “mixture of Eastern and Western methods, styles, habits, and histories.”6 Pamuk acknowledges his particular stylistic blend can render religious conservatives and also idealist modernists ill at ease with Western and Eastern traditions found in his work. He notes they may have difficulties understanding how these two sources, East and West, are combined to form a mixture he calls his own “double happiness” at being able to “wander between two worlds. . . . in both of which I am at home.”7

Pamuk's ability to find a literary home among both Eastern and Western cultures, artistic styles, and traditions, expresses artistic "communitas," in Victor Turner's sense. Turner describes “communitas” as expressions of community characteristically spontaneous, freely entered into, and naturally opposite to rigid structures of conformity. Representatives of conformity, including fundamentalists of all stripes, decry but often envy the spontaneous expression of joy and happiness. Set apart from society-at-large, and from the necessities of daily living, apprentice artisans, master artisans, and workshop masters enjoyed the discipline of their art as well as the spontaneous affection of their fellows. Miniaturist traditions were nurtured in workshops supported by the patronage and commissions of a whole litany of conquering kings, khans, sultans, and shahs. Artisan workshops were social microcosms allowing the formation and flourishing of brotherhoods of artistry or the spontaneous develpment of “communitas.”8

In this tale, the "communitas" of the miniaturists is opposed by a certain cleric and his followers who rail against the coffeehouse fellowship of the artisans and others who frequent a coffeehouse. Pamuk’s own favorite character is the coffeehouse storyteller—whose charms and stories are often spontaneously supplied with hastily (and happily) drawn illustrations produced on the spot by miniaturist patrons. Thus, story and art, word and picture, enjoy each other's company.
The novel shows how the miniaturist tradition is increasingly destroyed as much from within as without. Internecine conflicts arise from individual jealousies and envy among artisans. Turner suggests followers of spontaneity err when they begin to build up rigid structures—literal and/or figurative walls—to protect themselves from the rest of society. Enclosed within walls-of-their-own-making, the artisans invite their destruction by negating their own spontaneity and openness. What is needed, according to Turner, is “to discover the right relation between structure and communitas at a given time and place in history and geography, [and] to give each its due.”9

Besides tensions between communitas and structure, the novel portrays conflicts brought about by the emergence of Western-influenced individualist painting styles that differ from collectivist miniaturist traditions. A secret book commissioned by the Sultan disturbs the communitas of the artisans, disrupts their traditions, and thus propels characters into the turmoil of murder and mystery. This leads, in turn, to the deaths of individual artisans and, ultimately, the death of the miniaturist tradition.

At the same time, similar tensions play out within Islam—between a tradition in which spiritually-inspired cultural and artistic perspectives depict Allah’s view of the world in story/myth and miniatures, and the claims of formal religion in which illustration itself is suspect as idolatrous. At larger social levels, these same conflicts take place over large spans of time among competing empire-builders.

In the novel, self-destructive jealousies and envy occur most intimately between individual human beings close to one another. The story-within-a-story of Husrev and Sirin, as in the families of Shekure and Black and other characters in the novel, mirrors the childish conflicts portrayed in the novel between the brothers Orhan and Shevket. Mediated by their mother Shekure, the brothers' conflict mirrors, at an intimate familial level, the larger conflicts and tensions among communities, cultures, and empires.

Most intimately of all, conflicts are played out within individual human beings. Individuals may “fall out of harmony” with themselves as well as with those closest to them. This leads to the claims voiced by the narrator of the chapter, “I Will Be Called a Murderer.” Here, Pamuk gives voice to complexities behind a murderer’s acts and thereby courts a kind of “sympathy for the devil.” This has caused some readers to react with critical commentary. However, perhaps they overlook ways in which the novel portrays conflict (and murder) as the result of thwarted or absent "communitas."

On the tragic side (and there is plenty of humor in the novel to justify a tragicomic rather than tragic definition of this work), both the artisans' and the Sultan's overarching concerns for self-importance, as well as too-rigid collectivist traditions, all manage to upset the delicate balance of the miniaturists’ loveliest visions of individual bliss and social harmony.

Art is often the site of radical change and changes may reflect disruptions in surrounding social structures. Pamuk says his writing is meant to convey the deep disruptions experienced, as a result, by individuals:

“For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing.”10

However, the novel does not end upon a note of failed bliss and broken harmony. The tale is never wholly tragic. Pamuk is, by his own admission, essentially an optimist. He brings a new level of comfort to experiences of change and a new sense of a possible balance between opposing forces. His work represents hope for a future in which past and present, East and West, tradition and spontaneity, may coexist happily rather than collide destructively.

The final scenes belong to Shekure. Like the Persian and Ottoman miniaturists, and Pamuk, Shekure dreams of an art that can accomplish "the impossible"—the depiction of bliss or the desire that underlies religion and art, as well as familial harmony and happiness. Realizing the impossibility of adequately depicting bliss, Shekure nevertheless tells her story to her son Orhan, so that he might one day “convey the impossible” through storytelling.

Let Shekure have the last word:

“A picture of bliss: What the poet Blond Nazim of Ran had pondered in one of his verses. I know quite well how this painting ought to be made. Imagine the picture of a mother with her two children; the younger one, whom she cradles in her arms, nursing him as she smiles, suckles happily at her bountiful breast, smiling as well. The eyes of the slightly jealous older brother and those of the mother should be locked. I’d like to be the mother in that picture. I’d want the bird in the sky to be depicted as if flying, and at the same time, happily and eternally suspended there, in the style of the old masters of Herat who were able to stop time. I know it’s not easy.”11




1 Pamuk, Orhan. "Meaning," in Other Colours, Essays and a Story, Writings on Life, Art, Books and Cities, Maureen Freely, tr., Faber and Faber Ltd., UK, 2007, p. 412
2 Pamuk. "A Selection from Interviews on My Name is Red," in Other Colours, Ibid., p. 264.
3 Ibid, p. 265.
4 Pamuk. My Name Is Red, Erdag Goknar, tr., Faber and Faber Ltd., UK, 2001 (paperback), p. 488.
5 Pamuk. "A Selection from Interviews on My Name is Red," in Other Colours, Ibid., p. 265.
6 Ibid., p. 264.
7 Ibid., p. 264.
8 Turner, Victor W. "Passages, Margins, and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Commnitas," in The Anthropology of Politics, a Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique, Joan Vincent, ed., Blackwell Publishing Ltd., UK, 2002.
9 Turner, Ibid.
10 Pamuk. "My Father's Suitcase," The Nobel Lecture, in Other Colours, Ibid., p. 412.
11 Pamuk. My Name is Red, Ibid., pp. 502-03.