My Name Is Red

My Name Is Red invites us to think about art, love, and faith through lives drawn together by a murder. The miniaturists' arguments over how a picture should be painted also contain questions about how people want to live and be remembered. Mastery mingles with jealousy, faith with fear, love with possessiveness. What makes the novel so affecting for me is the depth these questions acquire in different people's lives. Pamuk brings great ideas face to face with human weaknesses without losing either the weight of the ideas or the complexity of the people.

In Istanbul in 1591, the events surrounding an illustrated book secretly commissioned by the sultan unfold over just a few days, yet the stories being told reach back across centuries. It is easy to be carried along by the narrative; pausing over the stories woven into it offers a different reward. As someone who enjoys reading İhsan Oktay Anar, I felt at home in this world where old books, beliefs, and everyday life intertwine. What particularly struck me in Pamuk was people's need for old stories to understand themselves. Black recognizes his own love in a painting, while a miniaturist can find justification for his actions in the life of an old master. The past has seeped into the very way these people think.

Telling your story, hiding yourself

Each chapter of the novel resembles a miniature. It is as though a figure in a scene built from fine details suddenly turns to address the reader. Is that intimacy enough to make us trust them? Shekure's corrections to her own account, her fear that we might think badly of her, and her occasional requests that we forget something she has said call for a different kind of attention to the story we are hearing. Before us is someone who wants to recount her experiences, but also someone who wants a say in how she will be remembered.

While the murderer tries to draw us into his reasoning, Esther's gift for understanding people is entangled with the interests she pursues as she carries messages. The need to say something matters as much as what is said. In defending themselves, the narrators can also betray the sides of themselves they wish to hide. The novel's many voices thus do more than recount the same events from different perspectives: readers must consider not only who is telling us what, but why they are telling it that way.

A connection might be drawn here with Roland Barthes's idea of the “death of the author,” which does not grant the author's intentions the final word on meaning. Simply invoking this concept would not adequately explain the use of multiple narrators, but the connection is meaningful in terms of the reader's responsibility to interpret. At the end, that responsibility grows heavier when Shekure says that her son Orhan, to whom she has entrusted her story, might alter the truth for the sake of a beautiful narrative. Now it is not only the characters' words that are open to doubt, but also the way the story in our hands has been constructed.

Style, tradition, and the traces we leave

The tension we encounter in the narrators' words is also present in the miniaturists' lines. Within an artistic tradition that prizes leaving no trace of oneself, there are people who want to be known as the best. Even as they speak of loyalty to the master and the pursuit of perfection, they are also keeping track of who earns more, who is loved, and who will be recognized. The boundary between a judgment about art and a personal calculation is not always as clear as it appears.

This is why it matters that the search for the murderer turns to a line, a habit of the hand, a trace left behind even in the effort to remain hidden. The novel's plot and its debate about art converge on the same question: how completely can someone erase themselves from their work? A miniaturist's line, like a narrator's words, can reveal what its maker wishes to conceal.

The stories of blindness expose the frightening side of the desire for perfection. The ideal of committing forms to memory to arrive at an image beyond the visible world must be considered alongside what is done in its pursuit. Master Osman's devotion to the beauty he is trying to preserve is powerful, but possessiveness and a desire for power are part of that devotion too. Love for the apprentice and violence inflicted on him belong to the same relationship. In the stories of old masters, some comic and some cruel, the distance between the virtues being described and the teller's own behavior is also striking. Absolute pronouncements about tradition cannot be separated from the fears of the people making them.

The debate between East and West calls for the same attention. The tradition being defended has a past shaped by the influence of other cultures, masters moving from place to place, wars, and books changing hands. It is difficult to draw an unchanging essence from such a restless history. Yet the fear that familiar forms of beauty and skills acquired over many years might lose their value is real. By making room for that fear while also showing the pressures tradition exerts, Pamuk keeps the debate from becoming a simple matter of choosing a side.

“To God belongs the East and the West” unsettles the certainty of these claims to ownership. Yet questions remain about what innovation might destroy and whom tradition might silence. Faith, too, exists within this same complicated life: as it gives meaning to death, painting, desire, and fear, it can also give jealousy and self-interest a language. Sincere belief does not prevent people from using their faith to serve their own wishes.

Black's love, Shekure's life

Black's love also shows what the debates about painting mean in a human life. His excitement at seeing again the face he has carried in his mind for years is accompanied by the unreliability of memory. Parts of the remembered face have faded with time, and imagination has filled the gaps. Here, the value of a portrait emerges from a deeply human need: never to lose the face of the person you love again.

There is something familiar in the way Black's carefully prepared words fall apart at a single glance. His ability to mistake the greatness of his own love for an understanding of Shekure feels familiar too. Having loved her for years is not enough to grasp how she has lived through those years. In Shekure's decisions, desire is joined by concerns about safety, making a living, and her children's future. Nor are her own wishes always clear. This uncertainty gives her a life that extends beyond the place allotted to her in Black's love.

The letters Esther carries also remind us how many people this relationship depends on. Even the private world of two people depends on others' self-interest, compassion, and help. Debates about art at the palace and worries about making ends meet at home belong to the same Istanbul. The novel's historical world can also be felt in who gets to speak within a household and who has to be afraid.

The coffeehouse's changing voices

The stories we hear in the coffeehouse use humor to unsettle the absolute judgments we encounter throughout the novel. The voice in “I Am Satan,” with its love of the smell of peppers frying in olive oil, rain falling on the sea, silence, and patience, disrupts the image in our minds before it even begins its defense. There is some justice, too, in asking why someone who can take any form is always depicted as ugly, horned, and tailed.

The voice becomes still more interesting when, even as it reminds us of the part ambition, stupidity, and lack of will play in human wickedness, it makes no secret of working to lead people into sin. Its objection concerning Frankish painting is particularly striking: why should someone punished for refusing to bow before man be considered the inventor of an approach that places man at the center of the picture and exalts him? The consistency of the defense is seductive. Yet its criticism of human self-adoration leaves its own pride untouched, preventing us from accepting its words without some distance.

In “I Am a Woman,” the storyteller's claim to know women is tested almost immediately when he begins counting the women whose faces he has seen. In his memory of wearing his mother's and aunt's clothes, maternal love, the power of being thought beautiful, the desire to be loved, and fear of the man one desires are intertwined. The voice we hear belongs to a man trying, with his limited knowledge, to feel in another way. The curiosity, tenderness, and confusion in that effort take the impersonation beyond simple mockery.

The song of the wavering heart, wishing to be in the West while in the East, to be a woman while a man, is part of this search too. The story of Chelebi Ahmet brings in the harm love can cause others. As the sorrow of his unrequited love spreads through the neighborhood, the happiness in the marriage of the woman he loves is also disturbed. The storyteller is about to blame this on the danger of women when he remembers that he is playing a woman and changes his words. A small joke reveals how much the position we occupy shapes our judgments. The violence that confronts this space for different voices in the coffeehouse shows how fragile its joy is.

What do we want to preserve in a painting?

It is easy to pick a few sentences from all these voices to use in Pamuk's defense or condemnation. But when a statement is separated from its speaker's fear, desire, and self-interest, the doubt the novel has built around it disappears too. The richness of My Name Is Red lies in the distance between the characters' judgments and their lives. Keeping that distance as we read does not lessen the impact of their words; it allows us to understand them more deeply.

The curiosity about miniature painting that the book inspires is connected to this kind of attention. It makes you want to look at scenes from the Shahnameh, at paintings of Khosrow and Shirin by different hands, at the place a figure has been given within a composition. Behind a painting that might once have seemed merely beautiful or detailed, there are now choices, fears, and other lives.

In the final pages, Shekure's two wishes for paintings brought me back to the ways of seeing debated throughout the novel: she wants her face to endure in a picture that resembles her, and the happiness she shares with her children to be preserved outside time. One holds the face that distinguishes her from others; the other, a moment she does not want to lose. The miniaturists' debates about memory, likeness, and style find a place in everyday life through Shekure's desires. A painting concerns not only how a master sees the world, but also how the person before him wishes to be remembered. What stays with me at the end of the novel is not which of the rival approaches to painting is right, but the fact that Shekure finds something of herself and her life worth preserving in both. Perhaps this is where the desire to gaze at paintings for a long time after finishing My Name Is Red comes from: the sense that behind what we see, there may be a life that neither the painter nor the person painted wishes to hide.