14 - 20 February 2002
Issue No.573
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 February 2002 Issue No.573 |
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An Istanbul anatomy
My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk London: Faber and Faber, 2001.
At certain points on the European coast of Istanbul the city rises up so quickly from the sea that when you look down from its heights it seems that another city lives beneath you. It's a magical impossibility, and a haunting one -- like walking in a drawing by Max Escher. From Eminonu, the ferry's embarkation point for a trip to Dolmabace (the last great Ottoman palace) and beyond, you can see Istanbul's other half, its mushrooming Asian side, minarets and bridges tumbling into each other. From the European heights, if you drop to your knees, the Bosphorus or the Golden Horn seems to lap the edge of your rooftop. It's a tiered city, carved geographically and symbolically into quarters of class and culture -- rich, poor; east, west -- that only live in opposition to each other.
Orhan Pamuk was born and brought up in Istanbul, where he trained as an architect. Its paradoxes, its structure, have left the deepest mark on him. He lives there now, and all four of his novels translated into English are set there. It's a city twice divided: left and right, between Europe and Asia, and up and down, between the fly's-flight zigzags of bazaars and markets and the fortressed beauty of the ambassadorial villas and palaces that tower over the waters. His fictions are as tiered as his capital -- perfect plots, packed with the untidiness of lived experience, they also read like mathematical formulae; perfect novels, they are also perfect anatomies of novel-writing.
My Name is Red is a historical murder mystery, a semiotic whodunit as fast-paced, as difficult and as enthralling as Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose or Richard Zimler's best-selling Last Kabbalist of Lisbon. In 1590s Istanbul, in the immediate and imperceptibly fading after-glow of Suleiman's magnificence, the new sultan commissions an illustrated manuscript to send to the Venetians. It is to be an icon of his power. As proof of Ottoman and Islamic inclusiveness, he commissions it to be painted in the European manner: a manner which seeks to portray reality as it is in the eyes of the world, not as God ordained it to be seen. For God's world is ordered, meaningful, unchanging, eternal.
However, a wave of Islamic fanaticism surging through the capital makes this work dangerous, since violent Erzurumis believe that any representational art is contrary to the dictates of Islam. The four great miniaturists of the sultan's atelier are therefore to work in secret and independently, neither aware of their patron, nor of the story they are to depict, coordinated by their master, Enishte or Uncle, who pieces together their separate illustrations to depict his sultan's world. The novel begins with the murder of the master gilder.
Why he is killed, and who killed him is the chief concern of the plot, and it provides Pamuk with a vehicle to discuss the intricacies of Persian painting. Just as Pamuk's New Life (1998) teaches its readers about modern-day provincial Turkey, and his White Castle (1990) explains the details of early modern Islamic science, so My Name is Red is an ornate examination of the rituals and values of representation and painting in the Islamic world. It is a world where individual style is devil- inspired, and the miniaturist's greatest accolade in his dwindling years is blindness, for blindness is God- given: deliverance from seeing with the eyes of men.
So far, so much like Eco (whose plot performed mediaeval philosophy) and Zimler (who played his narrative out through Kabbalah). These are novels that instruct as they spin along. But critics, from Time magazine to the Turkish dailies, have placed Pamuk amongst writers of a different league and of a different type: "it is as though Borges had sustained one of his crystalline fictions for the length of an entire novel" (New Statesman), "comparisons with... Calvino do not exaggerate" (The Independent).
Borges and Calvino's short stories read like mathematical equations. They take situations (looking at the sea, for example), or story structures (the detective story...) or ideas (an infinite library) and draw them out into cosmological or epistemological abstracts. These comparisons to Borges and Calvino refer to the process Pamuk uses to bring out his main theme. Like a hall of mirrors, reflecting the same image into itself in endless variations, Pamuk structures his story to play off itself.
My Name is Red is set on the fulcrum of East and West, at a time when the West first came truly to exert unease on the once so-powerful Ottoman Empire. It is just this unease that prompts the story itself: in the sophistication of their new ideas, their new ways of painting, the sultan sees in the Venetians a threat not just to his power, but to the very certainty of his ideas. The story that follows is a battle between two ways of seeing, that of Islam and that of the West. And this theme of competing perception echoes in the very form of the novel: in My Name is Red everyone speaks in the first person. Chapter by chapter, the protagonists tell their story, the story. If Enishte has Chapter 21 to explain what is going on, the murderer has Chapter 23 to acquit himself, as a horse has 36, Satan has 48, and two dervishes have Chapter 50. Everyone tells their own story: the structure of the novel embodies the idea it presents. Pamuk, the ex-architect, has built a palace of echoes. He has taken a form, a context and a narrative that ceaselessly spin around each other, weaving the same idea in always different patterns.
The Murder of Khosrow, Bihzad, from a manuscript of the Khamsa of Nizami, 1494; above: Portrait of an Artist, c.1487
But what Pamuk adds to the diamond-clear fictions of Borges and Calvino, are all the little inconsistencies of humans, their contradictions, the sharp edges of lives that can't be molded into ideas or principles. If the theme of the book, which might be seen as the competition between Eastern and Western perception (a comment on late 16th century Turkey, just as much as on Turkey today) is played out in countless intricate variations, the story is nevertheless packed with dead men who smell, women with unhealthy relationships with their children, and all the other meaningless but powerful details that make up ordinary life. My Name is Red is a novel of perfectly crafted ideas, but also of people -- irrational, at times ridiculous, always human. Pamuk does echo of Borges and Calvino, but he does more than either.
Turkey today is at a cross-roads. It has been run by the military, by a shaky and very corrupt elected autocracy, and even (very briefly) by a party seen by many as Islamist. Should it face West, and join Europe, or East as once it did, as standard-bearer of the Islamic world? A theme that recurs in a number of Pamuk's novels is this high-voltage tension inside identity. The protagonist of A New Life spends the novel on buses across rural Turkey in a double search: he is looking for the heart of old Turkey (a distant sense of wholeness, certainty, a little Islam, wrapped in a nostalgia for things that have passed), as well as for a cataclysm to break him into a new world, a new life. The White Castle tells the story of an Italian astronomer-scientist, held captive by a master desperate for his knowledge. They torture each other and gradually become one another, building for the sultan (with European technology) a machine that will conquer the West.
My Name is Red picks up the theme. You are danced through the streets and psyches of old Istanbul -- through harems, deep into the Sultan's secret library (now open to the public at Topkapi), into the back street sin-pits where story- tellers gather drinking God-forbidden coffee, and through the violent mob of Erzurum's fanatic supporters. Pamuk describes the smell of young boys leaning into their mother's breast for comfort, just as he describes the ineffable awe inspired by a sultan to whom no-one can raise their eyes. But it's through the minds of Pamuk's multiple protagonists that the city's and the culture's contradictions unveil. Nowhere does this resonate so strongly as in the thoughts of the four miniaturists for whom this identity crisis -- how to paint? How to see? East or West? -- is quite literally a matter of life and death.
The dynamo behind 16th century Turkey may well have been this tension, and it certainly is in the Turkey of today -- tugged as it is between renascent Ataturkism, Europe and the Islamic revival, pulled between modernity and Islam. In My Name is Red, that tension is the very motor of the novel. It is the cause of the first murder and every subsequent event.
In his last collection of essays, Reflections on Exile, Edward Said writes about the Arabic novel: "the Arabic-Islamic literary tradition views reality as plentiful, complete, and divinely directed, the European [literary tradition] sees reality as radically incomplete, authorizing innovation, and problematic." The novel, he explains, is a profoundly un-Islamic literary form, quoting George Lukacs who saw the novel as "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God." There is no direct ancestor of this form of prose in all Islamic literature.
In writing a novel, Orhan Pamuk has pitched headlong into politics. His is a form that looks West, not to the classic qissa, sira, hadith, khurafa... or countless other forms of Islamic literature. But this novel echoes with the influence of that most quintessential form of Islamic literature -- the story within a story, the Alf Layla wa Layla. As each of Scheherazade's heroes acts out his tale in ignorance both of the other tales to come and of the connection between them all, so each of Pamuk's characters tells their story disdainful of each other and unaware of the greater story told around and through them. The certainty of the novel -- so un- Islamic, since it purports to reinvent worlds rather than imitate God's (like Venetian painting...) -- is shaken asunder by the relativity brought by so many different story-tellers. This, therefore, is a novel that can include God, since there is no single, certain narrator constructing a complete and meaningful world. And in the fact that, unbeknownst to all the characters, a greater story is being told, God is directly gestured to.
And the author? Where does Pamuk fit in: chess- player of characters, co- ordinator of the stories? Does he play God? Authors cannot avoid blasphemy in this respect, cannot help but construct the worlds they write about. But Pamuk hints at his position in the ugly fate of Enishte, co- ordinator of the miniaturists, compiler of the painted manuscript.
Reading Pamuk is intellectual mountain- climbing: vertiginous. He is as neat, as brilliant and intricate as you have the time to discover. My Name is Red is a mental high-wire dance, an exposé of Ottoman Istanbul, a performance on the nature of perception, and a delicate, powerful comment not just on Turkey today, but on the Islamic world's relationship with the West.
Since around the time in which the novel is set, just past the peak of Islamic global power in its Ottoman incarnation, the West has knocked harder and harder against Muslim consciousness. In defeat, the Muslim world faces cultural collapse. God has lost against Modernity. The conundrum posed by this is being acted out today more powerfully than ever before: either God has not been properly exercised (as claimed by Osama Bin Laden), or Modernity must be championed in His downfall. Pamuk's work lives in that Gordian knot, defining what its problems are.
The answer is only intimated. It too lies in the realm of perception, but a quality of perception, not one that is defined by the cultural confines of East or West.
The 'Red' of the title of Pamuk's book is a colour -- the colour, so it tells us (for Red speaks) of determination and will. "Verily and truly, I've been everywhere and am everywhere". Red, amid much self-love and bombast about being king of the colours, tells the simple story of a conversation between two blind miniaturists.
" 'What is the meaning of red?' the blind miniaturist who'd drawn the horse from memory asked again.
'The meaning of colour is that it is there before us and we see it,' said the other. 'Red cannot be explained to he who cannot see.'
'To deny God's existence, victims of Satan maintain that God is not visible to us,' said the blind miniaturist who'd rendered the horse.
'Yet, He appears to those who can see,' said the other master. 'It is for this reason that the Koran states that the blind and the seeing are not equal.'"
Reviewed by Turi Munthe
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