Binaries in Venice

            In My Name is Red’s seventeenth chapter, narrated by Enishte Effendi, the “beloved uncle” describes the public unveiling of Elegant Effendi’s battered face as he is interred; imagining “an eye remaining in that smashed head,” the vision returns Enishte to his own earlier brush with Death, personified by a ghoulish Venetian gondolier, a familiar image lifted from Thomas Mann’s 1912 Death in Venice (95). Mann’s tragic hero Gustav von Aschenbach is briefly held captive by an unlicensed gondolier mechanically repeating, “You will pay” and “I row you well” to the unsettled passenger, despite his insistence to be returned to the wharf. Pamuk himself has gone on record describing Mann’s influence on My Name is Red, revealing that he “learned from Thomas Mann that the key to pleasures of historical fiction is the secret of combining details.”¹ Thus, I have taken Enishte’s account and the later, more Islam-specific chapter “I Am Death” as Pamuk’s intensely postmodern exploration of the West-East binary by way of their respective death tropes, anachronistic or otherwise.

            The uncle’s vignette borrows Mann’s location and uncanny-looking ferryman. Pamuk’s scene, set over water, is tied to baptismal Christian theology and the Greek River Styx, all while adding a supernatural “fog” and Effendi’s self-recognition in the eyes of his gondolier (himself a combination of Greek psychopomps Charon and Thanatos). While the haze is a simple nod to British Romanticism, Enishte’s quasi-Narcissus moment touches on a distinctly Western hallmark: death as the cessation of personal identity.

            Greek thought held, in contrast to prevalent Eastern belief systems (Confucianism especially), that man’s selfhood was static and entirely his own. Ostensibly watching himself die, Enishte’s sense of dread derives from 1) seeing his own identity being solidified, interpreted, and construed at another’s discretion, and 2) seeing it swallowed whole rather than, as the master miniaturist in “I Am Death,” “becoming what he has drawn” (128). Assuming that Enishte Effendi is the old patron of the chapter, is this why he favors the Frankish perspective? Is the Western death person more terrifying than the Muslim death deity? The latter is offended by the artist's gall “to make the illustration at all,” but seems even more perturbed by his inability to “[depict] me in a style befitting the dignity of Death” (128).

            Being from the continental crossroads that is Istanbul, Pamuk may be acting out an allegory of artistic influence given that he has said, “all good art comes from mixing things from different roots and cultures.”¹ My Name is Red’s manipulation of distinctly European Mann is Pamuk’s attempt to dissolve the West-conceived Orient-Occident binary, to in some way rewrite the social fallacies inadvertently made popular by works in the literary canon.  

^References

[1] http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/pamuk/qna.html