What I See Feels Real

            One of the major focuses in My Name is Red is the difference in perspective. Perspective serves as a powerful tool in the novel as the narrating voice changes each chapter presenting new opinions, feelings, colors, if you will, that enrich, broaden and deepen the plot and ideas. First person narrators are often unreliable because they exhibit a bias towards events that take place; this bias is evidently strengthened in Pamuk’s novel because the characters are also aware of the reader. The novel functions in a meta-fictional sense—often the characters address the reader directly and are conscious of the reader’s opinions. This awareness makes the characters seem more real. That many of the characters illustrate stories gives them an inherent awareness of readership, how stories work and on perspective because they have a sense of the process of reading and on the judgment and responses that readers have to a fictional character’s thoughts and actions. Pamuk uses the act of producing art as well as the contrast between Venetian and Muslim art to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these two very different approaches.

Despite the narrators’ strong opinions regarding the subject, Pamuk certainly has his own ideas, which are inherent in the design of the novel itself, and make him seem incompletely convinced to western art or Muslim art. For example, in addition to the perspectives of Shekure, Black and Enisthe Effendi, Pamuk gives credence to the thoughts of a coin, death, a murderer and a dog. These last two are the lowest of lows in Muslim culture, yet Pamuk devotes multiple chapters to their perspectives. As the murderer says of another miniaturist’s opinion on western art, “According to him…the art of perspective removes the painting from God’s perspective and lowers it to the level of a street dog” (160). To those offended, giving value to any perspective outside of God’s is blasphemous.

However, Enisthe Effendi also notes the vanity of Venetian art. “Just a glance at those paintings and you too would want to see yourself this way, you’d want to believe that you’re different from all others, a unique, special and particular human being” (170). This is addicting and gives the individual, with a limited time on earth, the potential to be remembered perennially. This explains why western individuals want to see their portrait and why western artists sign their names and also why this kind of art is so alluring globally. It seems that one of the major problems Pamuk is noting with this form of art though is that it is easy to misinterpret what has been painted as the reality that exists. After all, an artist has an incredible level of control over the art that they make; it can be as beautiful or as ugly as they wish. It is only a perspective.

When Enisthe Effendi is murdered the weapon used is an inkpot containing red ink. Pamuk writes that, “What I thought was my blood was red ink; what I thought was ink on his hands was my flowing blood” (173). Metaphorically, by blending blood and ink, Pamuk says that what is real and what is art become confused and mixed until they are indistinguishable. Enisthe Effendi is the miniaturist who most embraces Venetian art and, not to say that Pamuk threatens western art's ideologies, but his symbolism seems to suggest there is a danger in getting the two confused.

            Often times Pamuk makes reference to the old masters of the art would go blind but still be able to paint perfectly from memory, which many miniaturists take to be a blessing. But of course memory is clouded by perception. Pamuk suggests this extremism, obsession with painting, leads to a blindness that extends beyond a physical dearth. These masters go so far in their obsession that they stop seeing the real world, and only see in the world they are creating. In the novel miniaturists idealize ever reaching this state because it is a point from which they see things for what they really are. But based on this interpretation Pamuk appears to think that regardless, losing sight of what is real and what is only a perspective is extremely dangerous no matter the school of thought one comes from.