Metafiction in My Name is Red

If asked the question today, What is the purpose of art?, someone from the West might say “to explore truths” or “to illuminate overlooked social issues” and others might even argue it is useless, and exists only out of boredom or for purposes of enrichment. But in 16^th-century Turkey, in the rule of the widespread Ottoman Empire, art was imitation. Much like Plato’s criticism of poetry, Eastern painters looked upon art as supplements to legends known and loved, and not as a force all its own. Pamuk’s My Name Is Red stirs discussion of art and perspective’s influence on art. His novel, whose emphasis on perspective is fortified by his extensive network of narrators, questions point of view and how different groups of people, then and now, viewed and view the world differently. The painters in the novel, as many of the narrators are, concentrate on social hierarchy in their work instead of realism; for instance, in the pages Black leafs through upon his first visit to Master Osman in the apprenticeship building, the Sultan’s gaze is direct and focused, while the merchants and lords visiting him from the West have fogged and vague looks.  

These miniature artists are scandalized by much in the way of Western thinking. One of the most perceptible scandals is that of so-called “breaking the fourth wall”—when a character in a play or a painting or a book recognizes that he is inside that form of art and acknowledges the reader/watcher. Shekure is a most excellent example of this. In her first narration, she speaks at length about women figures in paintings, comparing herself to Shirin in the painting Black made for her and to the few-and-far-between shy beauties of other works.

In the West, figures who look out at the viewer are intelligent, curious, questioning. Shekure says that figures (in Eastern paintings) who look directly out, and not at something in the painting, are to be spotted “Only in cheap, hastily illustrated books by careless artists” (Pamuk 47). Simultaneously, she nods at the reader: “…just like those beautiful women with one eye on the life within the book and one eye on the life outside, I, too, long to speak with you who are observing me from who knows which distant time and place.” (47).

This metafiction adds another layer of interesting to Pamuk’s novel, which, in the end, realizes that each perspective is a different story and the identity of the murderer is hardly important to the plot of this one.