Sealed into his Sultan’s Treasury,
Master Osman pierces each retina with the late Master Bihzad’s own “golden
plume” blinding needle. Waxing woeful, he imagines the “painters…who suffered
for their art…before succumbing to anonymity and blindness after long years of
toil” (315). Osman’s lament for his name and his forbearers (and in a way,
successors) is a surprisingly bourgeois, Frankish concern. Despite the devout
nobility of the universal miniaturist style, his venture into the
enormous library reveals even this to be an evolution; where Chinese-inspired
clouds, “slant eyes,” and Mongolian horses’ nostril slits amid borrowings
gradually infiltrated illustrations. Osman believes he has labored to shovel
himself out of history, only to find he has pretended.
Now, just as a master miniaturist
blinds himself, what would a genius poet do? Commit suicide? Given the old
adage that a poet’s life “begins in sadness and ends in madness,” and that a
great many of the American literary vanguards of the twentieth century ended
their lives by their own hand (and likely secured their immortality as a
result), e.g., Sylvia Plath (1963) (Sample), Randall Jarrell (1965) (Sample), John Berryman
(1968) (Sample), Anne Sexton (1974) (Sample), while other poets, e.g., Robert Frost (Sample) and
Delmore Schwartz (Sample) managed their death instincts until taken by more natural
causes. Pamuk's Osman empathizes: “It was with such melancholy and regret that I entered
this world of fine and delicate feelings,” knowing full well that his keen
emotional sensitivity is part of the artistic condition (315). However, a wound with purpose makes its enduring no easier.
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
captures this nicely: “[heroine Clarissa] always had the feeling that it was
very, very dangerous to live even one day.” Perhaps this is why a posthumous career is
so alluring, especially as a relatively anonymous or misunderstood artist. A poet is unable to enjoy his postmortem infamy, but Plath’s Ariel would be a footnote in 1960s poetry if the manuscript weren’t left slumbering on her desk as she inhaled carbon monoxide, awaiting its discovery. Recognition, whenever, in
whatever capacity, redeems the agony of living. Certainly, Sylvia Plath’s work is
dazzlingly brilliant, demonstrating a technical command often overlooked by critics, but
as aesthetic criteria shift, she will be read less widely, viewed as difficult,
and set on the shelf alongside her own forbearers like Marianne Moore (Sample).
So yes, the body of work the suicide cultivates must necessarily be good, but even then, that label is subject to relative contemporary aesthetic criteria. Being a good poet becomes ancillary to being an influential poet. In the twenty-first century, few people read modernist Hart Crane (Sample), another American suicide poet (deceased 1932), for his work is at times nebulous, insular, and demanding. But he is considered one of the most influential writers of his generation, in the same way Diane Arbus (Sample 1, 2), suicidal photographer of the 1960s New York demimonde, is certainly famous, but few are familiar with her oeuvre aside from a few hallmark images.
Other poets, like two-time Pulitzer winner Robert Lowell (Sample), a contemporary of Plath, Jarrell, Berryman, and Sexton, chose to resist death, instead “not avoiding injury to others / not avoiding injury to myself,” as his later poem “Dolphin” tells. What is there to say for a man who refuses what his manic mind insists? Would Master Osman be any less of a miniaturist if he had set down the needle? Why do the arts beg of death as a test of talent? Even while creativity and mental illness are most probably linked, perhaps envious academia promoted this ideology; we, more “sane,” people shall ignore the genius withheld from us until the artist is deprived of his happiness, squanders his sanity, and renounces his life.
So yes, the body of work the suicide cultivates must necessarily be good, but even then, that label is subject to relative contemporary aesthetic criteria. Being a good poet becomes ancillary to being an influential poet. In the twenty-first century, few people read modernist Hart Crane (Sample), another American suicide poet (deceased 1932), for his work is at times nebulous, insular, and demanding. But he is considered one of the most influential writers of his generation, in the same way Diane Arbus (Sample 1, 2), suicidal photographer of the 1960s New York demimonde, is certainly famous, but few are familiar with her oeuvre aside from a few hallmark images.
Other poets, like two-time Pulitzer winner Robert Lowell (Sample), a contemporary of Plath, Jarrell, Berryman, and Sexton, chose to resist death, instead “not avoiding injury to others / not avoiding injury to myself,” as his later poem “Dolphin” tells. What is there to say for a man who refuses what his manic mind insists? Would Master Osman be any less of a miniaturist if he had set down the needle? Why do the arts beg of death as a test of talent? Even while creativity and mental illness are most probably linked, perhaps envious academia promoted this ideology; we, more “sane,” people shall ignore the genius withheld from us until the artist is deprived of his happiness, squanders his sanity, and renounces his life.
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