The miniaturists themselves knew they were treading, as it were, a fine line, on the edge of Allah's creative prerogatives. The style of the Persian masters—bright, unshaded colors; a high horizon; stylized faces; and little depth perspective—was designed to recall the world as Allah first saw it, freshly created. A traditionally depicted horse, say, shows Allah's idea of a horse, "the horse meticulously conceived by Allah." Human beings, too, are not meant "to resemble exactly those figures which we see around us. Quite to the contrary, they signify that they've emerged from Allah's memory. This is the reason why time has stopped for them within that picture." Miniatures depict this world "as if it were the Otherworld"; they summon us, through their beauty, "toward life's abundance, toward compassion, toward respect for the colors of the realm which God created, and toward reflection and faith." As the miniaturist called Butterfly puts it, "Yes, God must've wanted the art of illumination to be ecstasy so He could demonstrate how the world itself is ecstasy to those who see."
Yet seeing can become a temptation, and blindness—"a blessed darkness and the infinity of a blank page"—a virtuous renunciation. "Blindness is a realm of bliss from which the Devil and guilt are barred," the miniaturist called Olive asserts. In a realm so fraught with metaphysical nicety and deference, the advances of European painting form a perilous irruption, bringing with them "the violence implicit in the desire to be one-of-a-kind, unique and exceptional." The traditional masters often left their work unsigned, and suppressed the idiosyncrasies that might have constituted a personal style. Individual portraits quicken the heretical desire to be "different from all others." The portraitists "dare to situate their subjects in the center of the page, as if man were meant to be worshipped"; however ordinary the subject, he is placed "in the center of this world, where Our Sultan should've been." And objects in European perspective, with distant ones smaller than those in the foreground, "weren't depicted according to their importance in Allah's mind, but as they appeared to the naked eye—the way the Franks painted." When it is pointed out that "exalted Allah certainly sees everything we see," the rejoinder states, "He doesn't perceive it the way we do. The confused battle scene that we perceive in our bewilderment, He perceives in His omniscience as two opposing armies in an orderly array." Heresy hovers on all sides of the issue: the coffeehouse storyteller impudently raises the possibility that the classical miniaturists, in attempting to show not what they see but what God imagines, are "committing the sin of competing with Allah." The trend, however, as of 1591, is clear: Frankish painting and the egoistic delights of individualization will prove irresistible, and Turkish artists, the murderer tells his confreres in one of his many concluding pronouncements, henceforth can "sit yourselves down and do nothing but ape the Europeans century after century! Proudly sign your names to your imitation paintings."
Pamuk's consciousness of Turkey's fate of imitation and inauthenticity expresses itself in his characters' frequent feelings of detachment from their real selves. "I feel I'm living the present as if it were the past," the murderer says, and he watches his body commit a crime "as if it were a memory from long ago. You know how in dreams we shudder to see ourselves as if from the outside?" He warns that, if painters succumb to the Frankish manner, "we might resemble ourselves, but we won't be ourselves." Other selves haunt the innocent, too. Shekure says, "We reentered the house in the dead of night, and it suddenly seemed that the elongated shadows we were casting by the light of the oil lamp belonged to others." Later, "as I cried, it was as if I'd left myself and was becoming another, entirely separate woman. Like some reader troubled by a sad picture in the pages of a book, I saw my life from the outside and pitied what I saw." The author, the contriver of these dozen intertwining viewpoints, is both outside and inside his fiction. Shekure's younger son is called Orhan, and it turns out to be he who, with her coöperation, has written this novel. In the proud fashion of Joyce finishing "Ulysses," Pamuk has dated "My Name Is Red" at the end: "1990-92, 1994-98." The novel bears traces of an interrupted composition, wherein the author had to get a fresh grip upon the many glittering threads of theory and incident. Orhan Pamuk's labor, in this otherworld of miniatures, was long, and the reader's labor at times feels long, between spells of being entranced and educated.
Translating from the Turkish, a non-Indo-European language with a grammar that puts the verb at the end of even the longest sentence, isn't a task for everybody; Erdag Göknar deserves praise for the cool, smooth English in which he has rendered Pamuk's finespun sentences, passionate art appreciations, slyly pedantic debates, eerie urban scenes (it keeps snowing, which one doesn't think of as Istanbul weather), and exhaustive inventories. The inventory, Borges showed in his short story "The Aleph," evokes the terror of infinity; Pamuk gives us two pages describing miniatures through the ages, a paragraph crammed with the contents of the Sultan's Treasury, and a brisk list of Ottoman tortures. Göknar's English has such an air of classical timelessness that I was startled by the use, twice, of the word "ornery," with its flavor of American country dialect, and by the phrase "could care less" when the opposite was meant. And I was unable to detect what the title referred to. Murat III, my independent researches discovered, had "a long red beard," but the most likely source within the novel is the coffeehouse monologue supposedly delivered by the color crimson, a large pot of which is used to commit the second murder. The color of blood, it boasts, "As I bring my color to the page, it's as if I command the world to 'Be!' Yes, those who cannot see would deny it, but the truth is that I can be found everywhere." The world's name, in other words, is Red. ♦