(Western)Word / (Eastern)Image in My Name is Red: An Imagological Reading of Orhan Pamuk’s Ekphrastic Reimagination

Abstract

This article aims to read Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red as an ekphrastic reimagination and the “imagetext” in which the visual representation is the object of the novelist’s verbal account of the sixteenth century miniature art and Renaissance perspectival painting shown in a diabolic opposition. Ekphrasis as the leading mode is also realized in the novel through incorporating certain figures and images from Ottoman and Persian miniatures as character narrators who in turn bring forth their individual comments on specific drawings in particular and on art’s relation to reality in general. In this new paradigm of the copresence of word and image in the novel, we are told the Frankish style of perspective is deemed closer to the outer reality than Islamic miniature, whereas miniature illustrations are intended to represent meaning rather than distinct objects themselves. The East-West dichotomy reshapes itself on a metaphorical level in Pamuk’s imagetext, suggesting imagological readings through this binarism between the two forms of the visual arts and their opposing ways of seeing and depicting the outer reality. The dynamic between the “self-image” defining the domestic, national identity and the “hetero-image” which typifies “the so-called Europeans” is reworked in My Name is Red on the very basis of the same conflict between the two dominant art forms.