Western or Eastern?
A Review of “My Name Is Red” from an art historical Perspective
“I don’t want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning.”
The drawing of a tree, a copy of one of the illustrations for Enishte Effendi’s book, points out a recurring conflict in the novel “My Name Is Red” between art as representation of the world that God perceives, and art as depiction of the world which naked eye sees. In the world of Islamic art, the artists ought to create images stick to the text and the meaning of the world God created, so the tree on a single sheet laments that he lost his meaning without being a part of a book. When Enishte tells Black what Ottoman miniatures are, he says, “the images are the story’s blossoming in color” (Pamuk, 26). The images function as words to tell the story. Many people even think calligraphy should outweigh images in importance, disparage painting as flirtations with heresy.
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