“TO GOD BELONGS THE EAST AND THE WEST”

Crossing Boundaries: New Perspectives on the Middle East

http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/

“TO GOD BELONGS THE EAST AND THE WEST”[1]

Orhan Pamuk[2]

My Name is Red,

Faber and Faber, 2001.

Benim Adim Kirmizi, Iletisim Yayincilik, 1998

translated by Erdag Goknar

Ahmet Altan,

Comme une blessure de sabre,

Actes Sud, 2000.

Kilic Yarasi Gibi, Can Yatinlari, 1998

translated by Alfred Depeyrat

Reviewed by Marianne Selby Smith[1]

The current debate over Turkey’s joining the European Union is but one example of the difficulty faced by political scientists, economists, journalists, and, more simply, people’s imaginations to define the country’s identity. A NATO member since 1960, a secular democracy based on the French model and with a national economy which has been able to boast some success stories in the past few years, La Sublime Porte is still not easily accepted as European, not least because of its dominant Islamic culture, the questions over its human right records and its geographical presence on the Asian subcontinent.

My Name is Red and Comme une Blessure de Sabre, both published in Turkey in 1998 but only more recently translated into English and French respectively, put the question over Turkey’s identity into perspective and shed light on two different periods of the country’s history – both animated by the same East-West dichotomy as the one which exists today.

Set in the last decade of the 16^th century, under the reign of Sultan Murat III, My Name is Red raises the issue of human representation in art, a subject on which various interpretations of the Koran have something to say. Then, the country was divided between reformists and traditionalists, the former with their eyes on Europe and the latter looking toward Herat, Shiraz and Tabriz, where the tradition of manuscript ornamentation was born and developed, and whence it spread following the evolution of political and physical conquest. In the making of miniature, should perspective be taken into account, should individuals be painted “with style” (i.e. personal characteristics), and, thus, imitate the Venetian masters? Or should, on the contrary, painting consist of mere illustration to support a written story, following the technique of the old Persian masters? These are questions which, in the novel, remain unanswered, although Pamuk’s own postmodern style suggests an enjoyable “third way”.

Throughout My Name is Red, which The Economist[3] lists as one of the most interesting publications in English for the year 2001, the theme presented in the above paragraph is supported by a simple story: the miniaturists charged with the illustration of a book celebrating the Sultan’s reign are killed one after another, and the reader only finds out who, amongst the protagonists, is the murderer at the very end of the novel. The book on which the group of miniaturists is working must remain as secret as possible in so far as the Sultan has commissioned a making in the Western style, i.e. utilising perspective and representing human beings with their own characteristics, which is likely to be controversial amongst traditionalists. Indeed, it is implied that the miniaturists may be murdered by traditionalists because of their participating in a project that contradicts the laws of Islam. Unless of course they are being murdered by fervent advocates of the project who fear some denunciation by traditionalist opponents from within the guild. Black, Olive, Stork and Butterfly are the four participants to the project, the leader of which is the father of Sekure, whose beauty is legendary and who has been living at home with her two sons since her husband went to battle never to reappear at any stage in the book.

One of the interesting aspects of My Name is Red resides in its form: Pamuk describes the protagonists as a traditional miniaturist would paint them, he makes them part of an old manuscript, the support of the story it tells. At the same time, they are made aware of the fact that they are only part of a book, and address the reader with irony and virtuosity. In each chapter, the narrator is a different protagonist of the story, a whodunit which unfolds until the murderer is finally caught. Each narrator recounts a different scene of which he, or she, is part within the overall crime story, each time using the first person. Logically, one of the successive narrators is the murderer.

Examples of this unusual form in which the protagonists are book illustrations and, at the same time, made aware of this condition of theirs, can be drawn from the words which Pamuk puts into the “mouths” of a dog, a tree, or the murderer even. Thus, a dog, in the process of recounting a scene of which he is the witness, accounts for his own ability to speak by saying in substance that he is not real and the person who painted him could therefore choose to make him speak. Similarly, a tree says that he feels sad because he was drawn on a page of a book which was torn off and lost. As to the murderer, he does not explicitly say that he is unreal, but nonetheless acknowledges the reader by explicitly disguising his own identity, which allows him to speak more freely about his crime[4].

Those three examples show how Pamuk draws a line (so to speak) between two parallel worlds, as, paradoxically, he makes them meet: it is only when two worlds meet (the “real” world and that of the book), that the inhabitants of one world can become aware of the existence of that of the other world. The fact that the characters are aware of their being part of a book is a way of saying Ceci n’est pas une pomme[5], an acknowledgement of the scope and limitations of art.

The world of fiction and that of reality meet again when, at the end of My Name is Red, Pamuk reveals that he has all along been Orhan, one of Sekure’s sons. By doing so, Pamuk, whose first name is also Orhan, includes himself in his own painting, as Velázquez did in Las Meninas o la familia de Felipe IV[6]. He does this in the last paragraph of the novel, thus respecting the sequential order of the making of a painting: he signs last as though bowing to the audience at the end of a performance, and follows Jacques Prévert’s recipe of “how to make the portrait of a bird”[7]. This is ironical because at the time of the traditional Persian masters, signing one’s piece of work was forbidden in so far as it highlighted a no less forbidden intention to personalise one’s artwork, in other words to create a piece which had not been tried before and to blow some autonomous life into it.

Comme une Blessure de Sabre is apparently very different from My Name is Red, takes place at a completely different time in Turkey’s history and does tackle other subjects. Set in the pre-WWI era, Comme une Blessure de Sabre is the story of Hikmète Bey, a Turk brought up by his mother in Paris but more or less forced by his father, the sultan’s doctor, to spend his adulthood in Istanbul. Hikmète Bey does come back to his country of origin, where he eventually marries Mehparé Hanim, the beautiful as much as unfaithful ex-wife of a local religious authority. This is taking place at a time of political upheaval, the birth of secret societies, and Macedonian and Bulgarian uprisings. In contrast to My Name is Red, which takes place in the bitterly cold Istanbul winter, Comme une Blessure de Sabre is a book of light and summer, and smells of cypresses and orange blossom water. Also unlike My Name is Red, Comme une Blessure de Sabre does not touch the theme of how human beings should be represented in art. The novel does treat the use of photography – the sultan requests pictures of people he wants to know about, although they live in remote parts of the Ottoman Empire – but this is more to show the penetration of Western technologies into the country than specifically to question the legitimacy of such a technique in the light of religious constraints.

By setting Western techniques and certain features present in modern societies (such as the option for women to initiate a divorce) against the background of ‘traditional values’, Altan, too, engages in the subtle balance between East and West in Turkey. Thus, both My Name is Red and Comme une Blessure de Sabre present the capital of the Ottoman Empire as a place where modern values are superimposed on a traditional society in which the political and the religious spheres meet. Thus, in spite of their apparent differences, My Name is Red and Comme une Blessure de Sabre both highlight similar identitarian dichotomizations between East and West in 16^th century Turkey and the early 20^th century.

Another similarity in Pamuk and Altan’s presentations is the gender relations. The relative freedom of women, combined with the content of some sexually explicit scenes between a miniaturist and Sekure in My Name is Red and between Hikmète Bey and Mehparé Hanim in Comme une Blessure de Sabre, seem at odds with public restruictions for women to avoid men’s gazes. Thus, a parallel can be drawn between Sekure’s eavesdropping on her lover’s “manly” conversation with her father from the next room through a hole in the wall, on the one hand, and the evocation of the Islamic veil in Comme une Blessure de Sabre, on the other hand.

Alternatively, it could be argued that sensuality is produced as the result of an imagined contradiction between two frameworks of values: the necessity to stick to one versus the attraction toward the other, the unresolved opposition between the Islamic tradition and the temptation of Venice (in My name is Red) or Paris (in Comme une Blessure de Sabre). To evoke Baudelaire, and as George Bataille shows in Literature and Evil[8], the conscience of (real or imagined) evil – hence the necessity of social boundaries[9] to define its domain – is a condition of art / sensuality.

Both My Name is Red and Comme une Blessure de Sabre provide an subtle insight into a country whose perception is still blurred by the refusal to follow clear-cut orientations between a simultaneously Western identity and an undeniably Eastern heritage. Beyond this informative background, the two books are very skilfully-crafted novels, and amateurs of fiction will undoubtedly be seduced by the fascinating writing of two major authors of today’s Turkey.

[1] Marianne Selby Smith is an independent scholar in London.