Heteroglossic Sprees and Murderous Viewpoints in Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red

Everything in this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be laid hold by its moral handle . . . and that I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it, that is, in relation to good taste.

—Thomas De Quincey, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts"

I.

A crowd of voices draws us into a compelling narratological mystery, leading us to perform a reading of cold-blooded murder enfolded in lessons on Ottoman aesthetics. Since this tale is presented from several points of view—including the fabulous perspectives of a corpse, money, a tree, Satan, and the color red—what emerges in My Name Is Red (1998), Orhan Pamuk's postmodern detective story, is a novelistically innovative representation of death and its moments. Set in Istanbul during the reign of Sultan Murad III (r. 1574-95), this heteroglossic spree—a sudden outpouring of different narrative voices—is a veritable textual bazaar that includes even the reader, whom the murderer challenges to solve the mystery of his identity. Each unfolding voice comments on the events and characters surrounding the mystery that sets the narrative into motion: the murder of Elegant Effendi by one of three fellow court miniaturists who are illuminating a secret book that combines Frankish and Persian styles of painting.

Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel provides an ideal critical framework to explore the artistic and social functions of the multiple voices that open My Name Is Red as heteroglossia: the concept that every utterance involves multiple perspectives and layers, resulting in a polyphonic organization of language that does not surrender to the tyranny of monologic ideologies. As Bakhtin writes, "Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal ideological and social belief systems. . . . Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom" ("Discourse in the Novel" 288-89; hereafter "DN"). Within both the Ottoman and contemporary contexts of My Name Is Red, this heteroglossic interaction does not merely point to the global dialogic meeting of East and West, tradition and modernity, religious conservatism and secularism, but also amplifies the local diversity of voices and languages that exist within each perspective.

These dialogical encounters unfold in several ways: from the perspective of literary genre, for instance, Pamuk's Ottoman historiography places traditional Turkish storytelling elements within a Western tradition of novelistic writing; from an art history perspective, it meanders among both Eastern and Western visual aesthetic cultures; and as a political allegory it shows the weakening Ottoman Empire's struggle to negotiate between competing Eastern and Western ideologies.¹ Perhaps more significantly, Pamuk goes beyond the text's literary, aesthetic, and political registers by citing as an epigraph a line from the "Heifer" chapter of the Koran: "To God belongs the East and the West" (My Name Is Red vi). Yet this totalizing statement is brought down to earth by Satan (qua miniature drawing), who is accused of separating East from West (287). Situated in the midst of these geocultural extremes—unfinished, fragmented, and finally corrupted by the murderer's self-portrait—is the sultan's secret book of miniatures, which attempts to reconcile the two cultures without compelling either to succumb to totalitarian structures. Indeed, the entire phenomenon of the sultan's book—wherein marginal people, animals, and objects acquire presence and color and voice—is very similar to Pamuk's own project. In both, the different social classes of people and a vast array of objects that are brought together in the same text evoke—in their expressions of love, laughter, and misery—Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia. More accurately, though, Pamuk is taking as his narrative model his own multivocal coffeehouse storyteller (meddah), who gives voice to and parodies the sketches from the sultan's book. And by describing these miniatures so impressively in written narrative, it becomes clear that My Name Is Red does indeed mimic the sultan's book of...