How happy I am to be red! I’m on fire; I am strong; I know I’ve been noticed; that you can’t resist me.
My hiding: For me, it is not by grace, weakness or powerlessness, but by determination and willpower. I will reveal myself. I am not afraid of other colors, shadows, crowds or loneliness. How beautiful it is to fill a waiting surface with my own victorious fire.
(…)
As soon as I realized this, I sensed with fear and happiness that I was close to Him. At that time, I felt awe at the existence of a red color that could not be compared with anything. (…) It was such a wonderful and beautiful red that pervaded the whole place and in which all the images of the realm were playing, that this approaching, being a part of it and thinking that I was so close to Him quickened the tears in my eyes.
Telling colors has been a subject that attracted the attention of the writers . How can one describe blue or red to a color-blind person or someone who has never seen colors? It is one of the beloved subjects of literature, and especially poetry, perhaps because it pushes the limits of language, perhaps because it can only be described by reference to other senses and through similes. We can never be sure that every person perceives red the same. Like a headache, it is perceived only by the person and it can only be predicted that other people perceive it as well.
When talking about colours, Stendhal’s classic novel is one of the first examples that comes to mind. Red and Black paints a pessimistic picture of Restoration-era French society. The title of the novel refers to the dilemma in the life of the protagonist Sorel: Sorel has a hard time choosing between red symbolizing the army and black symbolizing the Church. Sorel’s personality also seems to be split in two. On the one hand, petty-bourgeois materialistic values, political self-interest and the easily attainable success they bring wink at him, on the other hand, there is fear that prevents him from making decisions.
Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red , which enlivens many images with a single color, is perhaps the best example of this subject. In Steven Spielberg ‘s Schindler’s List , a little girl walking around in a red coat among black-and-white picture frames — not knowingly — sneaks past the soldiers into a house and escapes death for a moment, as if to sprinkle the hearts of the audience. In the next scene, the Nazi officer asks an old woman waiting in line to be sent to the concentration camp, “How old are you, grandma?” we understood that the director was referring to the fairy tale The Girl with the Red Hat . The red that seemed like a sign of life in that colorlessness was actually death that purposelessly destroyed; When we saw the corpse of the little girl, dressed in a red coat, loaded into a wheelbarrow, we would realize that what was told was not a fairy tale at all.
Somehow I thought of the little girl in the red coat while reading My Name Is Red . Pamuk, like Spielberg, connected the stories with a red belt flying in a black and white world. He played all the characters in the novel in the same black and white world and colored them in red as a single color. Pamuk’s red was enlivened in a spectrum that encompassed all possible shades and emotions of red, from pink to bruise cherry, from bloody battle scenes to cherry lips, from flesh to red roses. He created many different images with a single red; On the pages of the book, red would take every shape and appear in every tone.
The first word “red” in the book is used in the context of “red sword of my uncle Hasan”, but before that, the reader is familiar with red: The first chapter, “I am dead”, is the description of a corpse whose skull is broken and lying in blood. Although the word “red” is not mentioned anywhere in this section, the section reaches us by coming out of red; There is a red curtain between the corpse lying in blood and the world. It is as if the “camera” of the novel is shooting images from a crimson front.
19 characters come to life in the novel. Most of them are people, some of them are objects such as trees, dogs, money that come to life and speak. Of course, the most interesting of them is red again. The Red that comes to life in chapter 31 of the book is spoken only once, but it is already present throughout the book, it is the belt that connects all the chapters. With the title My Name is Red , the color describes itself, but since it cannot have an existence on its own like a tree or a dog, it only expresses what it will be in (and on) as an adjective, and what it will add to the object with its presence:
Color is the touch of the eye, the music of the deaf, a word in the dark. Let me tell you that my touch is like the touch of angels, for I have listened to spirits talk like the howling of the wind from book to book, from thing to thing, for tens of thousands of years.
All but Ester of the 19 characters describe their black and white worlds. The only color that is mentioned in what you describe is red. In the world that only Esther saw, there were green, blue, purple satin fabrics of Chinese silk and a yellow house. Other colors appear as words only in the parts that are told in his language. In this respect, it is perhaps a candidate to be the most mundane character of the book. Maybe it is the window of the novel that opens out of Istanbul, the character that brings together the colors coming from the East and the West with the ships. The main colorist in the book, the muralist Butterfly, does not include color descriptions in his own narratives; Although he turned the painting into a festival by flapping its wings over the pages, there is no color in the stories we hear from his mouth in the novel. The reason for this is that the Butterfly is not in a painting he made himself, but in a black-and-white painting with all the heroes of the novel.
Throughout the novel, red, which tells about death when there is a sword, and beauty when there is cherry lips, becomes the painting and art itself, which closes its period with the words “This is how the red rose of embroidery and painting excitement that opened a century in Istanbul faded” in the last chapter. Orhan Pamuk’s use of red almost alone in all the images in the novel can be shown as a rare example in literature. Of course, apart from red, he places other features related to the nature of miniatures within the structure of the novel. For example, like the perspectiveless miniatures, the novel is written from a single point of view; The narration through the mouths of different characters, which seems like polyphony , is the deception of the author. The whole novel is told from Kara’s point of view (reemphasizing the black-and-white feature of the novel): the person voicing the “I am your brother-in-law” section also confines himself to a single point of view as a father-in-law, even though he is a father, grandfather or master. Shekure, on the other hand, is beautiful when viewed from every angle, which proves that it is not looked at from every angle.