'seeing had become a variety of memory'

"This is what occurred to me the moment before I was beheaded: The ship shall depart from the harbor; this was joined in my mind with a command to hurry; it was the way my mother would say “hurry” when I was a child. Mother, my neck aches and all is still.

This is what they call death.

But I knew that I wasn’t dead yet. My punctured pupils were motionless, but I could still see quite well through my open eyes.

What I saw from ground level filled my thoughts: The road inclining slightly upward, the wall, the arch, the roof of the workshop, the sky…this is how the picture receded.

It seemed as if this moment of observation went on and on and I realized seeing had become a variety of memory. I was reminded of what I thought when staring for hours at a beautiful picture: If you stare long enough your mind enters the time of the painting.

All time had now become this time.

It seemed as if no one would see me, as my thoughts faded away, my mud-covered head would go on staring at this melancholy incline, the stone wall and the nearby yet unattainable mulberry and chestnut trees for years.

This endless waiting suddenly assumed such bitter and tedious proportions, I wanted nothing more than to quit this time."

Pamuk em My Name is Red.

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e:
"Whilst ‘[t]raditionally, critics envisage ekphrasis as writing on art, a top-down suggestion that implies that the battle for mastery is already won (by the writer) contemporary ekphrastic poetics is revitalizing our understanding of the vivid, volatile relations between words and pictures’ (Susan Harrow: 2010 258-259). Written by 2006 Nobel Prize laureate Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red suggests a new reading in the light of the new ekphrastic poetics. The paper intends to discuss the word-image relationship in My Name is Red. The novel takes place in sixteenth century Istanbul, which was then the capital city of the Ottoman Empire. The sultan requires his artists to prepare a secret book that contains Western style pictures in it. However, that was problematic at the time as painting except for miniature was forbidden in the Ottoman Empire, which had adopted Islamic tradition. A miniature did not stand for itself but only ornamented and completed writing. In other words, the word was superior to the image and the image served the word. However, being of an interdisciplinary nature, the novel searches for a way to collapse the word-image hierarchy (2011: 144). The paintings are narrated and the narrative is pictorialized. The two interlace and the boundaries blur. In that aspect, the statement of one of the major characters of the novel is striking: ‘Poetry and painting, words and colo[u]r, these things are brothers to each other, as you well know’ (2001: 134). Pamuk’s relationship with painting is also interesting. Having aimed to become a painter in his childhood and youth, he later on changed his mind for private and social reasons and decided to become a writer. Yet, the traces of his devotion to painting are visible in his works." (daqui)

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um dos livros que sobreviverão o século, a indústria e os ódios políticos. talvez a melhor obra de Pamuk, o mais completo fazer reviver um mundo que se dispersava entre museus e o esquecimento.