A private history
It is a desire to be in another century, another milieu; to immerse oneself in different images, objects, a rather simpler life. Most of the time it is the imagery – not the history, not the drama, not what you can learn from it, but the imagery that makes history interesting. Then your imagination starts to work on a detail in a story.
In a way, after Kemal Ataturk’s occidentalist, secular reforms, Turkish culture was divided in two: the modern culture influenced by Europe and the Ottoman Islamic heritage. The founders of the modern republic naively thought that a shortcut to modernity, to Europe, would be to forget about the past, and they crudely suppressed Ottoman Islamic cultural history. They thought this would in itself make the country modern. But, as Freud says, what is suppressed comes back. I sometimes make a joke and say I am that which comes back. I write modern, some say postmodern, avant-garde-inspired novels, which is a western form, but they carry that suppressed Ottoman culture, Islamic culture.
I was drawn to the subject of painting because between the ages of seven and 21 I wanted to be a painter; when I was 13 or 14 I used to copy reproductions of the works of Ottoman Islamic illustrators. When I turned out to be a novelist I said: one day I will write a book about an Ottoman miniaturist. The idea changed and developed, but the basic impulse behind My Name is Red was to write a book about an Islamic painter living in Istanbul. Islamic painting is almost non-existent, so it is a very limited subject.
When I realised it was going to be a big book, I poured ideas into it: philosophical ideas; aesthetic ideas about painting, the joys of seeing, illustrating; philosophical questions about what comes first – stories or pictures – and what is seeing, whether from God’s point of view or from a regular person’s.
But what made the book more lively and personal for me was the family. Shekure and her two sons are fairly autobiographical. Orhan is based on me, Shevket is my brother’s name, Shekure is my mother’s name. For a time, as in the book, our father left us. The family relationship in the book is based on us: a mother trying to locate herself within her new material conditions, trying to protect herself and her two children.
The historical novel is a fashionable thing and I drew on some of today’s conventions – detective fiction à la Umberto Eco, or stories I learnt from Calvino and Borges. But at the heart of it I placed my very private story, and with a big gesture, not with a small detail. The sentimental texture of the book is very personal. That made the book fun to write because I was not only talking to readers but also talking to my past, reinventing my personal story. Perhaps the key to the joys of narration is that you have to disguise your personal life in such a way that, although it is still there, the book looks as if it has been written purely for the story. I think the weaknesses we have – not self-pity but the things that anger us, the jealousies, the lost loves – are what make us choose our subjects.
Everyone asks me what my brother thought of the book, because he does not come out well. But he did not want to argue with the book. The last paragraph of the novel was actually written to give him a pretext to excuse the book – this Orhan, he always tells lies, he exaggerates his mother’s beauty and misjudges his brother; it’s a joke. He looked at that last paragraph and said yes, yes, you exaggerate. And we closed the subject.
I think authors should have those kinds of personal obsessions, but they should know how to deal with them in a playful fashion. Once you begin to be a bit playful about your jealousies, your furies, then you can write good fiction about them. Once you hit that mood, then you are always playful and inventive. But the hardest thing is to be able to find that mood; to find the right tone.
