Intertextual Games - "My Name is Red" by Orhan Pamuk

Abstract

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk is set in 16th-century Istanbul, but it has numerous narrative realities that link it to Iranian culture and significant works of classical Persian literature.

My Name is Red includes numerous elements of the post-modernist novel and Persian classical literature; its characters enter Pamuk's novel in a post-modern “appearance.” As Umberto Eco notes, “Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told” (The Name of the Rose). Pamuk’s novel contains an extensive number of instances of intertextuality.

Although the protagonists of Nizami Ganjavi’s love poem Khosrow and Shirin and Kara and Shekure of Pamuk’s novel appear to be completely different from one another, the narrators, including the protagonists, continually draw attention to their similarities. While the characters in Nizami’s poem are not central to the plot of Pamuk’s novel, they do play a significant role in it.

Pamuk’s novel’s intertextuality elevates the discourse to the plane of worldview. With some familiarity with Eastern culture, the reader should be able to discern more than just the relationship between the two passages. Another allusion in My Name is Red is to the collective memory of modern Turkish society. Bakhtinian polyphony is a discourse between two (Persian and Turkish) and more cultures.