문학적 상상력을 통한 회화의 재현

Representation of Painting through Literary Imagination -Focusing on My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk-

Because creativity is the life of literature, modern writers have moved away from the traditional novel-writing techniques and are attempting new and diverse methods of narration, structure, motif, and form. These new attempts in aesthetics are appearing in the form of crossover or dismantlement between different artistic fields of post-modernism. Such phenomena of genre hybridity or crossover is being widely attempted in art and allows the co-existence of diverse genre as well as the fulfillment of expectation of modern people who wish to experience new and unknown things through this. For example, these phenomena are commonly witnessed in films where single genre is rarely seen and, instead, cases where horror, comic, and thriller genres are newly lighted within one film. This is very much related with post-modernism giving much attention to the dismantlement of genres and can be comprehended by the context of Umberto Eco’s prediction that the 21stCentury will be across mixture of various cultures. Pamuk experiments the restoration of stories relating the miniatures of 16thcentury using post-modern style of writing in My Name Is Red. Rather than as a novel, this piece of work gives a strong impression as an artwork drawn with letters, a large picture drawn with miniatures that are broken into pieces like a puzzle by the author for the readers to put the pieces into their places to complete the whole picture. In this sense, there is ground to interpret My name is Red as ‘Representation of Painting’ through novelistic imagination and with this, it crosses the borders of literature and painting. The reason that we endow such value to this work is because, in this way, it shows new and different features when compared with other previous works. Although literature and painting have different methods of expression, it may be considered that they both pursue the same aesthetic goal or influence. In other words, despite the fact that literature and painting have their differences in material or techniques of letter and picture, they share the relation of both being artistic expressions of a given subject. To represent painting through narrative imagination, in My Name Is Red, Pamuk spares much in pictorializing the overall novel by introducing, art history, schools of painting, techniques, artists, and artists’ works as well as by using writing styles of replacing a past scene within the story with an existing picture, expressing a scene or paragraph in detail so that it may be replaced with illustration, and unveiling the culprit with a trace found by an archaeological pursuit of a picture within the plot of finding the murderer of an event that opens the novel. Moreover, Pamuk mentions important insights relating important art genres as well as dealing with both artists’ lives and creation process to break down the boundary between painting and literature. Experimental writing in My Name Is Red is no more than each story within the novel reminding objects that are delicately and intimately drawn on a large painting as well as using narration to successfully recover miniature, the spirit of Islamic culture.