Polyphony In My Name Is Red

Vision and Sound: Polyphony in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red and Vaikom Muhammed Basheer’s Walls The term polyphony, meaning multiple voices, has its origin in Western music. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian thinker has adopted the term polyphony to explain the nature of Dostoevsky’s novels. In his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin says that Dostoevsky makes his characters free from his control and allows them to have their own voices. In the same work, Bakhtin later says that Dostoevsky is not the only novelist who has created multiple voices; other novelists are also capable of creating polyphonic novels. Polyphony is a situation in which all characters are free from authorial control and their voices are heard beyond the voice …show more content…
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But this paper is an attempt to find out how the visual images, especially paintings, are able to create multiple voices. In My Name is Red the plot centres around a murder mystery in which paintings and illustrations play a significant role. Though the novel has been divided into different chapters, narrated by different characters, the voices raised by the paintings are not less important.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel provides an ideal critical framework to explore the artistic and social functions of the multiple voices that open My Name Is Red as heteroglossia: the concept that every utterance involves multiple perspectives and layers, resulting in a polyphonic organization of language that does not surrender to the tyranny of monologic ideologies. (505 Barish Ali and Caroline Hagood)
My Name is Red which contains multiple layers of speeches which can be considered as an example of heteroglossia which results in polyphony. Different narrators speaking from different point of view contribute to the plot in their own way and they are free from authorial