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As the combination of spaces—Kemal’s childhood house, the Merhamet
Apartment, Füsun’s house—Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in its ideal Ottoman-style architecture acts as a suitable binding device for the novelist-curator to interweave his novel and the second-hand items he has rescued from the real-life experiences of the Istanbul recent past. Together with groups of black and white photographs, the museum itself becomes a dream space that hovers between the imaginary world and the reality. In this specific application of a house, what kind of viewing effect can it bring to the visitors? In Zehra Tonbul and Koen Van Synghel’s article “The Museum as Textum: Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence” (2017), the authors single out the important concept of “oneiric house” claimed by Bachelard and state that the spiral design of Pamuk’s museum create a circular and “one-way flows” of sensation that:
“once the visitor has reached the attic and is obliged to step back in time and space in order to leave the house/museum, one is no longer part of the linear time of the novel”
(345). In light of this article I would like to go further in connecting the house space of the Museum of Innocence with The Poetics of Space.
Bachelard points out that without a house: “man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world. Before he is “cast into the world,” […]
man is laid in the cradle of the house. And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle” (7). This large cradle relates to the childhood period when one is still well and protected by the presence of parents. As the first world of humans, the house promises the unity of body and soul, retaining a sense of wholeness and completeness.
The ideal house is also “oneiric.” As Bachelard states: “I called this oneiric house the crypt of the house that we were born in. Here we find ourselves at a pivotal point around which reciprocal interpretations of dreams through thought and thought
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through dreams, keep turning” (16). The oneiric house becomes the center where the rational thoughts and dreams of the dweller can be endlessly interpreted and
produced. While the house “shelters daydreaming, “protects the dreamer” and “allows one to dream in peace” (Bachelard 6), it serves as a container, and a place for a man to position himself properly with a sense of security. It is a space for nurturing
daydreams in solitude and developing the power to fight against the bleakness of the external world. In Bachelard’s idea, this oneiric house space has two distinct features:
verticality and centrality. He says: “A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of its verticality. It is one of the appeals to our consciousness of verticality. A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality” (17). The feature of verticality embedded in the house space derives from its polarized position of the basement and the attic. As the dark entity, the basement mainly governs fear and the irrational side of the human mind.
The attic, however, symbolizes the clarity of mind that enables the dweller to foresee a brighter future, for it is closer to the sky. In the Museum of Innocence, the structural design of the three-story house matches these two features to a certain extent (Fig.
25). However, since the basement serves as a museum shop that sells souvenirs and some of Pamuk’s books, the discussion on verticality and centrality will mainly focus on the attic space where every visitor will finally arrive at by following the viewing direction structured by a spiral staircase.
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Fig. 27. The scene looked from the attic space of the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 253.
In the novel, after Kemal converts the Keskins’ house into a museum, he stages the attic space like his childhood bedroom where it later turns into a creative space where he can safely sleep, dream in and produce narratives. He mentions:
now it had become a clean, bright room open to the stars by a skylight. I wanted to sleep surrounded by all the things that reminded me of Füsun and made me
feel her presence, and so that spring evening I used the key to the new door on
Fig. 25. The house structure of the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of
Objects, 2012, p. 19.
Fig. 26. The attic space of the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of
Objects, 2012, p. 249.
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Dalgiç Street to enter the house that had metamorphosed into a museum, and, like a ghost, I climbed the long, straight staircase, and throwing myself upon the bed in the attic, I fell asleep. (Pamuk 510)
It is not until chapter 83 when the voice of the narrator suddenly changes from Kemal to Pamuk that the readers realize that the overall narrative is the documentation derived from an interview with Kemal. “Orhan Pamuk” as the novelist inside the novel writes down what the protagonist Kemal recalled from his gloomiest yet happiest memories in life. In the novel, Pamuk cannot help but keep returning to the attic space to make sense of all the details of Kemal’s stories. He mentions that “I would always be drawn back, again want to visit the attic, to listen to this timeworn man delivering long monologues about Füsun” (Pamuk 517). In this attic chamber, Pamuk unceasingly listens to the stories and rewrites it through the voice of Kemal.
This attic thus becomes a germinal space where all the narratives are generated.
Moreover, it serves not only as of the starting point for the narratives of the novel but also becomes the heart for the museum space that connect all the displayed cabinets.
In the physical museum, as the viewers mount the staircase, by looking down from the attic (Fig. 26), all the displayed cabinets and objects can be viewed from this single point. Thus, although the cyclical viewing direction seems like ascending, the viewers can find themselves concentrating on the same point where all the materials of the love story, the desired and the imagined objects of both the fictional character Kemal and the novelist-curator Pamuk are reunited at the same point of departure—the happiness that Kemal wishes to recapture (Fig. 27). It creates a timeless perception of being caught in a dream-like state. Kemal points out that the sensation of being caught in a dream appears to have two aspects: “(a) as a spiritual state, and (b) as an illusory view of the world. (a) The spiritual state is somewhat akin to what follows drinking
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alcohol or smoking marijuana, though it is different in certain ways. It is the sense of not really living in the present moment, this now” (Pamuk 421). By positioning himself in this attic where all the objects he has collected can be seen, Kemal says, “I could pass the night in the company of each and every object in my collection—
commune with the entire edifice” (Pamuk 510). In this forward-looking, meanwhile, backward-looking spiral house space, different moments are gathered to cancel the sense of time. To be always transported into the origin, the dweller can experience the present without worrying about the future or the past.
This timelessly binding power created by the spiral structure corresponds to the second feature of the oneiric house —a “concentrated being” which “appeals to our consciousness of centrality” and becomes the “centers of boredom, centers of solitude, centers of daydream group together” (Bachelard 17). The spiral design is seen
evidently on the floor of the museum (Fig. 28) and in Füsun’s earring that appears in cabinet 1, “The Happiest Moment of My Life,” in which a piece of white curtain that is draped inside the box with a silver earring which bears the spiral shape of a
butterfly sets right in the middle. The very same pattern is also used as the emblem of the museum and the stamp pattern on the ticket, which is needed to enter the museum space (Fig. 29). The feature of centrality is solidified with these recurring spiral images that run through the dominating visual design of the museum curation. In this museum space, the fictional Kemal, who is homesick for a center in life can find his way back in the untainted home space where senses of concentration, perpetual self-meditations, and the yearning for permanence are all combined.
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The choice of a home structure in Pamuk’s museum represents a form of absolute refuge. Being at home means to behold the start of everything and immerse in a nest-like space that is closer to human origin. In his The Poetics of Space, Bachelard states:
The nest, quite as much as the oneiric house, and the oneiric house quite as much as the nest—if we ourselves are at the origin of our dreams—knows nothing of the hostility of the world. Human life starts with refreshing sleep, and all the eggs in a nest are kept nicely warm. The experience of the hostility of the world—and consequently, our dreams of defense and aggressiveness—come much later. (103)
Although the forms and style of a house space may vary differently, humans’ longing for returning to an ideal home points to a similar theme to return to a nest where one could be reminded of the original well-being that one has already received from the very beginning of existence. As Bachelard claims:
For not only do we come back to it, but we dream of coming back to it, the way a bird comes back to its nest, or a lamb to the fold. This sign of return marks an
Fig. 28. The spiral pattern inscribed on the first floor, photo from the official website of the
Museum of Innocence.
Fig. 29. The logo of the Museum of Innocence, photo from the official website of the Museum
of Innocence.
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infinite number of daydreams, for the reason that human returning takes place in the great rhythm of human life, a rhythm that reaches back across the years and, through the dream, combats all absence. (99)
The vertical, spiral and central features of a house create a nest-like space that gives this longing of return a feasible form. By following Kemal’s intimate daydreams in which objects, memories, narratives, and imaginations are merging on the same spiral path, the visitors are also embarking on a home-returning journey. In a nest-like space, one does not need to hide or curl inside to avoid the hostility of the outside world.
Rather, by entering, exiting and reentering it, one can remember that the sense of well-being has already incubated in our inner consciousness.
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Conclusion: Fiction of Innocence
Pamuk’s project creates a beguiling combination of a literary work along with an intricately designed museum. The connotation of innocence sews with each other to form not only the narrator as an amorous subject in the novel, but it also specifies the overall curatorial choices for the physical museum. To end, we might probably return to the question with which we began: What exactly is this idea of “innocence” that lies within Pamuk’s project?
In Chapter One, we’ve discussed that The Museum of Innocence is about how Kemal, who is in a seemingly stagnant life, comforts his traumatic love experience with the act of narrating, collecting, and establishing a museum dedicated to his lost love. The uncertain existence of Füsun becomes the drive for Kemal to catalog all the possible signs of love. Without any political intervention, Kemal becomes a nearly apolitical character who is impenetrable to the outside world. This posture contrasts for instance with Pamuk’s other novel Snow (Kar, 2002) which narrates the political exile of a Turkish poet in Germany.20 By producing a purely expressive, apolitical,
20 In the interview published by The Brooklyn Rail, Pamuk directly refers to Snow as a “political novel”. He states that “I wrote Snow, a political novel, thinking everybody would be angry, and, yes, everyone was angry; but everyone was also reading, discussing and talking about it. I think the art of the novel, as a form, is one of the great arts humanity has developed that has continuity, that changes and survives.” According to Pamuk, the “political novel” does not mean that the novel belongs to a specific genre or that it has to be used as a tool to assert the authors’ political stance; rather, the
“political novel” welcomes a multiplicity of voices. Here, Pamuk focuses on the “encyclopedic quality”
of the political novels. Please see the interview “Orhan Pamuk with Carol Becker”. The Brooklyn Rail.
Express In Conversation. Carol Becker. Web. Feb, 2008.
<https://brooklynrail.org/2008/02/express/orhan-pamuk-wih-carol-becker>. For an in-depth analysis of the political issues at stake in Pamuk’s works, please refer to Göknar, Erdag. Orhan Pamuk Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel. London: Routledge, 2013. Pamuk, seen as an advocate of his beloved city—Istanbul, has often been considered as an author who mainly deals with the anxieties between East and West. In his novels, the themes related to Turkish politics and identity made him a political pundit among the Western world and yet a controversial figure in his hometown.
Published in 2008, The Museum of Innocence is the first novel Pamuk published after receiving the Nobel Prize of Literature in 2006. The novel focuses mainly on the sentiments of love. The apparent absence of political commentaries puts The Museum of Innocence in a somehow unique position in comparison with Pamuk’s previous works.
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and futile amorous language in The Museum of Innocence, Kemal can immerse himself in a perpetual deferral of maturity. Although the readers may consider him foolish, to him, it does not matter. The overall narration presents like a textual image-repertoire and a “non-site” in which the sentiment of innocence, including a mixed feeling of childhood playfulness and a longing toward a lost world that Kemal projected toward the idealized Füsun, could be preserved and displayed. Pamuk does not sugar-coat or moralize the concept of love or the lover’s experiences. Rather, he presents a complex and genuine feeling of being a failed lover.
We learn from the novel that Istanbul during the 1960s and 1970s is in a transitional period when the terrain of Western capitalism and the craze of
modernization had reached its peak. A large number of foreign objects were imported into Turkey, raising a fascination toward European commodities, imitations, and copies. The project is wrapped by these objects, an aspect which casts certain moments from the personal memories of the fictional Kemal and the collective memories of the everyday life of the novelist Pamuk. Chapter Two points out that the infantile and game-like features of collecting push the idea of innocence further.
Within the novel, when the toy-like objects and everyday items are included within Kemal’s tailor-made collection, a subjective sense of time, consistency, and well-being are created for him to build a self-sufficient world. Along with the final
museum, the desired place where Füsun has gradually become could then be anchored into the present to be retold and revisited. In terms of the making process of the project, when Pamuk was wandering the backstreet of Istanbul, the objects he encountered initiated narratives for his novel, and further, served as the inspirational muses to create the poetic space of the museum. Throughout this project, a
complicated but highly intimate relationship interweave between the objects, the
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protagonist Kemal, and the creator Pamuk. No matter whether they are appearing within the novel or displayed within the museum, what is in common in these
souvenir-like objects is that their integrity must always remain partial, along with the narratives that attempt to fill the void. With unattainable completeness, these objects serve as innocent “non-sites” that welcome different forms of fiction. Narrating and collecting them remains always as a necessarily infinite game.
In Chapter Three, we’ve witnessed how the two-dimensional representation of the private world of the novel materializes into a three-dimensional museum display.
The application of the cabinet of curiosity serves as the ideal framing device to assert the idea of innocence, pointing back to the very origin of a museum space in which objects were made immaculate with a seemingly “naïve” form of display. With this display strategy, the viewers are invited to look directly into the items without moral judgments or presumptions. By compromising different compositional and aesthetic models such as the archival documentation, the surrealist-like imagery of chance encounter and automatism, and Joseph Cornell’s wooden boxes, Pamuk’s boxed assemblages are like the lover’s discourse comprised within the chapters of the novel.
They turn the museum into also an image-repertoire with a material and physical form. Moreover, the museum space is also made impenetrable within the nest-like house structure which is similar to a large cradle. With the spirally-turning inward effect and the attic that is staged like Kemal’s childhood bedroom, reflection on memories and self-contemplation are made possible. The overall design of the physical museum situates and protects both the collections and the viewers in an in-between status like an adult who tries to cling to the last scene of innocence.
Throughout the discussion of this thesis, we can assume that Pamuk’s project creates a hall of mirrors that thrive to reconstruct the happiest moments with textual
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and material traces gravitating around a sentiment of innocence. However, can we consider Pamuk’s project as an “innocent” work? Or does the quest of “innocence”
succeed or not? To tackle the questions, we might move our discussion slightly in a distanced position and turn to some paradoxical aspects of this strong assertion of
“innocence”. First of all, Pamuk’s project is highly self-conscious and constructive with various references, such as biblical stories21, the trope of involuntary memories triggered by objects from Marcel Proust’s writings22, hints to Hitchcock’s Rear Window23, ideas from Aristotle’s Physics24, and other museums dedicated to different literary figures25. . . etc. The compositions of the boxes also integrate different artistic models to piece the assemblages together like movie settings. The overall project might therefore be seen as a pastiche both in a literal and metaphysical sense.
Moreover, Pamuk also inserts himself as one of the characters in the novel. A similar metafictional and postmodern technique is applied in the museum catalog to blur the
21 See Chapter 11, “The Feast of the Sacrifice” within The Museum of Innocence, p. 34.
22 See Chapter 83, “Happiness” within The Museum of Innocence, p. 513.
23 See Chapter 72, “Life, Too, Is Just Like Love….” within The Museum of Innocence, p. 420.
24 See Chapter 54, “Time”, p. 287 and Chapter 83, “Happiness”, p. 512 within The Museum of
24 See Chapter 54, “Time”, p. 287 and Chapter 83, “Happiness”, p. 512 within The Museum of