This emotional sincerity of the collecting subject functions even more dynamically in this project. Unlike hoarding which derives from the inability to discard unwanted objects, what we encounter in this project is an introvert but a highly active movement that can create an amicable world that operates solely by the collector: Souvenir collecting. Souvenirs, which serve as the incomplete traces of the original scene, become strong narratives devices and mediums for patching up the gap between the romantic scene of origin and the comparably looming, impersonal
present. Kemal’s act of collecting does not start after the love journey ends. He preserves nearly every leftover of Füsun when they are still together. Numerous accidental encounters between the objects and Kemal make a large part of the collectibles partial in form. These relics of a fictional character are thus series of indicators, shreds of evidence and examples that strive to give a concrete form to capture the ever-changing emotions within the amorous experiences. They appear as transients of everyday life, which cannot truly function as perfect mediums for
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remembering. If not picked up by Kemal, they will soon be discarded and left aside.
This incompleteness serves as a crucial precondition for the objects within Pamuk’s project to function as souvenirs. Füsun’s cigarette butts collected from the ashtray could be a suitable example to discuss the power of fragmentary features of souvenir objects. As Kemal states: “the three cigarette butts I collected on May 17, 1981, […]
All are roughly bent, folded upon themselves, and compacted, perfectly recalling the terrible awkwardness of Füsun’s silence that day, her refusal to say what was
upsetting her, and her vain attempts to pretend nothing was wrong” (Pamuk 395).
Every cigarette butt that Kemal collected documents Füsun’s emotions on a specific day. Their unique shape does not only refer to the moments spent with Füsun but can also be exploited by Kemal to trigger elusive imaginations and activate different kinds of analogies. As he moves on in examining them, he says:
I would see some as little black-faced people with their heads and necks smashed, their trunks made crooked by the wrongs others had done them; or I would read them as strange and frightening question marks. Sometimes I likened the cigarette ends to crayfish or the smokestacks of City Line ferries;
sometimes I saw them as exclamation marks, one warning me to take heed of lurking danger of which another was an omen; or as just so much foul-smelling rubbish. (Pamuk 395)
With the abstract shape created after the cigarette is burnt out during the transitory smoking process, its materiality is almost already gone. Though attached to the very scene of acquisition, the dynamic images of loss become much more expanding and elusive than the original experiences of smoking. They turn into little figures that function as a suitable medium for building fiction. When Kemal continues the
depictions on cigarette butts, he asserts that the context of origin “with the promise of
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happiness, and scenes from heaven” (Pamuk 156) is restored with these cigarette butts. This resonates with Stewart’s writing, as she mentions what a souvenir can reconstitute is: “the scene of acquisition as a merging with the other and thus promises the preimaginary paradise of the self-as-world even as it must use the symbolic, the narrative, as a device to arrive at that reunion” (On Longing 165). The imagined wholeness that points to a nostalgic origin of “self-as-world” could thus be structured with the help of incomplete souvenirs and narratives. Here, the collected cigarette butts thus function like samples for allusions which are tailor-made according to Kemal’s most intimate desire. As the visitors enter into the physical museum, they will encounter an archive-like installation that has materialized from Kemal’s cigarette collection. It covers the entrance wall with 4,213 cigarette butts (Fig. 1).
Each displayed cigarette butt with different shapes and textures is pinned delicately like an insect specimen that is accompanied with some scribbled notes written at the dates of capture (Fig. 2). Although these cigarette butts are dated, the fact that they are all put together on the same panel with no chronological order exemplifies the
necessity of applying personal narratives to tame the highly fragmentary nature and give meanings. Due to their material worthlessness and lack of aesthetic value, imagination and interpretations are invited to reconcile these discrete transients for making the collector’s experiences more reportable and approachable.
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Another example that also calls for our attention to the need for tailor-made personal narratives is in chapter 26, “An Anatomical Chart of Love Pains” of the novel, in which the advertisement of an anatomical model that often was used for medical purpose is collected by Kemal. He claims:
THIS DEPICTION of the internal organs of the human body is taken from an advertisement for Paradison, a painkiller on display in the window of every pharmacy in Istanbul at the time, and I use it here to illustrate to the museum visitor where the agony of love first appeared, where it became most
pronounced, and how far it spread. (Pamuk 148)
The descriptions are also listed in detail in cabinet 26 within the museum, where Pamuk staged a dummy-like anatomical model that is numbered and labeled with precise indications (Fig. 3). Similar to its original function as a teaching prop, when viewing the anatomical model, the visitor could follow the provided paths and reimagine the movement of Kemal’s heartbreak and love pain.
Fig. 1. Full photo of Cabinet 68, “4,213 Cigarette Stubs” within the Museum of Innocence, photo from
Google Arts & Culture.
Fig. 2. A closer look at the Cabinet 68, “4,213 Cigarette Stubs” within the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of
Objects, 2012, p. 229.
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Fig. 3. Cabinet 26, “An Anatomical Chart of Love Pains” within the Museum of Innocence, photo
from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 131.
The inner body parts and organs correspond to the detailed explanations printed on the left side of the poster. For instance, the brain part is connected to number 6: “The pain of jealousy is initially felt in the mind and soon triggers a pain in the stomach,
bringing the lover to devastation” and the lung is connected to number 10: “The pain of regret is shorter and more contained; it will make itself felt in the back of the legs and in the lungs, mysteriously sapping the lover’s strength” (The Innocence 131).
With vivid and detailed descriptions, the abstract feeling of amorous desperation is transformed into a traceable route for the readers and visitors to simulate, follow and re-experience. Without proper explanations, this anatomical model that is displayed both inside the novel and the museum will only remain as a prop that could not function as a perfect medium to supplement the unspeakable and mystic feeling. Here we can link to Stewart’s emphasis on the necessity for the souvenir objects to remain
“impoverished” (136) to serve as a creative medium. As she states, “we do not need or desire souvenirs of events that are repeatable. Rather we need and desire souvenirs of
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events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative” (135). When “impoverished”
souvenirs are gathered to retell the interconnectedness between the collector and the world he tries to describe, senses of consistency and well-being are made possible.
A large part of the chosen souvenirs in this project is also related to unknown knowledge that could illustrate the importance of making the experience “reportable.”
In cabinet 36, “To Entertain a Small Hope That Might Allay My Heartache” (Fig. 4), Pamuk integrates the fortune of zodiac signs and horoscopes cut off from newspapers or magazines and juxtapose them with playing cards in the background of the box.
Aside are some scattered dices, indicating the fortuitous and uncertain essence of man’s destiny. Moreover, cabinet 72, “Life, Too, Is Just Like Love…” (Fig. 5) features various games of riddles, maze, and types of optical illusions, which
Fig. 4. Cabinet 36, “To Entertain a Small Hope That Might Allay My Heartache” within the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence
of Objects, 2012, p. 156.
Fig. 5. Cabinet 72, “Life, Too, Is Just Like Love…”
within the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 236.
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challenge men’s objective perspective and perceptional mechanisms. They materialize Kemal’s candid feeling of being caught in a dream-like state and his effort to make sense of his destiny. These poetic settings are calling to mind the elements of childhood pastime and indicate a spontaneous discovery of the mechanism of the world and the threat of chance.
To further illuminate Kemal’s sense of loss and loneliness, Pamuk displays a painting of a dog driving a spaceship in cabinet 34 “Like a Dog in Outer Space” (Fig.
6). A clipping about the farfetched cosmic wonders that is cut out from a natural-sciences textbook is attached on the right-hand side of the box (Fig. 7). In cabinet 13,
“Love, Courage, Modernity” (Fig. 8), the background of the Milky Way image is also cut off from a children’s encyclopedia. The eyes of the stuffed crow are linked with Kemal’s illusion toward eternity, pacing in front of the starry night sky. As Kemal says to Pamuk: “There must be a triangulation of light between the circles in the crow’s eyes, the eye’s reflection of faraway starlight, and the Aristotelian time spiral that sits in the cradle of eternity” (The Innocence 98). Mixing daily domestic items and the farfetched references of meteorological phenomena, these souvenirs of celestial spectacles suggest Kemal’s curiosities toward the mystery of the unknown when one is facing the uncertainty of life and the transience of worldly life. These materials related to cosmology also reveal the innate human desire to understand the mechanism of the world through a rather universal language.
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Fig. 8. Cabinet 13, “Love, Courage, Modernity” within the Museum of Innocence that applied the image The Milky Way cut
off from a Turkish encyclopedia as the background of the box, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 96.
Fig. 6. Cabinet 34, “Like a Dog in Outer Space”
within the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 152.
Fig. 7. A clipping cut out from the natural-sciences textbook designed for the elementary
school. It is attached to the right-hand side of cabinet 34 within the Museum of Innocence, photo
from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 154.
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The theme of childhood wonder is also evident in the souvenirs collection of this project. For Kemal, childhood points back to a state of well-being that offers a feast of first-hand experiences. The youthful child-woman Füsun stands for an ideal, universal state swaying between dream/actuality and being/becoming. In cabinet 28, “The Consolation of Objects” (Fig. 9) Pamuk hangs fragments of toys that are used for the protagonists to initiate a children’s game within the novel, as Kemal mentions:
The time she [Füsun] took a hand mirror from one of my mother’s drawers and used it as a microphone, imitating the famous singer Hakan Serinkan; the way she’d play with my toy Ankara Express train, the same one my mother had given her to play with when her seamstress mother brought her along on house calls;
the space gun, another favorite toy of mine—we’d shoot at each other and then mirthfully search the disordered room for the plastic projectile—all of them had the power to console me. (Pamuk 156)
At the lower part of cabinet 58, “Tombala” (Fig. 10), a wooden compartment that resembles a chessboard game invites the visitors to behold little toy-like items such as plastic animals, marbles, buttons, erasers, shells, and dices that seemingly belong to a child’s collection. These trinkets are the gifts of the winner of tombala—a game Kemal often played in his childhood with his family at the New Year’s party. As Kemal recalls the memories:
When the New Year’s Eve party had come to an end, the game was over, the presents distributed, and the children and the neighbors had begun to yawn and doze off, Aunt Nesibe, like my mother, would carefully gather up the pieces, fill the velvet pouch bag, and count the numbered wooden tiles (there were ninety in all) […] it seems to me that tombala captures the strange and mysterious spirit of those days. (Pamuk 322)
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Fig. 11. Cabinet 58, “Tombala” (upper part) within the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of
Objects, 2012, p. 207.
At the upper part of cabinet 58 (Fig. 11) the board game with numerical blocks converges with a broken porcelain doll of which only limbs and head have remained.
One of its hands holds a numbered card, referring to a child’s spontaneous discovery that belongs to a long lost past. Here the obsession toward a lost childhood function as a state which will remain forever out of reach, evocative also of the nature of
collecting as an impulsive play for the collector to recapture the pre-existing paradise.
Fig. 9. Cabinet 28, “The Consolation of Objects”
within the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 138.
Fig. 10. Cabinet 58, “Tombala” (lower part) within the Museum of Innocence, photo from
The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 206.
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However, the promised paradise provided by the souvenir collection is a “failed one.”
As Stewart points out: “Yet the magic of the souvenir is a kind of failed magic.
Instrumentality replaces essence here as it does in the case of all magical objects, but this instrumentality always works an only partial transformation” (151). Only with the impossibility of completeness, the collecting of souvenirs can imbue with intimate significances and sustain as a never-ending game. As the context of origin is gradually distancing in each passing day, the specificity of the “spiraling” and “inward” nature is necessary for souvenir-generated narratives to recapture the past moments. As Stewart contends:
The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia. The souvenir generates narrative which reaches only “behind,” spiraling in a continually inward movement rather than outward toward the future. (135)
Souvenir collecting does not simply mean to possess. It implies a form of dual manipulation in which the collector assigns value and a narrative on the objects to produce meanings that seem plausible to his private world. Souvenir collecting is hence an act that is both bitter and sweet. It is sweet because it reflects a naïve or innocent way of understanding the world through objects and narratives. It is a kind of belief that one’s relationship with the world can be described and told through
selected materials. On the other hand, it is bitter because souvenirs can only function when the destination of origin remains forever out of reach and the knowledge it aims to understand remains unknown. Thus, the continuous act of adding objects and narrating them becomes the necessary precondition to form the souvenir collection.
This bittersweet essence resonates with the story of The Museum of Innocence. For
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Kemal, although he may die a little in each passing day within this rather chaste relationship, he may still survive a little by gaining hope through his infantile demand of collecting and manipulating these Füsun-related souvenirs. Souvenirs create a new world Kemal can live in and make itself the point of origin for narratives. As Kemal’s narrative expresses his obsessive love toward Füsun, but his souvenir collection, in the end, demonstrate the futility and sincerity of his quest, it is, on the other hand, a materialization of his quest of innocence. However, how can we understand Kemal’s collections when they finally enter into a museum space? Stewart differentiates souvenirs from public collections by stating that:
Whereas the space of the souvenir is the body (talisman), the periphery (memory), or the contradiction of private display (reverie), the space of the collection is a complex interplay of exposure and hiding, organization and the chaos of infinity. The collection relies upon the box, the cabinet, the cupboard, the seriality of shelves. (On Longing 157)
If souvenirs are arrested in a perfect state of stillness within framed devices such as cabinets, shelves, or drawers, the ambivalent items that sway between the status of private/public and bashful/proud could be mediated into sacred sets of collections. It provides a romantic belief that a retraceable and an anticipating past still exist.
Stewart considers the museum as the ultimate and central metaphor of all collections.
As she claims, “it is the museum, in its representativeness, which strives for
authenticity and for closure of all space and temporality within the context at hand”
(161). Once the fragmented cathectic souvenirs enter into framing devices with a particular context of display and the articulation of boundaries, they gain a sense of sacredness with unusual longevity. Framed containments thus implicate the desire toward a possible closure—an end.
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In this chapter, we have noticed that the drive to collect derives from the longing for an unknown loss that embodies in the collector’s mind. By selecting and ordering the collection, the collector may defer the passage of time and produce a sense of security. In this project of The Museum of Innocence, which is full of souvenirs and mementos, we experience how the collector ritualizes the act of collecting and turns his collection into a satisfactory private universe. The game-like quality of collecting that strives endlessly toward an original scene and its self-contained nature brings further the idea of “innocence” that lies with the design of this project. The souvenir collections offer spaces to produce the languages of longing and desires that could draw the collector Kemal back toward his paradise lost.
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Chapter Three: Materializing Innocence
“Toward the end of his life, Kemal hung this thermometer on the wall at the head of his bed in the attic and always said that its true place was inside this box.
Sometimes he’d look at it carefully and then turn to smile at me. He told me once that he’d found traces of the banality and brevity of life and the childishness of men in this little object, and then he added: “The Museum of Innocence must portray these very same qualities!”
— Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects 123 I. Modern Curiosities: Innocence Recaptured
When encountering the objects exhibited in Pamuk’s cabinets, the visitors could gaze into an array of assemblages that are arranged according to different principles.
For instance, the layout of cabinet 40 (Fig. 12) is akin to 17th-century Dutch still-life paintings that often capture delicacies such as fruits, bread, and other dishes that come together on a tablecloth; while cabinet 19 (Fig. 13), which contains a human skull, watch and flies, resonates with the Western vanitas that points to the universal theme
Fig. 12. Cabinet 40, “The
Fig. 14. Cabinet 51, “Happiness Means Being Close to the One You Love, That’s All” within the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence
of Objects, 2012, p. 190-191.
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of the memento mori—the brevity of life and the coming of the inevitable death.
of the memento mori—the brevity of life and the coming of the inevitable death.