From the titles of the novel and the catalog to the design of the physical museum, we can see that what binds the project together is this mystic theme of innocence. The thesis is thus an exploration based on the premise that Pamuk’s project demonstrates the quest for innocence according to the following three axes: narrating, collecting and materializing.
In the introductory part, I have sketched out my impetus and the initial
approaches on Pamuk’s project. Chapter One “Narrating Innocence” is an attempt to offer a textual analysis and a comparative reading of the novel The Museum of
Innocence and Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse and, furthermore, to explore the design of the narrative and its relation to “innocence.” Throughout the novel, there is no strong storyline of how the two lovers desperately fell in love and overcome their mismatched backgrounds to be with each other. There are a few mutual memories that
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bond the two. Rather, what the narrative presents is more of a one-sided lament uttered by a first-person narrator Kemal, who spends most of his lifetime on remembering and reimagining the absent loved one, meanwhile, dissecting the nuances of his pain within his unrequited relationship. Kemal’s oppressive love over Füsun is also manipulative and sometimes creates a suffocating effect. How can we connect the idea of “innocence” with this peculiar narrative style? Is it because Pamuk lays bare the self-sufficient and narcissistic nature of love that could be considered innocent? The questions inspire me to draw upon Barthes’s iconic work A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977), in which Barthes explores the lover’s discourse within numerous amorous experiences from its form, writing style and contents. A Lover’s Discourse traverses a broad range of possibilities concerned with the nature of the lover’s discourse, moreover, revealing a possible degree of innocence within the style of amorous language, which could further illuminate my interpretations on the
narrative frame of The Museum of Innocence. This chapter will chart into two parts:
firstly, “Encountering a Barthesian Lover” is a textual analysis of Kemal’s position as a lover. Secondly, “The Lover’s Narrative as the Aesthetic Representation of
Innocence” will probe into Kemal’s narrative style with the features of A Lover’s Discourse.
Chapter Two “Collecting Innocence” will develop the idea of innocence a step further in connecting the act of collecting. It explores how collecting could be seen as an innocent act and analyze the souvenir collection chosen in this project. If the lover’s discourse operates through the voice of the narrator Kemal in the narrative mode, constructs his image-repertoire, and, furthermore, serves as a possible framework to approach the idea of innocence, the act of collecting objects, in both textual and metaphysical sense, is also central to our discussion of innocence. The
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first part, “The Childlike Collector and the Game of Collecting” aspires to develop the idea of innocence a step further in connecting the literature of collecting. This section will explore the common characteristics and the game-like elements proper to the act of collecting by demonstrating that there is an emotional sincerity strongly embedded in the act of collecting, making the collector a child-like subject. The related literature on collecting will mainly be borrowed from Susan Pearce’s works such as Museums, Objects, and Collections (1993) and On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (1995), because they offer a comprehensive analysis on the study of collecting. Moreover, a collection of essays The Culture of Collecting edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (1997) will also serve as a theoretical framework.
Secondly, within the novel Kemal’s collected objects somehow authenticate the memories of his ambiguous journey of lost love, just like the souvenirs a tourist will bring back from a special trip. Objects such as postcards, photographs, and Füsun’s cigarette butts all bear this talismanic essence. No matter how tiny and ephemeral the objects are, they are never trivial within Kemal’s narrative. The second section,
“Assembling the Fictional Souvenirs,” will offer a textual and visual analysis of the essence of Kemal’s souvenirs and Pamuk’s materialization of them. Here, the concept of souvenirs, as claimed by Susan Stewart in chapter five “Objects of Desire” (165) of her book On Longing (1993) will be crucial in exploring the features of souvenirs and its generated narrative.
Chapter Three “Materializing Innocence” moves on to tackle the overall curating choices of the physical museum. The first section, “Modern Curiosities: Innocence Recaptured,” will ask how the tradition of the cabinets of curiosities
(or Wunderkammer), the aesthetic impact of surrealist objects—more specifically Joseph Cornell boxes—could shed light on the quest of “innocence” at work within
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the display strategies deployed in the Museum of Innocence. When looking and gazing into Pamuk’s wooden cabinets, it is hard not to notice that these meticulously positioned objects share a similar taste with the 16th and 17th-century European tradition of the cabinets of curiosities. It will be in this respect necessary to ask whether the analogies between Pamuk’s display cabinets of wonder are functioning only at a visual level, or if the allusions to early encyclopedic forms of display are ways for Pamuk to refer to a state of innocence, a Enlightenment and Pre-Scientific mindset in which these cabinets illustrate the attempts of their owners to control their understanding of the world through arranging objects, a concern which also animates the collector Kemal to make sense of his amorous experiences.
However, although the cabinets share affinities with the Wunderkammer, it is
important to notice that Pamuk’s displayed items are not the exotic wonders collected from a faraway land. These carefully packed assemblages are made of the humble readymades that are left behind in a rather familiar modern daily life. This mania and the poetic resonances created by the everyday bric-a-brac highlight its affinity to the aesthetic form of the surrealist objects. Nevertheless, though employing formal and compositional strategies not unlike the surrealists, Pamuk’s assemblages do not aim at unsettling the viewers. Rather, they create a more tender effect that is similar to the boxes of the American artist Joseph Cornell. Both as ardent collectors and curators of their collection, Pamuk and Cornell share a similar fascination toward personal narratives, fictional characters, childhood experiences, and knowledge of the world that are recaptured in a rather romantic vein. But how far can we go from these visual parallels?
Lastly, within the novel, from Kemal’s house, the Merhamet Apartments where he and Füsun used to meet, the Keskin’s house he visited for eight years, and the 19th
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century house in Çukurcuma which has been finally turned into a private museum, we notice that a large part of the story takes place in domestic spaces. Nevertheless, the physical museum is also transformed from an old Ottoman-style apartment in the backstreet of Istanbul. If the act of collecting is seen as an instinctual survival skill, can home seen as the first attachment and universe of mankind symbolizes also an essential nest for human existence? In one of the subsection of Zehra Tonbul and Koen Van Synghel’s article “The Museum as Textum: Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence” (2017), the authors link Pamuk’s museum with Gaston Bachelard’s idea of house space. They state that both Pamuk’s house museum and Bachelard’s concept of a house possess a “common emphasis on daydreaming” (344). This linkage inspires me to analyze further Pamuk’s museum space through Bachelard’s work The Poetics of Space (1969), in which he delicately analyzes human consciousness with intimate spaces and interprets the space of the house as a poetic shelter for daydreams. The last section “A Museum Nested in A House” of Chapter Three will then delve into how the museum space and the spiral viewing path that leads to an attic can shape the viewing experiences into a home-returning journey. The conclusion will sum up the sentiments of “innocence,” further rethink about whether this quest of innocence succeeds or not.
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Chapter One: Narrating Innocence
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is “I desire you,” and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion […]; on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.”
–Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse 73 I. Encountering a Barthesian Lover
As a nexus of meditation and theories on the feeling of being a lovesick subject, Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977) is comprised and juxtaposed with references swaying between literature (mainly from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther), linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, which capture the complex psychological conditions and dynamics of a lover. When reading Barthes’ work, sometimes we are hearing the voice of a literary figure like Werther, who serves as the archetype of a lamenting lover; sometimes we are listening to sentences that are quoted directly from a philosopher, a friend, or Barthes himself. Although the
discourses are uttered by different speakers, they all point back to a specific subject—
an anxious speaking lover who is lost in a maze of images that are related to the loved one. A Lover’s Discourse does not define what is “love” or generalize the lover’s sentiments. Rather, it demonstrates how a discourse of love could be possibly presented, constructed and deconstructed. It introduces to the readers the
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characteristics of the amorous language—a specific way of narrating which could somehow be seen in the narrative style of The Museum of Innocence.
In a radio podcast named Bookworm hosted by Michael Silverblatt at KCRW.com, Pamuk has a discussion on the publication of The Museum of
Innocence5. In the interview, Silverblatt mentions A Lover’s Discourse in response to his reading on the novel:
There is also in the background of this novel, another to my mind very great book. If not specifically at least its outlines, and that to me is A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes, in which he describes love, Yes, waiting, anticipating, dreaming, feeling deprived, the deprivation of love, the turning inward of love.
Pamuk then responds affirmatively on his novel in linkage with Barthes’ work, which strengthens my choice on using A Lover’s Discourse as a filter to tackle the narrative style of The Museum of Innocence. As he says,
I’m very happy that you have mentioned Roland Barthes […] Patiently, analyzing your humanity, Proust comes from that, of course Roland
Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse comes from that and then my cruel observation about love pain how one part of the character’s mind is observing the other part of the brain which is badly in love, warning and telling himself not to do that […], but inevitably cannot control that part of his spirit that is heavily in love.
That is a sort of a mundane observations about, not only himself but about whole humanity. This book Museum of Innocence is based on the humanistic, optimistic
5 Podcast from (13:28-14:21) “Orhan Pamuk, Part II”. Hosted by Michael Silverblat. KCRW.
Bookworm. L.A. Radio. 24 December, 2009. <https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/orhan-pamuk-part-ii/orhan-pamuk-part-ii/>.
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perception that if I observe myself well and express it, if I observe a man in love well and observe it, I will also express all humanity.
In the novel, the love affair between the two protagonists starts with the fake bag Kemal initially buys as a gift for his fiancée. Due to its fakeness, Kemal has to return the bag to the Sanzelize Boutique where he ignites an intense relationship with the shop girl Füsun. Kemal reckons their first encounter by describing Füsun’s
shimmering physicality when she moves between the shop windows:
In a flash she had slipped off her yellow high-heeled pump, extending her bare foot, whose nails she’d carefully painted red, onto the floor of the display area, stretching her arm toward the mannequin. My eyes traveled from her empty shoe over her long bare legs. It wasn’t even May yet, and they were already tanned.
(Pamuk 6)
At this first encounter, different parts of Füsun’s body—arms and tanned legs—
merge, yet contrastingly with the fleshless displayed mannequin. These overlying images and the stillness of the mannequin opposed to the liveliness of the moving body parts make Füsun a pure object of desire. Her image, which resembles a store mannequin also foreshadows her dream to be an actress whose main job is to imitate others and present as a site of projections. In this scene of encounter, rather than depicting Füsun’s facial expression or the chemistry between them, Kemal is enthralled by her fragmented physical images. This image of the puppet-like mannequin that overlays with Füsun’s enigmatic body foretells her encased destiny and sets a major tone for Kemal’s narrative style—a one-sided construction of a loved one.
After their first encounter, they start to meet secretly at the Merhamet
Apartments, space where Kemal’s mother used as a storage room to keep old furniture
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and discarded objects. To meet Füsun more frequently, Kemal becomes her math tutor. Within this short period of an erotic relationship, the physical images of Füsun trigger most of Kemal’s narration. Even though Kemal and Füsun are only distant relatives that are not blood-related—Kemal’s grandfather married Füsun’s
grandmother, but her mother is the daughter of the previous marriage that Füsun’s grandmother once had when she was still very young. He still thinks they resemble each other in appearance and considers Füsun a younger and female version of himself. He mentions: “her body, with long limbs, fine bones, and fragile shoulders, reminded me of my own. Had I been a girl, had I been twelve years younger, this is what my body would be like” (Pamuk 17). Moreover, Füsun’s child-like way of perceiving the world could also stimulate him to take her as the medium to filter his sense into a rather innocent world. As Kemal states, “in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place, or in young people still open to new influences, still curious about the world because they have not yet been scarred by life” (Pamuk 22). As a dissolved and estranged subject himself, narrating and preserving every moment related to Füsun leads him back into his center of life, which promises an eternal source of happiness. Whenever Kemal is beside Füsun, the sound of children playing football on the street, which always appears as the
background of their lovemaking scene, also creates an innocent atmosphere. Devoid of guilt, Kemal can fall into constant flashbacks freely. Even at their most intimate moment, he can still transport himself to a distant fantasy where Füsun not yet exists and begin to form his “childish hope” (101). As he puts it, “a honeyed pool of warm saliva gathered in the great cave that was our mouths combined, sometimes leaking a little down our chins, while before our eyes the sort of dreamscape that is the preserve of childish hope began to take form—and we surveyed it as if through a
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kaleidoscope” (Pamuk 101). Here, the use of the word “kaleidoscope” captures precisely the intractable and dreamy essence of Füsun. The presence of the
otherworldly Füsun triggers Kemal’s childhood dream and offers him an innocent sense of perception.
Their love affair does not last long. After his engagement party with Sibel, Kemal loses every sign of Füsun. In this painful situation, he could not help but continuously recall the blissful memories with Füsun and start to encounter the
ghostly images of her at different places. Füsun’s absence thus exemplifies and makes her images manifest even more dynamically and pervasively in Kemal’s mental world. In Kemal’s vision, the external world is then blended with the phantoms of her, as he says,
Discounting the second or two of consolation that the first sightings of these ghosts brought me, I never for long forgot that they were not Füsun but figments of my unhappy imagination. Still, I could not live without the occasional sweet feeling, and so I began to frequent those crowded places where I might see her ghost; and eventually I would mark these places, too, on my mental map of Istanbul. Those places where her ghosts had appeared most often were the ones where I was most regularly to be found. Istanbul was now a galaxy of signs that reminded me of her. (Pamuk 167)
Coming across these doubles would hold him from falling apart in his sense of loss and his anxiety toward life. Even though Kemal knows that those ghostly images are merely illusions of other girls that resemble Füsun, he is still comforted by them and even enjoys being caught in this surreal dream-like state. When Kemal pays a visit to the psychologist, he confesses that “I felt compelled to disclose that I had lost the woman I loved and now felt as lonely as a dog sent into outer space […] “Perhaps I’m
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afraid of life, Doctor!”” (Pamuk 176). In response to the intractability of the loved one and to cope with the uncertainty of existence, Kemal turns to the help of mysterious messages from different resources and manipulates them to create his system of fortune-telling. He says: “I began to take an interest in coded messages, mysterious signs, and newspaper horoscopes. I put the most faith in the “Your Sign, Your Day”
column in Son Posta and the astrologist of Hayat magazine”, for him, “The world, life, all reality were swarming with signs sent by God so that we could discern our fortune” (Pamuk 181). Although these codes have already fallen out of the context of the moments he spends with Füsun, Kemal still strives to create a possible version of the story that feeds upon itself, as he realizes: “In those days I’d ceased to think of my life as something I lived in wakeful consciousness of what I was doing: I’d begun instead to think of it as something imagined, something—just like love—that issued from my dreams” (Pamuk 419-420). By twiddling and weaving together all possible signs and languages that could piece together the image of Füsun, trivial incidents of the everyday life vacillate between reality and a dream-like state, making Füsun a half-invented work of art.
Shortly after Kemal and Füsun reunite after one year of separation, Kemal finds out that Füsun is already married to a man named Feridun, who has the dream of being a movie director. Being unable to get together with Füsun, Kemal starts his nearly eight years of frequent visits to Füsun’s house and behaves like a wealthy distant relative who is going to invest in Feridun’s film business and turn Füsun into a
Shortly after Kemal and Füsun reunite after one year of separation, Kemal finds out that Füsun is already married to a man named Feridun, who has the dream of being a movie director. Being unable to get together with Füsun, Kemal starts his nearly eight years of frequent visits to Füsun’s house and behaves like a wealthy distant relative who is going to invest in Feridun’s film business and turn Füsun into a