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The story of The Museum of Innocence does focus on the intense love relationships and the bond between the two protagonists but depicts a one-sided lament toward the ambiguous images of the loved one. In comparison with the rich revelations of Kemal’s feelings, Füsun appears in front of the readers more as an idealized construction—a half-coded and half-projective fictional character within a fiction. In this section, I would like to elucidate the innocent essence that particularly lies in the literary style of the novel and discusses the position of the eloquent narrator Kemal as a Barthesian lover, whose act of narrating serves as the tool that ceaselessly pieces together his nebulous images-repertoire. I would also like to state that the style of a lover’s discourse highlights the vulnerability and innocent essence of both the lover and the loved one. Kemal, caught in the maze of his own making, situates himself in a perpetual deferral of desire and maturity.
In the preface of A Lover’s Discourse entitled “How this book is constructed,”
Barthes posits that the lover’s discourse is “the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak” (3).
Within the amorous narrative, there is only one solitary narrating subject who is in
“extreme solitude” (1) and narrates about a silent loved one who serves to be a site for piecing together images and desires. Within the emotional abyss, contentment,
pleasure, anxiety, and longing are mingled in a fragmentary manner. Barthes extracts certain feelings by giving them a proper name and entitles them alphabetically to serve as different “figures.” For instance: Adorable (18), Demons (80), Exile (106), and I-love-you (147). Under each figure is a definition-like sentence that is followed by a series of discourses which make the content similar to an encyclopedia of amorous sentiments. However, Barthes states that these sentences are not the
definitions or the explanations of each heading; rather, they are the articulations and
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examples, in Barthes’ words, the “exposition, account, summary, plot outline, invented narrative” (5) of that particular theme. Using the athlete as a metaphor, Barthes suggests that the narrating lover is similar to a runner who is suddenly caught in motion. These captured moments are not still-images but the arrested moving images of a “lover at work”, encompassing “something that has been read, heard, felt”
(4). At this point of being captured, every possible sensation, sentiment, touch or smell that might be considered proper to the formation of an ideal loved being, are gathered together in what Barthes calls “Image-Repertoire”—a reservoir to contain these fragments of discourses narrated by the sole lover, making it a “perpetual calendar” (7) that documents all the infinitesimal events, images and original senses of the lover.
In A Lover’s Discourse, though every amorous sentence is put at first glance under alphabetically arranged titles, their content and form vary from sentence to sentence. Even arranged under the same title, all the figures that are used to describe the image-repertoire are present in a very different manner. The titles which
supposedly function for categorization and framing, on the contrary, exemplify the chaotic nature of the amorous sentiments. By using different elements within the temporal experiences of love, these chapters offer a “discursive site” or a “portrait” of the loved one (Barthes 3). The amorous language is thus not analytical. It does not aim at dissecting or anatomizing the loved one. Rather, it produces successions of descriptive discourses to fill the image-repertoire. These features are seen in The Museum of Innocence. The titles of the eighty-three chapters of the novel could be put into different categories. For instance, chapters that include the amorous events and sentiments such as chapter 12, “Kissing on the Lips”, 16 “Jealousy”, 25 “The Agony of Waiting”, 51 “Happiness Means Being Close to the One You Love, That’s All”; or
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the places Kemal visits to encounter his lover: 2 “The Sanzelize Boutique”, 7 “The Merhamet Apartments”, 14 “Istanbul’s Streets, Bridges, Hills, and Squares”, 37 “The Empty House”; and the objects the lover Kemal encounters or collects: 8 “Turkey’s First Fruit Soda”, 58 “Tombala”, 67 “Cologne”, and 68. “4,213 Cigarette Stubs.”
These seemingly scattered titles that serve to be indivisible scenes within Kemal’s amorous experiences could preserve all the figures and emotions of his amorous experience. Like an old friend who tells his love story in a mesmeric style, Kemal’s intense confession throughout the novel has created a private world that sentimentally brings the readers to witness a perpetual delay of the fulfillment of desire. Kemal does not wish to entertain the readers by giving any sweet moment of his love story.
Rather, he presents the most futile, plaintive and purely expressive side of the amorous experiences. It makes Füsun into an object of fancy and innocence that should be collected, evaluated, authenticated, and displayed.
At the beginning of the novel, the readers have already beheld Kemal’s happiest yet futile moment. The very first chapter, “The Happiest Moment of My Life,” opens up with an intimate lovemaking scene between Kemal and Füsun. Kemal says: “It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it. Had I known, had I cherished this gift, would everything have turned out differently?” (Pamuk 3). This implies the story as a somehow degrading journey that seeks to return to this very moment of happiness. In this sensual scene, one distinct object catches the readers’ eye—a butterfly-shaped earring which belongs to the beloved Füsun. Out of compulsion, Kemal picks the earring up and puts it into his pocket without truly recognizing its shape and pattern. This earring, which resonates visually with the specimen
collections preserved in little glass-panned boxes, somehow sets a major tone for the overall narrative style of the novel. With a rather short life span and fragile
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physicality, butterflies still go through stages of powerful transformations. These butterflies, though devoid of life, still manage to sustain splendid colors on their delicate wings. Appearing like jewels, they derive from the natural world and cross the boundary between dream/reality, just like the images and figures of the loved one.
Their alluring qualities dazzle the eyes of the lover, who turns them into sites for projecting their desire toward an idealized beauty. Throughout the story, Füsun keeps reminding Kemal about how dear the earring is to her and asks him to return it.
However, Kemal keeps ignoring her request since he loses it and even attempts to replace it with another pair as a gift. This upsets Füsun during different phases of their relationship. It is not until Kemal lost Füsun that he suddenly realizes its importance.
The earring is thus valuable only after it is assigned, retrospectively, by Kemal’s discourse.
The choice of a butterfly-shaped earing as an important object that runs through Kemal’s love story is intriguing if we consider the nature of Kemal’s amorous narratives—a one-sided construction of an image-repertoire. The related figures gain meanings only within the utterance of the lover when he is narrating about the ever-missing loved one. This absence of the loved one makes the lover the one who is always waiting, as the Barthesian lover realizes: “The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits” (Barthes 40). As the amorous absence persists, the lover is then caught between two tenses as Barthes states in the chapter The Absent One: “you have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you). Whereupon I know what the present, that difficult tense, is: a pure portion of anxiety” (15). When the
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loved one is absent, the lover needs to speak constantly about his/her absence to remain in the state of love. As the narration continues, the loved one then appears in front of the lover. This awkward tense that situates the loved one in perpetual
departure and returning makes the loved one both absent and present, furthermore, it creates a “pure portion of anxiety”—a perfect condition for the lover to generate an abundance of language and extend this amorous state. To a certain extent, the position of the lover could also be consolidated for there are no other ways for him to escape this anxiety. This fixed position functions to sustain the production of a lover’s discourse.
Although the amorous language could generate abundantly, its horizontal nature cannot deepen their relationship. It will always fail the lover and make him remain insufficient. When Kemal is describing Füsun, the fragmentary discourses he generates are similar to encyclopedic documentations. For instance, in chapter 69 entitled “Sometimes,” Kemal uses the word “sometimes” to connect all his sentences and capture the moments at the Keskins’ house:
Sometimes I could tell from Füsun’s expression that she was daydreaming, and I would long to visit the country in her imagination, although everything seemed hopeless—my life, my lethargy, and even the way I sat there. Sometimes the objects on the table looked to me like mountains, valleys, hills, depressions, and plateaus. Sometimes a funny thing happened on television, and we would all burst out laughing at once. Sometimes it would seem ridiculous the way we all got sucked into whatever was happening on the screen. (Pamuk 399)
The structure of these sentences that complete the whole chapter not only invites the readers to bear witness to the triviality of amorous life but it also demonstrates the horizontal essence of the lover’s language. There are only layers of images,
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references, and fragmented events that are put together in one chapter. Here, we may turn to Barthes’ definition of the term “atopic,” which is used to describe the peculiar originality that lies in the image-repertoire. The word “atopic” comes from the word
“atopia,” referring to a site that has no “topos,” a site that is untraceable, namely, a
“non-site”. According to Barthes:
As innocence, atopia resists description, definition, language, which is maya, classification of names (of Faults). Being atopic, the other makes language indecisive: one cannot speak of the other, about the other; every attribute is false, painful, awkward: the other is unqualifiable (this would be the true meaning of atopos). (35)
With a language that only offers successions of immediacies and accumulations of images, the lover needs to search for the proper words that could endlessly give his image-repertoire an emotional force. Just as Barthes claims, “For the lover’s delicacy, every fact has something aggressive about it: a bit of “science,” however
commonplace, invades the Image-repertoire” (139). Every glance, subtle interaction, a piece of evidence that derives from the mystic amorous experience is important to construct his image-repertoire. Due to this urge to describe every incident all at once, the lover does not have the chance to develop his language structurally since
“reflection is immediately absorbed in the mulling over of images, it never turns into reflexivity” (Barthes 59). The image-repertoire that is situated in the lover’s desire is thus “atopic.” It is orderless and unclassifiable, pointing ceaselessly toward the unforeseen originality that could never be organized and defined. Hence, as Barthes states, the discourse of love will “always remain on the same level: the lover speaks in bundles of sentences but does not integrate these sentences on a higher level, into a work; his is a horizontal discourse: no transcendence, no deliverance, no novel
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(though a great deal of the fictive)” (7). No matter how much effort the lover Kemal puts to capture or describe Füsun, being an observer and outsider, he could only understand the partial knowledge about her. Kemal, as far less a reliant lover, who suffers in this incurable disease, is never satisfied. As he laments: “When I was far from Füsun, the world troubled me; it was a puzzle whose pieces were all out of place. The moment I saw her, they all fit back together, reminding me that the world was a beautiful, meaningful whole where I could relax” (Pamuk 318). In his narration, he puts all his effort to describe this shattered self and lets the readers experience every detail of this love pain.
Interestingly, Kemal is consciously aware of the repeating lament that is displayed in front of the readers. Between his sentences, he will sometimes ask the readers to be more patient and explain to the readers the intention behind his actions.
As he says: “For the sake of any readers who are amazed that I could visit Füsun and her family […] for eight years, and who wonder how I can speak so breezily about such a long interval—thousands of days—I would like to say a few words about the illusion that is time…” (Pamuk 282). He helplessly clings to the compulsion that divides him between the recognition of his foolishness and his inability to stop
himself from doing so. Even though he is aware of the illogical nature of his behavior, he could not help but keep continuing it. Moreover, at the point when Füsun genuinely confesses her love to Kemal in chapter 17, “My Whole Life Depends on You Now” by saying “I’ve fallen in love with you. I’m head over heels in love with you!” Kemal confesses to the readers that “my first impulse was to grin stupidly. But I didn’t.
Instead I frowned, assuming a tender expression of concern, until finally I had overcome the force of my own feelings. Here, at one of the deepest, most profound moments of my life, there was something contrived in my demeanor” (Pamuk 71).
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This awkward reaction of “something contrived” tells us that at the very point when Kemal can truly be together with Füsun, he chooses to remain at distance from her and finds Füsun within himself. He knows deeply that there is no mutuality between him and Füsun. As Kemal later admits to the readers “Even in the early days I’d known deep in my heart that mutuality could never happen in the world I’ve been describing, and so I’d turned inward, to seek Füsun there. I think that Füsun knew, too, that one day I would find her inside me. In the end, everything would be fine”
(Pamuk 381). Although Füsun is the main focus of Kemal’s life and of the whole novel as well, what Kemal makes the readers adore is not Füsun, but the images she can provide. Being unable to anchor his discourse, Kemal confesses and exposes his vulnerability to the readers with no reservation. Although he knows that narrating about the image-repertoire compensates for nothing, he is still willing to (or could only) be trapped. The narrator we encounter here is a powerless lover who baldly asserts his accumulating desire toward the loved one. It is in this position that the lover realizes that he is not someone else but himself. As Barthes states, “he has no time to transform, to reverse, to protect. Perhaps he knows his stupidity, but he does not censure it. Or again: his stupidity acts as a cleavage, a perversion: it’s stupid, he says, and yet . . . it’s true” (A Lover’s Discourse 177). From the construction of the dense narrative of Kemal, the readers encounter a pure narrating subject, who, being unable to leave his attachment to the image-repertoire and cure his lovesick, could only be subjugated to the illusion of expressivity.
In a way, Kemal’s accumulations of discourses toward Füsun has no real coherence and chronology, it is exempt of knowledge, in some way, purely
descriptive. This “atopic” nature of the image-repertoire provides an open space that welcomes the lover to project all possible languages and images and further makes the
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amorous narratives highly sensual and discursive. Barthes points out that the amorous languages, “would be precisely the utopia of language; an entirely original, paradisiac language, the language of Adam — “natural, free of distortion or illusion, limpid mirror of our senses, a sensual language.” […] all minds converse together, they need no other language, for this is the language of nature” (Barthes 99). By reading this
“language of nature”, the readers could gaze into the sincerity and simplicity of a lover’s experiences, which seem to have no beginning or end. Thus, when a lover is contouring his image-repertoire and narrating all the sentiments, he becomes a fragile, delicate speaking subject—a nearly pure subject who stays in a self-sufficient world.
In the framework of the lover’s discourse, there is no dialogue and deliverance between the lovers, but the perpetual desire of the lover to dramatize, enact and play with the language of love. As Barthes states, being a lover: “is becoming a subject, being unable to keep myself from doing so, which drives me mad. I am not someone else: that is what I realize with horror” (121). To cope with this intractability and unknowability of the loved one, Kemal uses all his effort to describe and capture the existence of Füsun. He resists any possible closure, other than a compulsive drive to repeat again and again moments of happiness. Speaking about Füsun becomes a necessary process through which Kemal can invent a tolerable, lasting mode of existence. However, can we say that Füsun is a representation of innocence? Or is Füsun the image of innocence?
In The Museum of Innocence, the style of a lover’s discourse highlights the innocent essence of the narrating lover, the loved one (the image-repertoire), and the amorous language itself. The readers encounter a powerless lover Kemal, who boldly asserts his accumulating desire toward the absent loved one. The narration functions like a pastiche, a “non-site” where Kemal could project all related images and
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immerse himself in the maze of his own making—a privately satisfactory universe.
Nearly at the end of the novel, the readers know that Füsun has committed suicide.
Her death becomes the major fall within Kemal’s overall amorous experience and makes the portrait of Füsun as an otherworldly state that preserves all the spirited sensations before this fall. As the past with Füsun is idealized as a time of innocence, Kemal could return to the sensations of “truth” by retelling her, similar to what Barthes states, that “the absence of the other holds my head underwater; gradually I drown, my air supply gives out: it is by this asphyxia that I reconstitute my “truth”
and that I prepare what in love is intractable” (17). However, this sense of “truth”
could only be realized after Kemal notices that he can never retrieve nor re-experience the moments he spends together with his beloved. Füsun thus remains an unattainable ideal—an innocent and forever original image-repertoire that can never be resolved as a whole. By following Kemal’s narration, the readers are experiencing and re-constructing the “truth” or “innocence” of the past moments when there were no worries. But this reconstruction of “innocence” is based on the premise of loss. And as
could only be realized after Kemal notices that he can never retrieve nor re-experience the moments he spends together with his beloved. Füsun thus remains an unattainable ideal—an innocent and forever original image-repertoire that can never be resolved as a whole. By following Kemal’s narration, the readers are experiencing and re-constructing the “truth” or “innocence” of the past moments when there were no worries. But this reconstruction of “innocence” is based on the premise of loss. And as