由戀人敘事、紀念物收集及博物館設計初探奧罕．帕慕克《純真博物館》計劃之純真性

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學文學院英語學系碩士論文 Department of English, College of Liberal Arts. National Taiwan Normal University Master’s Thesis. 由戀人敘事、紀念物收集及博物館設計初探奧罕帕慕克《純真博物館》計劃之純真性 Narrating, Collecting and Materializing Innocence in Orhan Pamuk’s Project The Museum of Innocence 彭卉薇 Pang, Hui-Wei 指導教授: 諾斯邦博士邵毓娟博士. 中華民國 109 年 1 月 January 2020.

(2) Acknowledgments Writing this thesis has been an extremely difficult but rewarding task for me. The experience has deepened my perceptions toward knowledge and has also enabled me to confront the long-ignored deficiencies in my learning habits. This once-in-alifetime journey has empowered me to face upcoming challenges with more confidence. None of these would have been possible without the expertise and kindness of both of my thesis advisors Prof. Valentin Nussbaum and Prof. Yuh-Chuan Shao. My deepest gratitude owes to Prof. Nussbaum for his continuous support throughout the whole process. Despite my background as a student from the English Department, he agreed upon my participation in his classes at the Graduate Institute of Art History. During the courses, I have gained access to the field I’m interested in and conceived an idea on a research subject that might connect literature and art. I’m also grateful for his instant agreement to be my thesis advisor. During the process, he generously offered me resourceful materials to enrich my approaches. Every meeting I had with him were so enlightening that it gave me the strength to continue my writings. Without his knowledge and corrections, I would not have the chance to complete this thesis. It is my pleasure to have had Prof. Nussbaum as my advisor. My deepest gratitude also owes to Prof. Yuh-Chuan Shao. Even though I’ve never been her student before, she believed in me and kindly agreed to participate in this project. Her detailed corrections have improved the overall clarity and accuracy of my writing. Moreover, her warmest encouragement throughout the whole journey also provided me with the strength to continue my work. With her professional guidance and support, I gain the chance to complete this thesis. It is my pleasure to have had Prof. Shao as my advisor. My sincere gratitude also goes to both of my committee members i.

(3) Prof. Han-Yu Huang and Prof. Louis Lo. I am extremely thankful for their instant agreement in participating in this project as the examiners. Their insightful suggestions were valuable in broadening the perspectives of my work. Without their help, I would not have the chance to complete this task. I would like to thank Prof. Han-Yu Huang for offering me the chance to be his assistant from the first semester of school until the very end of this journey. The job has supported me financially and offered me the chance to develop skills in managing different situations concerning the administrative works. I also gained numerous opportunities to participate in enlightening speeches and seminars as a listener. It has been a joyful working experience. Special thanks to Prof. Chiu-Hua Su and Prof. Chia-Shu Hsu from the English Department of Soochow University for they led me into the world of English literature with their enlightening courses back in my college days. Moreover, despite my background as a Chinese literature major student, they believed in me and kindly wrote the recommendation letters for me so that I was qualified to apply for the graduate program. Without their help, I would not have this opportunity to continue my studies at NTNU. I would like to thank my friend Brandy Hsieh, who has offered me the warmest encouragement throughout this long journey. With the laughter we shared, I gained the strength to continue my work. Thanks to my friend Ingrid Liao, who was extremely kind to me when we were both assistants. Her warm support gave me the power to believe in myself. To the people who once encouraged me at different phases of this journey, there are no words, only infinite gratitude. Lastly, my deepest gratitude owes to my beloved family: My mom, and aunt, who never lose faith in me. Their unconditional support helps me work through all the difficult phases. They are the only reason I can pursue my dream without hesitation. ii.

(4) 摘要小說《純真博物館》(2008) 出版後四年，土耳其作家奧罕帕慕克於伊斯坦堡成立了與小說同名之實體博物館，並於同年出版了博物館目錄冊 The Innocence of Objects (暫譯為《物件之純真》(2012)) 闡述其博物館起源與設計概念，此獨特之藝術計劃以「純真」為主軸，創作出包括小說、實體博物館與目錄冊等跨媒介作品，也開展了小說敘事、收集行為、物件陳列及博物館空間等不同領域之對話。本文試以《純真博物館》計劃為研究對象，希冀探討帕慕克如何藉由敘事、紀念物收集及實體博物館設計呈現抑或再現此「純真」之意。本文共分為介紹、三章節及結論。第一章小說文本分析借助羅蘭巴特《戀人絮語》為主要分析架構，探討敘事者凱末爾何以視其愛戀對象芙頌為意象拼貼之主要媒材，進而闡述其敘事風格與「純真」之連結。第二章旨在連結收集行為之純真特質與蘇珊史都華紀念物理論，進而探討收藏者何以藉由物件收集及個人敘事重返「純真」之境。第三章著重於實體博物館之視覺與空間設計，首先將分析其物件陳列何以與珍奇櫥櫃傳統、超現實主義物件及約瑟夫康奈爾的微型木盒裝置產生對話，進而探問帕慕克的櫥櫃設計與物件如何實體化對於失落純真之想望與渴求；第二部分則援引加斯東巴舍拉《空間詩學》中對於理想家屋的描繪以探討此博物館如何藉由家屋結構、迴旋式階梯及閣樓空間形塑一重返原初家屋之感官經驗。. 關鍵字:《純真博物館》、《戀人絮語》、羅蘭巴特、收集、紀念品與敘事、蘇珊 史都華、珍奇櫥櫃、超現實物件、約瑟夫康奈爾、家屋空間、加斯東巴舍拉. iii.

(5) Abstract Four years after the publication of the novel The Museum of Innocence (2008), the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk founded a museum with the same name in Istanbul to serve as the physical counterpart of the novel. In the same year, he published a compelling catalog—The Innocence of Objects (2012)—explaining the development of the actual museum and the cabinets that compose its collection. This thesis is 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. It consists of an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. Chapter one is an attempt to offer a textual analysis and a comparative reading of the novel through Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse and, furthermore, to explore the design of the narrative and its relation to “innocence.” Chapter two explores how the act of collecting could be seen as an innocent act and analyzes the souvenir collection intrinsic to this project. The relationship between narrative and souvenir objects will be tackled with Susan Stewart’s On Longing. Chapter three moves on to explore the curating choices of the physical museum. It will ask how the tradition of the cabinets of curiosities, the aesthetic impact of surrealist objects—more specifically Joseph Cornell boxes—could shed light on the quest of “innocence” at work within the display strategies deployed in the Museum of Innocence. Secondly, in light of Bachelard’s work The Poetics of Space, the last section will delve into how the domestic space and the spiral viewing path that leads to an attic can shape the viewing experiences into a home-returning journey. Keywords: The Museum of Innocence, A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes, collecting, souvenirs narratives, Susan Stewart, cabinets of curiosities, surrealist objects, Joseph Cornell, home space, Gaston Bachelard iv.

(6) Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………….….1 I. Background and Motivation……………………..……………………………..1 II. Literature Review: Approaching Innocence in Pamuk’s Project……………...4 III. Methodology and Outline of Chapters………………………………….......12 Chapter One: Narrating Innocence………………………………………………..17 I. Encountering a Barthesian Lover……………………………………………..17 II. The Lover’s Narrative as the Aesthetic Representation of Innocence……….24 Chapter Two: Collecting Innocence………………………………………………..35 I. The Childlike Collector and the Game of Collecting………………………....35 II. Assembling the Fictional Souvenirs…………………………………………44 Chapter Three: Materializing Innocence………………………………………….57 I. Modern Curiosities: Innocence Recaptured ………………………………….57 II. A Museum Nested in A House……………………………………………….76 Conclusion: Fiction of Innocence...……..…………….……..…………..................84 References………………………………………………………………………...…90. v.

(7) List of Figures 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. Fig. 3: Cabinet 26, “An Anatomical Chart of Love Pains” within the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 131. 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. 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. 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. 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.. vi.

(8) Fig. 11: Cabinet 58, “Tombala” (upper part) within the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 207. Fig. 12: Cabinet 40, “The Consolations of Life in a Yali” within the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 166. Fig. 13: Cabinet 19, “At the Funeral” within the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 114. 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. Fig. 15: Domenico, Remps. Cabinet of Curiosities. c. 1689, Museo dell’Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence. Image from Wikimedia Commons. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Domenico_Remps__Cabinet_of_Curiosities.jpg >. Fig. 16: Georg, Hinz Johann. Still-Life: a Cabinets of Curiosity. Later seventeenth century, image reproduced in The Illustrated Lodon News, (detail) Illustrated London News Archive, 1938. <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0001578/19381123/069/0 029>. Fig. 17: Breton, André, Poème Objet [Poem-Object].1935. Photo from Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. <https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-andartists/28925/po%C3%A8me-objet-poe m-object#related-media-anchor>. Fig. 18: Dalí, Salvador. Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically-Gala’s Shoe. Salvador Dalí Museum, Edition 1973; Original 1931 (lost). Photo from Salvador. vii.

(9) Dalí Museum official website. <https://archive.thedali.org/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=362;type=10 1>. Fig. 19: Cabinet 37, “The Empty House” within the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 158. Fig. 20: Cabinet 14, “Istanbul’s Streets, Bridges, Hills, and Squares” within the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 100-101. Fig. 21: Cornell, Joseph. Brochure for the exhibit Romantic Museum at the Hugo Gallery: Portraits of women, constructions and arrangements by Joseph Cornell. New York: Hugo Gallery, Dec 1946. Photo from Smithsonian, Archives of American Art, Joseph Cornell papers, 1804-1986, bulk 1939-1972. <https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/brochure-exhibit-romanticmuseum-hugo-gallery-portraits-women-constructions-and-arrangements-josephcornell-8256>. Fig. 22: Cornell, Joseph. The Crystal Cage (Portrait of Berenice) (1943), photo from McShine, Kynaston. The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999, p. 60. Fig. 23: Cornell, Joseph. Museum. 1949, photo from Lea, Sarah. Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe. and Sharp, Jasper. Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2015, p. 184. Fig. 24: Cornell, Joseph. Romantic Museum. 1949-50. Collection Mr. and Mrs. Gene Locks, photo from The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, 1999, p. 56. Fig. 25: The house structure of the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 19.. viii.

(10) Fig. 26: The attic space of the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 249. Fig. 27. The scene looked from the attic space of the Museum of Innocence, photo from The Innocence of Objects, 2012, p. 253. Fig. 28: The spiral pattern inscribed on the first floor, photo from the official website of the Museum of Innocence. <https://masumiyetmuzesi-en.myshopio.com/page/the-museum-of-innocence>. Fig. 29: The logo of the Museum of Innocence, photo from the official website of the Museum of Innocence. <https://masumiyetmuzesi-en.myshopio.com/>.. ix.

(11) Introduction I. Background and Motivation Four years after the publication of the novel Masumiyet Müzesi (The Museum of Innocence) (2008)1, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk founded a museum with the same name in Istanbul to serve as the physical counterpart of the novel. In the same year, he published a compelling catalog—The Innocence of Objects (2012)— explaining the development of the museum and the cabinets that compose its collection. More recently in 2015, Pamuk collaborated with the British film director Grant Gee to produce a poetic documentary film named Innocence of Memories. This special and complex project around The Museum of Innocence crosses various fields and further opens discussions on the aesthetic of narrating, the art of collecting and displaying, meanwhile, demonstrating the intertwining and ambiguous relationship between narrative, objects, and museum space. After the Ottoman Empire fell apart during WWI, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923, separated religion and politics and modernized the country. However, the policies haven’t made a clear cut between the Old Turkey and the New Turkey. There are still today two strong forces lurking in the country that seemingly contradict each other: Western secular values and Islamic conservatism. While some secularists consider Atatürk as the savior of the country and participate in extreme Kemalist revolutions, some traditionalists may suffer from various mistreatments and a sense of alienation within their own native country. Due to a lack of a firm democratic system to mediate the two poles, the process of modernization served not purely as an advancing procedure; it also triggered anxiety and tensions toward class, religion, and gender, making Turkey a turbulent country to. 1. Translated into English by Maureen Freely in 2009. 1.

(12) this day. Under this circumstance, most people position themselves in a rather inbetween, ambiguous status, resulting in a specific duality of Turkish identity. 2 Around the second half of the 20th century, most of the middle-class and nouveau riche White Turks were excited and meanwhile disturbed by the soaring consumption of numerous Western products. Set during this transitional period, the novel The Museum of Innocence reflects upon some aspects of Turkey’s turbulent history, identity issues, and the complex fascination toward Western value through the lens of objects wrapped within an amorous discourse. For instance, in the novel, the boutique that sells European commodities and imitations is the place where the two protagonists, Kemal Basmaci, a well-to-do thirty-year-old young man of the Istanbul bourgeoisie, and Füsun Keskin, a poor distant relative and an eighteen-year-old shop girl, with whom he falls in love with, meet. Kemal the narrator, points out: In those days, bored Westernized housewives of the affluent neighborhood like Sisli Nisantasi, and Bebeck did not open “art galleries” but boutiques, and stocked them with trinkets and whole ensembles smuggled in luggage from Paris and Milam, or copies of “the latest” dresses featured in imported magazines like Elle and Vogue, selling these goods at ridiculously inflated prices to other rich housewives who were as bored as they were. (Pamuk 5) Although belonging to the social elites, Kemal has always been absent-minded, distancing himself from the popular activities enjoyed by the Turkish upper-class people. From Kemal’s observations of the bourgeois circle within the novel, we can notice the overwhelming craze toward Western lifestyle and products. The exhaustive atmosphere of the endless pursuit of modern value suffocates Kemal. Without other. 2 See more discussions on Turkey’s political history and current situation in the collections of essay Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey (2012) edited by Ahmet T. Kuru and Alfred Stepans. 2.

(13) options, he could only follow the preordained path: To manage his father’s wellestablished company and marry the girl who suits him the most. As most of the uppermiddle class people are enjoying themselves in the pursuit of the so-called modern life, Kemal, on the other hand, constantly reveals his uneasiness toward the fascinations and belief in all that is considered “Western.” It is not until he meets Füsun that he starts to feel passionate about life and begins his life-long obsession. The sense of alienation permeates in every corner of the novel and paves the way for Kemal’s comparatively intense monologue and frantic act of collecting. During the eight years of his unrequited love relationship, Kemal obsessively collects and even steals for consolation the tiny objects once touched by his lover Füsun. This collecting drive does not merely play a vital role in the fiction; it also leads us to an actual museum in Istanbul and a catalog with a unique museography. Entering this house-like museum at the backstreet of Istanbul, the visitors will find themselves ascending a spiral space where 83 cabinets of different heights and sizes are displayed. Inside these cabinets, all sorts of everyday paraphernalia such as newspaper clippings, old photographs, toys, women’s accessories, and human anatomical models have been assembled to correspond to each chapter of the novel. The cabinets are subdivided into girded compartments or even arranged into hanging props, presenting a poetic visual experience that retells the subtle sentiments and memories one can invest in physical objects. These assemblages of everyday ephemeral invite both the visitors that have or have not read the novel to gaze at the most intimate emotions of a fictional lover—Kemal— and the material history of Istanbul’s recent past. They can, moreover, feel the melancholic yet innocent atmosphere of the museum space. Interestingly, it is not hard to notice that from the titles of the novel to the catalog and the design of the physical museum, the mystic and ambiguous theme of innocence 3.

(14) binds the project together. The novelist-curator Orhan Pamuk’s obsession toward the idea of innocence resonates from the text of the novel to the catalog and finally is reinforced in the design of his art museum. In one of the interviews, when the NPQ reporter asked Pamuk: “How do you define the “innocence” you are venerating in the museum, which figures in the title of your novel?” Pamuk answered: “I don’t explain my book titles. They are not summaries, like War and Peace. They add one final twist to the story. When my readers ask “why this title?”, I always reply “because it provides one more opportunity to think about the meaning of the book”3 (24-25). In Pamuk’s word, the idea of innocence does not limit or define the interpretation of this project; rather, it welcomes more interpretations. The main goal of this thesis is, therefore, to grope into what I have observed about how Pamuk’s project figuratively and physically brings the readers/visitors to experience a state of innocence. The thesis will approach the different connotations of a complicated sentiment such as “innocence” and come up with a possible interpretation of the “innocence” that Pamuk has delicately embedded throughout his literary art project. II. Literature Review: Approaching Innocence in Pamuk’s Project Pamuk’s unique project has prompted scholarly and public attention in various fields. What has mostly been discussed by the critics and reviewers include the recurring motifs of the East-West relations that appear in most of Pamuk’s works, the oppressive status of women under the pretentious value of modernization, the complex sentiments toward sexuality and virginity, and the autobiographical features that are strongly inscribed within the project. Though some reviews and articles have. 3. “On the Museum of Innocence: Caressing the World With Words”. New Perspectives Quarterly, volume 30, Issue 4, October 2013, 24-29. 4.

(15) related their discussions to the idea of innocence, a few of them reflect it comprehensively in relation to the overall project. However, what could still be assumed from the most dominant interpretation is that this idea of innocence in Pamuk’s project links to a search for the origins and authenticity, which both the protagonist Kemal and the novelist-curator Pamuk somehow attempt to pursue, preserve and regain. In the following review of literature, I would like to bring forth the possible implications of “innocence,” as claimed by critics and researchers as the first step in approaching Pamuk’s project. Firstly, the implication of innocence as virginity could be seen in the novel. As Pamuk also confirmed in the interview with NPQ: “Most obviously, innocence refers to virginity, which the lower middle-happy class shop girl Füsun loses to her upperclass Western-oriented distant cousin, Kemal, who falls in love with her” (NPQ 25). In the novel’s background, virginity is still a “treasure” that women should keep for the sake of a happy marriage. This loss of virginity plays an important role in Kemal’s relationship with both the wife-to-be Sibel and Füsun. As described in chapter 15 “A Few Unpalatable Anthropological Truths” of the novel (Pamuk 62-63), women who have a complex relationship with men or have sex before marriage are still considered inappropriate and often end up badly within popular movies or in the newspapers. In Kemal’s case, the reason why Sibel is willing to have a physical relationship with him before marriage is due to the fact that she foresees their relationship is heading toward a serious ending—Kemal is going to marry her. Moreover, since Sibel considers herself as a “modern” woman, this pre-marriage sex will also serve as a gesture of bravery among the so-called Westernized circle. However, after their relationship ends, Sibel cannot accept her past with Kemal. She, therefore, goes through a painful period of time. Her willingness and the “modernized” self-image is thus conditional, 5.

(16) constructed on the misunderstanding of herself as she is imitating the modern values. On the other hand, Kemal considers Füsun as a “modern” and “brave” girl who does not take the traditional value of virginity into consideration, while, in fact, it turns out that Füsun thinks that her life then counts on Kemal once they have a physical relationship. Kemal then confesses to the readers, I had suggested that what Sibel had done out of love and trust, Füsun had done out of courage and a modern outlook. I have suffered many years of remorse for labelling Füsun as ‘modern and courageous’, for the compliment also said that I would feel no special obligation to her just because she’d slept with me. If she was ‘modern’ she would not see sex with a man before marriage as a burden, and neither would she worry about being a virgin on her wedding day. Just like those European women we entertained in our fantasies. (Pamuk 50-51) Living under the pressure of traditional values, both Sibel and Füsun lost their innocence not only physically but also mentally within the ambiguous concept of “modern values,” leading toward the tragedy of their own relationships and even their destinies. They struggle between their desire and repression from a society where virginity is still a standard to judge a woman’s value. Secondly, innocence in the novel serves also as a kind of authentic perception toward the external world. As the NPQ reporter asked Pamuk: “At one point you refer to “the innocent charm” of daily life. The ordinary moments when Kemal sat around the dinner table at Füsun’s parents smoking, drinking raki and watching TV in the evening take on an almost sacred cast. Nothing spectacular or sophisticated is going on. But there is deep happiness in this ritual nonetheless” (25). Pamuk replied: There is a certain innocence to all of humanity watching TV every night while chatting away pointlessly. When my character visits Füsun’s middle-class 6.

(17) family for eight years, looking at TV every night, I am underlining, tongue in cheek, the actual experience of 90 percent of humanity…There was indeed a kind of naivete to the pre-modernity of those days, an innocence now lost in the transition to modernity and post-modernity. (25) Through observing Füsun’s tiny gesture and facial expressions when she is practicing daily rituals, Kemal himself can participate in a communal sense of happiness. His life at Füsun’s house is then a search of authenticity, a kind of long-lost lifestyle that had never once existed in his life—the beauty of the everydayness. This idea of authenticity of a pre-modern lifestyle is also discussed in Hülya Yağcıoğlu’s “The Innocence of Objects: Commodification, Collecting and Fetishism in The Age of Innocence and The Museum of Innocence” (2015). The author approaches Pamuk’s project through the lens of “commodity fetishism” and reads it as a “critique of Western capitalism” (59). She contends that “The Museum of Innocence is basically the story of a man who attempts to get away from his pretentious world in an endeavor to bridge the gap between objects and people by being a collector” (57). That is to say, by collecting the objects from the realm of lower-middle class Istanbulites represented by Füsun’s family, Kemal can get closer to the authentic world. Based on this perspective, the author brings forth the idea of ‘innocence’ in suggesting that The Merhamet Apartments is like the Garden of Eden, a place where Adam and Eve, here, Kemal and Füsun are “making love without interacting with the rest of the world.” This Eden-like garden refers to a nostalgic past that is “beyond all worldly significations and constructions” (98).4 Hence, objects in The Merhamet. Here, the author’s usage of the Garden of Eden points back to a prelapsarian and pre-capitalist world. In the Bible, we may have encountered possibly the most innocent mankind: Adam and Eve, who are the first two people created by God. God puts Adam, who was created out of the image of himself, in the Garden of Eden—a place where everything is in abundance and sufficient condition. He also gives him a wife Eve. Together they could look after the Garden he has created. Under the protection of God, Adam and Eve live in harmony with free will and a promise of an eternal soul. There is only one rule to 7 4.

(18) Apartments are decontextualized from the process of mass production and they mediate Kemal into the disappeared pre-capitalist past which Turkey has lost during the belated process of modernization. The search of authenticity is also analyzed in F. Meltem Gürle’s work “‘Wandering on the Peripheries’: The Turkish Novelistic Hero as ‘Beautiful Soul’ (2013)”. In the article, she first compares the differences between the classical Bildungsroman and its Turkish version to suggest that, unlike the protagonist that fights against the difficulties and transforms into a ‘better’ person throughout the journey in the conventional coming-of-age story, the protagonist in the Turkish Bildungsroman does not end up as a promising, ideal person who can fit into the normality. Rather, the problematic perception of self-identity makes the Turkish protagonist lack proper reconciliation and suffer from a sense of displacement and self-imposed confinement. The Turkish novelist hero remains as a pure subject who the author refers to as a “beautiful soul”: “in their search for aesthetic autonomy, their narcissistic self-involvement and nostalgic longing for a distant and irretrievable past. More or less “spiritual dandies” themselves, they both demand purity: a pursuit that ends only in the attainment of an abstraction” (108). Using Kemal as one example of a “beautiful soul”, Gürle suggests that as the upper-class Kemal is surrounded by numerous imitations in values and objects, he is suffering from the absence of real. follow: do not eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. However, with the lure of the serpent, Eve eats it and then she gives the fruit to Adam. Both of them disobey God’s command. This results in their failure, as the Bible wrote: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” (King James Version, Genesis 3.7). Before they eat the fruit, they walk around the Garden with their naked bodies. However, it is after Adam and Eve eat the fruit and acquire the knowledge of Good and Evil—mostly interpreted as sexual desire—that they self-consciously start to feel ashamed about their own naked body. They consider nudeness shameful and start to draw a distinction between their bodies and the external world. As a form of punishment and curse, they are expelled from Heaven and sent to the earthly world to suffer as sinful humans. As God says: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Genesis 3.15). This Fall of the Man, namely, the loss of innocence, leads to the birth of self that separates man from the primitive and paradisal state of happiness. 8.

(19) connection with the world. Thus, when he encounters Füsun, “Kemal notices immediately that Füsun, unlike his mother and fiancée, is able to engage in the world with no restraint” (104). During eight years of endless visits, Füsun’s house serves to be a temple-like space for Kemal to worship an untainted world of wholeness. Surrounded by objects related to Füsun, Kemal possesses a chance to reconstruct a sense of authenticity. However, Gürle contends that Kemal’s failure in recognizing Füsun as another subject results in the failure of this quest of innocence. As she concludes, the Turkish protagonists only “resides in a permanent delusion”: “The novelistic hero suffers from what we might call an emotional and intellectual “short circuit” stemming from his self-referential subjectivity, which detaches him or her not only from the world, but also from his/her own substance” (108). This search of authenticity then turns into an illusion that could only be capsulated and imagined in a static museum space. Let us turn the discussion to the physical museum. In “Fact, Fiction and Value in the Museum of Innocence” (2016), Duygu Tekgül relates the implication of innocence together with the design of the physical museum and considers the Museum of Innocence as a quasi-ethnographic literary museum in which the author-curator Pamuk parallels fiction and fact in order to activate a two-fold legitimizing process: an assertion of authenticity with the use of post-modern aesthetics. First of all, the sense of ethnographic verisimilitude could be observed in the novel when Kemal sometimes refers to himself similar to an anthropologist of his own experiences: “Having become—with the passage of time—the anthropologist of my own experience, I have no wish to disparage those obsessive souls who bring back crockery, artifacts, and utensils from distant lands and put them on display for us, the better to understand the lives of others and our own” (Pamuk 30). Nevertheless, there 9.

(20) is also one chapter entitled “A Few Unpalatable Anthropological Truths,” which documents the representation of women in Turkey’s newspapers with a rather rational manner and well-structured narrative. Through the ethnographic narrative and factual documentation, the ordinary objects are then transvalued and relocated, striving toward a sense of authenticity. Furthermore, since most of the displayed objects are genuine daily items once used by the Istanbul residents from the 1960s to 1980s, it indicates an assumed specificity both in time and space. The final application of the museum frame around this project thus reinforces this search of verisimilitude since museum is a proper space for encompassing genuine objects. However, what is interesting is that the article questions, in the end, this assertion of authenticity when concerning the overall design of the project. Whether the depiction is within the novel or the design of the physical museum, they both fall into a binaristic and artificial manner which is at odds with Pamuk’s intention of presenting the life of ordinary individuals. In the story, Füsun’s aspiration for the upper-middle-class life and her final suicide all strengthen the dichotomy of class distinction; inside the physical museum, the carefully designed cabinets, the ordinary objects collected from the lower-middle class inhabitants and the display of Western imitations also re-enforce Kemal’s male bourgeois status. Within these representations, the visitors might somehow passively accept the hierarchy of these collections and position in a standard that is highly influenced by Western consumer culture under a specific social status. These problematic “cultural translations” thus contradict the initial intention of the project (393-398). Tekgül notes that the tension also appears in the management of the museum, as he states, Upon entrance, visitors are asked to turn their mobile phones silent and reminded that photography is not allowed. Inside, signs on the walls tell browsers to keep 10.

(21) noise to a minimum. These seem to substantiate what Orhan Pamuk challenges in the ‘Modest Manifesto for Museums’, criticizing the grand museums of Istanbul for their ‘air of a government office’ (Pamuk, 2012a: 54). The mundane nature of the objects on display and the aesthetic stance embodied in the eclectic selection seem to be at odds with this elevated atmosphere of decorum. (393) It seems that the ordinary object can only manifest its meaning and value under the frame of an institutionalized space. In order to deal with these tensions, Tekgül contends that Pamuk uses the post-modern technique of narrative, a kind of “aesthetic autonomy” that magically eliminates these problems, when problems relating to cultural translation threaten the ideological legitimacy of the project, the personal and fabricated nature of fiction comes as a convenient epistemological strategy: curated with a postmodernist outlook, the museum collection can conveniently fall back on aesthetics if authenticity becomes untenable beyond the material dimension of the Museum. (399) Here, the post-modern aesthetics blurs the distinction between art and artifact, ethnographic museum and art gallery, imaginary and factual, aestheticizing the whole project into a work of transgression that could somehow cancel the hierarchical representations of the novel and the curatorial practices of the museum. For Tekgül, the idea of innocence that both Kemal and Pamuk assert emerges during this process of aestheticizing. Namely, with childlike behaviorism and “anti-conquest,” “victimized” characteristic, Kemal can problematize his own bourgeois subjectivity and reiterate his innocence. For the novelist Pamuk, his fictional character Kemal, who comes from a similar social background, can serve as a site to let out a sentiment of guilt. Namely, he could assert his innocence by problematizing Kemal’s subjectivity and questioning this alter-ego within a “quasi-ethnographic work”. Tekgül 11.

(22) concludes that “the idea of ‘innocence’ eventually implies that the Museum seeks to claim aesthetic autonomy in postmodernist terms. The Museum of Innocence, therefore, presents a unique case in bringing together fact and fiction in a dynamic relationship that challenges the view of clear-cut sources of value” (399). Since the meta-narrative nature of the project provides a threshold for Kemal and Pamuk to narrate the discourse of guilt, they are both considered innocent. The postmodern aesthetics of Pamuk’s project hence functions to legitimize this search of authenticity and the search for innocence. Motivated by the multimedial and multilayered design surrounding the idea of innocence, this thesis would like to further ask: How could we possibly invite the act of narrating, collecting and the design of the physical museum into a more fruitful dialogue on the theme of innocence? III. Methodology and Outline of Chapters 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 12.

(23) 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 13.

(24) 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 14.

(25) 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 Pre-Enlightenment and PreScientific 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 15.

(26) 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.. 16.

(27) 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. 17.

(28) 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. 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/orhanpamuk-part-ii/orhan-pamuk-part-ii/>. 18 5.

(29) 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 19.

(30) 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 20.

(31) 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 21.

(32) 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 famous movie star. During his visits to Füsun’s house, what Kemal can only do is to observe every precious moment of the Keskin family and Füsun’s daily rituals like an anthropologist who naïvely documents, catalogs, and studies with a curious gaze all the first-hand experiences that happen on a faraway land, as Kemal says: 22.

(33) I was coming to see myself as someone who had traveled to distant countries and remained there for many years: say, an anthropologist who had fallen in love with a native girl while living among the indigenous folk of New Zealand to study and catalog their habits and rituals, how they worked and relaxed, and had fun. (Pamuk 496) Kemal documents Füsun’s every tiny gesture like he was studying some kind of primitive knowledge of an exotic world. Kemal’s passion does not merely lie in Füsun but is also subjugating to a higher demand for a communal sense of intimacy, which he can harvest from the familial routine and conversations of the Keskins. Although the Keskins spend most of their time watching TV and listening to the radio, they deliberately ignore the tensions and turmoil that happens during the time. They use television and radio merely as a tool to remind the official time that they share with others. This absence of social awareness makes the space nearly motionless and timeless—a feeling of falling out of the official time, as Kemal reminds the readers and the visitors: When people come to visit my museum and view all the Keskins’ old possessions—especially all these broken, rusting clocks and watches that haven’t worked for years—I want them to notice how strange they are, how they seem to exist out of time, how they have created among themselves a time that is theirs alone. This is the timeless world whose air I inhaled during my years with Füsun and her family. (Pamuk 286) Within this rather timeless space, Kemal invents his strings of the present “happiness”. He states that, As we get older and come to the painful realization that this line per se has no real meaning—a sense that comes to us cumulatively in intimations we struggle 23.

(34) to ignore—we are brought to sorrow. But sometimes these moments we call the “present” can bring us enough happiness to last a century, as they did if Füsun smiled, in the days when I was going to Çukurcuma for supper. (Pamuk 288) Füsun’s house hence becomes a naïve land that he just happens to land on. Even without intimate physical interactions, visiting Füsun’s house still functions as an act to reproduce and harvest pleasurable moments that could help Kemal escape the pressure of linear time and gain a pure sense of happiness. Though Kemal is always the outsider in the Keskins’ house, he could still feel the bond to be part of the family routine and realize that “happiness means being close to the one you love, that’s all” (Pamuk 256). During eight years of visiting Füsun’s house, nothing between them has really been resolved, changed or achieved. Both Kemal and Feridun are afraid that they may lose Füsun as long as she becomes famous. Therefore, they manage to keep her away from the movie industry and even feel joyful about their exploited power of control over her, as Kemal says “SOMETIMES THE things we were obliged to do to keep Füsun away from the wolves and jackals besieging her on our every visit to the Pelür were less a source of distress than of mirth and even of moral uplift” (Pamuk 336). There is no transparency and mutual trust of their so-called “love” toward Füsun. Nearly at the end of the novel, Füsun commits suicide on the long-expected trip to Paris—the most active gesture she has performed throughout the novel. She would rather die than live in a world that does not promise any future—a life that is shattered by the disjunction between her dream to become a movie star and a suffocating reality. Without any progression, Kemal continuously produces and accumulates descriptive languages to immerse himself in the illusion of expressivity of amorous experiences. II. The Lover’s Narrative as the Aesthetic Representation of Innocence 24.

(35) 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 25.

(36) 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 26.

(37) 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 27.

(38) 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 evermissing 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 28.

(39) 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, 29.