The Museum Of Innocence

[Lane Frisch]

The Museum of Innocence (Turkish: Masumiyet Mzesi) is a novel by the Turkish Nobel-laureate novelist Orhan Pamuk, published on August 29, 2008. The book, set in Istanbul between 1975 and 1984, is an account of the love story between a wealthy businessman, Kemal, and a poorer distant relative of his, Fsun. Pamuk said he used YouTube to research Turkish music and film while preparing the novel.[1]

An excerpt, entitled "Distant Relations", appeared in The New Yorker on September 7, 2009.[2] The English translation, by Pamuk's long-time collaborator Maureen Freely, was released on October 20, 2009 by Alfred A. Knopf.[3]

Kemal has been engaged to a pretty girl named Sibel for two months when he meets a shop girl, Fsun, while buying a handbag for his fiancee. What follows in the next month and a half is an intense and secretive physical and emotional relationship between them. Kemal's happiest moment of life comes while making love the day Fsun confesses her deep love for him.

Though it is clear that he has also fallen completely for Fsun, Kemal keeps denying this to himself, believing that his marriage with Sibel and secret relationship could continue forever. His reverie is broken when Fsun disappears just after attending his engagement. Now he has to come to terms with his deep attachment and love for Fsun. He goes through a very painful period for about a year, unable to meet Fsun and deriving consolation from objects and places related to his beloved and their lovemaking.

Kemal's engagement to Sibel breaks off and finally Fsun responds to his letter and agrees to meet him. Fsun has got married, living with her husband and parents, and pretends to meet Kemal just as a distant relation, with undercurrents of anger. For the next eight years Kemal keeps visiting the family for supper and expressing his love for Fsun in various ways, while finding consolation in various objects related to her that he carries away from the house.

Pamuk's work often deals with a clash of culture between East and West, which was cited as part of the reason for him being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This novel continuously references the influence of the West (Europe and America) on Istanbul's culture, through both the idea of museums and the film industry, which becomes a large part of the novel.

The book, along with its accompanying museum, continuously refers to museums and collections. The idea of hoarding and collecting as a shameful act that becomes public and appreciated in the form of a museum is addressed particularly in the last chapters.

One of the key themes throughout the novel is the role of women in Turkish culture. The novel describes the ostracism of women who have lost their virginity before marriage, despite the fact that many claim to have a "more western" attitude toward this in 1970s Istanbul. Pamuk describes this as the taboo of virginity that is part of an old system in Turkey.

In an interview Pamuk blended all of these themes as he commented on how the role of the museum is also one of ownership, as Kemal looks to own Fsun as a trinket in his own museum, rather than allow her autonomy in her own life.[4]

The Museum of Innocence (Turkish: Masumiyet Mzesi) is a museum in a 19th-century house in Istanbul (ukurcuma) created by novelist Orhan Pamuk as a companion to his novel The Museum of Innocence. The museum and the novel were created in tandem, centred on the stories of two Istanbul families. On 17 May 2014, the museum was announced as the winner of the 2014 European Museum of the Year Award.[1]

The narrative and the museum offer a glimpse into upper-class Istanbul life from the 1970s to the early 2000s.[2] The novel details the story of Kemal, a wealthy Istanbulite who falls in love with his poorer cousin, Fsun, and the museum displays the artefacts of their love story.[2][3] According to the museum website, the collection, which includes more than a thousand objects, presents what the novel's characters "used, wore, heard, saw, collected and dreamed of, all meticulously arranged in boxes and display cabinets."

Pamuk first began to collect objects for the museum in the mid-1990s. "I wanted to collect and exhibit the 'real' objects of a fictional story in a museum and to write a novel based on these objects," he said.[4] Pamuk states that some of the objects displayed in the museum belonged to family and friends, while others were found elsewhere in Istanbul, or collected from around the world.[4] However, he has not specified which of the objects are directly linked to his own life; he maintains that the narrative of the museum should reflect that of the novel and not his own, having stated that, "This is not Orhan Pamuk's museum."[5]

After the novel was published in Turkish in 2008, the museum's collection was finalized, together with a multidisciplinary team of artists, designer and architects. It opened in April 2012[5] and now contains more than a thousand objects.

Situated in an area of Istanbul famous for the old antique shops that line its narrow streets, the museum reflects the character of everyday objects of 1970s upper-class Istanbul.[6] It consists of a series of displays, each corresponding to one of the 83 chapters in the novel.[7] According to the narrative, these objects were collected and arranged by Kemal, the novel's protagonist, as they are linked to his memories of Fsun, his love interest throughout the novel.[3] The displays include a large glass case containing 4,213 cigarette butts, each smoked by Fsun, a collection of salt shakers, and paintings and maps of the Istanbul streets where the narrative takes place.[5][4] Everything in the museum's four floors references the novel and the era in which the book is set.[5] Despite the coupling of museum and novel, Pamuk maintains that they can be experienced independent of each other: "just as the novel is entirely comprehensible without a visit to the museum, so is the museum a place that can be visited and experienced on its own."[4]

Pamuk developed the idea for the museum and novel in parallel from the outset; the museum is not 'based on' the novel, and likewise the novel was not written to capture the museum.[8] This blurring of lines between the two has been explored both in the novel The Museum of Innocence and in the museum catalogue, The Innocence of Objects.[4] In the early 1990s, Pamuk began collecting objects from the past that he saw and liked in junk dealers' shops and friends' homes, gradually forming the narrative that would become The Museum of Innocence. If he saw an object that he thought suited the novel in a junk shop, he bought it and described it in the text. He might stumble upon an object that would inspire a new story in the novel; or he might seek out objects to fit an existing story.[8]

In "The Innocence of Objects," a catalogue describing the creation of the novel-museum, Pamuk lays out a manifesto for museums. He calls for exchanging "Large national museums such as the Louvre and the Hermitage" for "smaller, more individualistic, and cheaper" museums, telling "stories" in the place of "histories." A museum, he writes, should work in its capacity to "reveal the humanity of individuals."[4]

Set between 1974 and the early 2000s, the novel The Museum of Innocence tells the story of Istanbul life from 1950 to 2000, through memories and flashbacks concerning the lives of two families, one wealthy, the other middle class.Kemal, who is from a wealthy Nişantaşı family, is due to marry Sibel, a girl from his own social class, when he falls in love with his distant relative Fsun, who works as a sales assistant in a shop. They begin to meet in dusty rooms filled with old furniture and memories.After Fsun marries someone else, Kemal spends eight years visiting her in this building, now transformed into a museum. After every visit, he takes away with him an object, which reminds him of Fsun. These objects form the collection of the Museum of Innocence.

There are exhibits on four of the museum building's five floors. Each of these four floors contains display cabinets corresponding to chapters from the novel, and carrying the same number and title as the relevant chapter. The boxes are displayed in the same order as the chapters, except for box number 68, entitled '4213 Cigarette Stubs', which is the biggest piece in the museum and is thus displayed at the entrance.The top floor, where Kemal Basmaci lived from 2000 to 2007 while the museum was being built, contains pages from Orhan Pamuk's manuscript of the novel, as well as his preliminary sketches for the boxes he created for each chapter.

We
settled down for a picnic on a meadow looking out at the view painted in this
Antoine Ignace Melling (1763-1831) landscape. I exhibit the thermos filled with
tea, stuffed grape leaves, boiled eggs and some Meltem bottles to evoke our
Sunday excursion that may offer the visitor some relief from the oppressive
succession of interior settings, as well as my own agony. But neither the
reader nor the visitor should on any account think that I could forget my pain
even for an instant.

In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects we love, but losing all sense of Time. Real museums are places where time is transformed into Space.

The Museum of Innocence is based on the assumption that objects used for different purposes and evocative of the most disparate memories can, when placed side by side, bring forth unprecedented thoughts and emotions.

The inspiration for the Museum of Innocence came to Pamuk in 1982, while he was having dinner with the last prince of the Ottoman dynasty. Exiled after the formation of the Turkish republic, the prince ended up in Alexandria and worked for decades at the Antoniadis Palace museum, first as a ticket collector and then as director. Now, back in Istanbul after a fifty-year exile, he needed a job. The guests discussed the delicate subject of employment for the straitened septuagenarian prince of a defunct empire. Someone said the İhlamur Palace museum might need a guide: who better than the prince, who had lived there as a child?

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