The Museum Of Innocence Orhan Pamuk
Gwenda Arguin
Even as Pamuk writes of a country running to catch up, he writes of a country that is so unlike anywhere else, and so much itself and as a consequence so desirable, that the rest of the us find ourselves scratching at its door like puppies hoping to be let in. For all that Pamuk the citizen has been embroiled in legal struggles with the Turkish state, he strikes me in one sense as an elemental patriot. To chronicle something obsessively is a form of love, and Pamuk documents the details of his Istanbul obsessively, just as his character Kemal creates his museum of innocence out of the universe of meaningless bric-a-brac surrounding his beloved.
Getting off at Şişhane metro station in Istanbul and asking for the Museum of Innocence draws blank looks, even when you call it by its Turkish name Masumiyet Mzesi, and even though this metro station is supposed to be the closest to it. And it is 10 minutes and many people later that I find someone who knows it. I am to take a right turn to a downward slope and go down an endless looking flight of steps.
I soon pass a modest church with a crowd of expectant young women and men outside its closed doors. The path gets narrower, takes a curve on a flat landing, and opens further below. Not narrow any more. I soon cross the Italian Embassy on my right as I climb further down and reach an intersection in an arty neighbourhood. The museum is a few steps to the left, and I have to go around the corner for the entry door.
To read Museum of Innocence was to relive the agonising pleasure of this irony, to watch life pass away, but slowly and with the unwarranted optimism of winning it back. No novel can be summarised, and the Museum even less so, especially if the chief pleasure the novel offers you is that of words following words, and you discover the impossibility of blocking the flow for the beauty of its prickly innocence, and you realise with pain that this beauty can exist only in and as a memory.
The intrigue that The White Castle provoked has now brought me to the Mzesi. I find an expansive instalment of a sample of the 4,213 cigarette stubs that Kemal Basmaci collected. Stubs of cigarettes his love Fsun had smoked, stubs that have touched her lips and remind him of the happiest moment of his life when he met her on a trip to buy a handbag for his fiance.
As I pass the corner with the stubs and make my way up the three storeys of this modest house where Kemal lived his last years, I relive the novel through its objects, situations, motifs, similes and metaphors, a box to each chapter of the novel.
The history of Turkey in the 20th century has not been without seismic shifts. After the trauma of defeat in World War I and victorious resistance against the invading forces, history was shaken up literally almost overnight when in 1928 Mustafa Kemal Pasha decreed that the existing Perso-Arabic script for Turkish would be completely replaced by the Latin script, thus rendering the history of a thousand years illegible. Six years later, in 1934, Kemal Pasha also required the Turks to have Turkish surnames, which did not represent any tribes, ethnicities, religions or foreign cultures.
The Frankfurt school philosophers, Adorno and Horkheimer, have commented that a totalitarian age brings a break between the signifier and the signified such that neither matter any more to prod political action. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, whom Pamuk has described as the greatest of Turkish novelists, explores the gap between words and their meanings by laying bare the duplicity of the spoken and the written in his The Time Regulation Institute . Madness seeps in through the said as the great unsaid between the words, leaving the reader uncertain.
As intentions, addresses, the said and the written fail to correspond to any deeply held certainty, every statement is a site of confusion and protean regeneration. Where does the rhetorical conventions end and the person begin? When can one finally escape the Word?
It is in the ever-transforming geography of Istanbul, which will swallow as well as be swallowed by the once-outcast Ongoren, KultepeKltepe and Duttepe, where history will fight out its dialectical forward march, through neighbourhood gang wars, the lockout of soft drink firms, the raising of mosques and auditoriums, and the long shadows of disguises and disappearances.
Rather, it is the gnawing mundanity of the quotidian, with its certainties and curious twists, that makes reiteration tragically farcical. For Victor Klemperer, Nazi Germany was a crucible of linguistic perversion. Pamuk, on the other hand, maps the unattainable irony of the departed word in the tensions between the lived reality and the aspirations of everyday Istanbul.
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