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Of trauma and happiness: Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence

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Abstract

This paper offers an interpretation of Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence (2008), and also the actual museum by that name curated by Pamuk in Istanbul. The museum differs fundamentally from any “real” museum in that it is a collection of objects memorializing the relationship between two fictional characters in Pamuk’s novel, and in particular one fictional individual—Füsun, the love of the fictional curator’s life. By relinquishing any claim to objectivity and embodying pure affect through actual objects of quotidian use, the museum conveys the traumatic experience of a fictional personal history. The museum embodies metafiction, using verisimilitude to make a cathartic impact. My analysis seeks to understand how this verisimilitude of the eponymous Museum of Innocence in Istanbul produces a cathartic rather than a neurotic effect on the fictional curator as well as on potential audiences.

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Notes

  1. This idea derives from Yağcıoğlu’s argument: “When Kemal imbues the fragments of his beloved with desire, he projects himself on these parts. This correlates to Baudrillard’s indication that ‘the true signified is no longer the beloved, but the subject himself. For it is the subject, the epitome of narcissistic self-engrossment, who collects and eroticizes his own being, evading the amorous embrace to create a closed dialogue with himself ’ (“The System of Collecting”). The fetishized, fragmented, reified object of desire embodies characteristics of the desiring subject” (2015, p. 151)

  2. Lynn Froggett and Myna Trustram (2014, p. 14) write:

    “We are suggesting that the holding environment of the museum enables people to connect psychically with objects and so find ‘external’ forms for their experience. The museum object becomes a third presence within the dynamic of the individual and the groups in which they participate – an ‘intersubjective third’ (Froggett, 2008). It is also a third presence between the individual and the cultural sphere – a ‘symbolic third’. Furthermore, its availability for use (in Winnicott’s sense) depends on its form and qualities and hence it is an ‘aesthetic third’ (Froggett et al., 2011a). It is almost certainly the conjunction of all these elements of ‘thirdness’ in the object that accounts for it being endowed with ‘vitality,’ so that it resonates in the imagination.”

  3. I thank Sreya Mallika Datta, a visitor to the museum, for sharing these personal responses with me.

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I declare that there is no conflict of interest. No third party permission was required for any source used in this paper.

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  1. Presidency University, Kolkata, India

    Dhee Sankar

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Sankar, D. Of trauma and happiness: Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence. Psychoanal Cult Soc 27, 56–70 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-022-00277-1

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