THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE, PRODUCTIVE NOSTALGIA AND EXPERIENCING HISTORY IN THE MUSEUM OF THE FUTURE
Eva Goth Student number: 10245545
E-mail: [email protected] First supervisor: Mr. dr. I.A.M. Saloul Second supervisor: Mrs. dr. M.H.E. Hoijtink
Masters Thesis MA Museum Studies Universiteit van Amsterdam 19th of May 2015 Word count: 20.753 CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ...... 3
INTRODUCTION – THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE ...... 4
ONE – FICTION VS. REALITY IN LITERATURE AND THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE ...... 10
THE SEPARATION BETWEEN FICTION AND REALITY AND LOSING THE SELF ...... 10
FICTION ENTERING REALITY AND VICE VERSA IN THE BOOK ...... 11
FICTION ENTERING REALITY AND VICE VERSA IN THE MUSEUM ...... 13
TURKEY’S HISTORY AND ITS ROLE IN THE STORY AND THE MUSEUM ...... 15
THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE IS BOTH A STORY AND A HISTORY ...... 19
TWO – NOSTALGIA INSTEAD OF HISTORY IN THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE ...... 22
THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE AS A HISTORICAL MUSEUM...... 22
NOSTALGIA AS A DISEASE OR ‘PRODUCTIVE NOSTALGIA’? ...... 23
THE PRODUCTION OF NOSTALGIA BY THE TURKISH GOVERNMENT AND BY PAMUK ...... 27
FROM SOUVENIRS TO A MUSEUM’S COLLECTION ...... 29
ESCAPISM TO DEAL WITH THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE ...... 30
THREE – THE CONSEQUENCES OF GLOBALIZATION AND INDIVIDUALIZATION ...... 32
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES AND THE GLOBALIZED WORLD ...... 32
MUSEUMS, LIEUX DE MEMOIRE AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY ...... 33
INDIVIDUALIZATION IN TURKISH SOCIETY AND MUSEUMS ...... 37
THE INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE AS REPLACEMENT FOR COLLECTIVE MEMORY...... 40
CONCLUSION – THE INNOCENCE OF OBJECTS ...... 43
REFERENCES...... 48
LITERATURE ...... 48
WEBSITES ...... 50
APPENDIX I – IMAGES ...... 51
APPENDIX II – A MODEST MANIFESTO FOR MUSEUMS...... 61
APPENDIX III – DECLARATION ON THE IMPORTANCE AND VALUE OF UNIVERSAL MUSEUMS ...... 63
2
ABSTRACT
The work of writer Orham Pamuk has been research quite intensively but his recently opened museum, The Museum of Innocence, based on his novel with the same name, has not received similar attention. This is unfortunate since the museum challenges our ideas of museums and of what the goals of museums should be. The Museum of Innocence is engages with two phenomena we are not accustomed to encountering in museums: fiction and nostalgia instead of reality and history. It uses these two qualities to allow a more personal and active engagement with our past and to stimulate the use of the past as a tool for dealing with the present. By analyzing the book and the museum and with analysis of some important theories in heritage and museum studies I will argue that The Museum of Innocence can and should function as a blue print for the future museum, albeit in a different way than Pamuk envisioned.
3
INTRODUCTION – THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE
The novel The Museum of Innocence was first published in 2008, in 2009 it was translated into English. The Turkish Orhan Pamuk, writer of the book, was awarded with a Nobel prize in 2006 and is somewhat controversial in his own country due to his remarks about the Armenian genocide. Pamuk comes from a wealthy upper class family and grew up in Istanbul, a city where many of his books take place. The Museum of Innocence is a novel about a fatal love story between two people but more so it is about Turkish society, the changes in the political and social landscape, and Istanbul. Some of these topics however, may not be visible at first sight. But they are in fact quite present. The book’s main protagonist is Kemal Basmacı, a man in his thirties from an elitist Istanbul family. The story starts in 1975 and ends in 1984. Kemal is about to be engaged to Sibel, a girl who also comes from a wealthy family. Only weeks before the enormous engagement party Kemal runs into Füsun, a distant family member from the impoverished side of the family. Kemal falls head over heels in love with the much younger and beautiful Füsun and for a while they have a secret affair. After the engagement party Füsun disappears from his live and Kemal slips into a deep depression. The only thing that gives him any relieve are the objects that remind him of Füsun. When about a year later Kemal and Füsun finally meet again, Kemal and Sibel have broken up and Füsun is married. For about eight years Kemal visits Füsun (who lives together with her husband at her parents’ house in Çukurcuma) several times each week. In this time he collects (steals) any object that is in any way connected to Füsun. After these eight years Füsun and her husband decide do divorce and Füsun finally agrees to marry Kemal, but not before they go on a road trip to Europe. On the first morning after having left Istanbul, Füsun purposely drives the car, with her and Kemal in it, with high speed against a tree. Füsun dies within seconds but Kemal survives the accident. After his recovery Kemal travels around the world and visits many museums. He also continues collecting objects that are in some way related to the already extensive collection he has consisting of objects relating to Füsun. He visits a total of 1743 museums all over the world and is most inspired by the small and personal museums, like the museums devoted to writers. For example, the F.M. Dostoevsky Literary-Memorial Museum in Saint Petersburg, in which only one object actually belonged to the writer, and by the Musée Marcel Proust in Illiers-Combray, in which he learned nothing about the writer himself but became so much wiser about the world in which Proust had lived. The most magnificent of writer museums he claims to ever have seen: the Museo Mario Praz in Rome.1 These museums inspired Kemal to open his own museum with in it all the object he collected over the years. This museum opened in April of 2012 in Istanbul and is named
1 Pamuk, 2009, pp. 512-514. 4
The Museum of Innocence. The museum is real and can be visited, the objects in it are real too. Family pictures of anonymous people and objects that are reminders of Turkey in the ‘70s and ‘80s are placed next to artist impressions of scenes from the book and an anatomical chart of love pains. Stepping into this museum is like stepping into the fictional story of Kemal. But it is much more than that. Although the book was published four years before the museum opened, the two were always intended as a dual-project. In a 2012 article for Newsweek Orhan Pamuk writes that by the late ‘90s the idea of creating a novel and a museum that would tell the story of two families in Istanbul was already formed in his mind. He also explains that the novel and the museum would both have different functions in the whole: “the novel would provide a matter-of-fact account of the two lovers’ moving tale […] the museum was going to be a place where objects from daily life in Istanbul in the second half of the 20th century would be displayed in a special atmosphere”.2 In the museum catalogue Pamuk describes the process of finding the museum’s collection and through that the development of the story. For years he rummaged through second hand shops, sometimes finding objects that inspired him instantaneously and that would find their place in the story straight away, sometimes finding objects he liked because of their beauty or peculiarity but that would stand on his desk for a long time before he knew how they would become part of the story or sometimes they would never find their way into the story at all.3 Reality, and chance if you will, therefor had a big influence on the details of Kemal’s story. In the catalogue Pamuk compares his museum to the National Museums that make up the major part of the museum landscape. He argues that although the national museums are important and they will continue to exist, small and personal museums are more appropriate ‘to display the depth of humanity’. That is why Pamuk doesn’t want the large national museums to be a blueprint for the future and instead he proposes people to start their own, small museums in their homes.4 Less than two years after first opening its doors, the museum received the European Museum of the Year Award and was praised for its high quality. According to the European Museum Form’s website “the Museum of Innocence can be seen simply as a historical museum of Istanbul life in the second half of 20th century. It is also, however, a museum created by writer Orhan Pamuk as an integral, object-based version of the fictional love story of his novel of the same name. The Museum of Innocence is meant as a small and personal, local and sustainable model for new museum development. The Museum of Innocence inspires and establishes innovative, new
2 Pamuk, 2012 (2). 3 Pamuk, 2012 (1), pp. 51-53. 4 Pamuk, 2012 (1), pp. 54-57 5 paradigms for the museum sector”.5 It is clear from both the statements of Orhan Pamuk and that of the European Museum Form that the museum and the book have an inseverable link. Although the book can be read without visiting the museum and the museum can be visited without having read the book, the combination of the two is what makes this project unique. The Museum of Innocence is a different museum from conventional museums; based on a fictional love story it is not historical like a national history museum might be, nor does it represent national pride like a national art museum might do. It was, after all, Pamuk’s intention to make a museum that was totally different from the historical monuments that he knew in his youth.6 He was inspired by small and personal museums, by writers and perhaps even by artist installations. Together with the opening of the museum a catalogue written by Orhan Pamuk was published. In this catalogue he writes about the coming into existence of the book, the museum and the collection and finishes with a small museum manifest. The foundations of the manifest are already laid out in the novel. In his manifest Pamuk focusses mainly the importance of developing museums that focus on the individual as opposed to the nation or groups. Museums, he says, should be small and cheap, tell stories instead of histories and be about people instead of nations. “Large national museums […], now national symbols, present the story of the nation -history, in a word- as being far more important than the stories of individuals”.7 Pamuk says that we don’t need these stories, what we need is the individual stories. In The Museum of Innocence he has done exactly that: tell a personal and individual story. All of this makes that this museum is quite an unconventional project that seems to want to shake traditional museums to its foundations. This, of course, leads to the question of which characteristics of conventional museums are exactly what Pamuk opposes so much. Eilean Hooper- Greenhill has illustrated this quite clearly and convincingly in her critical article ‘Knowledge in an open prison’. She calls museums warehouses full of knowledge that select and accumulate objects and in doing so constantly make choices, but who never tell how and why certain choices are made. “The artifacts which fill our museums embody discourse itself; they are material manifestations of techniques and effects, representations of the play of power. […] objects are confined, incarcerated, placed in a permanent, fixed relation to one another. Thus pinned and classified, their individual histories and identities are lost”.8 Museums not only classify objects in such a way that it fixes their connection with other objects and the visitor, they also impose universal truths on these coincidental connections: “A museum’s collection depends on arbitrary, external events: the availability of funds,
5 http://www.europeanmuseumforum.info/emya/emya-2014.html 6 Pamuk, 2012 (1), p. 54. 7 Pamuk, 2012 (1), p. 55. 8 Hooper-Greenhill, p. 21. 6 journeys undertaken, dispositions of inheritances, the vagaries of power relations. But the museum imposes a rationality on this incoherent material, and then represents it as truth”.9 Even though Pamuk’s writing has received much international attention, very little is written about The Museum of Innocence. The museum itself has received much praise but again very little actual research towards the role of the museum in Turkish society is done. This is striking, because the idea of a universal truth in museums is under scrutiny. Academic’s like Stuart Hall argue that the production of cultural identity needs to be based on more diverse identities instead of the one-size- fits-all majority approach that is the standard now. Museums, being places where identity is produced, should thus adapt to these new missions. The Museum of Innocence claims to be a museum that favors the personal over the collective, but does it truly, and if so, how? With this thesis I hope to contribute to the research that is done on Pamuk’s work and also to research that is being done to the future of museums. I will look for an answer to the question what the success of The Museum of Innocence in Istanbul can teach us about the goals of museums and how it can help us formulate new and perhaps better goals for the future museum. In order to find an answer to these questions I will discuss three themes that each relate to The Museum of Innocence in a different way. The first theme is the separation between fiction and reality. In order to understand the importance of a fictional story for people that have no apparent connection to it we need to understand how reality and fiction are connected and how the boundary between the two can disappear. After that I will go into the second theme: nostalgia and history. Because at this point we know that fiction can play an important role in reality we can now understand that fiction can be used to trigger nostalgia and thus that nostalgia doesn’t need to be based in history. Nostalgia can function as a very strong motivator but it is also very personal. To understand this I will discuss the final theme: globalization and individualization in museum. The first two themes will have shown that the conventional museum does not suffice in a society that is changing rapidly. By discussing another way of learning about history we see that The Museum of Innocence can offer a different experience from most museums: a more personal interpretation of history. In the first chapter I will go further into the story of the book and the coming into existence of both the book and the museum. It will become clear that a museum about such a story is very different from the national museums we are used to. I will go into the question of how the boundaries between fiction and reality are negotiated in the book The Museum of Innocence and in the museum. By applying theories of Ger Groot and Patricia De Martelaere to this case study I will show that fiction and reality manipulate each other in the book and in the museum, that the
9 Hooper-Greenhill, p. 22. 7 boundaries between the two are constantly being negotiated and what the consequences of this are for the reader and for interpreting the book. By discussing the history of Turkey and Istanbul and by drawing parallels between the political landscape in Turkey and the story of the book I will show that although history doesn’t seem to play a big role in the book it is in fact very present. And that, by not discussing history explicitly, Pamuk makes it very easy for the reader to escape reality. The second theme will be discussed in the second chapter of this thesis. At first hand, history and nostalgia seem to be very separate concept but they are more connected than one might expect. I will analyze Svetlana Boym’s theory on nostalgia and I will show that her interpretation of nostalgia as a ‘social disease’, although being one that is endorsed by many, is not appropriate for the kind of nostalgia we find in the Museum of Innocence. Instead, ‘productive nostalgia’ as described and applied by Nanna Verhoeff and Alison Blunt is much more correct. I will show that nostalgia is used in Turkey on many occasions and that the government is a major producer of nostalgia. Because the museum’s collection consist mainly of economically unimportant, everyday objects, brought together by Kemal more as souvenirs than as a historical- or art collection, I will discuss Susan Stewart’s theory on souvenirs and collection to argue that the transformation of Kemal’s souvenirs into a collection is important for our interpretation of The Museum of Innocence as a place of nostalgia. Also, the difference between souvenirs and collections will be a first hint at the difference between the individual and the collective interpretation of history. Nostalgia, being the most important concept of this chapter, should not be seen as a negative emotion but as a possibility for people to deal with the present by escaping the present and searching in the past for answers to current problems. This nostalgia thus is not directed at the past but at the present. In the third chapter of the thesis I will consider the consequences of individualization and globalization on museums and their role as producers of identity and memory. I will go into Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities and consequently Ulrich Beck’s response to that theory in the context of a globalizing world. I will discuss Pierre Nora’s theory on ‘Lieux de Memoire’ but I will show that in Turkey sites do not function as memory places the same way they do in Nora’s France. I will also discuss Maurice Halbwach’s theory on individual and collective identity and memory and the role of museums in the production of identity and memory. With a discussion of the history of museum goals I will argue that collectiveness and even universality have taken the overhand in museums, but that a realization about the importance of smaller groups is starting to arise. After that I will go further into Turkish society and the ever growing importance of the individual in Turkey. As argued by Unal Yetim and others, social relatedness is still very important in Turkey. With a small overview of museum reactions to individualization I will argue that Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence takes the individualization to a new level. After that, I will discuss Susan Crane’s arguments for a return of the individual in memory and identity. Crane argues that by
8 actively experiencing history people can once again remember in a natural way. I will argue that The Museum of Innocence can function as a museum in which people can do this. In the final chapter I will bring all three of the themes together in order to make a final argument. I will argue that the title of the book suggest that, perhaps in contrast to other museums, this museum can exhibit objects that maintain their innocence. Objects lose their innocence when they are used to produce memory and identity. By allowing people to interpret and experience history as personal and individual as possible Pamuk seems to have succeeded in bringing back the personal aspect of memory and identity. The objects are only displayed and an interpretation is not given. It is up to every visitor to interpret and experience the story how they wish too and by doing so the objects maintain innocent. Pamuk has allowed people to truly experience history in the museum. He achieved this by allowing a fictional story to become part of reality and by producing nostalgia for this fictive past that allows people to search through the past in hopes of finding answers to questions of the present and the future. Pamuk has said that he doesn’t want the monumental national museums to become blueprints for the future museum.10 The success of The Museum of Innocence suggests that he might not be the only one. In the final chapter I will discuss why The Museum of Innocence is a suitable blueprint.
10 Pamuk, 2012 (1), p. 54. 9
ONE – FICTION VS. REALITY IN LITERATURE AND THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE
THE SEPARATION BETWEEN FICTION AND REALITY AND LOSING THE SELF In the in 2010 published version of his inaugural speech Vergeten te bestaan, Echte fictie en het fictieve ik, Ger Groot, writer and philosopher, talks about the influence of fiction on reality and that of reality on fiction. When reading a book, fiction can, according to Groot, become real through the reader. For this he makes a clear distinction between truth and reality; a story or novel may be untrue yet be part of reality. He discusses the example of what is possibly the first novel ever: Don Quichot. In this book the author, Cervantes, seems to want to tell his readers to not believe too much in ‘the truth of novels’ yet at the same time apparently the reader should believe that what this specific novel claims to be true is in fact the truth. Cervantes is constantly playing a game in which reality enters the realm of fiction and vice versa. For example, when he tries to trump a fraud who published a sequel to his book, Cervantes has his protagonist discuss this fraud and reality (the real- life fraud) enters and changes fiction (the book). The fact that this fraudulent book was published urged Cervantes to finish his second book quickly and to change the story to be able to discuss this real-life event.11 Also in less obvious cases, argues Groot, fiction is as real as or even more real than reality. It is popular believe that in order to make a book believable and identifiable the writer is constantly pretending to write something real and the reader is always pretending to believe that what he reads is the truth. This is called ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’. Patricia de Martelaere, philosopher and professor, argues in her article about fiction in literature that it is highly unlikable that this is how reading works. De Martelaere’s main problem with the theory of ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’ is that it contains the believe that we choose to not fully identify with the characters in a book in order to not be too involved. She believes that while someone is reading the identification is stronger than ever, and that instead in real life we continuously don’t identify with the events around us because of the risks involved. We can easily watch a horrible news report, De Martelaere argues, without identifying too much because we learn not to identify with reality that would easily become too much to handle, instead we identify with fictive characters and cry when a fictive character dies.12 If we identify best with fictive characters, than what happens to the separation between fiction and reality when we read a novel? According to Groot the thing that is sometimes forgotten while reading is not so much the difference between reality and fiction but the readers own ‘me’. This own ‘me’ is exactly where
11 Groot, pp. 7-11. 12 De Martelaere, pp. 139-143. 10 fictions and reality come together and thus where their boundary is determined. He argues that fiction and reality come together in one thing: the reader (who he calls the subject). The only thing separating reality and fiction is therefore also the reader. The reader, the subject, can often forget his own ‘me’ when doing non-reflexive activities, like reading. This is because this ‘me’ only exists in relation to the world before it. When the subjects doesn’t reflect upon the world before it, as he wouldn’t when he is absorbed by an activity such as reading, the ‘me’ is forgotten and thus the one thing that can separate reality and fiction doesn’t exist.13 This phenomenon can, to some degree, be compared with the concept of ‘flow’ of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which describes a state of ecstasy. The word ecstasy originates after all from the Greek word ἔκστασις which means ‘to be or stand outside oneself’. In this state the person feels as if he is outside of everyday reality, forgets himself and becomes part of something larger.14
FICTION ENTERING REALITY AND VICE VERSA IN THE BOOK The Museum of Innocence is a novel that satisfies all the requirements for the loosing of the self. As a book it allows the reader to enter into a fictive world and, while becoming part of that world, to forget about the world around him. But any good book would allow this according to Groot’s and De Martelaere’s theories. In The Museum of Innocence however fiction and reality also intertwine in a different way, a way that is not present in most novels. Sometimes the book literally enters reality, like by the opening of the museum, but reality also has entered the book, albeit in a less obvious way. The history of Turkey and Istanbul run simultaneous with the story of the book, through metaphors and other relations we can find the story of Istanbul in the story of Kemal. But first, we need to know how the reality of Istanbul, Turkey, perhaps even the entire outside world, has entered into the story and how the story, aside from through the reader, has entered the world. These are quite literal ways and they are all similar to the examples Groot discusses in his inaugural speech. I will discuss a few of them. The first way in which this happens, also happens in Don Quichot: the main protagonist (also the teller of the story in both cases) addresses his readers directly, sometimes even in de middle of an important event. He shatter the possibility of ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’, because if the writer pretends that what he is writing is real, why would he interrupt this believe? The writer literally pulls reality into the fictional story and the reader out of reality. Pamuk does this, for example, in a scene where Kemal and Füsun kiss. He suddenly interrupts his train of thought and
13 Groot, pp. 16-22. 14 For video of Csikszentmihalyi explaining the concept of Flow, see: http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_ csikszentmihalyi_on_flow 11 addresses the reader when he says that he wants to make clear to the reader how important this kissing is for him.15 Later on in the story Kemal needs to admit to himself and to the reader that he was constantly thinking about Füsun. He remarks what ‘we’, the reader, would probably have realized a long time ago that Kemal was not successful in not thinking about Füsun and he promises to, from now on, be honest to the reader (and perhaps himself).16 And again, when discussing the fact that for eight years Kemal would go to Füsun’s house to have dinner, he addresses the reader by stating that he understands that most of ‘us’ will be surprised that he continued on visiting the house for such a long time.17 The book is a frame story: part of the story is used in order to tell another story: the love story of Kemal and Füsun explains and illustrated the story of the coming into existence of the museum. For this reason Orhan Pamuk, the official author of the book, even makes an appearance in the book during Kemal and Sibel’s engagement party. As does Cervantes in Don Quichot. Again ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’ is put under pressure because why would the author of a book, that is told in a first person narrative, take such prominent place in the story if he wants us to believe that it is not a story? Again, reality and fiction get intertwined. Kemal describes seeing Orhan Pamuk sitting at one of the tables, together with the rest of the Pamuk family and a little later Pamuk even interacts with the main characters when he takes Füsun for a dance.18 At the end of the book Pamuk makes another appearance when Kemal asks him to write the story of him and Füsun. At this point he even changes the narrator to himself and Pamuk himself becomes the first-person.19 This change from narrator is perhaps surprising and even shocking to the reader but the actual shift in perspective is not so major. The similarities between Kemal and Pamuk are obvious; both similar age, part of the Istanbul Bourgeoisie but chosen a different career path than expected. Erdağ Göknar makes another comparison. He writes: “these passages personify the authorial self as being divided between two related personas of collector and novelist”.20 This is something that is, according to Göknar, visible in many of Pamuk’s books. In The Museum of Innocence, however, the comparison is even underlined by the character himself. The night Kemal decides to contact Kemal he says: “I could see it all […] and like a shaman who can see the souls of thing, I could feel their stories flickering inside me. […] I realized then that just as the line joining together Aristotle’s moments was Time, so, too, the line joining together these objects would be a story. In other words,
15 Pamuk, 2009, p. 46. 16 Pamuk, 2009, p. 114. 17 Pamuk, 2009, p. 282. 18 Pamuk, 2009, p. 116 & p. 124. 19 Pamuk, 2009, p. 516. 20 Göknar, p. 238 12 a writer might undertake to write the catalog in the same form as he might write a novel”.21 It is almost as if writer (Pamuk) and collector (Kemal) become one in this very fragment. The admittance ticket that is printed in the book and that can be used to gain entrance to the museum, according to Göknar, can subsequently function as a way of reuniting the novelist and the collector in the real world. “That is, to the objects that are the source and origin of the novel”.22 Just as Göknar said, the museum is the last way in which the fictional story enters reality. All through the book, Kemal refers to the museum that doesn’t exist yet at that time. The museum is used, almost as a tool, in order to frame memories and give them a place in the bigger story. For example when Füsun takes out one of her earrings in the story and Kemal mentions that it is the first object he placed in the museum.23 Sometimes Kemal refers to acquiring certain objects like the picture-postcards of the Hilton Hotel that he, according to the story, bought twenty years after the events took place.24 Again this is a clear example of how the real museum, that exists and can be visited, makes an appearance in a story that is fictional.
FICTION ENTERING REALITY AND VICE VERSA IN THE MUSEUM The museum is located in the neighborhood Çukurcuma in Beyoǧlu, just east of İstiklâl Caddesi. The neighborhood wasn’t a rich area in the time Kemal visited the house and it still isn’t, although the area has been improving in recent years. Not many tourists will come here if it isn’t for visiting the museum, in that regard entering the museum truly feels like entering a safe haven in a not so appealing place. The fact that the outside-reality is completely shut out of the museum by the shutters that are kept closed, adds to this feeling of entering another world. Just like in the book, in the museum we find several ways in which reality and fiction are negotiated. Like Göknar has argued, Pamuk can be compared to his main protagonist Kemal in many different ways. However, Pamuk often stresses that neither the book nor the museum is about him. “This is not Orhan Pamuk’s museum. Very little of me is here, and if there is, it’s hidden. It’s like fiction” Pamuk has said.25 But the fact that Pamuk is not completely invisible in the book and in the museum makes the lines between fiction and reality all the more blurry. The first and perhaps foremost is the museum itself. Pamuk bought the house already in 1999, long before he published the book or opened the museum. Slowly the story and the museum started the form in his mind. The plan for a book and an accompanying museum had already been on
21 Pamuk, 2009, p. 512. Also quoted by Göknar. 22 Göknar, p. 238 23 Pamuk, 2009, pp. 28-29. 24 Pamuk, 2009, p. 102. 25 Kennedy. 13
Pamuk’s mind for much longer. When Pamuk started his search for a location for his museum it became clear to him that he would not be able to afford to buy a house in the rich neighborhoods of Istanbul and so he was limited in his possibilities. When he bought the house in Çukurcuma he knew that with that decision a part of the story would also be decided: at least one of the protagonists would have to be fairly poor because he or she would have to have lived here. The reality of Pamuk’s possibilities therefore influenced the story and in its turn the story is influencing the reality of Çukurcuma, where now suddenly tourists roam the streets and the neighborhood as a whole is improving a lot compared to when Pamuk bought the house.26 Of course, it can be debated if a richer area was really outside of the realm of possibilities, since Pamuk is a very successful writer and comes from a wealthy family. The fact that he choose Çukurcuma and the fact that the area improved with the coming of his museums is in line with the many gentrification projects in Istanbul at the moment. I will come back to this in a later chapter. The location and the type of building is also very important for the visitor experience. Stephanie Moser, professor at the university of Southampton, in her guide on how to how to analyze an exhibition, points out that the building itself is the first important factor. The Museum of Innocence is inside a small house, in a residential area. It doesn’t have the authority a neo-classical building might have, nor is it contemporary or challenging of traditions like a modern and purpose built museum can be. Instead, it is homely, secluded and safe. Inside the building this feeling is also maintained. The rooms are small and therefore allow the visitor to engage with the objects in a more private and personal way. Small galleries are suitable for telling stories, Moser argues, whereas large galleries can feel impersonal.27 In the museum the fictional story is literally transported into reality and much of the museum displays will make the visitor wonder what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’. Box 8, for example (the box that corresponds with chapter 8, see Appendix I, Image I), consists of bottles of Meltem Lemonade and a newspaper clipping of an advertisement for the lemonade. The brand doesn’t exist and it never has existed but the display is convincingly real. The newspaper (and also the television commercial in box 18) has been made by an advisement agency, completely in spirit with the book. For example: in the book the model is a German actress that happened to be in Istanbul at the time, the agency chose to make the advertisement we see in the exact same way. Contrary to what might be expected, there are also parts of the museum that are not so much in line with what is described in the book. In Chapter 22 Pamuk describes how Kemal visit’s the house of a mourning family. Everyone and everything in the apartment seems to be sad, including a little dog statue that has his head in his paws. All Kemal feels however is regret from the fact that he
26 Pamuk, 2012 (1), pp. 21-31. 27 Moser, p. 24-25. 14 isn’t able to connect to the people there. In box 22 (see Appendix I, Image II) we see a little dog statue but this isn’t the sad dog Pamuk described, it’s a dog that looks up to the sky, in a much more hopeful way than the sad dog, but also intimidated by the (in comparison) giant hand that floats above him and the stern looking Atatürk in the background. When Pamuk was making the museum he realized that people only remember a hand full of details from the book and so he felt that he could change small thing if this meant the general feeling of a chapter would be better expressed with the change.28 In box 66 (see Appendix I, Image III) Pamuk even leaves away most of what seems important in the chapter. In this chapter the 1980 coup d'état has recently found place and Kemal is driving home when it is about to be curfew. He is stopped by the military and his car is searched, they find a pear grater (displayed in the box) that he took from Füsun’s house that evening. Although this is the only part in which the politics of Turkey in the ‘70s and ‘80s is discussed, albeit briefly, the accompanying box in the museum is strikingly empty; the only thing displayed is the pear grater. Pamuk could have easily found newspaper articles or pictures of this coup but yet he chooses to not address it at all in the museum. It is almost as if Pamuk avoids this topic completely. The boxes that correspond with the chapters are at one hand a very smart ways to maintain the connection with the book. If a visitor would like, he could even look the chapter up in one of the book that can be found in the museum and compare the objects to the story. Another effect is that historic looking wooden cabinets can ‘define objects as curiosities’. Together with the fact that there is little light, a sense of mystery and wonder is created. The layout of the boxes is also very important. Most of the surface is used, making the museum quite the ‘visual spectacle’. This also leads to a sense of looking at treasures, curiosities and spectacle and evokes some form of amazement.29
TURKEY’S HISTORY AND ITS ROLE IN THE STORY AND THE MUSEUM The period between 1975 and 1984, in which the story takes place, were turbulent years in Turkey. During this time Istanbul was a place of political unrest as it had been for a while. The most important happening in modern Turkey’s history is of course that of Kemalist rule under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The secularization, modernization and nationalist ideas of Atatürk has influenced the country enormously and nowadays one cannot talk about Turkish history, identity and culture without talking about Atatürk and his influence on these things. In both 1960 and 1971 military coups had found place and still Turkish politics were not stable. In 1980 a third coup would finally bring some more quiet and peaceful times to the nation.
28 Pamuk, 2012 (1), pp. 121-123. 29 Moser, p. 26-27. 15
The political landscape in Turkey was very important for daily life in Istanbul. Although Istanbul was no longer the capital of the country, Atatürk had moved the capital to Ankara in 1923, it was still the most important city in the country. The story of Kemal and Füsun can therefore not be seen separate from Turkey’s politics. But more importantly, in many ways it even represents Turkish politics. At first sight, this novel is not a political novel; politics play no obvious role in the story and the characters don’t seem to pay much attention to politics. The same goes for the museum: mention of politics is not made. This is in line with the bourgeois characters and the somewhat critical view Pamuk has of the bourgeoisie. This is also apparent, according to Göknar, from Kemal’s name. Kemal means perfection in Turkish and Basmacı (his sir name) means maker or seller of printed cloth. Together “it signifies the ‘perfect copy’ or ‘perfect cliché’ in Pamuk’s ridicule of the Istanbul Bourgeois”.30 More so, the fact that the main character is named after Atatürk and the fact that the time in which the story plays was politically so important leads to assume that the significance of Kemal’s name cannot be denied. Kemal can be seen as a metaphor for Kemal Atatürk. A striking resemblance, Göknar argues, is Atatürk’s goal of establishing many kinds of museums, even a museum of himself. Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara houses a small museum with personal objects, “including combs and toiletries, cloths, binoculars, letters, photographs, documents, uniforms, shoes, weapons, and even a mysterious photograph that shows a cloud formation, a cumulous cloud taken by a citizen, that had assumed the profile of the leader himself”.31 In this museums Atatürk is mystified, just like Füsun is in The Museum of innocence. The difference being that Kemal’s museum is not about him but about Füsun, who (in this comparison) represents the people of Turkey and the Turkish history. Pamuk seems to argue that the government thus should carry responsibility not only for telling its own great tale, but also the stories of the people in the country. In this sense, Turkey’s history and politics is actually quite present in the book, this also becomes clear from a short summary of the events that happened around the time the story takes place. The years leading up to the 1980 coup were so filled with turmoil, political violence and chaos that the coup was welcomed by many.32 Now it is said that the different stakeholders in this time were most likely purposely adopting strategies of tension to manipulate public opinion and to create a climate that was suitable for a military coup.33 Be that as it may, it seems impossible for the Istanbul bourgeoisie not to have been affected by these events. One of the many incidents of that time was on the 1st of May 1977. Thirty-six people died, hundreds were wounded and 456 people were arrested on Taksim square, a mere two kilometers from where Kemal lives in the book, after
30 Göknar, p. 235. 31 Göknar, p. 242. 32 Ahmad, p.146. 33 Naylor, p. 94. 16 unknown man fired shots at people that were there to protest.34 This must have left a great impression on the Turkish people. The elections of 1977 didn’t lead to much peace and in the first fifteen days of 1978 a total of thirty political murders were committed.35 Aside from that, the Grey Wolves, a neo-fascist organization, was held responsible for many more murders. The group was notorious for their violence in the years leading up to the 1980 coup.36 Turkey was politically unstable but was also economically in big trouble. In 1978 the country was so much behind on payments for their imports the central bank had to admit they had lost track of the total size of the debt.37 The Turkish Lira was devaluating and in 1979 the devaluation was as high as 90%, the oil price was rising, and (up to) five-hour long power outs were no exception even in winter.38 The political problems worsened the economical ones and vice versa; it was partially due to the economic inequality that the Grey Wolves were able to recruit so many youngsters.39 The course of the events in Kemal’s attempts to win Füsun’s heart and the political unrest run almost simultaneous to each other. Kemal’s desperation, when every night he has to say goodbye to Füsun knowing she is married to another man, and the desperation of the Kemalist government, trying to win the hearts of entire nation but knowing that the fear of terrorist groups and the growing economic problems are really what is on the people’s minds, develop together. At the height of the political instability the 1980 coup d'état takes place and Füsun’s mother confronts Kemal (albeit indirectly) with the fact that his collecting is getting out of hand. Of course, this still doesn’t mean the end of the troubles for both Turkey and Kemal but the feeling that the current situation is not sustainable is clear to the reader. After the coup a new constitution was made up and in a national referendum in 1982 91.37% of the voters voted for the new constitution. While the leaders of Turkey understood this as overwhelming support for their government, for most of the voters it was in fact the lesser of two evils; the new constitution was seen as the only way to restore civilian rule.40 After peace and order was restored in the country, the economy did pick up (although only after 1981). Turkey started to become a consumer society, but this consumption was done mainly by the rich 10% of the population.41 Feroz Ahmad describes the mood in the country in these years as “upbeat and
34 Ikinci. 35 Ahmad, p. 144. 36 Zürcher, p. 323-325. 37 Naylor, p. 94. 38 Zürcher, pp. 330-331 39 Zürcher, p. 323. 40 Ahmad, p. 152. 41 Ahmad, p. 160 17 optimistic”. But also notes that much of the positivism was based on false ideas and that Turkey has never been able to achieve the expectation the world and the people of Turkey themselves had.42 After Füsun’s death in 1984 Kemal’s, just like political and economic life in Turkey, also quiets down. The 1980 coupe is the last coupe that Turkey has known to date. Just like the government did of Turkey, Kemal took control of his life and started exploring the world. He travels and visits many museums and finally come to the idea of opening his own museum. Kemal took a lot of his inspiration from the west (although he also visits non-western countries). Which again is an interesting similarity with Turkey. The country has tried for many years to be part of the European Union and so took a lot of ‘inspiration’ from European lawmaking but at the same time was, of course, heavily influenced by its Islamic citizens and history. A comparison can be made between the peculiar relationship Kemal and Füsun have and the relationship of Turkey with the west. Although modernization was one of the most important pillars of Atatürk’s philosophy, many aspect of Turkish culture have not changed. In an interview, with Harry Kreisler in 2009 for the University of California’s program Conversations with History, Pamuk even stated that Turkey is made up of the tension between the traditional culture and modernization.43 Although Kemal, Sibel and their friends and families try to almost mimic the behavior of the western bourgeoisie the taboo around intimate relationships before marriage is still very much present (which doesn’t mean that is doesn’t happen). By sleeping with Kemal, Füsun commits herself to Kemal, because no other man will have her now that she has lost her virginity. But Kemal is initially not planning on marrying her. The man she does marry is an obvious second choice, and not a secure and loving marriage. A similar thing has happened to Turkey; Turkey’s politics of modernization and ‘flirtations’ with the west have made Turkey’s relationship with neighboring, anti-western countries, difficult but at the same time the country has not been accepted into Europe either. The political situation Turkey finds itself in during this time is one of being torn between two times; on one hand the Ottoman past and on the other the promise of a future that is western (or at least global) but is quite unsure for everyone. It is not coincidental that time plays such an important role in the museum. Many clocks and watches can be found all through the museum (at least 14 of the 75 boxes contain clocks), chapter 54 is called Time and one of Füsun’s father most valued possessions is an ‘east-west watch’ that has roman numerals on one side and Arabic numerals on the other (see Appendix I, image IV). In chapter 54 Kemal ponders over the old clock in the house of Füsun’s parents and how clocks were once such important parts of a household but have been forgotten ever since the television has made its introduction. Time, he says, is according to
42 Ahmad, pp. 159-160. 43 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy62YqDeE0c In this interview Orhan Pamuk also talks about the significance of his own name. 18
Aristoteles a line that connects all the moments into the present. And although it is painful for most people to think about the line and to connect the moments because it always leads to death, sometimes the moments can also bring us enough happiness to last us for a life time.44 This is what Kemal has done in the museum, he has tried to connect the moments (represented by the objects) in order to bring him happiness. A museum therefore is a place in which time has been transformed into space. The result, according to Jon Pahl, Professor at The Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, is ‘a life among the living dead’, a constant juxtapositioning of longing and alienation and relationships that don’t truly exist.45 Longing and alienation are important themes in the relationship of Kemal with Füsun but also with his friends and family. A similar thing, you could say, is happening with to Turkey; it longs for both it’s past, of which it is long since alienated, and for a modern ideal, which is alien to its culture. In The Museum of Innocence the visitor first hand experiences this longing and alienation. The only time the tumultuous part of Istanbul’s history is discussed in the book, is when Kemal tells that he has to leave Füsun’s house earlier than he wanted because of the curfew. He doesn’t elaborate on why there is a curfew, he names the coup but doesn’t say anything about how this affected the daily lives of people in Istanbul and the economic problems don’t seem to exist in the lives of Kemal and Füsun at all. In the museum even less references to the turmoil is found. In fact, no reference to the event is found there at all even though Pamuk claims the museums is supposed to be “a place where objects from daily life in Istanbul in the second half of the 20th century would be displayed”.46 It is difficult to believe these objects never had anything to do with the political and economic situation. Turkey’s history seems to be hidden in the book and the museum, but it can’t be said that is doesn’t play a role in interpreting it.
THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE IS BOTH A STORY AND A HISTORY Fiction and reality are often more intertwined than one would think at first glance and, because the reader forgets his own ‘me’ while reading, fiction can sometimes even become more real than reality. Because the real world is often difficult to deal with and identification with what happens around us can be dangerous, fiction is a way to not only escape reality but more importantly to deal with it. This is the case in books, as Groot and De Martelaere have argued, but it can also be applied to the actual Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. The Museum of Innocence is, after all, exactly like a book, a story that can be read using the objects. Like Kemal has argued in the book: the writer and the collector
44 Pamuk, 2009, p. 288. 45 http://www.pubtheo.com/page.asp?pid=1548 46 Pamuk, 2012 (2). 19 are not all that different at all. This is also in line with Pamuk’s argument that museums should be made out of stories instead of histories. He argues that personal stories are more appropriate to display the depth of humanity. The beautiful thing about stories though, is that they are usually much more than fiction. The border between reality and fiction is negotiated through the reader and the visitor of the museum but also through the characters of the story and the objects in the museum. The at first sight un-political and un-historical story of Kemal and Füsun can transform into quite the political story. Because we can lose ourselves, our own ‘us’, while reading the story, the story can become reality and can be used it to help deal with today. For example, we can search the story for morals and motivation or we can reflect our hurt over real-life events onto the story so that we don’t truly have to deal with these issues. Throughout the book and especially in the museum, the objects become substitutes for Füsun’s presence. This becomes clear in chapter 28, The consolidation of objects. In this chapter Kemal takes some of the objects that he has collected so far into the bed he and Füsun have made love in. He takes the objects into his mouth and uses the objects to caress himself.47 This obsessive nature of collecting also becomes clear in the museum. For example in Boxes 35 and 65 (see Appendix I, images V and VI. The obsessive nature with which Kemal collected these hair clips and the tittle dog statues can have an alienating effect on the visitor. At the same time, however, their quaintness, the fact that anyone knows that no one could be hurt by taking these objects and the awkward way Kemal ‘collected’ these items also makes his habit acceptable. The visitor might think that, if one can do these thing and yet be excused, perhaps certain issues the visitor faces in his own life are not so bad after all. These objects, the multitude of these objects that are practically the same things and the way they are displayed (a way that evokes wonder and a feeling of looking at treasures) makes that the objects feel relatable, Kemal’s obsession seems acceptable and the visitor can lose himself in the fictional world of the museum. It is still remarkable that, although history plays such an important part in interpreting the story that there is so little mention of it in the museum and so little visible of it in the museum. But it is in fact quite understandable. If Pamuk would have made these, sometimes horrifying realities, part of the story the reader would not have been able to lose themselves in the book. After all, we escape into a fictional world in order not to have to deal with the real world. Would the things that we try to escape from now become part of the fictional world the escape would not work. But Pamuk does use history and although not explicitly it is part of the book and the museum. This history is in fact a nostalgic history. Nostalgia can, just like fiction, help people with dealing with the present. It allows
47 Pamuk, 2009, p. 156. 20 escape in the past only to return to the future better equipped. I will elaborate on nostalgia and history in the next chapter.
21
TWO – NOSTALGIA INSTEAD OF HISTORY IN THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE
THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE AS A HISTORICAL MUSEUM On the European Museum Forum’s website it is stated that “The Museum of Innocence can be seen simply as a historical museum of Istanbul life in the second half of 20th century”.48 Visitors who have read the book will link some of the objects in the museum to the story, but as Pamuk has said so himself, people only remember a handful of details and the objects they don’t remember will only illustrate the general story and feelings. Even those who have read the book quite attentively will find themselves wondering what role a certain object in the museum had in the story, but they most likely won’t feel that the objects don’t fit in with the others. Many visitors will also not have read the book, for them the museum will feel like a visit to the daily life of Istanbul’s middle class in the ‘70s and ‘80s and not like a very personal love story. Certain aspects of Füsun’s home, the current museum, where Kemal spent many evenings together with Füsun, her parents, and her husband, are described in quite some detail in the book. For example the way the dinner table was placed so that the television could be seen, and the sink near the stairs. The table and the television play a very important part in the book since Kemal sits here, evening after evening, during his attempts to be close to Füsun. He often describes how he places his chair in such a way that he can look at Füsun without being obvious and how the television would give a much welcomed distraction when Kemal would be too swallowed up in his own sorrow to really function normally. Only at the very end of the book, after Füsun has died, Kemal will see Füsun’s room for the first time. None of these aspects of the ‘homeliness’ that the house once had and the fact that Füsun once lived here are maintained, with one exception: the attic room where Kemal lived when the museum was under construction. As a result, the museum truly feels like that: a museum. It is no longer the house Füsun once lived; it is in no way personal anymore. It could just as well have been the house of someone else entirely. None of the many pictures show Füsun, even though one would expect that she, as the main object of Kemal’s obsession would have a prominent place in at least some of the boxes. The museum therefore is not so much a museum of Füsun, or even of Kemal’s love for Füsun or his time trying to conquer Füsun’s hart, it’s a museum of just any person’s obsession with another person. The objects in the museum are objects anyone could and would have encountered had they lived in the same city at the same time as the protagonists. They are like
48 http://www.europeanmuseumforum.info/emya/emya-2014.html 22 souvenirs of a bygone era. Both literally: the decennia that have passed, and figuratively: the time with Füsun. Taking all of this into account, we could see The Museum of Innocence as mainly a historical museum; showing, ethnographically in some ways, the daily life of the Istanbulite in the 1970s and 1980s. However, as we have seen in the first chapter, The Museum of Innocence might seem like a historical account of this time, it is in fact not historically accurate at all (I use the term historically accurate here as an accurate reflection of popular scholar believe about a certain time). Pamuk picks out certain aspects of society while leaving out others and many (almost all) important historical events have no part in the story. More importantly, the atmosphere of the museum and also of the book are not historical, they ooze a feeling of grieve for something that is lost. For Füsun on the one hand, the happiest time of Kemal’s life, but also Istanbul itself, the Istanbul of the past. The city has changed, the many old black and white pictures in the museum show the old buildings, traditional way of depicting woman, movies in which people would not kiss on the mouth, the innocence of forty years ago. Kemal’s longing for something he has lost is projected on the entire city. We have all lost this old Istanbul and visiting the museum makes us long to get this Istanbul back. It makes us nostalgic. Nostalgia is an emotion that is often linked to escapism. If you feel nostalgic you must be trying to escape the present situation, the reality of today. But as we have already seen in De Martelaere’s arguments, it doesn’t need to be a negative thing to escape. Like we can escape in fiction we can also escape in nostalgia. Nostalgia in this case is not just the past, it’s an idealized past; a past in which we specifically look for certain aspects while ignoring others. Nostalgia is often seen as a negative emotion but I can in fact also have very positive aspects, which is the case in The Museum of Innocence. Because the objects in the museum are trinkets, daily objects with no apparent value, they can also be seen as souvenirs. Susan Stewart, Professor at Princeton University and literary critic, argues that souvenirs help us invent a narrative of events that are not repeatable but are reportable and thus only exist through the invention of a narrative. “The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia”.49 In the Museum of Innocence the souvenir, however, transforms into a collection. At the end of this chapter I will return to this topic.
NOSTALGIA AS A DISEASE OR ‘PRODUCTIVE NOSTALGIA’? “Nostalgia (from nostos-return home, and algia-longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with
49 Stewart, p. 135 23 one’s own fantasy”.50 With these words Svetlana Boym, Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University, introduces nostalgia in her book The Future of Nostalgia. She traced the history of nostalgia from the seventeenth century in which nostalgia was seen as a curable disease to present day in which nostalgia is described as an ‘incurable modern condition’, an escapist tendency that makes us live in the past instead of the present. Nostalgia is used as a negative concept by the writers Boym cites but also by Boym herself. She speaks of victims of nostalgia and outbreaks of it, it can even be dangerous because it can make us confuse our actual homes with imaginary ones.51 Susan Stewart even calls nostalgia a ‘social disease’. Stewart argues that “by the narrative process of nostalgic reconstruction the present is denied and the past takes on an authenticity of being”.52 The home the nostalgic individual longs for, is often not so much a different place but more so a different time. It differs from home-sickness because it is not necessarily the longing for a place because you are in another place, but more often it is a longing for the place you are in, but the historic, perhaps, imaginary version of it. Even when Kemal was visiting Füsun at her parents’ house, there is always a sense of nostalgia that follows him around, nostalgia for a better time, when Füsun was ‘his’. Not realizing that even then Füsun was never Kemal’s since he could and would not commit himself to her. We see this also in the museum. The many clocks and watches that can be found in the museum are a reference to time, time that goes by and that never stops passing. In box 54 (see Appendix I, image VII) time is even the main subject; dozens of clocks, watches and alarms are displayed in one box. In the matching chapter Kemal tells that when he was at Füsun’s house time never did seem to pass because time didn’t seem to exist. He even quotes Füsun’s father who urges his wife to forget about time. But the clocks are reminders that time does, in fact, pass and that we measure time obsessively, perhaps because we wish it wouldn’t pass. Kemal is homesick, not for a place that he has left, after all he has never left Istanbul, but for a time that has passed by. In other words: he is nostalgic. He escapes the reality of this by visiting the objects he collected and by doing so revisiting the time that is gone. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, professor at the Aarhus University, has described this beautifully in his analysis of Pamuk’s work: “It is not a question of identifying with the past or displacing oneself from it, but accepting that it is present in the same space as the presence […] This feeling is melancholic in its engagement with a double absence: both that which has disappeared, and that which will disappear over time”.53 Boym distinguishes two forms of nostalgia; restorative and reflective. The reflective sufferer from nostalgia lingers in his or her longing which is often more individual than restorative nostalgia.
50 Boym, p. xiii. 51 Boym, p. xiv-xvii. 52 Stewart, p. 23. 53 Thomsen, p. 162. 24
Restorative nostalgia is more focused on the actual home and the attempt the reach this home. It sees its own nostalgia as truth and wants to restore the lost home.54 “While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one’s homeland with paranoic determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion”.55 Even though the restorative nostalgia seems to be a fairly positive form of nostalgia, the fact that Boym calls it ‘paranoic determination’ proves otherwise. In The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia by Malcolm Chase, Professor of Social History at the University of Leeds, and Christopher Shaw, from the Harrogate College of Arts and Technology, nostalgia is described as something that is only experienced when someone feels the present to be lacking something. The nostalgic person might feel ‘defective’, and this defect is not believed to be fixed through progress. In such a case, people will start looking at the past to solve their problems instead of at the future.56 It is important to notice the fact that in this theory people are looking for solutions, the problematic part is that they look for it in the past instead if the future. Boym concludes her book with saying that although nostalgia can be a social disease and a poison, it can also be a creative emotion and a cure, for example for the defects Chase & Shaw talk about. In Istanbul this would mean that the idea that Istanbul was once an important and cosmopolitan city can lead people to behave in such a way and for them to embrace these values. This could lead, for example, to a society that is more tolerant towards strangers. However, Boym advices, nostalgia should best be left alone, nostalgic dreams should be seen as dreams and not as guidelines. We should laugh at them and realize that we are all nostalgic for a time in which there was no nostalgia.57 Chase and Shaw have said that Nostalgia helps to find solutions from the past for problems of today. Boym agrees that nostalgia could function as a cure, although she doesn’t seem very optimistic about it. The idea of nostalgia as a solution is in line with Nanna Verhoeff’s concept of Instant Nostalgia. Verhoeff, associate professor at the department of Media and Culture Studies at the University of Utrecht, argues that Nostalgia shouldn’t be dismissed as just sentimental and escapist. Instead, it can be ‘culturally helpful’. She argues that “we are dealing with a longing, not in order to escape, but to deal with, the present”.58 Alison Blunt, professor of Geography at the Queen Mary University of London, calls this form of nostalgia productive nostalgia. “I use this term to represent a longing for home that was embodied and enacted in practice rather than solely in
54 Boym, p. xviii. 55 Boym, p. 354. 56 Shaw & Chase, p. 15. 57 Boym, pp. 354-355. 58 Verhoeff, pp. 149. 25 imagination, and a longing that was oriented towards the future as well as towards the past and to a sense of place that was both proximate and distant”.59 Blunt’s research involved the Anglo-Indian settlement McGluskieganj in the east of India. Here she found that nostalgia had quite some influence on the collective identity of the inhabitants and on their ‘dream for independence’. She argues that productive nostalgia at McGluskieganj is aimed at the present and the future as well as the past. The collective memory of imperial ancestry was put to work in relation to the future, strengthening the dream. Part of the collective memory also entails a collective forgetting; the imperial forefather is often stressed and the Indian maternal ancestors forgotten and, perhaps because of this, the ideas of the settlers were not always progressive. But important is the fact that for the Anglo-Indian settlers the nostalgia they feel for the old McGluskieganj is not a sentiment of loss and displacement but one that confirms their belonging to the current place.60 Similar conclusions are drawn in the article ‘The Past Makes the Present Meaningful: Nostalgia as an Existential Resource’. In six small studies it is shown that Nostalgia can indeed be “a vital resource on which one might draw to maintain and enhance a sense of meaning”.61 In this study researchers prove that nostalgia leads to enhanced social connectedness and social connectedness, in turn, has the capacity to enhance personal meaning in life. Furthermore it shows that when meaning is threatened, people turn to nostalgia and nostalgia in its turn helps people to face these existential crises. It is also argued that nostalgia can have therapeutic value and can help people with dealing with stressful life events.62 The negative connotation nostalgia usually has, doesn’t prove to be legitimate. Productive nostalgia (as opposed to restorative and reflective nostalgia) can have quite positive effects on the sufferer from nostalgia, although suffering would not be the correct term in this case. We see this also in Ihab Saloul’s interpretation of The Ship, a novel by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. In this book “the past constantly inhibits the present” because of the trauma the protagonist suffered.63 But, the nostalgic feeling he has does not allow him to dwell upon his lost and upon the past, instead nostalgia is used as a cure.64 Although you could call this form of nostalgia escapistic, after all the nostalgic person does look for answers somewhere other than the here and now, this form of escapism doesn’t need to be a negative one. It’s an escaping from the present in order to come back again and deal with it better and more equipped. This is similar to De Martelaere’s idea of fiction; a way of escaping the
59 Blunt, p. 718-179. 60 Blunt, p. 735-736 61 Routledge et al. p. 650. 62 Routledge et al. pp. 641-647. 63 Saloul, p. 122. 64 Saloul, p. 123. 26 present. This allows the reader to escape from their own present (and even their own ‘me’ Groot ads) and it helps them in dealing with what happens around them. After all, if one were to identify with everything in reality he or she would probably not be able to cope, just like Kemal was not able to cope with the reality of losing Füsun without finding a nostalgic refuge with the objects and the memories. In The Museum of Innocence Kemal continuously finds comfort in the objects he collects. He will visit the apartment where he stores all of his collected objects and there he will touch them while he remembers the past. It’s an almost melancholic nostalgia that Kemal displays here but it allows him to not only look at the past but also to consider the future. The thought of Füsun with him in the future motivates him to continue. After Füsun dies Kemal does the most nostalgic deed possible: he makes a museum in order to preserve the past in the present and the future. And although this might seem like living in the past, it actually allows him to deal with his sorrows of today. This is what productive nostalgia can offer to the heartbroken, the homesick and to a nation that is perhaps both. For the audience it could do a similar thing: the museum visit can lead to a state in which the visitor can forget his own me but also, it can offer inspiration from the past for the future. This could differ from person to person, while one person might find comfort in the idea that certain traditions are still the same, like the small tulip like tea glasses. Others might emphasize that while some people are no longer here, like Atatürk, their influence can still be felt and thus their presence still is important
THE PRODUCTION OF NOSTALGIA BY THE TURKISH GOVERNMENT AND BY PAMUK Boym argues that the twentieth century may have started with confidence in the future, it ended with nostalgia for the past.65 Turkey in general and Istanbul in particular might be perfect examples of this. The start of the century was, also for Turkey, an upbeat and optimistic time. With the falling of the Ottoman empire and the ideas of Kemal Atatürk, Turkey was developing quickly and the country looked at the west as a future ideal; western writing was introduced and the middle class was highly influenced by western fashion and style trends. After these first ‘leaps forward’, development started to stagnate and political, economic and social unrest dominated the country. Now, less than a century later, people look back at this time with nostalgic feeling and look for a possible future in the past. This nostalgia is strengthened by the government who actively uses (a historically inaccurate) nostalgia in their promotion of the city of Istanbul. Gentrification projects, the promotion of photographer Ara Güler, an Armenian-Turkish photographer from the 1950s and ‘60s whose photos are now celebrated as portraying the old Istanbul, and the reinstatement of the
65 Boym, p. xiv 27 historic tramline on what is now İstiklâl Caddesi but was once known as Grande Rue de Péra, are just a few of many examples. Due to the anti-minority laws and riots of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, Turkey’s population today exists of 99.9% Muslims. Ironically though, memories of the ‘old’ Istanbul often involve feelings of tolerance and ‘living together in peace’.66 Beyoǧlu for example (the neighborhood The Museum of Innocence is in), was once a cultural and commercial center in Istanbul mainly inhabited by Jews and Christians. For a long time the area was in decline, until huge gentrification projects started in the 1980s. Now, tourists and locals alike can enjoy the historic atmosphere of places like the Ara Café, where nostalgic photographer Ara Güler is honored, and French Street, once an area mainly inhabited by Jews and Europeans, now a tourist destination.67 The Museum of Innocence is also in this neighborhood, but in a less developed part of it. With the arrival of the museum, tourists also arrived. It’s an old trick in the gentrification-book, museums attract tourists, tourists bring money, developers will get interested in the area and slowly but surely the neighborhood will improve. The neighborhood often gets too expensive for the people who were living there for years and so they have little other choice than to leave. In Çukurcuma it hasn’t come that far yet, but Pamuk must have been aware of the feeling of ‘authenticity’ the neighborhood would have on the visitor. An authenticity that is rarely even similar to how it used to be. Mills argues that “The landscapes of Kuzguncuk and French Street in Istanbul […] may encourage Istanbul residents to conceptualize a tolerant, cosmopolitan, and multiethnic narrative of city history. The productive nostalgia in Istanbul […] obscures the tensions that would force a truer examination of history, and this is the only way to facilitate any possibility for real tolerance in the future”.68 Although this might not have been Pamuk’s objective, the museum did bring tourism to the area and has led to nostalgia for how the neighborhood ‘used to be’. ‘Used to be’ because it is only certain aspects that people are nostalgic for. The residents of Istanbul are nostalgic for the past, but mainly an imagined past. It doesn’t matter whether this past is true or imagined, what matters is that it helps them imagine a possible future. This is how the melancholic past is present also in the future. Although, of course, scholars argue that genuine research about history is needed. The link between Atatürk, the current Turkish government and Kemal has already been made. In The Museum of Innocence Kemal creates an atmosphere that is very nostalgic. Black and white pictures of happy people next to old trinkets beautifully displayed as if they weren’t once replaceable objects. Souvenirs have become a museum’s collection, which is an important shift that I will get back to shortly. In the book Pamuk hardly mentions the political unrest, economic problems and
66 Mills, p. 447 67 Mills, p. 453. 68 Mills, p. 458. Kuzguncuk and French Street in Istanbul are two gentrification projects in Istanbul, French Street is located near The Museum of Innocence. 28 other negative aspects of the ‘70s and ‘80s. This process is similar to that that we see with the nostalgia that focusses on the ‘old Istanbul’; the negative aspects are denied and the positive ones are put under a spotlight to let them inspire. In his manifest Pamuk puts much emphasis on stories as opposed to history, and the human scale (small and individual) of the ideal museum. This would be more suitable to display the depth of humanity, also, or perhaps more so, it is more suitable for identification.69 The fact that Pamuk’s story is a fictive story makes it even easier for the reader and the visitor to identify with the protagonists and to escape the present. The feeling of nostalgia that the book and the museum produce (a feeling that only fiction can evoke, since reality is never that sunny) enhances escapism, it compliments each other and allows people to deal with the present and the future. The past, however, seems to be worst off in this equation.
FROM SOUVENIRS TO A MUSEUM’S COLLECTION As said before, the objects in the Museum of Innocence can be seen as souvenirs. They substitute the presence of the past and also the presence of Füsun (who is part of the past). Stewart distinguishes between two different kinds of souvenir: firstly, souvenirs of exterior sights, which are objects that can be bought, for example in souvenir shops and that are most often representations. The second kind are souvenirs of individual experiences, these are most often samples and in contrary to the souvenirs of exterior sights they are generally not available as general consumer goods, instead, a personal memory or story is attached to these objects.70 The objects in the museum of Innocence in a way classify as both; they are often everyday objects, available for mass consumption, for Kemal however their significance lies in the link they hold with Füsun. For example Füsun’s earring that is displayed in the first box (see Appendix I, image VIII). It is worth very little, it has even lost its use value since there is only one piece left. But for Kemal it’s a memory of the happiest day of his life and thus one of the most important objects in the museum. For the visitor though, they may be either the first kind of souvenirs or the second, more personal, one depending on the ability of the visitor to identify with and to personalize the objects and the story. The role souvenirs play in remembering is quite significant. Stewart argues that “childhood is not a childhood as lived; it is a childhood voluntarily remembered, a childhood manufactured from its material survivals”.71 Those material survivals being the souvenirs. Substitute childhood with the word history and it is clear that souvenirs
69 Pamuk, 2012 (1), pp. 54-57. 70 Stewart, p. 138. 71 Stewart, p. 145. 29 can produce nostalgia. Also, souvenirs have a narrative that reveals the longing for a place of origin, just like nostalgia does.72 Stewart notes a few important differences between souvenirs and museum’s collections: “in contrast to the souvenir, the collection offers examples rather than samples, metaphor rather than metonymy. The collection does not displace attention to the past. Rather, the past is at service of the collection, for whereas the souvenir lends authenticity to the past, the past lends authenticity to the collection. […] The souvenir still bears a trace of use value in its instrumentality, but the collection represents the total aestheticization of use value”.73 A collection is also a place in which history is transformed into space and property.74 Souvenirs can thus be seen as personal and individual while collections are collective and belong to the group. This is an important difference that I’ll get back in in the next chapter. But a souvenir can be transformed into a collection, and with that the personal can become collective. In the Museum of Innocence the objects might be nostalgic, but they are, as opposed to the definition of nostalgia Stewart uses of nostalgia, productive. Like a collection, they do not displace attention to the past but instead to the present and the future. Furthermore, in the museum they are completely aestheticized. This is clear from a view of the entire museum (see Appendix I, image XI) that shows the meticulous attention that is paid to the way the objects are displayed, the lighting, and the overall feel of the museum that is also discussed in chapter one. Another example is box 66 (see Appendix I, Image III) where the grater is displayed as if it is an art object. The many souvenirs in The Museum of Innocence together therefore make a collection. This is significant, because in the case of a collection, it is the past that lends authenticity to it. All the objects together form a new context and a new meaning that is given to it by human history and experience. All of the elements of one collection work together to create a new context and this context supersede the individual narratives that lie behind it.75 In other words: because the souvenirs have transformed into a collection they go beyond the personal story and create a new context and a new meaning; a new narrative.
ESCAPISM TO DEAL WITH THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE The Museum of Innocence is full of nostalgia. This is partly due to the objects: souvenirs of better days and black and white pictures of how it used to be but the design of the museum is also very important. The small and comfortable house feels much more homely than the average museum
72 Stewart, p. xii. 73 Stewart, p. 151. 74 Stewart, p. xii. 75 Stewart, pp. 151-153. 30 feels. Inside the museum Pamuk chose to use small and wooden cabinets, handmade and individually lit, giving each box the feeling of a small treasure chest. The rooms are small and intimate and because Pamuk doesn’t allow too many people to enter at once the visitor can truly engage with all the objects. It’s not surprising that many people take their time to inspect the boxes, look at all the objects that were also described in the book and to gaze at the many black and white pictures. Although each and every box evokes some feeling of nostalgia, box 7 ( see Appendix I, image X) in which Kemal shows objects of his youth is perhaps the most clear example. All of the different aspects are combined into one, nostalgic, display. We see picture of Kemal’s youth, old toys, a curtains that could have hung in his room and the name plate of the apartment he grew up in. All of these happy memories together could make anyone melancholic. The Museum of Innocence is thus a nostalgic museum; a museum that at first sight might show historical objects and tell history but on further inspection only tell a very limited and one sided side of history. Although this might nog be historically correct, it can be very useful. The nostalgic feeling that The Museum of Innocence evokes allows the visitor to use the past in dealing with the present. This sentiment is really not all that different from the one that De Martelaere described. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about fiction or nostalgia or perhaps even a combination of the two, the fact is that escaping the present can help people in dealing with today’s world. Escapism might easily be associated with a literal escape but what is forgotten is that with the escapism that happens through fiction and nostalgia the person is always (re)directed at the present and the future. In spite of all of this, it remains the case that the objects in The Museum of Innocence are very personal objects. They are the souvenirs that Kemal collected to remind him about Füsun and although some objects might be familiar to some people most will not. However, because Pamuk placed the objects in a museum that is accessible to everyone the objects were aestheticized and they started to transform into a collection instead of independent souvenirs. And more so, the link between the story of the book and the history of Turkey make that the objects in the museum is a collection. The objects are not samples, Pamuk could also have chosen other objects, and history is what lends them their value, not the personal aspect. The museum therefore goes beyond the initially very personal story that it tells and creates new meanings. Meanings that are not only true for Kemal but also for the visitors. Although Pamuk has argued that he wants to make museums that are individual, it seems that this isn’t entirely the case in The Museum of Innocence. The upcoming chapter will deal with this apparent contrast between the personal and the group and with the creation of meaning and narrative and, in turn, the creation of identity through these meanings and narratives. Both personal and collective identity is influenced by museum.
31
THREE – THE CONSEQUENCES OF GLOBALIZATION AND INDIVIDUALIZATION
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES AND THE GLOBALIZED WORLD In 1983 Benedict Anderson published his book on imagined communities in which he describes how nation states come to exist. He argues that nations are imagined communities because people of a nation will never know most of the other people of that same nation, nor will he or she meet them or even hear about them. And yet, these people live in a community, in their minds anyway. Anderson states that nations do not exist but are invented. The bond between people of nations and between people with and the nation, however, is so strong that people are not only willing to kill but also to die for this imagined community. These imagined communities, or nations, were first made possible by the invention of printed book.76 Nowadays however other forms of media play a much more important role in community building. Ulrich Beck, professor at the University of München, has introduced the concept of imagined communities of global risk. He argues that global crises like the financial crisis, Chernobyl, the attacks on the Twin Tower and climate changes have made a new form of imagined communities come to the surface. Mass-media report (instead of Anderson’s printed books) and the recognition of dependency and interdependency triggers what he calls cosmopolitization (this is different from cosmopolitism which is voluntarily and often of elites while cosmopolitization is involuntarily). This cosmopolitan and imagined community include nations and is in that regard not so different from the imagined communities Anderson talks about. But cosmopolitan communities depend on mass- media and internet.77 The most important difference is the “fundamental difference to our relationships with distant others. No longer can we regard them as poor strangers, inviting us to be good and compassionate. Instead we must now understand them as partners in a common cause: both ‘us’ and ‘them’ tied together in the interests of survival, in the challenge of mastering global risks”.78 Nations thus are imagined but very strong identifiers, the Turkish nation is a great example of that, it was established only in 1923, less than a hundred years ago, and yet people attach much importance to the title of being a Turk. At the same time, cosmopolitization and globalization also has its impact on Turkey and, Beck has argued, the effects of relationships with the other people and nations is stronger than ever. Museums are and always have been important ways of establishing communities. This chapter will go further into the question of how museums have been used to build
76 Anderson, pp. 7-8. 77 Beck, pp. 1351-1353 78 Beck, p. 1357 32 community but also on questions regarding the globalizing and individualizing world. What are the consequences of globalization and individualization on the way in which museums function as a medium to build community? Generally museums are national and collective in character, the Museum of Innocence (as we have seen) is much more personal. Are globalizing and individualizing tendencies changing our view on museums goals?
MUSEUMS, LIEUX DE MEMOIRE AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY Memory is often seen as a mental and therefore invisible process, but in fact, memory can become visible through what Susan Crane, professor at the University of Arizona, calls “imaginative recollection and representation”.79 In other words, the objects we use to remember: museum collections. These objects can help us trigger memories and to think about things that are actually absent. Objects therefore become a surrogate for something else. In Kemal’s case the union with Füsun; the objects he collects help him to remember and recall Füsun when she is not there. More generally speaking, the objects are a surrogate for the past. The particular thing about museum objects though is that they do not (or at least not only) trigger personal memories but more so (or also) collective ones. “Memory is both personal and collective; although each individual has memories that belong to her and no one else, other memories are shared, based on common experience, learning, heritage, tradition and more”, Crane argues.80 Museums in other words ‘preserve’ and ‘fix’ the memory of entire groups of people, nations in general, through collecting and displaying collections, by preserving and also by choosing which objects deserve to be kept and remembered. “Memory of cultures, nature and nations is set to trigger memory in and for multiple diverse collectives. These memories then become components of identities – even for individuals who would in no other way feel connected to these objects”.81 In other words, museums function as archives of memory. French historian Pierre Nora has argued that this remembering used to happen as a natural thing, but in modern days memory no longer functions in such a way. Instead, people require sites to which memory can attach itself.82 These sites can be anything from monuments to archives and also museums. These sites, or Lieux de Memoire as Nora calls them, function as sites where people can remember actively, as opposed to remembering naturally as used to be the case. Nora wrote his book on Lieux de Memoire at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. He only discussed French examples but his theory became popular also in other nations. In The Netherlands for
79 Crane, 2000, p. 1. 80 Crane, 2000, p. 2. 81 Crane, 2000, p. 3. 82 Nora, p. 22. 33 example a four volume book titled Plaatsen van Herinnering (places of memory) was published in 2005 and 2006. Nora’s theory became one of the important theories of heritage studies, and therefore can almost not not be part of an theory on the future museum. But Thomsen has noted a very important aspect of Turkey’s history that makes the Turkish situation impossible to use as comparison to the French. He argues that, “even though all cultures change, few involve the kind of shift that took place in Turkey”.83 And still, he argues, the culture is changing but in a much more radical way than, for example, France did during the French Revolution (where many aspects did not change and it were still the French that ruled France). This is where the idea of longue durée of Fernand Braudel comes from. In Turkey, according to Thomsen, the transformation is not yet complete and continues to involves ruptures: sudden and big changes in culture and national politics.84 In the last hundred or so years alone it has gone from Ottoman rule to Atta Türk, has witnessed three coups and has known a dramatic change in population (from mixed nationalities to over 99% Islamic). Turkey doesn’t rely on Lieux the Memoire to remember because it’s ‘places’ have simply changed too often and too quickly. Nora owes a lot of his ideas to the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and although Nora’s theory is not applicable to The Museum of Innocence, Halbwachs’ theory is important for interpreting the museum. Halbwachs distinguished between personal and collective memory. He argues that “individual memory can only be recalled in the social framework within which it is constructed. Individuals […] belong to many social groups, and a collective memory inheres in each. […] These groups maintain a living relation to collective memory, and it is only within such groups that any individual can remember and express personal memories”.85 In other words, a person may belong to various different groups throughout his life but he can only look at and consider his own memories through the viewpoint of the group (the collective). Individual memory thus became subordinate to collective memory. “Individuals,” Crane argues, “provide interpretations for other individuals, and these are dealt with as information to be assimilated, remembered, or archived. The criteria, however, of ‘what remains’ has more to do with who is acting as a witness and who is remembering lived experience than it does with whether a narrative adequately sums op a historical event”.86 Museums are one of the places collective memory is ‘kept’. But, Crane argues, “museums are more than cultural institutions and showplaces of accumulated objects: they are sites of interaction between personal and collective identities, between memory and history, between information and
83 Thomsen, p. 158. 84 Thomsen, p. 158. 85 Crane, 1997, p. 1376. 86 Crane, 1997, p. 1378. 34 knowledge production”.87 She notes that people visiting the museum may ask themselves the question of who decides what they get to see and don’t get to see, but that in general people don’t do this.88 What would they discover when they would give it a moment’s thought? If they would consider if and why they feel connected to the objects they see, would they discover that their personal memory and identity is in line with what they see, or perhaps not at all? The conventional museums that currently make up the museum landscape are generally focused on showing only collective memories and identities. The Museum of Innocence is an example of this. Here a very personal and individual history is told (although there is also a second, national layer). The museum proved that it is possible to return to the individual, even in something as collective as a museum. Not many museums have done this, partially because of the way museums have developed. Museums and collections know a long history and a multitude of developments that have led to their role as memory places and creators of identity nowadays. Originally collections (generally not yet museums than) were meant to be encyclopedic; where the encyclopedia was a written presentation of all words and knowledge, the encyclopedic collection was a presentation of everything but than in material form. Collections were meant to be all-embracing and universal. In the 18th and 19th century collections were becoming more specialized and at the end of the 19th century most collections were reorganized (for example in natural objects or art objects) and national museums were opened to house the national collection.89 Ever since then lay-outs have changed, focuses have shifted and museums have professionalized a lot, but the initial ideal of collecting universal objects has always been part of the museums missions. When we visit some of the world’s most famous museums’ websites today, we find that in their mission statements some form is national or even world history is almost always included. Like that of the British Museum: “the British Museum exists to tell the story of cultural achievement throughout the world”.90 And of the Louvre: “the Louvre has embraced the history of France for eight centuries. Intended as a universal museum […]”.91 The national Art Gallery of the United Stated even claims to want to serve the nation in a national role.92 In 2002 nineteen museums (among which The Louvre, The Metropolitan and Hermitage museums) signed the ‘Declaration on the importance and value of universal museums’ in which they stated that “Museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation.”93 This is in line with the globalized imagined communities of Beck, but opposes Pamuk’s statement that museums should be about small and about stories and
87 Crane, 2000, p. 12 88 Crane, 2000, p. 12. 89 Bergvelt, p. 8 & 17. 90 http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/news_and_press/statements/the_lewis_chessmen.aspx 91 http://www.louvre.fr/en/missions-projects 92 http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/about/mission-statement.html 93 McClellan, p. 276. For entire declaration and list of museums who signed see appendix II. 35 individuals. It’s not surprising perhaps that such a different view would originate in Turkey, where due to the ruptures in history a collective story would be difficult to show. Large and national museums simply don’t seem suitable for a country in which history is constantly being rewritten. Although The Museum of Innocence might be quite unique in this regard, Pamuk was not the first person to observe that museums are changing and to think about the future of museums. Nor is he the first to notice the important role small museums can play in society. In 1984 the Commission on Museums for a New Century published their report on the role of museums in American society. A section of this report is dedicated to ‘small museums’ in which they state, apparently to counter popular opinion, that we shouldn’t see small museums as just lesser versions of large institutions. And that small museums can contribute a lot to a small community and their key to success is often their close ties to this community. The commission also notes that society is changing and that the fact that America’s movement towards ‘an ethic of private commitment’ seems to be one of the most important changes for museums.94 Of course, this commission doesn’t go nearly as far as Pamuk does, but it is clear that the issue of growing individualism in society and an appreciation for small museums it not new. In the 1993 article ‘The Future of Museums’, Frans Schouten argues that museums have seem to have stood still but that changes in society will force museums to change now. Just like companies, museums are getting more and more specialized and have to adapt to their specific location and niche markets. At the same time, Schouten detects a demand for a more generalist approach because visitors of museums don’t see the world in sub-groups like art, applied art, exotic art, ethnography etc. According to Schouten, the majority of the museums that were being built in Europe in 1993 were small and independent museums, often run by volunteers. This is, he argues, because there is more and more need for identification with the past since the world we live in is becoming more complex and more difficult to survive in. Apparently (he does not explain why and how) these small museums make it easier for people to identify with what they are seeing. Small museums, Schouten argues, reflect society’s need for attachment to our historical roots because society has gotten to complex and people want to use the values of the past in order to re-orientate themselves.95 The Center for the Future of Museums (CFM), part of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), has publishes a paper in 2008 on expected trends and potential futures for American museums. One of their expectations is that the growing popularity of video gaming is going to render a change in the museum experience of many people. When gaming, the person playing often serves as the protagonist and is thus the main force behind the narrative of the game. This, according to
94 Bloom, pp. 21-24. 95 Schouten, pp. 381-384. 36
CFM will cause people in museums to also expect to be part of the narrative experience and thus, even though the main narrative might not change, identify better with what they are seeing trough their roles as protagonists. A more personal and stronger engagement and identification will thus be the result.96 Perhaps then, it is not so much the historical roots that the visitor finds here that make the small museums so attractive (as Schouten argues), but the possibility small museums offer the visitor to identify with the story and the characters and to lose him or herself (just as Ger Groot and Patricia De Martelaere suggest happens when reading) in the museum; to escape the present in order to find answers to problems of the present and the future elsewhere. Schouten ends his article with an important piece of advice to museums: “visitors must recognize themselves and their questions in the displays of the collections if the museum is to fulfil its role in society properly”.97 This recognition is all the much stronger if the visitor can influence the narrative.
INDIVIDUALIZATION IN TURKISH SOCIETY AND MUSEUMS Changed in ideas about museums and about their tasks (like the ones we have seen in the previous section) are generally directly triggered by changes is society. An important change or development in society is the growth of individualism as a consequence of modernization.98 In a brief summary of a number of key articles and literature about individualism and collectivism in Turkish society Unal Yetim shows that four large cross-cultural studies have shown that Turkey scores about 3.85 out of 10 when it comes to individualism. This means that Turkey is a mainly collectivist country, comparable with Taiwan, Portugal and Brazil, but yet Turkish psychologists claim that in cultural practices Turkey shows both collectivist and individualist trends and thus can’t be classified as being either one or the other.99 Melek Göregenli supports this claim in his 1997 article about individualist and collectivist tendencies in Turkey and argues that “Turkish culture cannot be placed on one or the other side of the individualism-collectivism dichotomy”.100 In a study by E. Olcay İmamoğlu and Zahide Karakitapoğlu-Aygün it is shown that the youth of 1990 rates individual values as more important than the youth of 1970 did. 101 Other studies from the ‘90s have shown that individualism is spreading especially among the urban, the highly educated and again the young generations in Turkey.102 A study by Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı even shows that cultures
96 Museums & Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures, pp. 17-18. 97 Schouten, p. 385. 98 Allik & Realo, p. 29 99 Yetim, p. 301. 100 Göregenli, p. 791. 101 Yetim, p. 302. Original article in Turkish. 102 Yetim, p. 301. 37 such as Turkey’s culture are able to become more and more individualistic while at the same time keep certain values and the emotional relatedness that belong to collectivist cultures.103 Yetim concludes his article by arguing that, according to his own study, Turkey isn’t collective at all but has high levels of “emotional relatedness of related autonomous self” in other words: Turkey is an individualist country with some collectivist tendencies and values such as high emotional relatedness.104 Geert Hofstede, pioneer in the individualism-collectivism debate, has claimed that rich and industrialized societies are becoming more and more individualistic, while poorer and rural societies remain collectivistic. With many countries in the world, and not only the west, becoming more and more industrialized, wealthy and urbanized one would expect the world to become increasingly and unlimitedly individualistic. But as we have just seen in the example of Turkey, this division between individualism and collectivism is not very clear or obvious. In Jüri Allik and Anu Realo’s article about the relationship between individualism and social capital, the authors argue that individualism and collectivism are not, contrary to popular believe, opposites op each other. In fact, they argue, more individualism, autonomy and self-sufficiency will lead to and is even a requirement for more interpersonal-connections, mutual dependency and social solidarity. Take for example division of labor. This is perceived as being individualistic but requires coordination between different people, in this case individualism promotes trust. Division of labor and other forms of voluntary cooperation between individuals is only possible when these individuals have autonomy, self-control and (perhaps most importantly) a sense of responsibility.105 Jüri Allik and Anu Realo’s argument is similar to that of Meira Z. Weiss’ collective individualism. Weiss argues collective individualism is an integral part of the post-modern state. This is, she argues, because citizenship on the one hand gives rights and duties to individuals but at the same time these rights and duties contribute to a standardization and thus diminish individualization. And so, “individualism becomes an institutional code, constituting the self-awareness of individuals and the social construction of political reality”.106 Allik & Realo also demonstrate this by showing that statistically the countries with the higher levels of interpersonal trust also have higher levels of individualism. The only country of the 42 countries they studied for which this wasn’t the case was China.107 Individualism and collectivism are therefore not opposite of each other; they influence and interact with each other and even run parallel to each other. Hofstede’s and Pamuk’s strict division
103 Yetim, p. 302. Original article in Turkish. 104 Yetim, p. 313. 105 Allik & Realo, pp. 31-35. 106 Weiss, p. 278 107 Allik & Realo, p. 41. 38 between either individualistic or collectivist tendencies is not a necessary distinction. Instead, it turns out, the two can run parallel to each other and even enhance each other. In the catalogue of The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk has included what he calls ‘A Modest Manifesto for Museums’ (see Appendix II). A short introduction, eleven statements and a finally seven bullet points summarizing what ‘we had’ and what ‘we need’ make up the manifest. The main argument of the manifest is that future museums should be smaller and should focus on the individual. 108 Pamuk’s ideas are generally in line with the challenges that other authors have predicted museums to have to deal with in the future, but Pamuk’s conclusions go a lot further than that of the other authors; instead of the individual becoming more important he becomes the only important thing and instead of museums becoming smaller and more focused on communities or small groups, communities or even groups should play no role at all according to Pamuk. The smaller the better seems to be Pamuk’s device. But is this approach completely new and more importantly, what are its consequences? Individual museums might not seem like such a new thing. We all know museum that are about one person, for example the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the National Pushkin Museum in Saint Petersburg. There is a big difference though, because these two museums and other museums of its kind are really quite nationalistic. Monographic museums are usually about people who have been or still are important people for the nation and thus they represent a group instead of the individual and so are distinctly different from Pamuk’s ideas on individualist museums. Pamuk’s museum is part of a development that we see in museums and museum theory. We have seen that already in 1984 Bloom spoke about the importance of small museums and also Frans Schouten and The Center for the Future of Museums has signaled a development in which people expect museums to more identifiable and personal. Museums are also participating in this trend. For example The National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, in The Netherlands, organized an exhibition on the pilgrimage to Mecca and for this they invited people to lend and display their own pilgrimage souvenirs. Video interviews with personal stories of people who went on pilgrimage could also be viewed in the exhibition.109 A similar thing happened also in Leiden at Museum De Lakenhal where the museum again asked people from the region to show their personal collections and while doing so tell their personal stories.110 The newly opened International Museum for Family History in Eijsden in The Netherlands can also be seen in line with this development. Although it is not about one family in particular it does illustrate the importance of small groups and families.111
108 Pamuk, 2012 (1), pp. 54-57. 109 http://volkenkunde.nl/nl/verlangen-naar-mekka-intro 110 Timmermans & Knol, p. 55. 111 http://www.museumvoorfamiliegeschiedenis.nl/ 39
We have seen that society is becoming more individualistic but also that with this individualism a new form of collectivism is developing. Individualism and collectivism seem to be connected to each other and while one trend might be stronger than the other at a certain point in time, Jüri Allik and Anu Realo suggest that it isn’t possible for one to completely banish the other since the increase in individualism will only lead to more necessity for more voluntary collectivism. We see this also in The Museum of Innocence, in the story that is about Kemal but also represents the story of Turkey. And while many of the displays show very personal objects, others concentrate on more general topics. Like box 10 (see Appendix I, image XI) that focuses not on Keal’s experience but on something that everyone that has visited Istanbul would recognize: the beauty of the lights of Istanbul by night. The same thing goes for box 11 (see Appendix I, image XII) that is about the Festival of the sacrifice. This festival plays a small role in the book because this is one of the last times Kemal saw Füsun as a child but also because it becomes clear here that one thing (for Abraham the love of God, for Kemal objects) can be a surrogate for something else (for Abraham his son, for Kemal Füsun). More so the festival of sacrifice it’s a festival that is very important for the religious culture of Turkey. The box, therefore, can be seen as something with both personal and collective importance.
THE INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE AS REPLACEMENT FOR COLLECTIVE MEMORY Due to the growing importance of historicism in the 19th century and the above described development of national museums, expressing group identity was the aim of museums then and also now. Crane describes that it was and is impossible for someone to claim to have their own sense of historical consciousness but argues that they should.112 Groups, as we all know, do not have a shared brain. In theory, sites (Lieux de Memoire, museums, archives, et cetera) have therefore been the physical location in which memory was supposed to be located. But what seems to be forgotten is that all these sites, narratives and collections remain objects until they are interpreted by individuals. This interpretation is what Crane calls ‘thinking historically’. Learning about history is a lived and active experience that can become part of collective memory. Lived experiences, according to Nora and Halbwachs, was the way in which people remembered in the past when memory was still a natural process. ‘What remains’, what is remembered, therefore has everything to do with when one is ‘acting as a witness’ and when one is ‘remembering lived experiences’. Because witnessing is also lived experience, it means being aware of someone else’s story. We have already seen that Nora’s theory, in which he argues that there is no active memory any more, does not apply to the Turkish situation. Memory as experience does.
112 Crane, 1997, p. 1375 40
Memory is individuals providing interpretations for other individuals, and dealing with this as information that needs to be kept, remembered and stored. Historical research thus is a lived experience. The location of memory is removed from Lieux de Memoir to individuals.113 “I am not suggesting that the inclusion of intimate personal information is essential to the honest production of history. But neither is it inappropriate, […] it may also serve as a mode of access for nonprofessional historians”, Crane argues, because the moment anyone begins to think about history they become historians and they are producing history.114 The importance of the individual that we see in Cranes argumentation is also found in that of Stuart Hall, cultural theorist and sociologist. He argues that “the past […] is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth”.115 But, national museums and national tellings of history suggest one, correct, interpretation. Hall argues that we should start seeing identity as something that is produced and therefore never complete. But it is not a mere ‘phantasm’ either, identity has history and that history continues to influence identity today.116 Interpreting history should therefore not be a collective interpretation, this would after all not do justice to the many differences in individual identity. The Museum of Innocence is the perfect example of an individual interpretation of history; an individual engaging with history and by doing so producing both history and identity. Because globalization is changing the imagined communities of Benedict Anderson so drastically it is clear that the collective plays a much different role now than when the collective was only the nation. Although collectivism is still part of the culture in Turkey, individualism also plays an important role. The two can function next to each other and the harsh separation that Pamuk makes between the two doesn’t seem to be necessary. It seems, however, that museums haven’t yet caught up with this change in society. We still see Museums as Lieux de Memoire, storehouses for collective history and memory, and that hasn’t changed since the 19th century. They have been places in which collective, national and even universal histories, identities and ideals have come to be expressed, but in the last few decades the popularity of smaller and local museums has been growing and The Museum of Innocence can be seen as the ultimate individual museum. At the same time The Museum of Innocence is also quite collective. Kemal’s story can be interpreted as the story of Turkey and some of the boxes are more about cultural phenomena than about Kemal and Füsun. The fact though, that the museum makes it possibly to personally engage with the objects, to interpret them and to become an active witness of history is what makes The Museum of Innocence so different from national museums. The individual museum isn’t individual because it shows the story of one
113 Crane, 1997, pp. 1381-1383. 114 Crane, 1997, p. 1384. 115 Hall, p. 226. 116 Hall, p. 226. 41 person, it’s individual because that story can be interpreted by many individuals, each in their own way.
42
CONCLUSION – THE INNOCENCE OF OBJECTS
As we have seen in the previous chapters, an object placed in a museums is never just an object. It becomes part of a collection and with that collection it is part of the narrative of a museum. The museums creates history and identity and through that it influences even our personal memories. You could say that an object that is part of a collection, a (national) narrative, is never innocent. The name The Museum of Innocence can be interpreted in two ways; the first and most obvious is the innocence of Füsun. By sleeping with Kemal she has lost her innocence, but when she divorces her husband and agrees to marry Kemal she tells him that she has never slept with her husband. Therefore, she argues, for all intents and purposes she is still a virgin and wishes to only share the bed with Kemal after they get married. Kemal agrees but on the first night of their trip to Europe they do sleep together and Füsun, again, loses her innocence. The second interpretation is about the innocence of museums and their objects. It is, after all, no coincidence that the catalogue of the museum is named The Innocence of Objects. Objects that are part of a museum’s narrative have always been interpreted and displayed with a certain goal and therefore you could say that these objects are never innocent. They are used for national objectives and to create imagined communities. The non-national, personal, character of The Museum of Innocence and the space the museum offers to interpret the objects individually suggest that in this museum the objects are innocent. Museums, in other words, are places where history is constantly being interpreted on the basis of a collection. In general though, museums are aimed at groups, mostly nations, and they leave very little room for personal interpretation. As a result, a huge emphasis has been put on collective history and collective memory. Pierre Nora describes how the modern day’s memory culture has led to people preserving as much objects as possible in order to remember but that because of this habit natural remembering has been lost. But, as Susan Crane argues, it is more likely (at least in Turkey) that remembering does occurs in a natural way, by experiencing history. After all, individuals who learn about history are actually experiencing history and thus remembering in a natural way. In order for this to work, people do need to be given the freedom to interpret history in an individual manner and not to rely on collective interpretation and collective identity. After all, there is not one correct interpretation of history and identity is continuously changing and engaging with history. This demand for more room for personal interpretation and identity is not surprising in today’s time. We have seen that society is becoming more and more individualized and at the same time Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities are expanding far beyond the nation’s borders. It
43 simply does not seem enough for people to identify with an unknown group of people. And, as people become more and more aware of their dependencies and interdependencies as countries, they also appear to become more aware of their personal dependencies and interdependencies. Social connectedness in small groups therefore remains important, even in individualizing countries and especially in a country like Turkey. The Museum of Innocence provides an opportunity for an individual telling of history. Kemal, as maker of the museum, can tell his story, a very personal story and one that isn’t nationalistic of nature. If everyone would open up their own museums as Pamuk suggests, everyone would be interpreting history and everyone would be actively forming their personal identity. However, this plan is not very realistic nor is it very effective. Even if everyone could open their own museum, people would not be able to visit even the smallest fractions of these museums. The effect would not be very different from the imagined communities of Anderson; a lot of stories that most people will never know and never hear of. These personal museums would be nothing but a lot of wasted effort. What we can learn from Pamuk’s effort is first of all that personal engagement with history is what is important for the future museum, because by actively experiencing history, identity does not need to be subordinate to the collective. Secondly, that the responsibility for this lies not (or at least not only) with every single inhabitant of a nation but with the government. Kemal, after all, is the one who makes the museum and he can be seen as signifying the Turkish government. What the analysis of The Museum of Innocence has shown us, is that the personal engagement that we see in the museum comes not from the possibility for every single person to tell their own story, but from the possibility to actively experience history. According to Crane, everyone that starts learning about history is already experiencing history and therefore adding a personal aspect to the collective story and identity. In our current, often nationally or at least-group oriented, museums there is often no personal aspect to be found. One could argue that, also in large and national museums people can learn about history and thus that visiting any museum would be actively experiencing history. But this experience is more often than not a very passive way of learning. National museum offer one story that is, supposedly, the story that fits every person in that nation. In practice, however, one story never fits every single inhabitant. Take for example The Amsterdam Museum, a museum not even about an entire nation but about one city. One of their most important permanent exhibitions is called Amsterdam DNA. In this exhibition the four core values of Amsterdam (or better: the inhabitants of Amsterdam, because a city obviously has no values, the inhabitants do) are discussed. Entrepreneurship, free thinking, citizenship and creativity apparently are applicable to all 800.000 inhabitants of the city. Or at least, that is what is suggested
44 by the museum.117 So even though the visitor can learn about the seven important periods of the city, this learning is quite passive. After all, the interpretation is already given. The Museum of Innocence on the other hand both is and isn’t historical at the same time and so it does leave room for interpretation. From very personal ones to ones that are about the entire nation. The Museum of Innocence is historical, because partially it is a museum that shows daily life in Istanbul in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but it also isn’t because the story that is told is not true. Kemal and Füsun don’t exist and the way Istanbul is portrayed is not historically accurate. Instead, it is a nostalgic past, a fictive one. But, as Ger Groot has shown, fiction can be as real as reality or even more real because when reading (and visiting the museum is often and certainly in this case like reading) a person can forget himself and by doing so the border between reality and fiction disappears. And, as Patricia De Martelaere has argued, because a person voluntarily loses himself and identifies with the characters, fiction can be a helpful tool for dealing with the present. Nostalgia can, in a similar way to fiction, be a perfect tool for dealing with the present and the future; in the past people can find answers to their current question and they can find ideals that they might miss in their current society. The society they were once part of function as an example of how it once was and how it one day again could be, or perhaps how it even is very deep down. Like in Istanbul, where people feel nostalgia for the cosmopolitan and multi-cultural society that they think Istanbul was like in the past, and they use this nostalgic (almost fictive) idea of the past to find these ideals in their current society. In other words: in the imagined pasts people can find ideals that may not truly have been part of society but that nevertheless can give them a feeling of faith in today’s society. The souvenirs that make up The Museum of Innocence’s collection are perfect objects for evoking a feeling of nostalgia; they are personal and above all relatable. The interior and exterior of the museum also help with creating a feeling of nostalgia; the darkly-lit rooms, the small and old- looking cabinets and the intimate atmosphere all contribute to the feeling. It’s very important to remember that nostalgia here doesn’t involve a negative emotion. Productive nostalgia, the kind of nostalgia that we can find in The Museum of Innocence, is not directed at the past but instead at the present and the future, it uses history to deal with today. The past lends authenticity to the collection instead of vice versa. In The Museum of Innocence visitors truly have the opportunity to lose themselves in the story and to identify with what they are seeing. When this happens the nostalgic, fictive past becomes part of reality. People become part of the narrative but in a very personal way. The past then is actively lived but perhaps more importantly, used to find answers to current questions. The
117 http://www.amsterdammuseum.nl/en/amsterdam-dna-0 45
Museum of Innocence could therefore be seen as a place where personal memory can be actively experienced instead of an archive of collective memory that the average museum is. What can the success of The Museum of Innocence teach us about possible future goals for museums? First of all that museums that only engage with national identity and history are no longer sufficient; there is demand for more personal approaches to these issues. We need personal engagement with history and active experiencing of history in order to accomplish that. And secondly, that fiction and nostalgia seem to be very effective ways of establishing that. Pamuk has stated in the catalogue that he doesn’t want national museums to become the blueprint for new museums. Instead he suggest that everyone should open their own museums. This plan doesn’t seem realistic for obvious reasons but it also not necessary. He is right in saying that we need museums that don’t focus on national identity but this doesn’t have to involve millions of so called ‘living room museums’. As it turns out, by fictionalizing the past and evoking a feeling of nostalgia for this past, Pamuk has established something even better than he set out to do. Not only has he created room for a personal telling of history, more importantly he has also created room for personal interpretations, associations and engagement. By doing so personal identities and histories can win back the spotlight from collective ones. Of course, not all museums have the ‘advantage’ of relying on a fictive story to tell. National museum, museums that tell the history of groups are not likely to disappear anytime soon. Nor do they need to disappear. It is important though to remember that all of the groups represented in museums are imagined communities. This, in itself, doesn’t need to be problematic; even in individualizing countries social connectedness can remain very important. But what these museums can learn from the success of The Museum of Innocence is that there is a lot of demand for museums that offer the possibility to interpret and actively experience history. Museums can do this by incorporating personal stories into their narrative and by showing multiple possible interpretations. Museums can and should be clearer about the fact that what they do is interpreting history and what they show is the truth, it is only an interpretation. More so even, they need to leave room for personal interpretation. In this thesis I have shortly discussed a few examples of museums that have tried to incorporate personal stories into their exhibition. Of course, there are many more examples all over the world. Museums that leave room for personal interpretation are less common; in museums history is often portrayed as having happened a certain way. Instead museums should be clear in showing that with collecting and with displaying collections choices are always made and that by showing certain things and not showing others an interpretation is already being made for the visitor. In The Museum of Innocence there are no texts next to the displays. The visitor can read the book or can listen to the audio-tour that discusses fragments of the book in order to understand the
46 story. But the visitor can also choose not to read the story of Kemal and Füsun but instead only look at the exhibition and leave the interpretation up to himself. Where one person might interpret the many clocks as a wish to stop time, another visitor might see it as a reminder that the past is still part of the present. Either way, the visitor is forced to actively interpret what they see and is enabled to experience history in a completely new way. This is where the strength of The Museum of Innocence seems to lie. Whether this is how Pamuk intended his museum to be, or not, is not very important in this regard. What is important is to note that although all museums are different this way of showing the past can be applied to many kinds of museum. Take for example The Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in The Netherlands, In their semi-permanent exhibition ‘I Love Holland’ the texts next to the artworks here are only visible when a visitor presses a button (See Image XIII, Appendix I. The column in the middle lights up when the visitor presses the button). If he doesn’t do this, he can just look at the works and leave the interpretation up to himself. Museums could also choose to print the exhibition texts only in a leaflet and not on the wall and, better yet, to offer within their own interpretation several different possible interpretations, questions for the visitor to think about and possible contradictory opinions and ideas. Nostalgia is also used more and more in museums. Take for example The Rijksmuseum (the national museum of The Netherlands) and especially the Gallery of Honours here. It was recently brought back to its original look and only works of the Dutch Golden Age are shown here now (See Image XIV, Appendix I). By doing so, the museums has created a nostalgia for the time in which The Netherlands was, apparently, at its greatest. The atmosphere in this hall allows for the paintings to be interpreted as treasures and curiosities and encourages closer inspection. But still, the hall (the entire museum in fact) is about the nation and personal interpretation is not easy. If the collective will ever not play an important role in museums remains to be seen. Pamuk’s ideal of a completely personal museums seems to be very idyllic, but at the very least The Museum of Innocence can function as an example for other museum on how to stimulate personal engagement. Perhaps Pamuk’s hopes of the museum functioning as a blue print for the future museum will become reality. It is not only the task of museums to consider this but also of governments. It is perhaps not surprising that when governments are such major stockholders in museums and in what they represent that the personal has been overlooked, but it seems to be time now that the government also takes responsibility in showing more than just the collective. The Museum of Innocence can serve as a excellent example of how to do that.
47
REFERENCES
LITERATURE Ahmad, F. Turkey: the quest for identity. London: Oneworld Publications, 2014.
Allik, J., Realo, A. ‘Individualism-Collectivism and social capital.’ Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, vol. 35, no. 1 (2004), pp. 29-49.
Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006.
Beck, U. ‘Cosmopolitanism as Imagined Communities of Global Risk.’ American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 55, no. 10 (2011), pp. 1346-1362.
Bergvelt, E., Meijers, D., Rijnders, M, Kabinetten, galerijen en musea : het verzamelen en presenteren van naturalia en kunst van 1500 tot heden, Zwolle: WBOOKS, 2013.
Bloom, J.N. Museums for a new century: a report of the Commission on Museums for a New Century, Washington, D.C.: American Association of Museums, 1984.
Boym, S. The future of nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Crane, S.A. ‘Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory.’ The American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 5 (1997), pp. 1372-1385.
Crane, S.A. Museums and Memory, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Göregenli, M. ‘Individualist-Collectivist tendencies in a Turkish sample.’ Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, vol. 28, no. 6 (1997), pp. 787-794.
Göknar, E.M., Orhan Pamuk, secularism and blasphemy: the politics of the Turkish novel. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Groot, G. Vergeten te bestaan, Echte fictie en het fictieve ik. Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2010.
Hall, S. ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora.’ Framework : the journal of cinema and media, vol. 36 (1989), pp. 222-237
Hooper-Greenhill, E. ‘Knowledge in an open prison.’ New Statesman, vol. 113, no. 2916 (1987), pp. 21-22.
Ikinci, S. ‘Turkey’s bloody 1977 May Day still clouded in mystery.’ 1.05.2003. accessed through: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/05/turk-m01.html last visited: 27.11.2014.
Kennedy, J.M. ´Turkish writer opens museum based on novel.´ The New York Times, 29.04.2012. via:
48
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/books/orhan-pamuk-opens-museum-based-on-his-novel- in-istanbul.html?_r=0 last visited on: 10.11.2014.
Martelaere, P. de. Een verlangen naar ontroostbaarheid: Overleven, kunst en dood, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 2003. Via: http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/mart003verl01_01/mart003verl01_01.pdf last visited on: 10-.11.2014.
McClellan, A. The Art Museum, from Boullée to Bilbao. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Mills, A. ‘Narratives in City Landscapes: Cultural Identity in Istanbul.’ Geographical Review, vol. 95, no. 3 (2005), pp. 441-462.
Moser, S. ‘The Devil is in the detail: Museum Displays and the Creation of Knowledge.’ Museum Anthropology, vol. 33, no. 1 (2010), pp. 22-32.
Museums & Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures. Center for the Future of Museums, December 2008. accessed through: http://www.aam-us.org/docs/center-for-the-future-of- museums/museumssociety2034.pdf?sfvrsn=0 last accessed: 14.1.2015.
Naylor, R.T. Hot money and the politics of debt. New York: Linden Press/Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Nora, P. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’ Representations, vol. 26, spring, (1989), pp. 7-24.
Pamuk, O. The Museum of Innocence. Translation: Maureen Freely. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.
Pamuk, O. The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. New York: Abrams, 2012 (1).
Pamuk, O. ‘This is the museum of the future; Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk explains why he built a museum dedicated to the glory and tragedy of one fictional couple’s love.’ Newsweek, 03.11.2012 (2): p. 46.
Routledge et al, ‘The past makes the present meaningful: Nostalgia as an existential resource.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 101, no. 3 (2011), pp. 638-652.
Saloul, I. ‘Nostalgia.’ In: Pollock, G., Bal, M. red. Conceptual odysseys: passages to cultural analysis. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007.
Schouten, F.F.J. ‘The Future of Museums.’ Museum management and curatorship, vol. 12, no. 4 (1993), pp. 381-386.
Shaw, C., Chase M. The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1989.
Stewart, S. On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1993.
49
Thomsen, M. R. The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Change in Body, Mind and Society after 1900. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
Timmermans, L., Knol, M. Werk in Uitvoering, Leiden: Museum de Lakenhal, 2011.
Verhoeff, N. The West in Early Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.
Weizz, M.Z. ‘The postmodern state and collective individualism: a comparative look at Israeli society and western consumer culture.’ The Social Science Journal, vol. 40, no. 2 (2003), pp. 269-282.
Yetim, U. ‘The Impacts of Individualism/Collectivism, Self-Esteem, and Feeling of Mastery on life Satisfaction among the Turkish University Students and Academicians.’ Social Indicators Research, vol. 61, no. 3 (2003), pp. 297-317.
Zürcher, W.J. Een geschiedenis van het moderne Turkije. Amsterdam: SUN, 2006.
WEBSITES http://www.europeanmuseumforum.info/emya/emya-2014.html last visited on: 6.1.2015. http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow last visited: 26.2.2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy62YqDeE0c last visited: 12.2.2015. http://www.pubtheo.com/page.asp?pid=1548 last visited: 26.2.2015 http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/news_and_press/statements/the_lewis_chessmen.aspx last visited on: 8.1.2015. http://www.louvre.fr/en/missions-projects last visited on: 8.1.2015. http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/about/mission-statement.html last visited on: 8.1.2015. http://volkenkunde.nl/nl/verlangen-naar-mekka-intro last visited: 16.1.2015. http://www.museumvoorfamiliegeschiedenis.nl/ last visited: 16.1.2015. http://www.amsterdammuseum.nl/en/amsterdam-dna-0 last visited: 4.5.2015 http://www.stephenlioy.com/Archive/Middle-East/Turkey/Istanbul/Museum-of-Innocence/i- xVzhJz5/A last visited 4.5.2015
50
APPENDIX I – IMAGES
Image I: box 8, The first Turkish fruit Image II: box 22, Rahmi’s hand. lemonade. Pamuk, O. The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. New York: Abrams, 2012 (1). P. Pamuk, O. The Innocence of Objects: The 120. Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. New York:
Abrams, 2012 (1). P. 80.
51
Image III: box 66, What is it exactly?
Pamuk, O. The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. New York: Abrams, 2012 (1). p. 220.
Image IV: The East-West Watch.
Pamuk, O. The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. New York: Abrams, 2012 (1). p. 248.
52
Image V: box 35, The first seeds of my collection.
Pamuk, O. The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. New York: Abrams, 2012 (1). P. 155.
Image VI: box 65, Dogs.
Pamuk, O. The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. New York: Abrams, 2012 (1). P. 215.
53
Image VII: Box 54, Time.
Pamuk, O. The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. New York: Abrams, 2012 (1). p. 197.
54
Image VIII: Box 1, The happiest moment of my life.
Pamuk, O. The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. New York: Abrams, 2012 (1). p. 248.
55
Image IX: Partial view of the first floor (boxes 2 through 12) of The Museum of Innocence. http://www.stephenlioy.com/Archive/Middle-East/Turkey/Istanbul/Museum-of-Innocence/i-xVzhJz5/A
56
Image X: box 7, The Merhamet apartments.
Pamuk, O. The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. New York: Abrams, 2012 (1). P. 74.
57
Image XII: box 11, The feast of the sacrifice.
Pamuk, O. The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. New York: Abrams, 2012 (1). P. 88.
Image XI: box 10, City lights and happiness.
Pamuk, O. The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. New York: Abrams, 2012 (1). P. 84.
58
Image XIII: The Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, ‘I Love Holland’ exhibition. Light-up exhibition texts can only be read when the visitor presses a button. http://www.lost-painters.nl/wp-content/uploads/Ik-hou-van-Holland-detail.jpg
59
Image XIV: The Rijksmuseum, Gallery of Honours.
http://www.nrc.nl/inbeeld/files/2013/04/0404WEBAPP1-980x653.jpg
60
APPENDIX II – A MODEST MANIFESTO FOR MUSEUMS
I love museums and I am not alone in finding that they make me happier with each passing day. I take museums very seriously, and that sometimes leads to angry, forceful thoughts. But I do not have it in me to speak about museums with anger. In my childhood there were very few museums in Istanbul. Most of these were historical monuments or, quite rare outside the Western world, they were places with an air of a government office about them. Later, the small museums in the backstreets of European cities led me to realize that museums – just like novels – can also speak for individuals. That is not to understate the importance of the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Topkapi Palace, the British Museum, the Prado, the Vatican Museums – all veritable treasures of humankind. But I am against these precious monumental institutions being used as blueprints for future museums. Museums should explore and uncover the universe and humanity of the new and modern man emerging from increasingly wealthy non-Western nations. The aim of big, state- sponsored museums, on the other hand, is to represent the state. This is neither a good nor innocent objective.
I would like to outline my thoughts in order: 1. Large national museums such as the Louvre and the Hermitage took shape and turned into essential tourist destinations alongside the opening of royal and imperial palaces to the public. These institutions, now national symbols, present the story of the nation – history, in a word – as being far more important than the stories of individuals. This is unfortunate, because the stories of individuals are much better suited to displaying the depths of our humanity. 2. We can see that the transitions from palaces to national museums and from epics to novels are parallel processes. Epics are like palaces and speak of the heroic exploits of the old kings who lived in them. National museums, then, should be like novels; but they are not. 3. We don’t need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are richer, more humane, and much more joyful. 4. Demonstrating the wealth of Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Iranian, or Turkish history and culture is not an issue – it must be done, of course, but it is not difficult to do. The real challenge is to use museums to tell, with the same brilliance, depth, and power, the stories of the individual human beings living in these countries. 5. The measure of a museum’s success should not be its ability to represent a state, a nation or company, or a particular history. It should be its capacity to reveal the humanity of individuals. 6. It is imperative that museums become smaller, more individualistic, and cheaper. This is the only way that they will ever tell stories on a human scale. Big museums with their wide doors call upon us to forget our humanity and embrace the state and its human masses. This is why millions outside the Western world are afraid of going to museums. 7. The aim of present and future museums must not be to represent the state, but to re-create the world of single human beings – the same human beings who have labored under ruthless oppression for hundreds of years. 8. The resources that are channeled into monumental, symbolic museums should be diverted into smaller museums that tell the stories of individuals. These resources should also be used to encourage and support people in turning their own small homes and stories into “exhibition” spaces.
61
9. If objects are not uprooted from their environs and their streets, but are situated with care and ingenuity in their natural homes, they will already portray their own stories. 10. Monumental buildings that dominate neighborhoods and entire cities do not bring out our humanity; on the contrary, they quash it. Instead, we need modest museums that honor the neighborhoods and streets and the homes and shops nearby, and turn them into elements of their exhibitions. 11. The future of museums is inside our own homes.
The picture, in fact, is very simple: WE HAD: WE NEED Epics Novels Representation Expression Monuments Homes Histories Stories Nations Persons Groups and teams Individuals Large and expensive Small and cheap
62
APPENDIX III – DECLARATION ON THE IMPORTANCE AND VALUE OF UNIVERSAL MUSEUMS
The international museum community shares the conviction that illegal traffic in archaeological, artistic, and ethnic objects must be firmly discouraged. We should, however, recognize that objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different sensitivities and values, reflective of that earlier era. The objects and monumental works that were installed decades and even centuries ago in museums throughout Europe and America were acquired under conditions that are not comparable with current ones. Over time, objects so acquired – whether by purchase, gift, or partage – have become part of the museums that have cared for them, and by extension part of the heritage of the nations which house them. Today we are especially sensitive to the subject of a work’s original context, but we should not lose sight of the fact that museums too provide a valid and valuable context for objects that were long ago displaced from their original source. The universal admiration for ancient civilizations would not be so deeply established today were it not for the influence exercised by the artifacts of these cultures, widely available to an international public in major museums. Indeed, the sculpture of classical Greece, to take but one example, is an excellent illustration of this point and of the importance of public collecting. The centuries-long history of appreciation of Greek art began in antiquity, was renewed in Renaissance Italy, and subsequently spread through the rest of Europe and to the Americas. Its accession into the collections of public museums throughout the world marked the significance of Greek sculpture for mankind as a whole and its enduring value for the contemporary world. Moreover, the distinctly Greek aesthetic of these works appears all the more strongly as the result of their being seen and studied in direct proximity to products of other great civilizations. Calls to repatriate objects that have belonged to museum collections for many years have become an important issue for museums. Although each case has to be judged individually, we should acknowledge that museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation. Museums are agents in the development of culture, whose mission is to foster knowledge by a continuous process of reinterpretation. Each object contributes to that process. To narrow the focus of museums whose collections are diverse and multifaceted would therefore be a disservice to all visitors.
Signed by the Directors of: The Art Institute of Chicago; Bavarian State Museum, Munich (Alte Pinakothek, Neue Pinakothek); State Museums, Berlin; Cleveland Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art Louvre Museum, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Prado Museum, Madrid; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The British Museum, London
Source: http://icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/ICOM_News/2004-1/ENG/p4_2004-1.pdf last accessed on 21.1.2015.
63