Novel or Museum? Reading ’s Museum of Innocence Museum of Innocence, , (museum review)

Sebnem Timur Ogut

Figure 1 Logo of The Museum of Innocence. Designed by The Museum of Innocence. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/32/4/91/1715705/desi_r_00419.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

Figure 2 Stamped ticket included inside the novel: “The Museum of Innocence, Single Admission Only.”

If you are visiting Istanbul and want to experience the city from a material cultural point of view, you either walk down from Taksim or climb your way up from Tophane tram station to reach the Museum of Innocence.1 If you take the published novel bearing the same name as the museum and show the entrance ticket printed inside the book, you gain free entrance. Within the small window of the old but refurbished red building where the novel takes place, the officer stamps your ticket with a beautiful butterfly stamp—a shape which corresponds to the earrings worn by the female protagonist named Füsun and also the logo of the museum (see Figure 1 and 2). The novel is based on the found objects collected by its author, Orhan Pamuk, and interestingly, on an assembly of objects that were collected simultaneously during the author’s writing process. The museum itself represents the synchrony between the interwoven relation of real objects and the fictional stories told throughout the novel. Most of the objects in the museum are objects that Kemal, the male protagonist, collects and accumulates 1 http://en.masumiyetmuzesi.org/ (accessed July 4, 2016). © 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi: 10.1162/DESI_r_00419 DesignIssues: Volume 32, Number 4 Autumn 2016 91 Figure 3 View from above of museum’s interior, taken during construction and showing the “Spiral of Time” on the floor of the museum’s entrance. (All rights belong to the Museum of Innocence.) Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/32/4/91/1715705/desi_r_00419.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

from Füsun’s house as physical substitutes for her absence. Later, Kemal, as a fictional character, tells his desperate love story to Pamuk in the very same house in which Füsun’s family lives. This house is transformed into a museum that is designed to display the whole collection of items. In this transformation, the house and its contents become material, cultural, and historical evidence reflecting the process of modernization of Istanbul. Museum of Innocence is made up of 83 chapters,2 equal to the number of cabinets that line the walls of the museum. A few unfinished cabinets are deliberately displayed with their red vel- vet curtains not yet opened. Each cabinet is included to represent one chapter, presenting a theater-like display in which the objects are metaphors for the characters. In viewing the representations, we are inclined to reflect on Roland Barthes’s comments about the “law of the theatre”: If you want to represent oldness, he says, “it is not enough to use a real old jacket, you have to invent the signs of being old.”3 Pamuk has created these signs precisely within the cabinets of the Museum of Innocence. He has re/ 2 Orhan Pamuk, Masumiyet Müzesi [The invented and re/constructed his story, using the language of Museum of Innocence] (Istanbul: Iletisim, objects. He has semanticized the objects with his own storyline, 2008). which in turn was triggered by the materiality of the objects them- 3 Roland Barthes, “Semantics of the selves—a spiral of meaning that closes in on itself to say some- Object,” in The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (California: Univer- thing outside itself and that results in a fictionalized account. sity of California Press, 1994), 179–90.

92 DesignIssues: Volume 32, Number 4 Autumn 2016 Pamuk reflects on these spirals of meaning in a subsequent book about—or what could also be described as a catalog for— the museum, titled The Innocence of Objects: .... the line that connected Aristotelian moments – in other words, Time – was not a straight line and that it could only be a spiral. Those who look down from the penthouse where Kemal told me his story to the spiral of Time at the museum’s entrance three floors below will see that just as the line that links moments together forms Time, so the line that ties objects together creates a story. This, accord- ing to Kemal, is the greatest happiness a museum can bring: to see Time turning into Space.4 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/32/4/91/1715705/desi_r_00419.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 This same spiral, which is embedded in the intricate surface of the butterfly’s wings, forms the shape of the earrings, and is repro- duced as art of the book’s stamp, as well as painted onto the floor of the museum (see Figure 3). In the museum we find three different dimensions or layers of meaning that are conveyed in this context. Each of these three levels of meanings is intertwined within the museum experience and cannot be separated. First and throughout the whole experi- ence, we encounter the display of “objects with meanings.” By the use of recognizable, everyday objects, the viewers are able to access the meaning of what is being displayed—like the meaning in a pair of scissors, a china dog, a saltshaker, or a washbasin— because objects themselves are conveyors of meaning that can be deciphered by the viewer. This is the level where the language of objects speak to the audience. This first order meaning is triggered by the materiality of the objects. The object is the signifier of the first order signification of what Barthes describes as “myth.”5 The object by its denotative meaning is “taken prey” by the second order signification of myth to function as the signifier through its material presence. This sec- ond order meaning attached to the object might reflect personal experiences or be embedded within ideological, political, social, historical, cultural, religious, or symbolic references. The semiotic autonomy of the objects enable those who might not have read the novel to find enjoyment, meaning, or connection in the museum. At the second dimension, the novel comes into play, where “objects become part of a story”: the story within the novel. This is the level at which the mythical object becomes the signifier of the object within the novel. For example, the washbasin—with all its material qualities of design regarding its form, material, color, texture, and the way it is fixed on the wall—is the product of a certain history, and that washbasin is deliberately included 4 Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects in the museum. Because of these properties, it is deprived of all (New York: Abrams, 2012). the personal or any other connotations already attached to it; it 5 Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythol- ogies (London: Vintage, 1993), 109–59.

DesignIssues: Volume 32, Number 4 Autumn 2016 93 Figure 4 Detail showing a sewing box and old photo- graphs from Box 3. (All rights belong to the Museum of Innocence.) Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/32/4/91/1715705/desi_r_00419.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

becomes the washbasin within the story. Like actors wiping the make-up from their faces when they have finished with one role, the objects are stripped of all other meanings. And as the make-up is reapplied in a different manner for another play, the meaning of the objects is reconstructed within the new “play,” which is the novel. The novel and its assigned meanings within the museum form the third order of signification—the level at which only the reader of the novel can understand and appreciate. This washbasin is the one at Füsun’s house; these scissors are the ones that Füsun’s mother used (see Figure 4); Kemal rode this bicycle in his child- hood (see Figure 5). Readers might have imagined it differently while reading the novel, but now they are faced with the real thing. This object is the one that is deliberately depicted. The viewer, when entering the small building for the museum experience, is offered an audio guide. The guide says that each cabinet and its objects are explained according to their significance in the novel, along with background information. Each chapter starts with the voice of Pamuk speaking in Turk- ish, reading excerpts from the same chapter, and then the voice slowly transforms into an English-speaking narrator. This auditory

94 DesignIssues: Volume 32, Number 4 Autumn 2016 Figure 5 The attic of the museum, where Kemal tells his story to Pamuk. (All rights belong to the Museum of Innocence.) Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/32/4/91/1715705/desi_r_00419.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

experience helps viewers make sense of what they are looking at, while also creating another level of meaning. (Think of a silent disco, in which everyone is listening to different DJs but dancing together.) In Pamuk’s museum, each chapter is narrated into the viewer’s ear, while the viewer considers the mute theater of novel- objects on display. Although most of the cabinets look like still-life paintings, some of the cabinets are designed using light, sound, movement, and sometimes screens showing specially produced videos to create the necessary impression or effect on the viewer. Museum visitors who have read the novel know as they climb the stairs, from which all three floors are in view, that they are in Füsun’s house. Kemal is desperately in love with Füsun, and here he spends his many evenings together with Füsun and her family. This museum-turned-house is the backdrop for the many hours that Kemal, Füsun, and her family spent watching television, smoking, drinking, and having dinners together—a quasi-anthro- pological accompaniment to a life of which he cannot be a legiti- mate part. The building is the first and foremost element of the story, the biggest object that houses all the other objects to which it refers and that it contains.

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Figure 6 The Museum of Innocence opened in 2012, four years after the The layers of meaning and the levels of publication of the novel, and won the European Museum of the Year signification. Award in 2014. It was also one of the venues during the 14th Istan- bul Biennial of 2015. In terms of museology, the museum offers a unique experience formed by its compactness, design, refinement, detail, and its technique of display, as well as by the viewers’ sense of the “aura” that radiates from the objects. Located in the heart of Istanbul, the museum can be considered as a reflection or repre- sentation both of the novel and of the city of Istanbul itself— although not a contemporary reflection. It is a reflection of a recent past, stopping and framing what once was, turning time into space and objects (see Figure 6). To add another layer to the reading of the novel and the museum, the British filmmaker Grant Gee has made a documen- tary film about the novel and the museum titled Innocence of Mem- ories.6 The film premiered at the 2015 Venice International Film Festival. For the film, Pamuk says that he has written “a 30-minute long original script.... The new text tells the love story in the 6 Trailer, “The Innocence of Memories Doc- Museum of Innocence book from the eye of a secondary character.”7 umentary,” by Grant Gee, https://vimeo. The film adds yet another layer of meaning to the existing ones com/132308824 (accessed July 4, 2016). 7 “Documentary on Orhan Pamuk’s created by the “novel” and the “museum”; this powerful “film” is Museum of Innocence to See First prone to elevate our understanding and perception of the mythical Screening at Venice Film Festival,” Inde- character created by the interplay of the novel, the museum, pendent.mk: The Macedonian English Pamuk’s memories and stories, and Istanbul, as well as by the Language News Agency, July 28, 2015, shifting role the reader/viewer/guest/museum-goer plays in the http://www.independent.mk/arti- cles/20281/Documentary+on+Orhan+Pam creation of the layers of meaning. Even without the film, the novel uk’s+Museum+of+Innocence+to+See+Firs and the Museum of Innocence still work together as intended and t+Screening+at+Venice+Film+Festival both also stand alone perfectly: each offers unique experiences to (accessed September 10, 2015). their readers and visitors.

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