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