The Mystery of the Object and Anthropological Materialism: Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence and André Breton's Nadja

This paper is a comparative study of Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence and André Breton's Nadja. Both novels engage with the problem of the subject's relation to the objective world within the context of a love story. However, while the omnipotent subject position of the male protagonist is re-affirmed in Breton's novel; in Pamuk's novel the security of the male protagonist's subject position is dismantled. In Museum of Innocence, the objects embody the cultural history of Turkey between 1970 and 1983 and the novel becomes a successful example of the "anthropological materialism" that Walter Benjamin posits against Surrealist spiritualism.