ORHAN PAMUK'S RADICAL PROJECT TO VISUALIZE THE MAKING OF NOVELS

1 3 6 Y O R H A N PA M U K ’ S R A D I C A L P R O J E C T T O V I S U A L I Z E T H E M A K I N G O F N O V E L S A N I S S H I V A N I What is a museum? Why do we have museums? What do museums do? Can we get along without museums? Is there an alternative to museums? These questions have obsessed me for a long time. To believe in museums is to believe in a certain kind of modern cultural authority, to subject oneself to certain interpretive restrictions with respect to cultural value. A museum, we presume, is a collective endeavor, where objects of veneration have found their place because of consensus among authorities. But are museums really that innocent? There exists a cultural critique of museums as impartial aggregators of cultural value just as there is a critique of the literary canon. Who decides what belongs in a museum? Who arranges the objects within it, and to what purpose? The museum, like other modern institutional innovations, is a reflection of the urges embodied in the Enlightenment, where progress was inextricably tied up with notions of the state. The museum came into being along with the modern factory and school and prison. Although there T h e I n n o c e n c e o f O b j e c t s , b y O r h a n P a m u k ( A b r a m s , 2 7 2 p p . , $ 3 5 p a p e r ) 1 3 7 R were museums open to the public in antiquity and certainly in the Renaissance, the museum as we know it today emerged in the eighteenth century (the British Museum, 1753; the U≈zi, 1765; the Hermitage, 1764; the Louvre, 1793). As soon as democracy in its modern form began to be idealized, it also began to be sabotaged in the form of new means of obedience and regimentation. So if the museum reflects the optimistic side of the Enlightenment – the ‘‘naive’’ belief in popular education – it also reflects the dark side of the Enlightenment, to the extent that it assigns subordinate ranking to values deemed to have lost in the race to progress . If one visits a museum of Native American history in Virginia or New Mexico, what exactly is being presented? What about a museum in London containing images or objects pertaining to British rule in India? What would such a museum, with exactly the same artifacts, have meant in the eighteenth century as opposed to now? What about a similar museum in Delhi under the auspices of the Indian government? A museum is never innocent. It is consummately political, ideological, corrupted. It is interesting then that Orhan Pamuk’s new book is called The Innocence of Objects. Not the innocence of museums, but the innocence of objects, though the book is, among other things, an expansive, philosophical, meditative catalogue of the objects collected in the museum Pamuk worked so assiduously over the better part of a decade to assemble in connection with his novel The Museum of Innocence (published in Turkey in 2008). Imagine, a novelist creating a museum, from scratch, to exemplify the characters and events in his novel of tragic love in the authoritarian Turkey of the 1970s and 1980s, and to claim exemplary innocence for the project! Objects, we are to believe, can speak for themselves . If any novelist in contemporary times has enacted a more radical project on behalf of the innocence of writing, I don’t know of it. This is how Pamuk explains the origins of his unique venture: In its first version, The Museum of Innocence was to be a novel that resembled an encyclopedia – an ordered series of entries – about love and family with its narrative built around the Keskin family’s and Füsun’s belongings. From the mid-1990s, even while I was writing My Name Is Red, I had 1 3...