Aug 27, 2012 The Daily Beast
Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk explains why he built a museum dedicated to the glory and tragedy of one fictional couple’s love.
The museums I visited in my childhood—not just in Istanbul but even in Paris, where I first went in 1959—were joyless places infused with the atmosphere of a government office. In keeping with their state-sanctioned mission, shared by schools, of telling us the “national history” that we were supposed to believe in, these large museums held authoritarian displays of various objects whose purpose we could not quite fathom, belonging to kings, sultans, generals, and religious leaders whose lives and histories were far removed from ours. It was impossible to forge a personal connection with any of the objects displayed in these monumental institutions. Nevertheless, we still knew exactly what we were supposed to feel: respect for that thing known as “national history”; fear of the power of the state; and a humility that overshadowed our own individualities.
The idea of the “Museum of Innocence” was already fully formed in my mind by the late 1990s: to create a novel and a museum that would tell the story of two Istanbul families—one wealthy, the other lower middle class—and of their children’s obsessive romance. The novel was going to revolve around a wealthy man who falls in love with his poorer cousin in 1970s Istanbul, where sexual intimacy outside of marriage was taboo even among the richest, most Westernized bourgeoisie. This young woman, the beautiful daughter of a retired history teacher and a seamstress, reciprocates her wealthy relation’s love partly because she is looking for a way to leave behind her job as a shop girl and become a film star, but also because she is genuinely in love with him. The novel’s wealthy protagonist, in love with his cousin, soothes his despair by collecting everything that his beloved has touched, and as their sad story nears its end, he decides that all these things must be displayed in a museum. I think that if museums, like novels, were to focus more on private and personal stories, they would be better able to bring out our collective humanity.
Pamuk, who wants to focus on personal histories, outside his Museum of Innocence, in Istanbul. (Sedat Mehder / The Innocence of Objects by Orhan Pamuk-Abrams)
Full story at The Daily Beast
The idea of the “Museum of Innocence” was already fully formed in my mind by the late 1990s: to create a novel and a museum that would tell the story of two Istanbul families—one wealthy, the other lower middle class—and of their children’s obsessive romance. The novel was going to revolve around a wealthy man who falls in love with his poorer cousin in 1970s Istanbul, where sexual intimacy outside of marriage was taboo even among the richest, most Westernized bourgeoisie. This young woman, the beautiful daughter of a retired history teacher and a seamstress, reciprocates her wealthy relation’s love partly because she is looking for a way to leave behind her job as a shop girl and become a film star, but also because she is genuinely in love with him. The novel’s wealthy protagonist, in love with his cousin, soothes his despair by collecting everything that his beloved has touched, and as their sad story nears its end, he decides that all these things must be displayed in a museum. I think that if museums, like novels, were to focus more on private and personal stories, they would be better able to bring out our collective humanity.
Full story at The Daily Beast