The Museum of Innocence, Productive nostalgia and experiencing history in the museum of the future

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PRODUCTIVE NOSTALGIA AND

EXPERIENCING HISTORY IN

THE MUSEUM OF THE FUTURE

Eva Goth

Student number: 10245545

E-mail: eva.goth@student.uva.nl First supervisor: Mr. dr. I.A.M. Saloul Second supervisor: Mrs. dr. M.H.E. Hoijtink

Masters Thesis MA Museum Studies Universiteit van Amsterdam

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C

ONTENTS

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–AMODEST MANIFESTO FOR MUSEUMS... 61

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A

BSTRACT

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.

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INTRODUCTION

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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

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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 will continue to exist, small and personal museums are more appropriate ‘to display the depth of humanity’. That is why Pamuk doesn’t want the large national museums to be a blueprint for the future and instead he proposes people to start their own, small museums in their homes.4

Less than two years after first opening its doors, the museum received the European

Museum of the Year Award and was praised for its high quality. According to the European Museum Form’s website “the Museum of Innocence can be seen simply as a historical museum of Istanbul life in the second half of 20th century. It is also, however, a museum created by writer Orhan Pamuk as an integral, object-based version of the fictional love story of his novel of the same name. The Museum of Innocence is meant as a small and personal, local and sustainable model for new museum development. The Museum of Innocence inspires and establishes innovative, new

2 Pamuk, 2012 (2). 3 Pamuk, 2012 (1), pp. 51-53. 4 _{Pamuk, 2012 (1), pp. 54-57}

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paradigms for the museum sector”.5 It is clear from both the statements of Orhan Pamuk and that of the European Museum Form that the museum and the book have an inseverable link. Although the book can be read without visiting the museum and the museum can be visited without having read the book, the combination of the two is what makes this project unique. The Museum of Innocence is a different museum from conventional museums; based on a fictional love story it is not historical like a national history museum might be, nor does it represent national pride like a national art museum might do. It was, after all, Pamuk’s intention to make a museum that was totally different from the historical monuments that he knew in his youth.6 He was inspired by small and personal museums, by writers and perhaps even by artist installations.

Together with the opening of the museum a catalogue written by Orhan Pamuk was

published. In this catalogue he writes about the coming into existence of the book, the museum and the collection and finishes with a small museum manifest. The foundations of the manifest are already laid out in the novel. In his manifest Pamuk focusses mainly the importance of developing museums that focus on the individual as opposed to the nation or groups. Museums, he says, should be small and cheap, tell stories instead of histories and be about people instead of nations. “Large national museums […], now national symbols, present the story of the nation -history, in a word- as being far more important than the stories of individuals”.7 Pamuk says that we don’t need these stories, what we need is the individual stories. In The Museum of Innocence he has done exactly that: tell a personal and individual story.

All of this makes that this museum is quite an unconventional project that seems to want to shake traditional museums to its foundations. This, of course, leads to the question of which characteristics of conventional museums are exactly what Pamuk opposes so much. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill has illustrated this quite clearly and convincingly in her critical article ‘Knowledge in an open prison’. She calls museums warehouses full of knowledge that select and accumulate objects and in doing so constantly make choices, but who never tell how and why certain choices are made. “The artifacts which fill our museums embody discourse itself; they are material manifestations of techniques and effects, representations of the play of power. […] objects are confined, incarcerated, placed in a permanent, fixed relation to one another. Thus pinned and classified, their individual histories and identities are lost”.8 Museums not only classify objects in such a way that it fixes their connection with other objects and the visitor, they also impose universal truths on these coincidental connections: “A museum’s collection depends on arbitrary, external events: the availability of funds, 5 _{http://www.europeanmuseumforum.info/emya/emya-2014.html} 6 Pamuk, 2012 (1), p. 54. 7 Pamuk, 2012 (1), p. 55. 8 _{Hooper-Greenhill, p. 21.}

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journeys undertaken, dispositions of inheritances, the vagaries of power relations. But the museum

imposes a rationality on this incoherent material, and then represents it as truth”.9

Even though Pamuk’s writing has received much international attention, very little is written about The Museum of Innocence. The museum itself has received much praise but again very little actual research towards the role of the museum in Turkish society is done. This is striking, because the idea of a universal truth in museums is under scrutiny. Academic’s like Stuart Hall argue that the production of cultural identity needs to be based on more diverse identities instead of the one-size-fits-all majority approach that is the standard now. Museums, being places where identity is produced, should thus adapt to these new missions. The Museum of Innocence claims to be a museum that favors the personal over the collective, but does it truly, and if so, how? With this thesis I hope to contribute to the research that is done on Pamuk’s work and also to research that is being done to the future of museums. I will look for an answer to the question what the success of The Museum of Innocence in Istanbul can teach us about the goals of museums and how it can help us formulate new and perhaps better goals for the future museum.

In order to find an answer to these questions I will discuss three themes that each relate to The Museum of Innocence in a different way. The first theme is the separation between fiction and reality. In order to understand the importance of a fictional story for people that have no apparent connection to it we need to understand how reality and fiction are connected and how the boundary between the two can disappear. After that I will go into the second theme: nostalgia and history. Because at this point we know that fiction can play an important role in reality we can now understand that fiction can be used to trigger nostalgia and thus that nostalgia doesn’t need to be based in history. Nostalgia can function as a very strong motivator but it is also very personal. To understand this I will discuss the final theme: globalization and individualization in museum. The first two themes will have shown that the conventional museum does not suffice in a society that is changing rapidly. By discussing another way of learning about history we see that The Museum of Innocence can offer a different experience from most museums: a more personal interpretation of history.

In the first chapter I will go further into the story of the book and the coming into existence of both the book and the museum. It will become clear that a museum about such a story is very different from the national museums we are used to. I will go into the question of how the

boundaries between fiction and reality are negotiated in the book The Museum of Innocence and in the museum. By applying theories of Ger Groot and Patricia De Martelaere to this case study I will show that fiction and reality manipulate each other in the book and in the museum, that the

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boundaries between the two are constantly being negotiated and what the consequences of this are for the reader and for interpreting the book. By discussing the history of Turkey and Istanbul and by drawing parallels between the political landscape in Turkey and the story of the book I will show that although history doesn’t seem to play a big role in the book it is in fact very present. And that, by not discussing history explicitly, Pamuk makes it very easy for the reader to escape reality.

The second theme will be discussed in the second chapter of this thesis. At first hand, history and nostalgia seem to be very separate concept but they are more connected than one might expect. I will analyze Svetlana Boym’s theory on nostalgia and I will show that her interpretation of nostalgia as a ‘social disease’, although being one that is endorsed by many, is not appropriate for the kind of nostalgia we find in the Museum of Innocence. Instead, ‘productive nostalgia’ as described and applied by Nanna Verhoeff and Alison Blunt is much more correct. I will show that nostalgia is used in Turkey on many occasions and that the government is a major producer of nostalgia. Because the museum’s collection consist mainly of economically unimportant, everyday objects, brought together by Kemal more as souvenirs than as a historical- or art collection, I will discuss Susan Stewart’s theory on souvenirs and collection to argue that the transformation of Kemal’s souvenirs into a collection is important for our interpretation of The Museum of Innocence as a place of nostalgia. Also, the difference between souvenirs and collections will be a first hint at the difference between the individual and the collective interpretation of history. Nostalgia, being the most important concept of this chapter, should not be seen as a negative emotion but as a possibility for people to deal with the present by escaping the present and searching in the past for answers to current problems. This nostalgia thus is not directed at the past but at the present.

In the third chapter of the thesis I will consider the consequences of individualization and globalization on museums and their role as producers of identity and memory. I will go into Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities and consequently Ulrich Beck’s response to that theory in the context of a globalizing world. I will discuss Pierre Nora’s theory on ‘Lieux de Memoire’ but I will show that in Turkey sites do not function as memory places the same way they do in Nora’s France. I will also discuss Maurice Halbwach’s theory on individual and collective identity and

memory and the role of museums in the production of identity and memory. With a discussion of the history of museum goals I will argue that collectiveness and even universality have taken the

overhand in museums, but that a realization about the importance of smaller groups is starting to arise. After that I will go further into Turkish society and the ever growing importance of the individual in Turkey. As argued by Unal Yetim and others, social relatedness is still very important in Turkey. With a small overview of museum reactions to individualization I will argue that Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence takes the individualization to a new level. After that, I will discuss Susan Crane’s arguments for a return of the individual in memory and identity. Crane argues that by

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actively experiencing history people can once again remember in a natural way. I will argue that The Museum of Innocence can function as a museum in which people can do this.

In the final chapter I will bring all three of the themes together in order to make a final argument. I will argue that the title of the book suggest that, perhaps in contrast to other museums, this museum can exhibit objects that maintain their innocence. Objects lose their innocence when they are used to produce memory and identity. By allowing people to interpret and experience history as personal and individual as possible Pamuk seems to have succeeded in bringing back the personal aspect of memory and identity. The objects are only displayed and an interpretation is not given. It is up to every visitor to interpret and experience the story how they wish too and by doing so the objects maintain innocent. Pamuk has allowed people to truly experience history in the museum. He achieved this by allowing a fictional story to become part of reality and by producing nostalgia for this fictive past that allows people to search through the past in hopes of finding answers to questions of the present and the future. Pamuk has said that he doesn’t want the monumental national museums to become blueprints for the future museum.10 The success of The Museum of Innocence suggests that he might not be the only one. In the final chapter I will discuss why The Museum of Innocence is a suitable blueprint.

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ONE

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In the in 2010 published version of his inaugural speech Vergeten te bestaan, Echte fictie en het

fictieve ik, Ger Groot, writer and philosopher, talks about the influence of fiction on reality and that

of reality on fiction. When reading a book, fiction can, according to Groot, become real through the reader. For this he makes a clear distinction between truth and reality; a story or novel may be untrue yet be part of reality. He discusses the example of what is possibly the first novel ever: Don

Quichot. In this book the author, Cervantes, seems to want to tell his readers to not believe too much

in ‘the truth of novels’ yet at the same time apparently the reader should believe that what this specific novel claims to be true is in fact the truth. Cervantes is constantly playing a game in which reality enters the realm of fiction and vice versa. For example, when he tries to trump a fraud who published a sequel to his book, Cervantes has his protagonist discuss this fraud and reality (the real-life fraud) enters and changes fiction (the book). The fact that this fraudulent book was published urged Cervantes to finish his second book quickly and to change the story to be able to discuss this real-life event.11 Also in less obvious cases, argues Groot, fiction is as real as or even more real than reality.

It is popular believe that in order to make a book believable and identifiable the writer is constantly pretending to write something real and the reader is always pretending to believe that what he reads is the truth. This is called ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’. Patricia de Martelaere, philosopher and professor, argues in her article about fiction in literature that it is highly unlikable that this is how reading works. De Martelaere’s main problem with the theory of ‘a willing

suspension of disbelief’ is that it contains the believe that we choose to not fully identify with the characters in a book in order to not be too involved. She believes that while someone is reading the identification is stronger than ever, and that instead in real life we continuously don’t identify with the events around us because of the risks involved. We can easily watch a horrible news report, De Martelaere argues, without identifying too much because we learn not to identify with reality that would easily become too much to handle, instead we identify with fictive characters and cry when a fictive character dies.12 If we identify best with fictive characters, than what happens to the

separation between fiction and reality when we read a novel?

According to Groot the thing that is sometimes forgotten while reading is not so much the difference between reality and fiction but the readers own ‘me’. This own ‘me’ is exactly where

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Groot, pp. 7-11.

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fictions and reality come together and thus where their boundary is determined. He argues that fiction and reality come together in one thing: the reader (who he calls the subject). The only thing separating reality and fiction is therefore also the reader. The reader, the subject, can often forget his own ‘me’ when doing non-reflexive activities, like reading. This is because this ‘me’ only exists in relation to the world before it. When the subjects doesn’t reflect upon the world before it, as he wouldn’t when he is absorbed by an activity such as reading, the ‘me’ is forgotten and thus the one thing that can separate reality and fiction doesn’t exist.13 This phenomenon can, to some degree, be compared with the concept of ‘flow’ of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which describes a state of ecstasy. The word ecstasy originates after all from the Greek word ἔκστασις which means ‘to be or stand outside oneself’. In this state the person feels as if he is outside of everyday reality, forgets himself and becomes part of something larger.14

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The Museum of Innocence is a novel that satisfies all the requirements for the loosing of the self. As a

book it allows the reader to enter into a fictive world and, while becoming part of that world, to forget about the world around him. But any good book would allow this according to Groot’s and De Martelaere’s theories. In The Museum of Innocence however fiction and reality also intertwine in a different way, a way that is not present in most novels. Sometimes the book literally enters reality, like by the opening of the museum, but reality also has entered the book, albeit in a less obvious way. The history of Turkey and Istanbul run simultaneous with the story of the book, through metaphors and other relations we can find the story of Istanbul in the story of Kemal. But first, we need to know how the reality of Istanbul, Turkey, perhaps even the entire outside world, has entered into the story and how the story, aside from through the reader, has entered the world. These are quite literal ways and they are all similar to the examples Groot discusses in his inaugural speech. I will discuss a few of them.

The first way in which this happens, also happens in Don Quichot: the main protagonist (also the teller of the story in both cases) addresses his readers directly, sometimes even in de middle of an important event. He shatter the possibility of ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’, because if the writer pretends that what he is writing is real, why would he interrupt this believe? The writer literally pulls reality into the fictional story and the reader out of reality. Pamuk does this, for example, in a scene where Kemal and Füsun kiss. He suddenly interrupts his train of thought and

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Groot, pp. 16-22.

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For video of Csikszentmihalyi explaining the concept of Flow, see: http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_ csikszentmihalyi_on_flow

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addresses the reader when he says that he wants to make clear to the reader how important this kissing is for him.15 Later on in the story Kemal needs to admit to himself and to the reader that he was constantly thinking about Füsun. He remarks what ‘we’, the reader, would probably have realized a long time ago that Kemal was not successful in not thinking about Füsun and he promises to, from now on, be honest to the reader (and perhaps himself).16 And again, when discussing the fact that for eight years Kemal would go to Füsun’s house to have dinner, he addresses the reader by stating that he understands that most of ‘us’ will be surprised that he continued on visiting the house for such a long time.17

The book is a frame story: part of the story is used in order to tell another story: the love story of Kemal and Füsun explains and illustrated the story of the coming into existence of the museum. For this reason Orhan Pamuk, the official author of the book, even makes an appearance in the book during Kemal and Sibel’s engagement party. As does Cervantes in Don Quichot. Again ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’ is put under pressure because why would the author of a book, that is told in a first person narrative, take such prominent place in the story if he wants us to believe that it is not a story? Again, reality and fiction get intertwined. Kemal describes seeing Orhan Pamuk sitting at one of the tables, together with the rest of the Pamuk family and a little later Pamuk even

interacts with the main characters when he takes Füsun for a dance.18 At the end of the book Pamuk makes another appearance when Kemal asks him to write the story of him and Füsun. At this point he even changes the narrator to himself and Pamuk himself becomes the first-person.19

This change from narrator is perhaps surprising and even shocking to the reader but the actual shift in perspective is not so major. The similarities between Kemal and Pamuk are obvious; both similar age, part of the Istanbul Bourgeoisie but chosen a different career path than expected. Erdağ Göknar makes another comparison. He writes: “these passages personify the authorial self as being divided between two related personas of collector and novelist”.20 This is something that is, according to Göknar, visible in many of Pamuk’s books. In The Museum of Innocence, however, the comparison is even underlined by the character himself. The night Kemal decides to contact Kemal he says: “I could see it all […] and like a shaman who can see the souls of thing, I could feel their stories flickering inside me. […] I realized then that just as the line joining together Aristotle’s

moments was Time, so, too, the line joining together these objects would be a story. In other words,

15 Pamuk, 2009, p. 46. 16 Pamuk, 2009, p. 114. 17 _{Pamuk, 2009, p. 282.} 18 Pamuk, 2009, p. 116 & p. 124. 19 Pamuk, 2009, p. 516. 20 _{Göknar, p. 238}

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a writer might undertake to write the catalog in the same form as he might write a novel”.21 It is almost as if writer (Pamuk) and collector (Kemal) become one in this very fragment. The admittance ticket that is printed in the book and that can be used to gain entrance to the museum, according to Göknar, can subsequently function as a way of reuniting the novelist and the collector in the real world. “That is, to the objects that are the source and origin of the novel”.22

Just as Göknar said, the museum is the last way in which the fictional story enters reality. All through the book, Kemal refers to the museum that doesn’t exist yet at that time. The museum is used, almost as a tool, in order to frame memories and give them a place in the bigger story. For example when Füsun takes out one of her earrings in the story and Kemal mentions that it is the first object he placed in the museum.23 Sometimes Kemal refers to acquiring certain objects like the picture-postcards of the Hilton Hotel that he, according to the story, bought twenty years after the events took place.24 Again this is a clear example of how the real museum, that exists and can be visited, makes an appearance in a story that is fictional.

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The museum is located in the neighborhood Çukurcuma in Beyoǧlu, just east of İstiklâl Caddesi. The neighborhood wasn’t a rich area in the time Kemal visited the house and it still isn’t, although the area has been improving in recent years. Not many tourists will come here if it isn’t for visiting the museum, in that regard entering the museum truly feels like entering a safe haven in a not so appealing place. The fact that the outside-reality is completely shut out of the museum by the shutters that are kept closed, adds to this feeling of entering another world. Just like in the book, in the museum we find several ways in which reality and fiction are negotiated. Like Göknar has argued, Pamuk can be compared to his main protagonist Kemal in many different ways. However, Pamuk often stresses that neither the book nor the museum is about him. “This is not Orhan Pamuk’s museum. Very little of me is here, and if there is, it’s hidden. It’s like fiction” Pamuk has said.25 But the fact that Pamuk is not completely invisible in the book and in the museum makes the lines between fiction and reality all the more blurry.

The first and perhaps foremost is the museum itself. Pamuk bought the house already in 1999, long before he published the book or opened the museum. Slowly the story and the museum started the form in his mind. The plan for a book and an accompanying museum had already been on

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Pamuk, 2009, p. 512. Also quoted by Göknar.

22 _{Göknar, p. 238} 23 Pamuk, 2009, pp. 28-29. 24 Pamuk, 2009, p. 102. 25 _Kennedy.

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Pamuk’s mind for much longer. When Pamuk started his search for a location for his museum it became clear to him that he would not be able to afford to buy a house in the rich neighborhoods of Istanbul and so he was limited in his possibilities. When he bought the house in Çukurcuma he knew that with that decision a part of the story would also be decided: at least one of the protagonists would have to be fairly poor because he or she would have to have lived here. The reality of Pamuk’s possibilities therefore influenced the story and in its turn the story is influencing the reality of Çukurcuma, where now suddenly tourists roam the streets and the neighborhood as a whole is improving a lot compared to when Pamuk bought the house.26 Of course, it can be debated if a richer area was really outside of the realm of possibilities, since Pamuk is a very successful writer and comes from a wealthy family. The fact that he choose Çukurcuma and the fact that the area

improved with the coming of his museums is in line with the many gentrification projects in Istanbul at the moment. I will come back to this in a later chapter.

The location and the type of building is also very important for the visitor experience.

Stephanie Moser, professor at the university of Southampton, in her guide on how to how to analyze an exhibition, points out that the building itself is the first important factor. The Museum of

Innocence is inside a small house, in a residential area. It doesn’t have the authority a neo-classical building might have, nor is it contemporary or challenging of traditions like a modern and purpose built museum can be. Instead, it is homely, secluded and safe. Inside the building this feeling is also maintained. The rooms are small and therefore allow the visitor to engage with the objects in a more private and personal way. Small galleries are suitable for telling stories, Moser argues, whereas large galleries can feel impersonal.27

In the museum the fictional story is literally transported into reality and much of the museum displays will make the visitor wonder what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’. Box 8, for example (the box that corresponds with chapter 8, see Appendix I, Image I), consists of bottles of Meltem Lemonade and a newspaper clipping of an advertisement for the lemonade. The brand doesn’t exist and it never has existed but the display is convincingly real. The newspaper (and also the television commercial in box 18) has been made by an advisement agency, completely in spirit with the book. For example: in the book the model is a German actress that happened to be in Istanbul at the time, the agency chose to make the advertisement we see in the exact same way.

Contrary to what might be expected, there are also parts of the museum that are not so much in line with what is described in the book. In Chapter 22 Pamuk describes how Kemal visit’s the house of a mourning family. Everyone and everything in the apartment seems to be sad, including a little dog statue that has his head in his paws. All Kemal feels however is regret from the fact that he

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Pamuk, 2012 (1), pp. 21-31.

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isn’t able to connect to the people there. In box 22 (see Appendix I, Image II) we see a little dog statue but this isn’t the sad dog Pamuk described, it’s a dog that looks up to the sky, in a much more hopeful way than the sad dog, but also intimidated by the (in comparison) giant hand that floats above him and the stern looking Atatürk in the background. When Pamuk was making the museum he realized that people only remember a hand full of details from the book and so he felt that he could change small thing if this meant the general feeling of a chapter would be better expressed with the change.28

In box 66 (see Appendix I, Image III) Pamuk even leaves away most of what seems important in the chapter. In this chapter the 1980 coup d'état has recently found place and Kemal is driving home when it is about to be curfew. He is stopped by the military and his car is searched, they find a pear grater (displayed in the box) that he took from Füsun’s house that evening. Although this is the only part in which the politics of Turkey in the ‘70s and ‘80s is discussed, albeit briefly, the

accompanying box in the museum is strikingly empty; the only thing displayed is the pear grater. Pamuk could have easily found newspaper articles or pictures of this coup but yet he chooses to not address it at all in the museum. It is almost as if Pamuk avoids this topic completely.

The boxes that correspond with the chapters are at one hand a very smart ways to maintain the connection with the book. If a visitor would like, he could even look the chapter up in one of the book that can be found in the museum and compare the objects to the story. Another effect is that historic looking wooden cabinets can ‘define objects as curiosities’. Together with the fact that there is little light, a sense of mystery and wonder is created. The layout of the boxes is also very important. Most of the surface is used, making the museum quite the ‘visual spectacle’. This also leads to a sense of looking at treasures, curiosities and spectacle and evokes some form of amazement.29

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The period between 1975 and 1984, in which the story takes place, were turbulent years in Turkey. During this time Istanbul was a place of political unrest as it had been for a while. The most

important happening in modern Turkey’s history is of course that of Kemalist rule under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The secularization, modernization and nationalist ideas of Atatürk has influenced the country enormously and nowadays one cannot talk about Turkish history, identity and culture

without talking about Atatürk and his influence on these things. In both 1960 and 1971 military coups had found place and still Turkish politics were not stable. In 1980 a third coup would finally bring some more quiet and peaceful times to the nation.

28

Pamuk, 2012 (1), pp. 121-123.

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The political landscape in Turkey was very important for daily life in Istanbul. Although Istanbul was no longer the capital of the country, Atatürk had moved the capital to Ankara in 1923, it was still the most important city in the country. The story of Kemal and Füsun can therefore not be seen separate from Turkey’s politics. But more importantly, in many ways it even represents Turkish politics. At first sight, this novel is not a political novel; politics play no obvious role in the story and the characters don’t seem to pay much attention to politics. The same goes for the museum: mention of politics is not made. This is in line with the bourgeois characters and the somewhat critical view Pamuk has of the bourgeoisie. This is also apparent, according to Göknar, from Kemal’s name. Kemal means perfection in Turkish and Basmacı (his sir name) means maker or seller of printed cloth. Together “it signifies the ‘perfect copy’ or ‘perfect cliché’ in Pamuk’s ridicule of the Istanbul Bourgeois”.30

More so, the fact that the main character is named after Atatürk and the fact that the time in which the story plays was politically so important leads to assume that the significance of Kemal’s name cannot be denied. Kemal can be seen as a metaphor for Kemal Atatürk. A striking resemblance, Göknar argues, is Atatürk’s goal of establishing many kinds of museums, even a museum of himself. Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara houses a small museum with personal objects, “including combs and toiletries, cloths, binoculars, letters, photographs, documents, uniforms, shoes, weapons, and even a mysterious photograph that shows a cloud formation, a cumulous cloud taken by a citizen, that had assumed the profile of the leader himself”.31 In this museums Atatürk is mystified, just like Füsun is in The Museum of innocence. The difference being that Kemal’s museum is not about him but about Füsun, who (in this comparison) represents the people of Turkey and the Turkish history. Pamuk seems to argue that the government thus should carry responsibility not only for telling its own great tale, but also the stories of the people in the country. In this sense, Turkey’s history and politics is actually quite present in the book, this also becomes clear from a short summary of the events that happened around the time the story takes place.

The years leading up to the 1980 coup were so filled with turmoil, political violence and chaos that the coup was welcomed by many.32 Now it is said that the different stakeholders in this time were most likely purposely adopting strategies of tension to manipulate public opinion and to create a climate that was suitable for a military coup.33 Be that as it may, it seems impossible for the Istanbul bourgeoisie not to have been affected by these events. One of the many incidents of that time was on the 1st of May 1977. Thirty-six people died, hundreds were wounded and 456 people were arrested on Taksim square, a mere two kilometers from where Kemal lives in the book, after 30 _{Göknar, p. 235.} 31 Göknar, p. 242. 32 Ahmad, p.146. 33 _{Naylor, p. 94.}

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unknown man fired shots at people that were there to protest.34 This must have left a great impression on the Turkish people. The elections of 1977 didn’t lead to much peace and in the first fifteen days of 1978 a total of thirty political murders were committed.35 Aside from that, the Grey Wolves, a neo-fascist organization, was held responsible for many more murders. The group was notorious for their violence in the years leading up to the 1980 coup.36

Turkey was politically unstable but was also economically in big trouble. In 1978 the country was so much behind on payments for their imports the central bank had to admit they had lost track of the total size of the debt.37 The Turkish Lira was devaluating and in 1979 the devaluation was as high as 90%, the oil price was rising, and (up to) five-hour long power outs were no exception even in winter.38 The political problems worsened the economical ones and vice versa; it was partially due to the economic inequality that the Grey Wolves were able to recruit so many youngsters.39

The course of the events in Kemal’s attempts to win Füsun’s heart and the political unrest run almost simultaneous to each other. Kemal’s desperation, when every night he has to say goodbye to Füsun knowing she is married to another man, and the desperation of the Kemalist government, trying to win the hearts of entire nation but knowing that the fear of terrorist groups and the growing economic problems are really what is on the people’s minds, develop together. At the height of the political instability the 1980 coup d'état takes place and Füsun’s mother confronts Kemal (albeit indirectly) with the fact that his collecting is getting out of hand. Of course, this still doesn’t mean the end of the troubles for both Turkey and Kemal but the feeling that the current situation is not sustainable is clear to the reader.

After the coup a new constitution was made up and in a national referendum in 1982 91.37% of the voters voted for the new constitution. While the leaders of Turkey understood this as

overwhelming support for their government, for most of the voters it was in fact the lesser of two evils; the new constitution was seen as the only way to restore civilian rule.40 After peace and order was restored in the country, the economy did pick up (although only after 1981). Turkey started to become a consumer society, but this consumption was done mainly by the rich 10% of the

population.41 Feroz Ahmad describes the mood in the country in these years as “upbeat and

34 _Ikinci. 35 _{Ahmad, p. 144.} 36 Zürcher, p. 323-325. 37 Naylor, p. 94. 38 _{Zürcher, pp. 330-331} 39 Zürcher, p. 323. 40 Ahmad, p. 152. 41 _{Ahmad, p. 160}

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optimistic”. But also notes that much of the positivism was based on false ideas and that Turkey has never been able to achieve the expectation the world and the people of Turkey themselves had.42

After Füsun’s death in 1984 Kemal’s, just like political and economic life in Turkey, also quiets down. The 1980 coupe is the last coupe that Turkey has known to date. Just like the government did of Turkey, Kemal took control of his life and started exploring the world. He travels and visits many museums and finally come to the idea of opening his own museum. Kemal took a lot of his

inspiration from the west (although he also visits non-western countries). Which again is an interesting similarity with Turkey. The country has tried for many years to be part of the European Union and so took a lot of ‘inspiration’ from European lawmaking but at the same time was, of course, heavily influenced by its Islamic citizens and history.

A comparison can be made between the peculiar relationship Kemal and Füsun have and the relationship of Turkey with the west. Although modernization was one of the most important pillars of Atatürk’s philosophy, many aspect of Turkish culture have not changed. In an interview, with Harry Kreisler in 2009 for the University of California’s program Conversations with History, Pamuk even stated that Turkey is made up of the tension between the traditional culture and modernization.43 Although Kemal, Sibel and their friends and families try to almost mimic the behavior of the western bourgeoisie the taboo around intimate relationships before marriage is still very much present (which doesn’t mean that is doesn’t happen). By sleeping with Kemal, Füsun commits herself to Kemal, because no other man will have her now that she has lost her virginity. But Kemal is initially not planning on marrying her. The man she does marry is an obvious second choice, and not a secure and loving marriage. A similar thing has happened to Turkey; Turkey’s politics of modernization and ‘flirtations’ with the west have made Turkey’s relationship with neighboring, anti-western countries, difficult but at the same time the country has not been accepted into Europe either.

The political situation Turkey finds itself in during this time is one of being torn between two times; on one hand the Ottoman past and on the other the promise of a future that is western (or at least global) but is quite unsure for everyone. It is not coincidental that time plays such an important role in the museum. Many clocks and watches can be found all through the museum (at least 14 of the 75 boxes contain clocks), chapter 54 is called Time and one of Füsun’s father most valued

possessions is an ‘east-west watch’ that has roman numerals on one side and Arabic numerals on the other (see Appendix I, image IV). In chapter 54 Kemal ponders over the old clock in the house of Füsun’s parents and how clocks were once such important parts of a household but have been forgotten ever since the television has made its introduction. Time, he says, is according to

42

Ahmad, pp. 159-160.

43

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy62YqDeE0c In this interview Orhan Pamuk also talks about the significance of his own name.

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Aristoteles a line that connects all the moments into the present. And although it is painful for most people to think about the line and to connect the moments because it always leads to death, sometimes the moments can also bring us enough happiness to last us for a life time.44 This is what Kemal has done in the museum, he has tried to connect the moments (represented by the objects) in order to bring him happiness. A museum therefore is a place in which time has been transformed into space. The result, according to Jon Pahl, Professor at The Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, is ‘a life among the living dead’, a constant juxtapositioning of longing and alienation and relationships that don’t truly exist.45

Longing and alienation are important themes in the relationship of Kemal with Füsun but also with his friends and family. A similar thing, you could say, is happening with to Turkey; it longs for both it’s past, of which it is long since alienated, and for a modern ideal, which is alien to its culture. In The Museum of Innocence the visitor first hand experiences this longing and alienation.

The only time the tumultuous part of Istanbul’s history is discussed in the book, is when Kemal tells that he has to leave Füsun’s house earlier than he wanted because of the curfew. He doesn’t elaborate on why there is a curfew, he names the coup but doesn’t say anything about how this affected the daily lives of people in Istanbul and the economic problems don’t seem to exist in the lives of Kemal and Füsun at all. In the museum even less references to the turmoil is found. In fact, no reference to the event is found there at all even though Pamuk claims the museums is supposed to be “a place where objects from daily life in Istanbul in the second half of the 20th century would be displayed”.46 It is difficult to believe these objects never had anything to do with the political and economic situation. Turkey’s history seems to be hidden in the book and the museum, but it can’t be said that is doesn’t play a role in interpreting it.

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Fiction and reality are often more intertwined than one would think at first glance and, because the reader forgets his own ‘me’ while reading, fiction can sometimes even become more real than reality. Because the real world is often difficult to deal with and identification with what happens around us can be dangerous, fiction is a way to not only escape reality but more importantly to deal with it. This is the case in books, as Groot and De Martelaere have argued, but it can also be applied to the actual Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. The Museum of Innocence is, after all, exactly like a book, a story that can be read using the objects. Like Kemal has argued in the book: the writer and the collector 44 Pamuk, 2009, p. 288. 45 http://www.pubtheo.com/page.asp?pid=1548 46 _{Pamuk, 2012 (2).}

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are not all that different at all. This is also in line with Pamuk’s argument that museums should be made out of stories instead of histories. He argues that personal stories are more appropriate to display the depth of humanity. The beautiful thing about stories though, is that they are usually much more than fiction. The border between reality and fiction is negotiated through the reader and the visitor of the museum but also through the characters of the story and the objects in the museum. The at first sight un-political and un-historical story of Kemal and Füsun can transform into quite the political story. Because we can lose ourselves, our own ‘us’, while reading the story, the story can become reality and can be used it to help deal with today. For example, we can search the story for morals and motivation or we can reflect our hurt over real-life events onto the story so that we don’t truly have to deal with these issues.

Throughout the book and especially in the museum, the objects become substitutes for Füsun’s presence. This becomes clear in chapter 28, The consolidation of objects. In this chapter Kemal takes some of the objects that he has collected so far into the bed he and Füsun have made love in. He takes the objects into his mouth and uses the objects to caress himself.47 This obsessive nature of collecting also becomes clear in the museum. For example in Boxes 35 and 65 (see Appendix I, images V and VI. The obsessive nature with which Kemal collected these hair clips and the tittle dog statues can have an alienating effect on the visitor. At the same time, however, their quaintness, the fact that anyone knows that no one could be hurt by taking these objects and the awkward way Kemal ‘collected’ these items also makes his habit acceptable. The visitor might think that, if one can do these thing and yet be excused, perhaps certain issues the visitor faces in his own life are not so bad after all. These objects, the multitude of these objects that are practically the same things and the way they are displayed (a way that evokes wonder and a feeling of looking at treasures) makes that the objects feel relatable, Kemal’s obsession seems acceptable and the visitor can lose himself in the fictional world of the museum.

It is still remarkable that, although history plays such an important part in interpreting the story that there is so little mention of it in the museum and so little visible of it in the museum. But it is in fact quite understandable. If Pamuk would have made these, sometimes horrifying realities, part of the story the reader would not have been able to lose themselves in the book. After all, we escape into a fictional world in order not to have to deal with the real world. Would the things that we try to escape from now become part of the fictional world the escape would not work. But Pamuk does use history and although not explicitly it is part of the book and the museum. This history is in fact a nostalgic history. Nostalgia can, just like fiction, help people with dealing with the present. It allows

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escape in the past only to return to the future better equipped. I will elaborate on nostalgia and history in the next chapter.

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OSTALGIA INSTEAD OF HISTORY IN

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On the European Museum Forum’s website it is stated that “The Museum of Innocence can be seen simply as a historical museum of Istanbul life in the second half of 20th century”.48 _{Visitors who have} read the book will link some of the objects in the museum to the story, but as Pamuk has said so himself, people only remember a handful of details and the objects they don’t remember will only illustrate the general story and feelings. Even those who have read the book quite attentively will find themselves wondering what role a certain object in the museum had in the story, but they most likely won’t feel that the objects don’t fit in with the others. Many visitors will also not have read the book, for them the museum will feel like a visit to the daily life of Istanbul’s middle class in the ‘70s and ‘80s and not like a very personal love story.

Certain aspects of Füsun’s home, the current museum, where Kemal spent many evenings together with Füsun, her parents, and her husband, are described in quite some detail in the book. For example the way the dinner table was placed so that the television could be seen, and the sink near the stairs. The table and the television play a very important part in the book since Kemal sits here, evening after evening, during his attempts to be close to Füsun. He often describes how he places his chair in such a way that he can look at Füsun without being obvious and how the television would give a much welcomed distraction when Kemal would be too swallowed up in his own sorrow to really function normally. Only at the very end of the book, after Füsun has died, Kemal will see Füsun’s room for the first time.

None of these aspects of the ‘homeliness’ that the house once had and the fact that Füsun once lived here are maintained, with one exception: the attic room where Kemal lived when the museum was under construction. As a result, the museum truly feels like that: a museum. It is no longer the house Füsun once lived; it is in no way personal anymore. It could just as well have been the house of someone else entirely. None of the many pictures show Füsun, even though one would expect that she, as the main object of Kemal’s obsession would have a prominent place in at least some of the boxes. The museum therefore is not so much a museum of Füsun, or even of Kemal’s love for Füsun or his time trying to conquer Füsun’s hart, it’s a museum of just any person’s

obsession with another person. The objects in the museum are objects anyone could and would have encountered had they lived in the same city at the same time as the protagonists. They are like

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souvenirs of a bygone era. Both literally: the decennia that have passed, and figuratively: the time with Füsun.

Taking all of this into account, we could see The Museum of Innocence as mainly a historical museum; showing, ethnographically in some ways, the daily life of the Istanbulite in the 1970s and 1980s. However, as we have seen in the first chapter, The Museum of Innocence might seem like a historical account of this time, it is in fact not historically accurate at all (I use the term historically accurate here as an accurate reflection of popular scholar believe about a certain time). Pamuk picks out certain aspects of society while leaving out others and many (almost all) important historical events have no part in the story. More importantly, the atmosphere of the museum and also of the book are not historical, they ooze a feeling of grieve for something that is lost. For Füsun on the one hand, the happiest time of Kemal’s life, but also Istanbul itself, the Istanbul of the past. The city has changed, the many old black and white pictures in the museum show the old buildings, traditional way of depicting woman, movies in which people would not kiss on the mouth, the innocence of forty years ago. Kemal’s longing for something he has lost is projected on the entire city. We have all lost this old Istanbul and visiting the museum makes us long to get this Istanbul back. It makes us nostalgic. Nostalgia is an emotion that is often linked to escapism. If you feel nostalgic you must be trying to escape the present situation, the reality of today. But as we have already seen in De Martelaere’s arguments, it doesn’t need to be a negative thing to escape. Like we can escape in fiction we can also escape in nostalgia. Nostalgia in this case is not just the past, it’s an idealized past; a past in which we specifically look for certain aspects while ignoring others. Nostalgia is often seen as a negative emotion but I can in fact also have very positive aspects, which is the case in The Museum of Innocence.

Because the objects in the museum are trinkets, daily objects with no apparent value, they can also be seen as souvenirs. Susan Stewart, Professor at Princeton University and literary critic, argues that souvenirs help us invent a narrative of events that are not repeatable but are reportable and thus only exist through the invention of a narrative. “The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia”.49 In the Museum of Innocence the souvenir, however, transforms into a collection. At the end of this chapter I will return to this topic.

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“Nostalgia (from nostos-return home, and algia-longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with

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one’s own fantasy”.50 With these words Svetlana Boym, Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University, introduces nostalgia in her book The Future of Nostalgia. She traced the history of nostalgia from the seventeenth century in which nostalgia was seen as a curable disease to present day in which nostalgia is described as an ‘incurable modern condition’, an escapist tendency that makes us live in the past instead of the present. Nostalgia is used as a negative

concept by the writers Boym cites but also by Boym herself. She speaks of victims of nostalgia and outbreaks of it, it can even be dangerous because it can make us confuse our actual homes with imaginary ones.51 Susan Stewart even calls nostalgia a ‘social disease’. Stewart argues that “by the narrative process of nostalgic reconstruction the present is denied and the past takes on an authenticity of being”.52

The home the nostalgic individual longs for, is often not so much a different place but more so a different time. It differs from home-sickness because it is not necessarily the longing for a place because you are in another place, but more often it is a longing for the place you are in, but the historic, perhaps, imaginary version of it. Even when Kemal was visiting Füsun at her parents’ house, there is always a sense of nostalgia that follows him around, nostalgia for a better time, when Füsun was ‘his’. Not realizing that even then Füsun was never Kemal’s since he could and would not commit himself to her. We see this also in the museum. The many clocks and watches that can be found in the museum are a reference to time, time that goes by and that never stops passing. In box 54 (see Appendix I, image VII) time is even the main subject; dozens of clocks, watches and alarms are displayed in one box. In the matching chapter Kemal tells that when he was at Füsun’s house time never did seem to pass because time didn’t seem to exist. He even quotes Füsun’s father who urges his wife to forget about time. But the clocks are reminders that time does, in fact, pass and that we measure time obsessively, perhaps because we wish it wouldn’t pass. Kemal is homesick, not for a place that he has left, after all he has never left Istanbul, but for a time that has passed by. In other words: he is nostalgic. He escapes the reality of this by visiting the objects he collected and by doing so revisiting the time that is gone. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, professor at the Aarhus University, has described this beautifully in his analysis of Pamuk’s work: “It is not a question of identifying with the past or displacing oneself from it, but accepting that it is present in the same space as the presence […] This feeling is melancholic in its engagement with a double absence: both that which has disappeared, and that which will disappear over time”.53

Boym distinguishes two forms of nostalgia; restorative and reflective. The reflective sufferer from nostalgia lingers in his or her longing which is often more individual than restorative nostalgia. 50 _{Boym, p. xiii.} 51 Boym, p. xiv-xvii. 52 Stewart, p. 23. 53 _{Thomsen, p. 162.}

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Restorative nostalgia is more focused on the actual home and the attempt the reach this home. It sees its own nostalgia as truth and wants to restore the lost home.54 “While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one’s homeland with paranoic determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion”.55 Even though the restorative nostalgia seems to be a fairly positive form of nostalgia, the fact that Boym calls it ‘paranoic determination’ proves otherwise.

In The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia by Malcolm Chase, Professor of Social History at the University of Leeds, and Christopher Shaw, from the Harrogate College of Arts and Technology, nostalgia is described as something that is only experienced when someone feels the present to be lacking something. The nostalgic person might feel ‘defective’, and this defect is not believed to be fixed through progress. In such a case, people will start looking at the past to solve their problems instead of at the future.56 It is important to notice the fact that in this theory people are looking for solutions, the problematic part is that they look for it in the past instead if the future. Boym

concludes her book with saying that although nostalgia can be a social disease and a poison, it can also be a creative emotion and a cure, for example for the defects Chase & Shaw talk about. In Istanbul this would mean that the idea that Istanbul was once an important and cosmopolitan city can lead people to behave in such a way and for them to embrace these values. This could lead, for example, to a society that is more tolerant towards strangers. However, Boym advices, nostalgia should best be left alone, nostalgic dreams should be seen as dreams and not as guidelines. We should laugh at them and realize that we are all nostalgic for a time in which there was no nostalgia.57

Chase and Shaw have said that Nostalgia helps to find solutions from the past for problems of today. Boym agrees that nostalgia could function as a cure, although she doesn’t seem very optimistic about it. The idea of nostalgia as a solution is in line with Nanna Verhoeff’s concept of Instant Nostalgia. Verhoeff, associate professor at the department of Media and Culture Studies at the University of Utrecht, argues that Nostalgia shouldn’t be dismissed as just sentimental and escapist. Instead, it can be ‘culturally helpful’. She argues that “we are dealing with a longing, not in order to escape, but to deal with, the present”.58 Alison Blunt, professor of Geography at the Queen Mary University of London, calls this form of nostalgia productive nostalgia. “I use this term to represent a longing for home that was embodied and enacted in practice rather than solely in

54

Boym, p. xviii.

55 _{Boym, p. 354.} 56

Shaw & Chase, p. 15.

57

Boym, pp. 354-355.

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imagination, and a longing that was oriented towards the future as well as towards the past and to a sense of place that was both proximate and distant”.59

Blunt’s research involved the Anglo-Indian settlement McGluskieganj in the east of India. Here she found that nostalgia had quite some influence on the collective identity of the inhabitants and on their ‘dream for independence’. She argues that productive nostalgia at McGluskieganj is aimed at the present and the future as well as the past. The collective memory of imperial ancestry was put to work in relation to the future, strengthening the dream. Part of the collective memory also entails a collective forgetting; the imperial forefather is often stressed and the Indian maternal ancestors forgotten and, perhaps because of this, the ideas of the settlers were not always

progressive. But important is the fact that for the Anglo-Indian settlers the nostalgia they feel for the old McGluskieganj is not a sentiment of loss and displacement but one that confirms their belonging to the current place.60

Similar conclusions are drawn in the article ‘The Past Makes the Present Meaningful: Nostalgia as an Existential Resource’. In six small studies it is shown that Nostalgia can indeed be “a vital resource on which one might draw to maintain and enhance a sense of meaning”.61 In this study researchers prove that nostalgia leads to enhanced social connectedness and social connectedness, in turn, has the capacity to enhance personal meaning in life. Furthermore it shows that when meaning is threatened, people turn to nostalgia and nostalgia in its turn helps people to face these existential crises. It is also argued that nostalgia can have therapeutic value and can help people with dealing with stressful life events.62

The negative connotation nostalgia usually has, doesn’t prove to be legitimate. Productive nostalgia (as opposed to restorative and reflective nostalgia) can have quite positive effects on the sufferer from nostalgia, although suffering would not be the correct term in this case. We see this also in Ihab Saloul’s interpretation of The Ship, a novel by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. In this book “the past constantly inhibits the present” because of the trauma the protagonist suffered.63 But, the nostalgic feeling he has does not allow him to dwell upon his lost and upon the past, instead nostalgia is used as a cure.64 Although you could call this form of nostalgia escapistic, after all the nostalgic person does look for answers somewhere other than the here and now, this form of escapism doesn’t need to be a negative one. It’s an escaping from the present in order to come back again and deal with it better and more equipped. This is similar to De Martelaere’s idea of fiction; a way of escaping the 59 Blunt, p. 718-179. 60 Blunt, p. 735-736 61 _{Routledge et al. p. 650.} 62 Routledge et al. pp. 641-647. 63 Saloul, p. 122. 64 _{Saloul, p. 123.}

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present. This allows the reader to escape from their own present (and even their own ‘me’ Groot ads) and it helps them in dealing with what happens around them. After all, if one were to identify with everything in reality he or she would probably not be able to cope, just like Kemal was not able to cope with the reality of losing Füsun without finding a nostalgic refuge with the objects and the memories.

In The Museum of Innocence Kemal continuously finds comfort in the objects he collects. He will visit the apartment where he stores all of his collected objects and there he will touch them while he remembers the past. It’s an almost melancholic nostalgia that Kemal displays here but it allows him to not only look at the past but also to consider the future. The thought of Füsun with him in the future motivates him to continue. After Füsun dies Kemal does the most nostalgic deed

possible: he makes a museum in order to preserve the past in the present and the future. And although this might seem like living in the past, it actually allows him to deal with his sorrows of today. This is what productive nostalgia can offer to the heartbroken, the homesick and to a nation that is perhaps both. For the audience it could do a similar thing: the museum visit can lead to a state in which the visitor can forget his own me but also, it can offer inspiration from the past for the future. This could differ from person to person, while one person might find comfort in the idea that certain traditions are still the same, like the small tulip like tea glasses. Others might emphasize that while some people are no longer here, like Atatürk, their influence can still be felt and thus their presence still is important

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Boym argues that the twentieth century may have started with confidence in the future, it ended with nostalgia for the past.65 Turkey in general and Istanbul in particular might be perfect examples of this. The start of the century was, also for Turkey, an upbeat and optimistic time. With the falling of the Ottoman empire and the ideas of Kemal Atatürk, Turkey was developing quickly and the country looked at the west as a future ideal; western writing was introduced and the middle class was highly influenced by western fashion and style trends. After these first ‘leaps forward’,

development started to stagnate and political, economic and social unrest dominated the country. Now, less than a century later, people look back at this time with nostalgic feeling and look for a possible future in the past. This nostalgia is strengthened by the government who actively uses (a historically inaccurate) nostalgia in their promotion of the city of Istanbul. Gentrification projects, the promotion of photographer Ara Güler, an Armenian-Turkish photographer from the 1950s and ‘60s whose photos are now celebrated as portraying the old Istanbul, and the reinstatement of the