A writer, a museum, and 4,213 cigarette stubs: As Netflix adapts ‘Museum of Innocence,’ interest surges in Orhan Pamuk’s real-life monument

Incidentally, Pamuk conceived the book and the actual brick-and-mortar Museum of Innocence simultaneously and spent two decades working on both. The novel was released in 2008, while the museum, a Wunderkammer, or “cabinet of curiosities,” of 20th-century Istanbul life, displaying the objects touched by Füsun and collected by Kemal, was opened to the public in 2012.

When Füsun marries another man, Kemal spends eight years visiting her family’s home, which is the same building that now houses the museum, taking away objects after each visit. His collection includes an assortment of everyday items such as a saltshaker, a thimble, a dog-shaped napkin holder, and eventually 4,213 cigarette stubs, each one touched by her rouged lips. It certainly is one of the world’s most unusual museums. It is, depending on your perspective, either a novel as a museum or a museum archiving real 20th-century Istanbul life.

 

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Museum as novel

Barring the cigarette stubs, which have been mounted on the rear wall of the entrance hall of the museum, the displays move as per the narrative of the book, chapter by chapter and box by box. Google Arts and Culture, calls Box 68, “4,213 Cigarette Stubs,” the museum’s largest installation, displayed there rather than in its chronological place among the 83 display cases that correspond to the novel’s 83 chapters.

The museum, a monument to lost love, is also a meditation on the nature of memory. “In poetically well-built museums, formed from the heart’s compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects we love, but losing all sense of Time,” reads the text accompanying Box 25, “The Agony of Waiting.”
Inscribed on the museum’s floor is a “time spiral,” which symbolizes Aristotelian ideas about time as a line connecting indivisible moments.

The objects are suffused with longing. Box 27, titled “Don’t Lean Back That Way, You Might Fall,” recreates a picnic overlooking the Bosphorus. Pamuk exhibits a thermos, stuffed grape leaves, boiled eggs, and Meltem-brand water bottles, which are the detritus of a 1970s Istanbul Sunday excursion. “Neither the reader nor the visitor should on any account think that I could forget my pain even for an instant,” the accompanying text warns, bringing the visitors back to Kemal’s star-crossed love story.

The story of a city

The red building housing the Museum of Innocence. (Wikimedia)

The novel, spanning from 1950 to 2000, also traces the transformation of a city. Walking through the museum, one can almost watch Istanbul modernise in real time. The ashtrays, photographs, ticket stubs, and kitchen implements, most of which were incidentally sourced from the flea market, become artifacts of a particular moment in Turkish history. For instance, if Box 40, “The Consolations of Life in a Yalı,” evokes the wooden mansions that defined Ottoman-era Bosphorus civilization, then Box 15, “A Few Unpalatable Anthropological Truths,” addresses the treatment of women in 1970s Turkey.

“In those days, even in Istanbul’s most affluent Westernized circles, a young girl who ‘gave herself’ to a man before marriage could still expect to be judged harshly,” the text reads. Newspapers ran photographs of “violated” girls with black bands over their eyes—”so numerous that reading a Turkish newspaper in those days was like wandering through a masquerade.” The objects in this case become evidence not of one story but of a society.

Box 47, “My Father’s Death,” contains everyday objects transformed by loss. “Every man’s death begins with the death of his father,” reads the text. “My father’s death had turned all the familiar props of my childhood into objects of immeasurable value, each one the vessel of a lost past.”

Art and architecture

Orhan Pamuk at the ‘The Museum of Innocence’ in Turkey. (Source: masumiyetmuzesi.org/)

Incidentally, Pamuk abandoned a career in architecture to become a writer. The top floor of the building, where Kemal lived from 2000 to 2007 while the museum was being constructed, now contains Pamuk’s original manuscript pages and his preliminary sketches for the display cases. Here, the novel and the museum literally share space. The author’s handwriting, his marginal notes, and his drawings become objects in the collection, artifacts of the creative process that generated both book and building.

One of the museum’s deepest ambitions is to create new meanings through juxtaposition. “The Museum of Innocence is based on the assumption that objects used for different purposes and evocative of the most disparate memories can, when placed side by side, bring forth unprecedented thoughts and emotions,” one explanatory text reads.

Thus, a saltshaker from one context, a photograph from another, and a thimble from a third, placed together in a case, generate associations no single object could produce alone. As Box 51, titled “Happiness Means Being Close to the One You Love, That’s All,” puts it directly: “The mementos preserve the colors, textures, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanied us through those moments.”

Pamuk has said he was inspired by the modest museums of his childhood. He has also acknowledged the influence of modernist literary experiments with form and the conceptual art movements of the late 20th century.

The museum demonstrates that love, memory, and objects are connected and that a collection of cigarette stubs, properly arranged, can be a memento of love.

The Netflix series, which has received mixed reviews, has renewed interest in both the novel and the museum.  According to an AFP report, released on February 13, as many as 500 people have been visiting the museum since Netflix began running trailers for the series, which was launched on February 13, compared to 200 on a normal day. The curator estimated that the numbers would double once the series was launched.