Gone Away

“Most of us faced with a traumatic loss of life or love, find consolation in attaching ourselves to objects.”

I’ve been away. Far away.  It takes a lot to budge me from the island in September – what most folks here agree is the “best month” – but this year, I succumbed to the siren call of my Turkish friends tempting me to come stay with them in Istanbul.

Lucky me, this wasn’t my first trip to Istanbul, truly one of the world’s great cities, but it was an opportunity to see much of it again in the company of good friends who know it well and to gain a different perspective, a deeper understanding. It also offered me the chance to visit the newly opened Museum of Innocence, something I was eager to do – not surprising, I guess, for a writer who has long been a fan of its creator, the Turkish writer and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

Housed in a 19th century four-story, wine-red townhouse, the museum is located on a quiet side street in Cukurcuma, a once down-trodden neighborhood of cheap dives, apartments, and abandoned buildings but more recently home to an increasing number of galleries, a boutique hotel, and antique stores that offer much of the same old brass and worn rugs that had packed the former junk shops but now sell at much inflated prices. Part museum, part art installation, and part novel, Pamuk’s museum is a somewhat quirky place.

Everything found here is a specific reference to Pamuk’s novel Museum of Innocence written in the 1990s, at the same time he conceived of the museum. Published in 2008 and set in 1970s Istanbul, it’s a story narrated by the protagonist, Kemal, a young, wealthy businessman soon to marry into another successful upper class family, but who falls in love with Fusun, a distant relative and store clerk of a considerably less privileged background. After breaking a cultural taboo and the code of virginity, Fusun is besmirched and Kemal is scandalized within the society of his peers. As he becomes more and more obsessed with Fusun, he loses his fiancée and his social standing. When Fusun emerges from self-imposed exile, she’s married to a penniless, would-be filmmaker. This sets Kemal on a compulsive path of collecting objects, many belonging to or associated with Fusun, including ones pilfered from her family home over the next decade – a home in the same Cukurcuma neighborhood and not unlike the building Pamuk bought to house the museum.  

Upon entering it, the first thing encountered is a wall of cigarette butts – 4,213 of them – individually labeled and mounted behind plexiglass and all supposedly touched by Fusun. What follows on the next two floors are 83 glass-fronted boxes and cupboards corresponding to a novel chapter, captioned and organized according to the storyline. More than 1,000 artifacts fill these boxes, all obtained by Pamuk in flea markets and from Turkish friends while writing the novel, many of which, he has said, propelled the book’s narrative. Each represents an object touched by Fusun or taken from her family – old clocks, cinema tickets, ceramic dogs, hair barrettes, a pair of yellow shoes, an empty Meltem soda bottle. Others are the things – hats, a tricycle, a quince grater – the novel’s characters would’ve seen, owned, or worn. Also, old photographs and newspaper clippings, including ones of women with black lines drawn across their eyes, the standard way women caught in scandal were portrayed at the time.

Pamuk’s novel is an extraordinary love story with deeply drawn characters, all of whom are represented in the museum. But more broadly, the book and thus the objects within the museum, also chronicle Turkey’s halting, tumultuous movement into the modern era at a time of great cultural change in Istanbul, when, especially, the upper class was poised between modern and traditional attitudes. When, says Pamuk, Turks “in spite of their pro-Western attitudes were highly conservative.” And when, proclaims Kemal, the Istanbul bourgeoisie “trampled over one another to own an electric shaver, a can opener, and any number of strange and frightening inventions, lacerating their hands and faces as they struggled to learn how to use them.”

Such aspects of the museum become evident, whether or not you’ve read the book. By way of collected objects, images and totems, the viewer is offered a broad swath of Istanbul’s recent cultural history, but on a human scale. This is not the museum stuff of sultans, religious leaders, great artists or government officials. It’s the daily-life stuff, claims Pamuk, of two lovers, two intersecting Istanbul families of different classes at an important cultural time. An example, he believes, that “if museum, like novels, were to focus more on individual, personal stories, they would be better able to bring out our collective humanity.”

All indeed true, but personally, I’ve always been drawn to this kind of art, these kinds of “boxed” enclosures. Of small worlds. Of stories told through objects. Shadow boxes. Curio cabinets. Dioramas. My childhood’s sugar Easter eggs with interior scenes viewed through a peephole. The enclosed Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago that I first saw decades ago on a junior high field trip, awakening in me what I didn’t recognize at the time was a sort of nascent nostalgia for a world I never knew but yet somehow missed.  

At the Museum of Innocence, I was often reminded of a personal favorite – Joseph Cornell’s boxes. Even though Pamuk’s boxes and cabinets are often larger, more elaborate, less mysterious and symbolic than Cornell’s, most are artistically presented, the objects masterfully juxtaposed, all revealing Pamuk’s early passions to be a painter and architect. These are no specimen cabinets or sample cases that merely present facts. They invite the viewer in for closer inspection. An invitation to make connections. To tease out the narrative threads of the story each tells or that we imagine and give to the chosen objects.

There is not much talking that goes on in this museum. Viewers, moving slowly, tend to murmur. As if it’s demanded by the stillness that objects possess, especially the revered objects of someone we've loved and lost. Indeed, permeating the dimly lit room is stillness, an ineffable sadness. The sadness of the characters, and what they have left behind. And of what, more generally in this collection, in Pamuk’s words, is the “melancholy of the period.”

As I made way up the floors, past the cases, reading the captions, stooping to peer in, and, having read the novel, making narrative connections (though not in the same league of two women who armed with a Kindle assiduously checked off each chapter), I appreciated the “human scale,” the somewhat ordinariness of what was gathered here, items not so very different from what I, too, have possessed. I was reminded that we’re all collectors in a way, no? Sometimes we’re drawn to objects for their beauty alone. Perhaps, with a bit of nostalgia, we’re drawn to what represents a former time, what, whether historical or personal, is of a time when life may have seemed simpler, of less complications and complexities. Of perceived innocence. And is now lost.

We’re all collectors in what we choose to keep, collect, display in ways pleasing to our eye, even if we do not ask ourselves why. Unlike Kemal and Pamuk, we may not have specific goals, nor think much about conferring meaning. Unlike them, we’re unlikely to consider the innocence of objects, no matter the totemic or symbolic freight they carry. Around us, we simply gather, or use, objects – the beautiful and functional, the unique and commonplace. But also those that once belonged to someone loved and now lost to us. Those that, steeped in memory, saturated with our remembering, are transformed. And, in their stillness, shimmer with meaning. Tell a part of a story. Some part of the past now preserved.

It may be that Pamuk’s novel was in many ways a better guide book than those I’d left behind on the island. And the museum, in its quiet, offbeat way, as important to me as any mosque or bazaar. In Istanbul, in the museum, I was so far from home. I was in a culture vastly different from mine, one that itself was different than 1970s Istanbul depicted in the museum. And yet I was reminded: the impulses are the same. To preserve. To love. To hold close what is important to us. And was to those now absent. Whether out of nostalgia, love, or honor, we all yearn to tell our individual human stories – by way of objects, art, or words, be they in museum displays, on our bookshelves, or in our homes.  

“My father’s death had turned all the familiar props of childhood into objects of immeasurable value, each one the vessel of a lost past.”