Orhan Pamuk: A book is a promise
The Turkish laureate Orhan Pamuk tells Sameer Rahim why he has made his fictional museum a reality.
By Sameer Rahim
7:00AM GMT 09 Nov 2012
In Orhan Pamuk’s second novel, Silent House, published in Turkey in 1983 and newly translated into English, the lovelorn Hasan secretly looks through his beloved’s handbag while she is out swimming. Among the suntan lotion, wallet, hair clips and cigarettes, he spies a green comb. Before she returns he swipes the comb, keeping it as a memento of his unrequited passion.
“Before I reread the novel, I had forgotten about this moment,” Pamuk tells me when I meet him at his publisher’s offices. Objects are incredibly important in the fiction of the Nobel Prize-winner: in My Name Is Red, his murder mystery set among Ottoman miniaturist painters, one chapter is narrated by a coin. Pamuk’s object obsession was brought to new heights in his wonderful 2009 novel, The Museum of Innocence, in which the narrator, Kemal, like Hasan in unrequited love, collects dozens of things owned by his beautiful cousin Füsun, and arranges them in a museum.
Pamuk, who was born in 1952 to upper-class parents, assures me that his interest in stealing women’s trinkets is imaginative, not autobiographical. “Getting an object secretly and returning home is not my fantasy, but the idea of possessing a woman in a culture where a man and a woman cannot come together outside of marriage that easily. You cannot possess her sexually, but you can possess the objects.” He speaks English rapidly, only occasionally groping for a word; when he finds it, he takes off fluently.
In other respects, Hasan in Silent House is a very different character from the upper-class dilettante Kemal from The Museum of Innocence. Hasan has dropped out of school is hanging out with Turkish nationalists. He falls for an upper-class Leftist with a taste for Turgenev. His story ends in violence.
I wonder where this pervasive longing comes from. “In classical Islamic literature, the desire for the beloved is a metaphor for the desire for God,” says Pamuk. “But in my novel, Hasan’s longing, in all its radicalism, reflects a desire for a better life. I like that idea; it’s an artistic idea. But it’s also a very realistic idea. We fall in love more deeply when we’re unhappy.”
Anyone who has visited Istanbul will know the city is haunted by its Ottoman past. Turkey’s new assertiveness – over its former possession Syria, for example – has led some observers to think the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, longs to revive the past. Pamuk, though, is nervous of being drawn on the political aspects of his work: “I never thought it was a political novel when I published it,” he says of Silent House, “and no one said it was a political novel in Turkey.” If one visits the mausoleum of Mehmet the Conqueror in Istanbul, I press, there is a strikingly nationalist atmosphere. “Istanbul is a vast place,” he says carefully. “There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture.”
His wariness is understandable. After his 2005 comments highlighting the Armenian massacres following the break up of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish authorities pursued him under Article 301 of the penal code, which made it a crime to “insult Turkishness”. The case ended in 2009 and the law has since been amended, but he still reportedly has bodyguards when he is in Istanbul. (He spends the rest of his time teaching at Columbia University, New York.) “Everyone is saying the same thing now,” he says of the Armenian issue, the note of pride at having opened up freedom of speech in his homeland tinged with melancholy at what his stance has cost him.
He is delighted the Turkish public took so warmly to The Museum of Innocence. “It was a sweet reception – not something, I confess, I was used to from the Turkish media. The Museum of Innocence is not about politics, it’s a love story, but I think it’s political in the sense that it wants to capture how a man suppresses a woman. The more he is in love, the more he suppresses her – a typical non-Western, Middle Eastern situation.”
Not that one should make easy assumptions about the place of women in Turkish society. “I have seen so many photos of women on the covers of English books about feminism and Islam,” he says. “It’s almost nearly always the same photo: two women wearing headscarves, driving around on a motorcycle, or using a computer, or doing something modern. These are naive, almost uneducated Western responses in understanding what is happening. They seemingly imply that if you wear a headscarf you don’t ever leave the house, whereas actually, you only wear the headscarf in order to leave the house.”
In an unusual twist, The Museum of Innocence is not only a novel: it is also now an actual museum. In April this year Pamuk opened for real what his character Kemal created in his fiction: a collection of Füsun’s objects arranged according to his memories. It is an “uncanny” project, he admits, but one that has happily taken him back to his roots as an architecture student and an artist: his earliest ambition was to be a painter.
Pamuk corrects me when I describe it as though it were, like a film, the museum version of the novel. “It’s not that I wrote the novel first and it was successful, and I thought let’s do an adaptation. I wrote the novel as I collected the objects that would end up in the museum.” To help him describe them in the novel, the author bought his character’s dress, earrings and slippers, now displayed in the museum. “Postcards, photos, objects, not only Füsun’s, but the whole epoch,” he says, twitching with excitement. “It was a desire to grasp that period with objects.”
He carries on: “When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass and all they will remember are five pages. They don’t remember the text – instead they remember the sensations the text gives them. In The Museum of Innocence, we are trying to give illustrations to those emotions. The layout of the museum is based on the chapters of the novel: the novel has 83 chapters so the museum has 83 display cabinets, and each box corresponds to the emotion of that chapter.”
One of the most extraordinary exhibits is the collection of Füsun’s 4,213 cigarette stubs saved by Kemal. Each one is handcrafted to represent Füsun’s emotional state on the day she smoked it: some are twisted from when she angrily crushed it on the ashtray, some only half-smoked from when she had to leave early; all have traces of red lipstick. If this were not detailed enough, Pamuk writes a sentence under each one adding up to a miniature history of their relationship: “You’re very cautious”, “Late-night shame”, “There is no turning back”.
“It didn’t take too long – but it’s fun,” he says, bursting into laughter. “A lot of work – but all good fun!” He took six months off his forthcoming novel – also set in Seventies Istanbul, but this time from the point of view of a street vendor – to complete the project. Since the museum opened it has been well attended – about one third are tourists and about two thirds Turks.
Making a real museum memorialising a fictional person you have created might indicate that Pamuk has become as obsessed as his character. “I’m not an obsessive collector,” he says. “I perhaps have 16,000 books and wouldn’t mind if one was stolen. A collector is a person who has 16,000 books and he is proud to have not read any of them. I’m not like that – I use them and read them.”
Pamuk has the habit of slipping a character called “Orhan Pamuk” into his novels: in Silent House he is “supposedly writing a novel”; in The Museum of Innocence, he is at Kemal’s engagement party, chain-smoking with a “mocking smile”. Why is he so interested in blurring the boundary between fiction and reality? “I appear in my novels not necessarily in a Hitchcock way,” he says. “Not to make people wonder what is fiction and what is reality, nothing like that, but I appear to remind the reader that this is fiction.”
Has he put his own picture in the museum? “I appear,” he teases. “There are little hints to me and my family, private jokes, but you don’t miss much if you don’t get it.”
He has lived with these objects for so long they are not mere fictional props but, like the books on his shelf, resonant with gathered meaning. “All art is about seeing other worlds through the details of this world. Holding a copy of a book is akin to holding optimism in your hand – that you will follow the story, you will learn about the human heart. A book is a promise.”
* Silent House is published by Faber at £18.99 and The Museum of Innocence at £7.99
* The Innocence of Objects, the museum catalogue, is published by Abrams at £21.99
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