by Orhan Pamuk
I had a ‘runner’, too. Runners are employed in the production of Turkish films and television serials, as well as by contemporary visual artists, for their ability to locate and retrieve particular objects. Say you are trying to recreate a post office on set, or you need a 1950s newspaper as a prop, or a thermometer of a particular shape, decorated with the picture of a mosque; the runner will find what you need. Runners will trawl through flea markets, second-hand bookshops, venerable old stores, shops in poorer neighbourhoods, the Grand Bazaar, and anywhere else that sells used items, until they find whatever it is you’re looking for. Since they cannot know exactly what you have in mind, they will bring their finds to you so you can take a look before you decide whether to make the purchase. What makes runners good at their jobs is the rapport they establish with shops. Traders will let them borrow their stock: ‘Take these to Mr Pamuk and let him pick something out.’ Our runners at the museum would bring us things to look at every day; those moments are some of my happiest memories from the time I spent working on the museum. Each day brought an endless array of objects to consider. ‘Tell Mr Pamuk to take a look at this,’ shopkeepers would say. They knew what I was doing, and tailored their propositions accordingly. Some of them had even read the novel. So I would acquire objects for my collection from among their offerings. Those trinkets and pictures and photo albums made me think of people’s homes, and the lives they lead in the city. Until, one day, they die, and their home, its day-to-day items, an entire life – all are gradually exposed to the world, object by object, frame by frame.
I discovered something else while I was building the Museum of Innocence. The local celebrities who used to populate the society columns had taken photographs at the parties they threw and put them in photo albums. These were the same wealthy socialites my mother and father used to tell me about when I was a child, but now those people had died, and their party albums had ended up in flea markets and from there in my hands. I used some of their photographs for the cover of the novel. Their descendants got in touch to say they’d had no idea the photographs had been lost. Some of the images I used in the museum; others I only showed to my mother. ‘Do you remember this woman? She’s dead now, but I’ve got her photo albums. They’d ended up in the flea market.’ I discovered just how fragile the lives of these proud Nişantaşı middle classes, the westernised Istanbul bourgeoisie, had actually been, how ephemeral their triumphs. Working on the museum, I realised once more how readily the memory of the wealthy and upper middle classes of that period had faded away, how quickly these people whose lives we’d deemed so noteworthy had fallen into oblivion. Continuity and preservation are relatively new values among the Turkish middle classes. It is significant that although objects and photographs are the only tangible evidence of the life we have lived, old photo albums are quickly forgotten from one generation to the next. Everything, it seems, is temporary.
As described in the novel, after Füsun’s death Kemal bought her house (the building that now holds the museum) from her mother, including all of the furniture and objects inside it – effectively also buying back all the things he had left there and all the gifts he had given Füsun, ready to be displayed in the museum. The additional objects given to me by Kemal, or which I found or bought from shops and gathered from acquaintances, can be considered, in Marcel Duchamp’s definition, ‘readymades’. But the museum also holds certain items crafted especially for the museum, and which I designed myself. Among these is the Meltem soda bottle. Turkey’s first national fruit-flavoured sodas came out in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, around the time our story is set. I still remember when Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola first arrived in Turkey, and the day I drank my first Coke and my first Pepsi. But I liked the local sodas, too – their fruitiness and the fact that they were Turkish. I invented something similar for the novel, the Meltem soda, and enlisted some artist friends to create newspaper advertisements for it to display in the museum. These advertisements are not readymades, but fresh creations made purposely to look as if they were bought from vintage shops. So the collection is composed of objects that I’ve gathered or taken from Kemal, and objects that we commissioned specifically for the museum because we couldn’t find anything already in existence that matched the events narrated in the novel. There are also items that lie somewhere in-between. They may have served one purpose back in the day, but we’ve used them in a different context – or we’ve modified them a little to align more closely with how they appear in the novel itself …
Photo: Museum of Innocence archives
I’ve always liked to boast about a comment we once had from a visitor: ‘I went to the Museum of Innocence and came out hungry!’ The museum displays the kinds of meals that Istanbul’s middle-class families – whose lives are the subject of the novel and the museum itself – used to eat back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. We can’t keep actual food on display, of course. Instead, we’ve sculpted near-perfect replicas of those dishes, painted to look as real as possible, and which may indeed trigger hunger pangs in visitors with particularly healthy appetites. Food is rarely displayed in most museums, and even when it is, it is considered a lesser component within the wider collection. But in our museum, you can find a photograph next to an expensive ashtray or an Ottoman crystal artefact, next to an ordinary plate of food, next to another photograph … Like a Dutch still-life painting which brings together in one frame all kinds of objects from our daily lives, plain or precious, ordinary or significant, simple or allegorical, inviting us to observe and interpret life through these objects and draw from them some kind of new meaning, the Museum of Innocence shows us that life will surround us with a vast and varied range of objects, from morsels of food to postcards of beautiful views, from valuable items to forgotten scraps, from discarded newspapers to identity cards, and leads us to consider what we might learn from this fact.
I’m not convinced that conserving the past is only about preserving so-called ‘collectibles’. Smells, sounds, tactile experiences can and should also be preserved. The Museum of Innocence is, among other things, an aural museum. We sought out and recorded the noises of the city, its secret voice, and the sound of the horns of its ferries, for which the museum is now a repository. You will hear three types of sounds in the Museum of Innocence. The first kind is activated automatically as you approach certain display cabinets, sounds like the ‘hooooot’ of the ferry horn, so familiar to all those who live in Istanbul, and which helps to convey the general mood of the city. Secondly, though you may not even realise that you are hearing these sounds, other visitors will perceive them as distant and intermittent notes. Finally, there is the faraway sound of a foghorn or a freight ship’s whistle that can be heard throughout the entire museum, but which plays only once every forty-five minutes, so that in order to hear it twice, you would have to spend at least two hours in there. At one point we had plans to recreate smells, too, but have yet to put those into practice.
NOVEL–MUSEUM
I started thinking in the early 1990s about a linked novel and museum. I mulled it over for a few years until I grew convinced it would be impossible. But then one day I put down the cash and bought the building. Now I had no choice but to forge ahead. All the people who had told me twenty years ago, ‘Don’t bother with novels, Orhan, go and be an architect or an engineer, get a real job,’ were now saying, ‘Orhan, you’ve somehow made it as a novelist, but a museum, well, that’s too much; don’t do it.’ So I decided not to tell anyone what I was doing. I began to collect objects from shops in Çukurcuma and from relatives, never revealing what they were really for and saying instead, ‘I just really like this stuff, I’m a bit obsessed’ – like Kemal. As my collection grew, I studied the items I had gathered and related them to Füsun’s story, to Kemal’s story, to the love that brought them together, and to the Istanbul landscapes that formed the background to their affair. The Museum of Innocence doesn’t just display objects from life in Istanbul between 1950 and 2000, bu
t also the landscapes that its citizens saw, the films, postcards, and newspapers of that era, poignant mementoes of the old Istanbul, and anything my collaborators and I were able to find that could illustrate Füsun and Kemal’s romance.
When I first started writing the novel and assembling objects, I didn’t dwell too much on how exactly I would display things in the museum. There was enough to think about already, and I preferred to focus on the novel for the time being, and set the collection aside until I was ready. I finished the book and published it in 2008. But I was under some political pressure in those years, and besides, I didn’t even have the kind of money you might need to build a museum, so until the Nobel Prize I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I had begun to think that the museum would never be anything more than a dream, that the building I’d bought would remain as it was, with the objects I’d gathered all stored in my house, that I’d forget everything and start working on a new novel entirely, and simply move on. But with the Nobel Prize, and with the increasing sales of my books, the money I needed fell into my lap.
After the novel came out in 2008, I made up my mind to complete the museum. I’d expected to be done within six months, but it took four years to finish – despite the vast collection I’d already gathered. Of course, it only took so long because I wanted to make the display boxes look beautiful. I couldn’t bear to just lay them out on a table, stick a few labels on, and leave it at that, as if it were some ordinary state museum.
I am at heart a failed painter, a fact which undoubtedly also played its part. The dormant painter inside me was revived by the sight of all these objects, and wanted to turn the vitrines in which they would be displayed into works of art. I wanted to make a beautiful exhibit of each cabinet; in other words, the painter inside me wanted to use these objects to make art. That’s why it all took longer than predicted. Here we are five years later, having this conversation in 2014, and I have yet to publish my new novel. It’s not all Mevlut’s fault; it is also because I devoted two and a half years of my life to the museum.
ISTANBUL IN OLD FILMS
Only as I got older did I learn to pay attention to what was going on in the background of Yeşilçam movies set in 1960s Cihangir. Back then, like every other boy my age, my attention was solely on Türkan Şoray and Müjde Ar’s faces in the foreground. I’ve watched them all again since then to focus expressly on the black-and-white Istanbul landscapes in the background, which have now become an integral part of my enjoyment of the films, as much as the formidable presence of Türkan Şoray, Müjde Ar, or Hülya Koçyiğit in the foreground. Those cinematic landscapes have become inseparable in my mind from the kissing scenes to which they provide the backdrop, much as Istanbul forms an integral part of Füsun and Kemal’s love story. And the kisses, the fistfights and car chases filmed over those old and crumbling cityscapes have become fundamental components of the image of Istanbul in my mind.
Nowadays, if you’re yearning for a glimpse of the Istanbul of your childhood, there is a film channel on TV that can help. Every now and then a friend will call me: ‘Orhan, quick, they’re showing that scene!’; ‘See how different that street looked; look what that place used to be like before it all changed …’ We’ve spent our whole lives feeling either shocked or thrilled by the transformation of Istanbul. ‘They’re knocking the old buildings down, we’re going to be modern!’ we would rejoice when we were children. ‘They’re knocking the old buildings down, we’re losing our culture!’ we now protest.
THE HILTON HOTEL IN ISTANBUL
The first thing that the Hilton Hotel showed us was that westernisation and economic growth in Turkey were processes pioneered by the wealthy, and enabled by bureaucrats and the upper classes. In my boyhood, there was a widespread notion – rather narrow and irksome – that leading a westernised lifestyle meant travelling to Europe and back for glorified shopping trips to Paris or London. The Hilton Hotel is to me a symbol of that shift in consumption habits that can be termed ‘wardrobe westernisation’. Now the glitter and charm of those days have been supplanted by the effects of mass tourism. The Hilton’s old pomp has faded.
I have another memory associated with the Hilton. It was after the military coup of 1980, and incidents of horrific torture, oppression, and custodial death had reached their peak. A PEN delegation consisting of Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter had come to Turkey, and I was to act as their guide. Harold Pinter’s suitcase never arrived, and we were all quite paranoid, worried that we were being followed. Everybody became very cautious.
Miller and Pinter were staying at the Hilton, so we would meet up there. We knew we were being followed, though we weren’t doing anything illegal. We would sit in the hotel and talk about politics, while laughing about our slightly pretentious, not quite Turkish surroundings.
The house in Nişantaşı where I lived while I wrote My Name Is Red faced the Hilton. The Hilton is like a wall that divides Nişantaşı from Taksim. The residents of Nişantaşı like to go shopping in Taksim and Beyoğlu. On the way, they’ll have a slice of cake at the Hilton, which lies in-between.
When the Hilton first opened in the 1950s, it became the favoured haunt of the Istanbul bourgeoisie. They used to move in small circles back then. But things have changed, and the Hilton is no longer the exclusive spot where the city’s upper middle classes come to socialise.
ISTANBUL AND WALKING
When I was a child, people were fascinated with cars – or ‘automobiles’, as they were known back then. Not everyone had an ‘automobile’. People used to walk, or take public buses. I enjoy walking in the city, and so do the heroes of my novels. The best thing about modern cities is the way they bombard you with pictures, images, dreams, objects, billboards. I love that feeling. When he walks around the city, Kemal is looking for Füsun, but also reflecting on the nature of his love, and trying to relieve his anguish – as he also hopes to do through Füsun’s belongings and her discarded cigarette butts.
In a way, Istanbul ‘made’ me. I’ve spent my whole life in this city. Istanbul has determined the course of my life, defined me, and raised me. In 2006, I accepted a job offer from Columbia University, which meant that every year, I spent four months away from Istanbul to teach a semester there. Political pressures certainly played a role in my decision to take the job. The change served me well. It allowed me to evaluate certain aspects of the museum and the novel from an external vantage point. Writing about a city when you’re somewhere else gilds and sweetens your view of it. The Museum of Innocence is in parts a novel written by someone who has been separated from a city but loves it all the more for that.
When I first began to write, I didn’t really think, ‘I want to be a writer of Istanbul.’ What I thought instead was, ‘I want to be a good writer.’ A good writer needs stories about people to investigate their humanity. Like all writers, I was writing about people I knew, my people, the people I’d met in Istanbul. From the late 1990s onwards, when my books began to be translated into foreign languages, I realised that writing about the people I encountered in the city had made me into a writer of Istanbul. Before then, it had been an unconscious inclination: I had always written about Istanbul, but it had never occurred to me that this was what I was doing. Borges said that there are no camels in the Qur’an. That’s not quite true, but what Borges meant is that when you become too conscious of something about your identity, and what other nations think of its signs and symbols, that self-awareness can hinder your sense of authenticity. During the first half of my life as a writer, I never realised that I belonged to Istanbul. But in the second half, as I worked on the Museum of Innocence, I understood that I belong to this place, and I carry that understanding with me as I write today. This shifting awareness has also changed the way I look at the city.
In my first twenty years as a writer, before my daughter was born, I would write until four in the morning, then go to sleep and wake up at noon. I used to walk back home from my studio in the middle of the night. At that hour, th
e city is deserted, save for packs of street dogs. It’s as if the city were abandoned. In the 1970s and 1980s, it wasn’t particularly safe, either. In my mind, the lone mysterious figure walking through the city streets at night became connected, in the 1970s, with violent street clashes between left- and right-wing militants and people putting up posters and writing slogans on walls, and in the 1980s with the curfews that were imposed after the military coup. You follow the shadow of a dog on a wall over here, you see beggars or stray cats and dogs rummaging through a bin over there, you come across people going to work or returning from their night shifts, and slowly the small textile workshops behind Nişantaşı start to open … In the city, in Istanbul, life never stops. Even at the quietest hour – even at four thirty in the morning – you will hear the distant put-putting of a little boat on the Bosphorus, the whistle of a ferry, the clang of an engine, the last drunk out on the streets, or the first few people to wake up for work … My ears and my mind are attuned to each of these sounds, their shifts and motions, the way they move the air, and so too to the padded footsteps of dogs and stray cats. As I observe all this, I imagine a man – a man who’s been drinking, perhaps, but maybe he is just a little tired, or irritated, or melancholy – walking in the darkness or the twilight of the city, through courtyards and secret alleys, and I imagine putting that man’s inner world at the centre of a novel. Maybe that man is me; maybe we are alike. It would be interesting to look at the world through his eyes. This man who is on his way home at four in the morning, just like me … where is he coming from? Where is he going? There is a satisfaction in puzzling over this kind of question, and it usually means I have begun to envision that man as part of a story, a dream, a novel I might write someday. If I have started to imagine the story of a man walking alone in the middle of the night down an eerie and dangerous street, I have also started to imagine a new novel.