The Innocence of Memories

by Orhan Pamuk

  ART–LITERATURE: AM I KEMAL?

  I dreamed of becoming a painter before deciding to become a writer, so I have always been intrigued by the correspondence between a world created through words and a world created through paintings and objects. A work of literature operates through time. Stories have a beginning and an end; between them runs time. But a painting deals with space. It portrays a moment. It covers a scene. This similarity between the two mechanisms – how the work of art exists in space and the work of literature exists in time – must be what the German philosopher Heidegger meant when he referred to the ‘thingness of artworks’. Here I am, sitting alone, writing a novel, a work of the imagination. Then I start to gather real objects, and envision a museum for the novel. Then, I actually purchase a building and start setting up the museum. I work diligently to turn it into something worthwhile. Finally, that museum I had imagined becomes reality. Soon there are street signs cropping up around the neighbourhood, pointing in the direction of my museum. Even I am still taken aback every time I see one. Even I forget sometimes that it is my own creation to which they point, when, walking on the street or sitting in a taxi, thinking distractedly about one thing or another, I suddenly look up and see a sign that says this way to the Museum of Innocence.

  Each of these signs reminds me that what I had imagined has become reality. I’m not too surprised that it has: I know that art and literature are inexorably linked, that the Museum of Innocence is rather like a novel, and that my novels are themselves like museums. Still, if you were to ask me, ‘When you started writing your first novel at the age of twenty-three, did you ever imagine that it would lead to a museum, more books, libraries, translations into sixty languages, and all the rest that’s happened?’, I would tell you no, I could never have imagined it. I deal with it sometimes by pretending it’s all happening to someone else.

  Some of the things I have written about love have later happened to me in real life. After The Museum of Innocence was published, I had a lot of inquisitive readers, particularly women, wondering about Kemal’s obsessive, feverish love for Füsun. So many times I have been asked, ‘Orhan Bey, are you Kemal?’ Of course there are certain aspects of my own experience which resurface in the stories of those characters from my novels who are most like me. But it is a peculiarity of the art of the novel that even if you tell readers of a love story like Kemal’s that ‘it’s a novel, it’s all fiction’, they won’t want to believe you. They will think instead, ‘He would never have been able to describe it so well if he hadn’t been through the same thing himself.’ A reader’s refusal to believe that you’ve never experienced first-hand the things you’ve written about is a compliment to your literary capabilities, your style, the force of your book. The best thing to do is to accept the compliment and tell them with a knowing wink, ‘Yes, I am Kemal.’

  VISITING THE MUSEUM

  Visiting the museum is not a prerequisite for enjoying the novel. The novel can stand alone. And I’m pleased to say that reading the novel is not essential to enjoying the museum. In fact, even people who’ve read the novel before coming to the museum start to behave, fifteen minutes into their visit, as if they hadn’t read it at all.

  Visitors to the museum can be placed into two groups: those who’ve read the novel, and those who haven’t. The first few display cabinets correspond to the initial chapters of the novel, so at the very start of their visit, those who’ve read the book find themselves thinking back to it and gleefully matching each object to its twin in the novel.

  For these visitors there is something understandably satisfying in studying the displays and recognising objects described in the pages they remember reading, or which they may be perusing again from their copy of the book (or from one of the museum’s copies, attached to the displays). This usually goes on for the first ten to fifteen minutes of their visit.

  But soon enough they start to behave exactly like the visitors who haven’t read the book. They stop seeing the museum as if its purpose were to follow a particular story. Instead they begin to understand it as the representation of an emotion. Of course, the Museum of Innocence functions as an enactment of the plot of The Museum of Innocence, but more than that, it is the embodiment of a feeling, a state of mind, a place created to convey the mood and atmosphere of the novel, the story of a wretched love affair, and the soul, the texture of a provincial city at the margins of Europe in the fifties and sixties. Visitors who recognise this atmosphere may well find themselves drawn back to the story. But I know from my own observations, and from the way visitors behave, that the museum conveys primarily an essence, a mood, an atmosphere. It is an atmosphere built on a love story, on feeling provincial, on belonging to a poor outpost on the edge of Europe. The love story, the museum, the novel all hinge on the hardships experienced by a lower middle class with no way up, and on the futility and precariousness of their lives.

  Your perspective on the museum will vary depending on whether you read the novel before your visit, after your visit, or not at all. But your fundamental response to what you see will not differ so greatly. If you’ve read the novel, the museum will give you access to the intimate details of its characters’ lives. You will see how a lighter, a driver’s licence, or a newspaper clipping can illuminate a life, and at the same time the museum will show you that driver’s licence or that newspaper in a different light. You might perceive a different sort of energy from what you observe. But even if you haven’t read the novel, you will still be able to savour the mood invoked by those same objects. Of course, I’m glad if people read the novel before or after visiting the museum. But I’m sure that those who come without having read the book can enjoy the museum as much as those who have.

  After The Museum of Innocence, I wrote a manifesto for museums. My aim was to use the manifesto form to explain in simple terms what I was trying to achieve in my museum. The word ‘manifesto’ tends to evoke images of angry, impassioned youths with powerful ideas. I am no longer an angry young man, but I do love museums. The manifesto of the Museum of Innocence is against large, institutional, state-sponsored museums that tell the history of a nation and its people. Of course, I love and enjoy those kinds of museums, too. But what I’m trying to express in my manifesto is this: in the modern era, humanity has progressed from the enjoyment of epic sagas to the pleasures of the novel. Today, the equivalents of those sagas are major institutions like the Louvre and the British Museum. National museums are concerned with nation states, the lives of kings, and ancient history. We’ve moved on from sagas to novels which tell the stories of individual human beings, but we still haven’t managed to make that transformation when it comes to museums. Unfortunately, museums today – particularly in non-Western countries – still operate as epics, more concerned with flag-waving and acting as repositories of the signs and symbols of national identity. I think that museums should concentrate on the stories of individuals, and be founded upon the creativity of individuals. Like novels, museums that rest on the imagination of individuals within a nation rather than on the accomplishments of that nation as a whole will be better at portraying its people and the trials they’ve faced.

  The film’s director Grant Gee, the director of the !f Istanbul film festival Pelin Turgut, and the director of the Museum of Innocence Onur Karaoğlu are reflected in a green-room mirror prior to the filming of Orhan Pamuk’s interview with Grant Gee. February 2016. (From Orhan Pamuk’s private collection.)

  A Conversation with Grant Gee

  ORHAN PAMUK: Welcome, everyone. It all started when Grant Gee came to Istanbul for the screening of his film Patience (After Sebald), based on Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Let’s hear about your first take on Istanbul, Grant.

  GRANT GEE: I came here knowing nothing, almost nothing about Istanbul beyond a few tourist images in my head.

  OP: What were they?

  GG: The Blue Mosque … I’m sorry!

  OP: Did you see that in a movie, Grant?

  GG: I h
ad three days and I left the city thinking, ‘I have to work here.’ It made an impression on me no city ever has in such a short space of time. And then, my wife was actually reading your Istanbul and she was telling me, ‘You should read this. You would really like this.’ And I did. So right from the start, Orhan’s vision of Istanbul and my actual experience of Istanbul were mixed up into one thing – they became inseparable.

  I returned to England, thinking I had to get back to Istanbul somehow – for a film, for work, anything. I didn’t have a plan yet. But then, as if by magic – as these things often go, when you have a strong enough desire, magic starts to happen – I’m reading the London Review of Books, and I see a report from the opening night for a thing called the Museum of Innocence, which had just opened in Istanbul. The article says there is something metafictional going on there. Some people who were familiar with the museum started to explain that aspect to me, and within a minute I said, ‘Okay, that’s the film I want to make.’ And then I wrote to Orhan, saying, ‘Dear Orhan, please could I make a film about your museum?’

  OP: My memory is slightly different, though more or less the same. My agent told me that Grant Gee, who made a film on Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, was interested in making a film on the museum and on Istanbul. I watched Grant’s film Patience (After Sebald) and saw how good a documentary it was. So this was the kind of adaptation he was planning, and I would find myself in the same position as Sebald in that film. I was interested. Coincidentally, I was planning to go to London in November 2012. So we met in London. What was the restaurant where we met?

  GG: It was the restaurant of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

  OP: As a failed architect who dropped out of architecture school to be a writer, this venue intrigued me. So, we had lunch. What was your impression?

  GG: I thought you were going to ask what my lunch was. I think I had a glass of wine – I believe it was a Chardonnay.

  OP: You must forgive me, Grant, I have recently had a book published in Turkey and one in Germany, and I’ve been doing thousands of interviews. All this time I’ve been waiting for my turn to interview someone famous. It’s just your luck that the honour has fallen to you.

  GG: I think we got down to business in about ten seconds. You said, ‘I liked your Sebald film. If you made a film about my museum and if it was anything like that, I would be happy.’

  OP: That’s true, we talked about this and that, and there was a moment exactly like you said. But there is one thing you forget, or maybe you are too British and humble to say it. I said to you, ‘I loved your film. You are very talented. I’d be very happy if you were to do something similar for me.’ It was just as we were saying goodbye, right?

  This was October 2012. In December, Grant came to Istanbul. I took you on a long walk – I think from around two o’clock in the afternoon till ten o’clock at night. We walked for eight hours. I would like to talk about that long walk. I picked Grant up and took him first to Nişantaşı, on which enough has already been said, I think. Then from Nişantaşı we went to Osmanbey, Kurtuluş, Pangaltı, Feriköy, Kasımpaşa, and to the neighbourhood of Tarlabaşı, home of Mevlut, the hero of my novel A Strangeness in My Mind. We walked, and walked, and walked. I’m sure it will be much more interesting to hear what Grant has to say about that long walk.

  GG: I had read in England so many fictional and autobiographical pieces about Istanbul that it was significant for me to find myself suddenly there, walking around Istanbul with a writer. The thing is, I’m primarily a fan when I make these films. I’m a fan of Orhan’s, so I’m still susceptible to the fan thing. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is a person I’m a fan of, obviously.’

  Anyway, you find yourself walking around with him, and it’s a slightly weird, fictional experience. You’re walking around streets you’ve been reading about in novels, and then you are able to walk with the person who wrote the novels. So fact and fiction were getting mixed up in my head right from the start. It was a great walk and it was really interesting to understand so much more about the novels that I’d read by doing that. It was especially interesting ending up in Tarlabaşı at about nine o’clock at night, when groups of young men started coming out of the shadows, hissing ‘Ssss’ and surrounding us. Orhan kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry,’ and I guess it’s common knowledge that Orhan has a bodyguard with him. So we are walking through Tarlabaşı and I’m getting really quite scared because of these quite heavy-looking kids, and it took about ten seconds of quiet conversation with Orhan’s bodyguard before these nasty young men all just disappeared again. I still don’t know what happened, but it was quite interesting.

  OP: Actually, Grant’s not telling the whole story. These boys who were trying to sell drugs were suspicious of us, and I had a bodyguard behind me …

  What next? You returned to London armed with a sense of Istanbul by night, of the visual texture of the city. Meanwhile, during our long walks we had also been negotiating, talking, discussing how to use and adapt the novel, and of course your ideas for this documentary. We had different motivations. We talked about our ideas in coffeehouses and teahouses and as we walked, and while doing so I think we were also negotiating over what each of us wanted to see in the film. Grant had some ideas, I had some ideas, but they were not contradictory. We were very optimistic about this film. So we said, ‘We can do this,’ and our agents united our ideas in a contract. What were these ideas? What did you want to make, what did I hope you would make? What did the contract say we would make?

  GG: For me, the basic idea was to make a film, a poetic documentary that combined elements of objective documentary with the subtleties of what we call, in shorthand, the essay film. So we were going to incorporate some fictional elements. We might have a fictional voice leading the viewer through objective documentary locations and situations.

  OP: You said poetic documentary. I’d be happy if you could elaborate on that. There’s poetry, and then there’s documentary! Surely they are opposites?!

  GG: Well … My favourite film ever is a film by Chris Marker, Sans Soleil – and I think I brought a copy of that movie when I came to meet you.

  OP: Yes, we watched this film Grant brought, Sans Soleil. You can find it in any shop that sells DVDs of art films, in London, in Paris, or anywhere else. I got myself a copy. It really is a modernist film, or postmodernist, whatever you want to call it – an experimental, dizzying film. Grant, you are a bigger fan than I am, perhaps you’ll want to talk about it a little more.

  GG: Sans Soleil is very simple. It’s shot mainly in Japan. The story is that these are shots taken by a fictional cameraman who is meanwhile also writing letters back to a girlfriend of his in France – just saying where he’s been, what he’s seeing, what he’s thinking about. The narration is both funny and sad. He’s making comparisons between postmodern societies and simpler societies, he’s reflecting on time, memory, and movies he’s seen. They are just simple shots of drunks on the street, creatures in a zoo, trees, being on a ferry … But out of this, he creates a world that’s both factual and fictional.

  OP: Since we’re on the subject of the influence of other films … We haven’t yet talked about those influences or precursors whose impact we realised later. While Grant shot, edited, and produced the film, we also had conversations about other films, and other filmmakers whose work interested us. One filmmaker we discussed was Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet shot a film in Istanbul in the 1960s called L’Immortelle. Ömer Kavur, a Turkish director for whom I wrote a script, was an assistant director on that movie. Why that film, and why also Alain Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad …? Why are these films important to us? Why did we discuss these films and not others? What’s the common inspiration behind your film and these sources?

  GG: With L’Année dernière à Marienbad, it’s just because of the tracking shots. I mean, Alain Resnais’ tracking shots in the early sixties sort of transformed cinema, into a kind of cinema t
hat was like what the reinventors of a certain type of jazz did: it turned things around. It’s the very insistent tracking shots that just keep going without bothering with the niceties of tying things up. This kind of narration gives you a feeling of suspended time and place, the camera puts you into a hypnotic state. That hypnotic, always driving camera was really important.

  OP: You’ve put it very beautifully. But this is not the language of a documentary-maker, by the way. I like your relaxed approach here. So this background was more or less our inspiration for our film; just walking on the street doesn’t guarantee you’ll end up with a good film.

  Let’s talk about what was written in our contract. After our first meeting and our conversations as we both walked around Istanbul, you came to Istanbul again in the summer of 2013, this time to Büyükada, and again we walked and talked and chatted. We weren’t sightseeing this time, but discussing the structure of the film.