Of trauma and happiness: Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence

This paper offers an interpretation of Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence (2008), and also the actual museum by that name curated by Pamuk in Istanbul. The museum differs fundamentally from any “real” museum in that it is a collection of objects memorializing the relationship between two fictional characters in Pamuk’s novel, and in particular one fictional individual—Füsun, the love of the fictional curator’s life. By relinquishing any claim to objectivity and embodying pure affect through actual objects of quotidian use, the museum conveys the traumatic experience of a fictional personal history. The museum embodies metafiction, using verisimilitude to make a cathartic impact. My analysis seeks to understand how this verisimilitude of the eponymous Museum of Innocence in Istanbul produces a cathartic rather than a neurotic effect on the fictional curator as well as on potential audiences.