Trakya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi (Dec 2019)
A HETEROTOPIC AND GLOCAL PLACE: THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE
Abstract
Orhan Pamuk’s eighth novel, Masumiyet Müzesi (The Museum of Innocence) is a long-term and obsessive love story. Published in 2008, it has attracted a lot of attention positively as well as criticism. It depicts not only a love story but also the impossibility of experiencing a physical and emotional love together in a geography trapped between modern and traditional life-style. In the novel, the protagonist converts the abstractness of his love into the concreteness of his lover’s belongings. His dream of generating a real museum from these belongings came true in Çukurcuma-Istanbul in 2012. In this context, he is the first novel fictional protagonist to build a museum in reality. Masumiyet Müzesi is actually the novel of a museum. It can be likened to a catalogue of a museum informing the stories of every object in it and also how they are brought together. The museum can be assessed that it is the witness of both protagonist’s love story and political, cultural, and social events in Istanbul in those years. It can be said that Masumiyet Müzesi is produced locally as a literary production, but distributed globally in the form of a museum as a real place. Based on the interconnection of fiction and reality, the museum in Istanbul can be accepted as a heterotopia which is a term Foucault coined in one of his lectures in 1967. For him, every culture has created his own heterotopia throughout its history. Utopia is basically an unreal space, but heterotopia is a real one. In the novel, the protagonist’s utopia for collecting his lover’s belongings to reach his lover emotionally turns into a heterotopia by the way of a real museum. Heterotopia is one real place which juxtaposes various incompatible spaces or sites. In this sense, Masumiyet Müzesi (The Museum of Innocence) in Istanbul is a heterotopic place juxtaposing real and imagined, local and global, virtual and physical. This study explores how the novel and museum are interpreted together by the concept of heterotopia coined by Foucault.
Keywords
