Different aspects of melancholy in the museum of innocence

Demet Karabulut

doi:10.24289/ijsser.279087

Abstract

Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence offers prevalent examples of melancholy which is based on the pratoganist Kemal’s state of mind. Even before losing the object of desire, Kemal mourns about the future separation which signals the beginning of melancholy that increases after the end of the affair with Fusun and turns into a mood of life that lasts as long as he lives. Attached to the lost object (Fusun) and the gesture of its loss, Kemal yearns to be a part of Fusun’s life. Therein resides the cause of his attachment to the objects that belong to Fusun which he gathers in Merhamet Apartment that already functions as a museum. This paper analyses object attachment and the idea of museum that devoloped from this which direct us to the concept of the “aura” and transmissibility of the past to the future.

Highlights

Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence offers prevalent examples of melancholy which is based on the pratoganist Kemal’s state of mind
The Museum of Innocence can be considered as a novel that offers prevalent examples of melancholy which is a concept that means a sorrow with purpose, an intentional unhappiness or as defined by Jonathan Flatley in Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism an emotional attachment to something or someone lost (Flatley, 2008, p.1)
Orhan Pamuk, in İstanbul: Memories and the City, claims melancholy to be a Western concept which is not appropriate for the selfless people in the east, as a result of which he prefers to refer to the state of affairs in the novel as “sadness” instead of melancholy (Pamuk, 2013)

Summary

Introduction

Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence offers prevalent examples of melancholy which is based on the pratoganist Kemal’s state of mind. Pamuk’s referring to Kemal as a “selfless” character who reflects the prominent problem of the society he lives in which is the idea that it neither belonged to the West nor to the East renders us to understand that there are different aspects of Kemal’s melancholy.

Results

Conclusion