MASUMİYET MÜZESİ’NİN SINIRLARI: “DÜŞÜNCESİZ” NOSTALJİ VE MASUMİYETİN İMKÂNSIZLIĞI

Abstract

Nostalgia promises wholeness, happiness and a sense of being at home in response to the social discontent and sense of being disintegrated. Therefore as discontent grows, it is observed that the interest toward nostalgic themes also grows. So in literature, nostalgic discourse becomes strong and the past is handled in such a way that satisfies the lack which people feel today. Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence which was published in 2008 narrates a love story which takes place at the end of 1970s and aims to refresh our collective memory of that years. But Pamuk’s style of expressing emotions with the lack of profundity and with his effort of naming the emotions recurrently, the text’s nostalgic intentions turn into a formof a “set up stage”. Lack of attention and perspective toward political issues, its peaceful melancholy towards residuals and ruins of the past and its point of view away from “suspicion”, moves the novel away from modernist “reflective nostalgia” and the notion of innocence. Despite the memory being an “anti-museum”, narrator Kemal and Orhan Pamuk both transform their powerful desire to seize the past into a proud museum which has a meaning they are sure of.