Objects of philology or philology of the objects? Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence. Between material culture, memory and narrative

Abstract

This article reflects on material objects and the practice of collecting as literary subject linked to the themes of memory and past in contemporary Turkish fiction. The analysis focuses mainly on Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence considering the objects exhibited both in the novel and the museum as narrative texts of subjective and collective memories. In order to better understand Pamuk’s works we will preliminarily reconstruct the intertextual chain that preceded such a specific approach to material culture, having particular reference to Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s first novel Mahur Beste. By comparing both the authors’ poetics of objects we aim at highlighting the intimate reasons which made this subject a peculiar topos in modern Turkish literary tradition.