The Postmodern ‘Sublime’ in Orhan Pamuk’s Texts of Innocence

Öz

Orhan Pamuk published The Museum of Innocence in 2008, two years after getting his title of the first Turkish Nobel laureate. He opened the city museum named “Museum of Innocence” four years after the publication of this novel, which he had dreamed of collecting the objects to be exhibited for many years. In the same year, he published a catalogue titled The Innocence of Objects (2012) for this museum in which Pamuk writes about the objects, their relations to his life and his city İstanbul. The documentary film on this city museum, Innocence of Memories (2015), is shot in a collaboration between Pamuk and British director Grant Gee. Finally, a retrospective book titled The Innocence of Memories–which includes the screenplay, the conversation between the author and the director, and selected frames of this film–was published in 2016. All these written and visual texts by Pamuk, which are preferred to be named The Texts of Innocence in this study, open the way for an interplay and intertextuality re-represented by the spiral metaphor. This paper suggests, based on this metaphor that signifies an ‘unwinding path’ going through all these narratives, Orhan Pamuk produces the dynamics of the sublime that is related to presenting the unpresentable, free play, aesthetic formation, and the gaze of the perceiver in the postmodernist era. In this sense, this study aims to trace the postmodern dynamics of the sublime, turning around a set of objects presented and (re)presented to the reader, the museum-goer, and the audience within the fiction, the fictionalized non-fiction, and visual art narratives by Orhan Pamuk.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Orhan Pamuk
• The Museum of Innocence
• postmodern sublime
• object
• representation

Orhan Pamuk’un Masumiyet Metinleri’nde Postmodern ‘Yüce’

Öz

Orhan Pamuk, ilk Nobel ödüllü Türk unvanını aldıktan iki yıl sonra, 2008 yılında Masumiyet Müzesi’ni yayımlar. İçinde sergilenecek nesneleri toplayarak uzun yıllardır açma hayali kurduğu “Masumiyet Müzesi” adındaki şehir müzesini ise romanın yayımlanmasından dört yıl sonra açar. Aynı yıl, müzede sergilenen nesneleri, bu nesnelerin yaşamıyla ve yaşadığı şehir İstanbul ile ilişkisini anlatan Şeylerin Masumiyeti (2012) adlı müze kataloğunu yayımlar. Bunları takiben, bu şehir müzesini konu alan Hatıraların Masumiyeti (2015) adlı belgesel, Orhan Pamuk ve İngiliz yönetmen Grant Gee iş birliğiyle çekilir. Son olarak, belgeselin senaryosunu, yazar ile yönetmen arasındaki röportajı ve bu belgeselden seçilmiş kareleri içeren Hatıraların Masumiyeti adlı retrospektif bir kitap 2016 yılında yayımlanır. Bu çalışmada Masumiyet Metinleri olarak adlandırılması tercih edilen Orhan Pamuk’un tüm bu yazılı ve görsel metinleri, sarmal metaforu ile temsil edilen bir karşılıklı etkileşimin ve metinlerarasılığın yolunu açmaktadır. Bu makale, Orhan Pamuk’un tüm bu anlatılarının içinden “çözülerek giden bir yolu” temsil eden sarmal metaforundan yola çıkarak, Pamuk’un postmodernist çağda temsil edilemeyeni, serbest oyunu, estetik biçimi ve metinleri algılayan kişinin bakışını ortaya koyan bu metinlerinde yücenin dinamiklerini ürettiğini öne sürmektedir. Bu anlamda bu çalışma, okura, müze gezginine ve izleyiciye sunulan ve yeniden temsil edilen bir dizi nesne etrafında dönen yücenin postmodern dinamiklerinin Orhan Pamuk’un kurgusunda (roman), kurgulaştırılmış kurgu-dışı anlatılarında (müze kataloğu ve film üzerine kitap) ve görsel sanat anlatılarındaki (müze ve belgesel film) izini sürmeyi amaçlamaktadır.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Orhan Pamuk
• Masumiyet Müzesi
• postmodern yüce
• nesne
• temsil

Kaynakça

1. Abrams, M.H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (Seventh Edition). Heinle&Heinle.
2. Addison, J. (1712). The Spectator, No. 412. Retrieved November 17, 2022, from https://philosophy. lander.edu/intro/artbook/x2073.htm
3. Alfrey, S. (2017). Looking awry: Žižek’s ridiculous sublime. In (R. Sbriglia. Ed.) Everything you always wanted to know about literature but were afraid to ask Žižek, (pp.62-88). Duke University Press.
4. Barrett, L. (2001). How the dead speak to the living: Intertextuality and the postmodern sublime in ‘White Noise.’ Journal of Modern Literature, 25(2), 97-113. Retrieved August 2, 2020, from www. jstor.org/stable/3831638
5. Börekçi, G. Orhan Pamuk: ‘Ruhum ikiye bölünmüştü, şimdi birleşti’ [My soul had been split into two parts, now, it is united]. Egoist. Retrieved May 15, 2020, from https://egoistokur.com/orhanpamuk-ruhum-ikiye-bolunmustu-simdi-birlesti/
6. Deleuze, G. (2003 [1981]). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation (D. Smith, Trans) Continuum.
7. Deleuze, G. (2006). The brain is the screen. In D. Lapoujade. (Ed.), Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975-1995, (pp. 282-291). Semiotext(e).
8. Ginsborg, H. (Winter 2019 Edition). Kant’s aesthetics and teleology. The Stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy. (E. N. Zalta. Ed.) Retrieved May 15, 2020, from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2019/entries/kant-aesthetics/

9. Griffiths, K. and Marmot. J. (Producer), & Gee, G. (Director). (2015). Innocence of memories. The UK. İpekçi, Y. (2020). The transition from the neoclassical ‘beautiful’ to the romantic ‘sublime’: Longinus, Burke and Kant. Atatürk Universitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, (65), 265-285.
10. Johnson, D. B. (2012). The postmodern sublime: Presentation and its limits. In T. M. Costelloe (Ed.), The sublime: From antiquity to the present, (118-131). Cambridge UP.
11. Kant, I. (2007[1790]). Critique of judgement (J. C. Meredith, Trans.) Oxford UP.
12. Kitson, C. (2019). Legacies of the sublime: Literature, aesthetics, and freedom from Kant to Joyce. Suny Press.
13. Lyotard, J.F. (1985). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (by G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Trans.) Manchester University Press.
14. Lyotard, J.F. (1993). The interest of the sublime. In J. S. Librett.(Trans.&Ed.) Of the sublime: Presence in question, (109-132). State University of New York Press.
15. Lyotard, J.F. (1994). Lessons on the analytic of the sublime (E. Rottenberg, Trans.) Stanford UP.
16. Longinus. (2010). On sublimity. In V. B. Leitch (Ed.), The Norton anthology of theory and criticism, (135-154). W.W. Norton and Company.
17. Ogut, S. T. (2017). The struggle of objects and meaning: Design, representation and material culture in the everyday objects of Orhan Pamuk’s ‘Museum of Innocence.’ The Design Journal, 20(1), 45-66. DOI: 10.1080/14606925.2016.1206721
18. Pamuk, O. (2006). My father’s suitcase. Nobel Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2020. Retrieved May 15, 2020, from
19. Pamuk, O. (2009). The museum of innocence (M. Freely, Trans.) Alfred A. Knopf.
20. Pamuk, O. (2010). The naive and the sentimental novelist (N. Dikbaş, Trans.) Harvard UP.
21. Pamuk, O. (2012). Şeylerin masumiyeti [The innocence of objects] İletişim.
22. Pamuk, O. (2017). Hatıraların masumiyeti [The innocence of memories] YKY.
23. Pulver, A. (2015). Innocence of memories review: Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul rendered strange and beautiful. The Guardian. Retrieved Jun 18, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/sep/10/ innocence-of-memories-review-orhan-pamuk-istanbul-grant-gee-venice-festival
24. Tabbi, J. (1995). Postmodern sublime: Technology and American writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. Cornell University Press.
25. Tüzün, D. (2012). Abject’s “ideal kin”: The sublime. In (G.B. Pierce, Ed.) The sublime today: Contemporary readings in the aesthetic, (pp. 119-142). New Castle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
26. Xing, Y. (2013). The novel as museum: Curating memory in Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 54 (2), 198-210. DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2011.555798
27. Žižek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. Verso.
28. Žižek, S. (1991). Looking awry: An introduction to Jacques Lacan through popular culture (e-book). October Books. Retrieved May 5, 2020, from http://en.bookfi.net/s/?q=looking+awry&e=1&t=0