Philip Harvey
Before and After: The Museum of Innocence in Istanbul
Five years ago the Turkish
novelist Orhan Pamuk published ‘The Museum of Innocence’. It is a love story
that unfolds in the provincial world of Istanbul during the 1950s and 60s. However,
this is a novel with a difference because it is also, quite literally, a
museum. As Pamuk developed the story he felt a need to construct a physical
space that could play out the verbal story through the exhibition of objects brought
together and arranged in one place. Pamuk purchased a rundown building in an
old Christian quarter of the city, gutted it and began the process of designing
and constructing his museum space on different floors of this small corner
house. He had been collecting all sorts of things for years from flea markets
and antique stores and maybe even what in Australia we call Opportunity Shops:
objects from the period of the story, objects redolent of the moderate
westernized society that Istanbul was becoming. These hundreds of objects –
toys, tickets, tin signs, lamps, glasses, vases, black and white photographs of
Istanbul at the time – Pamuk placed delicately into vitrines and glass cases
for placement in the house. These cabinets are reminiscent of the boxes of the
American artist Joseph Cornell. The museum is what we would call an
installation, even if an installation designed with the intention of remaining
there for some time to come. The catalogue of the Museum of Innocence is called
‘The Innocence of Objects’. It was published this year, to coincide with the
opening of the Museum, and it helps evoke a lost world in which middle class
life in Istanbul carried on without a seeming care for the outside world. We
find collages of Turkish film stills, postcards of ships on the Bosphorus,
collations of work cards and passes. Each box evokes a different chapter of the
book, a different aspect of Istanbul society. It is a wondrous invention, this
Museum, but tending toward the melancholy which comes to surround objects over
time, a melancholy which is a special preserve of this Turkish writer. It is
the work of an unfulfilled architect, which in fact is the case: Pamuk gave up
architecture courses for writing in his early twenties. There is another
curiosity about the Museum that only dawns slowly. For it is indeed strange
that a Museum built by a writer and Nobel Prize laureate should have cases full
of every imaginable object, except a book. The closest we get is a book of matches and a driver’s license, suggesting
that Pamuk’s characters spend their time smoking cigarettes and motoring around.
In my copy of the catalogue I cannot see one monograph. Perhaps the people in
the novel didn’t read much, maybe there was a conscious choice by the author to
exclude books. But there we have it, a Museum built on the basis of a single
book called ‘The Museum of Innocence’, a Museum without any books.
This year the British
librarian David Pearson gave the Foxcroft Lecture at the State Library of
Victoria. The lecture starts out as a hard-nosed appraisal of the digital
revolution and its impact on book learning and libraries. It then turns into a
fancy-footwork routine to promote special subject collections. In the process
he declares his belief that libraries need to become more like museums. While anathema
to anyone who thinks libraries have the purpose of serving readers, it is worth
giving some time to Pearson’s position. His view is that libraries need “a more
museum-like approach” and an “adjusted set of criteria” for management of
collections. Closer inspection tells us that he argues from History. Books of
long-term historical value, including books with author annotations or that
belong together with one ownership, need to be kept together. The book as an
historical artefact, like a Wedgewood bowl or a suit of armour, must be kept
apart in a place where it can live on, a reminder of how people did things in
other ages. The books he seems most interested in are those of unique value
because of their rarity, provenance, bookplate, or marginalia. These books must
not be discarded. They must be kept together in museum-like conditions for
future use and exhibition. Taken on its own merits this idea has some
positives. We certainly want to preserve special books, especially in an
information environment today where culling and wholesale disposal of
collections is an easy decision for some in authority. No one questions the
rightness in preserving special collections that can, in time, disclose new
meanings about an author or an owner of a discrete collection. It would be
perverse to dispute Pearson’s assertion that history matters, that it helps us
to understand where we have come from. He lays out a simple case for keeping
special collections in museum conditions. Such collections must be saved from
the general traffic. This tendency to make a library a museum has the character
of the English gentleman’s attitude to a book collection. This attitude is
learned, charming and respectful, but the policy is keep it to yourself, only
share it with people like us, and turn it into a talking point, only accessible
to researchers under certain terms. This vision of a museum displays an entirely
different sensibility to Orhan Pamuk’s. In Pearson’s monographic museum the
only objects are books, books that no one can borrow. It is a museum built to
preserve history, where the books themselves are already exhibits from another
era, the pre-digital era.
Signposts in Istanbul
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