A HETEROTOPIC AND GLOCAL PLACE: THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE

Abstract

Orhan Pamuk’s eighth novel, Masumiyet Müzesi (The Museum ofInnocence) is a long-term and obsessive love story. Published in 2008, it has attracted a lotof attention positively as well as criticism. It depicts not only a love story but also theimpossibility of experiencing a physical and emotional love together in a geographytrapped between modern and traditional life-style. In the novel, the protagonist converts theabstractness of his love into the concreteness of his lover’s belongings. His dream of generating a real museum from these belongings came true in Çukurcuma-Istanbul in 2012.In this context, he is the first novel fictional protagonist to build a museum in reality.Masumiyet Müzesi is actually the novel of a museum. It can be likened to a catalogue of amuseum informing the stories of every object in it and also how they are brought together.The museum can be assessed that it is the witness of both protagonist’s love story andpolitical, cultural, and social events in Istanbul in those years. It can be said that MasumiyetMüzesi is produced locally as a literary production, but distributed globally in the form of amuseum as a real place. Based on the interconnection of fiction and reality, the museum inIstanbul can be accepted as a heterotopia which is a term Foucault coined in one of hislectures in 1967. For him, every culture has created his own heterotopia throughout itshistory. Utopia is basically an unreal space, but heterotopia is a real one. In the novel, theprotagonist’s utopia for collecting his lover’s belongings to reach his lover emotionallyturns into a heterotopia by the way of a real museum. Heterotopia is one real place whichjuxtaposes various incompatible spaces or sites. In this sense, Masumiyet Müzesi (TheMuseum of Innocence) in Istanbul is a heterotopic place juxtaposing real and imagined,local and global, virtual and physical. This study explores how the novel and museum areinterpreted together by the concept of heterotopia coined by Foucault.