Turkish Academic Research Review

Öz

The aim of this study is to analyse Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence as a multi-layered narrative revolving around individual memory, nostalgia, museology and gender. At the centre of the novel is the character Kemal and his efforts to preserve his love for Füsun by collecting everyday objects associated with her. This act of collecting refers to a complex construction of memory that encompasses aesthetic, political and social dimensions of the past. Within this framework, the study interprets Kemal’s practise of collecting objects that belonged to Füsun through Aleida Assmann’s theory of cultural memory and discusses it in the light of Svetlana Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia. Kemal’s personal archiving activity is not only sentimental but is also understood as a representational strategy of a male subject who aestheticizes and shapes memory. The narrative structure of the novel unfolds on several levels, in which Kemal appears as lover, narrator, collector and curator. These overlapping roles are analysed based on Jacques Derrida’s thesis “archive = power” and Michel Foucault’s concept of the relationship between knowledge and power. Throughout the narrative, Kemal constructs a personal past and curates it through the act of collecting, transforming the idea of the museum into a regime of representation. The museum, both as a fictional construct within the novel and as a physical institution in the real world, becomes a space of power in which the past is selectively fixed and aestheticised. In this context, the portrayal of Füsun is particularly noteworthy. Her voice is consistently silenced, and she is only made visible through the objects that Kemal collects. This dynamic exposes the gendered nature of narrative authority. From a feminist-literary perspective, this mode of representation is characterised by the male gaze and signals a regime of memory that suppresses Füsun’s subjectivity and symbolically objectifies it. Kemal’s practise of remembering reveals not only a desire to record the past, but also to reshape it according to his own will and authority. The novel thus shows that nostalgia is not an “innocent” feeling, buta selective form of remembering that is interwoven with repression, forgetting and power. The Museum of Innocence is thus not only a personal love story, but also a critical narrative that scrutinises cultural memory, the epistemology of representation, nostalgic aesthetics and gender-specific narrative structures. The coexistence of the narrative architecture of the novel with the institutionalisation of the museum in the real world should not only be seen as a question of literary representation, but also as a concrete manifestation of modern regimes of memory and politics of representation. This overlap simultaneously offers a structural critique of how power relations can be made invisible through the “over-aestheticisation” of the past. The aestheticised form of memory establishes a selective regime of representation in which certain narratives about the past are circulated while others are silenced. In this context, the museum functions as a discursively organised field of knowledge -a kind of “topography of power”- that disciplines narrative and memory and acts as an epistemological apparatus that establishes meaning within a normative framework. Within this framework, the study presents a three-stage analytical structure that scrutinises the ontological status and power dynamics of representation. The first part, “Kemal’s Aesthetics of Memory”, discusses the embodiment of memory through objects within the material archives of cultural memory; the second part, “Male Nostalgia and Power”, highlights the patriarchal structures established through restorative memory; and the final part, “Between Aesthetics and Ethics”, examines the museum narrative in the tension between the normative limits of representation and ethical responsibility.