Onvervulbare verlange tussen tradisie en moderniteit : Orhan Pamuk se The Museum of Innocence

Unfulfillable Longing between Tradition and Modernity: Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence This article analyzes The Museum of Innocence, a novel by the Turkish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, Orhan Pamuk. The starting thesis of this article is that the wilful, centralist and thus typically modernist way in which Turkey’s greatest modern statesman, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) modernized Turkey at breakneck speed led to a lasting in-between condition of Turkey between tradition and modernity. It is argued that Turkey has yet to find a satisfactory mediation between tradition and modernity, and that Orhan Pamuk is the peerless literary archivist of this in-between condition between tradition and modernity. The effective destruction of the traditional moorings of Turkish society under Atatürk came after the already destructive effects on Turkish tradition of the long, slow decline of the Ottoman empire, which was finally brought to an end by Western powers in the First World War between 1914 and 1918. The characters in the novel have been the primary (urban) beneficiaries of Atatürk’s modernization efforts, both economically and otherwise. However, it turns out that these benefits are ambiguous. While the principal character, Kemal, and his peers experience the trappings of unprecedented wealth, they also find themselves unmoored from Turkish tradition. They try to compensate for this state of disorientation by mimicking what they take to be the model of Western modernity. As Pamuk brilliantly shows, these mimetic efforts of Kemal and the other characters in the novel lead to very mixed and ultimately tragic results, as the tragic outcome of the love triangle between Kemal, his fiancée Sibel and his lover, Füsun proves.