The Possession-Possessor Dichotomy in the Turkish-Museum Novel

Abstract

This article explores the possession-possessor dichotomy in the Turkish museum-novel. The process of curation presents itself as an aesthetic concept refracted between literary and visual perceptions of everyday life. The research presented focuses on the relationship between curatorial practices and storytelling, and its aesthetic importance to the process of archiving the identity of nations. The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk and The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak will be portrayed as literary institutions that resemble museums as re-imagined reconstructions of the nation’s social life. The collector figure in the literary and visual imaginations find themselves at the forefront of existential questions: Are the resulting collections controlled by the collectors, or is there a point in which the collections themselves begin possessing their original creators? Furthermore, this article argues that within the selected texts, the practice of collecting is institutionalized through the moving of an accumulation of objects from the private space to the public, manifested through museums, which can be otherwise thought of as memory institutions. Novel-writing originates from the same compulsive obsession as collecting: each process represents and equal effort to create, control, and manipulate one’s perceptions of the world and of their recollection of the past.