Ticket to a Museum: Reading Orhan Pamuk in Our Times

This article is an inquiry into the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, designed and built by the writer Orhan Pamuk as twin to his novel The Museum of Innocence (2008). It is interested in what might lie behind the desire of the contemporary novelist to buttress the world of his novel with the material addition of a museum (a collection of the things depicted in the novel), an artifact also invented by himself. Understanding the circumstances in which the alliance between novel and museum takes place, through Pamuk's explanations but going beyond them—its conditions of possibility, so to speak—provides the larger perspective in which it can be seen in dialectical relation to contemporary literature and culture.