Elif Batuman, Pamuk, and Hüzün

The closing paragraphs of Elif Batuman's visit to Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence:

When I first read Istanbul, ten years ago in California, I didn’t see why disused fountains should fill anyone not responsible for their maintenance with ‘shame and melancholy’, or why anyone should experience living in Istanbul as ‘the melancholy and desolation of sharing [the city’s] shameful fate’. I knew many Turks of my parents’ generation who were brought up to view the fall of the Ottoman Empire as a great personal humiliation, one the West was constantly sneering at. But this didn’t make me any more sympathetic to what I saw as the romanticisation of hüzün. Frankly, I’m still unsympathetic. I think pride and shame should be based on what you do, not who you are. For Istanbul to have its own special shameful melancholy, imperceptible to everyone except Istanbullus and maybe Claude Lévi-Strauss, sounds to me like an invitation for a bunch of self-important lugubrious dudes to sit around doing nothing and feeling like they’re fulfilling their Hegelian role (if only Hegel applied to the East).

In response to the question about hüzün and Füsun, Pamuk said that he had written Istanbul right in the middle of working on The Museum of Innocence. Resonances would be unavoidable. That was when I realised that my exasperation with Istanbul was directly proportional to my admiration for The Museum of Innocence, and that, to my mind, it was less a matter of ‘resonances’ than of balancing the books. It was as if, in the year he took off from the novel to write the memoir, Pamuk had poured all the rancour from his heart. (‘Until the age of 45,’ he writes in Istanbul, ‘it was my habit, whenever I was drifting in that sweet cloud between sleep and wakefulness, to cheer myself by imagining I was killing people.’) When Kemal feels shame, it isn’t geographic or metaphysical. It’s the reasonable and understandable shame of a man who chooses to spend eight years collecting his married ex-lover’s cigarette stubs. The replacement of hüzün (melancholy) by füsun (magic) mirrors the central truth of the novel: ‘If the objects that bring us shame are displayed in a museum,’ Kemal realises, ‘they are immediately transformed into possessions in which to take pride.’ The Museum of Innocence is a machine that processes shame into pride. By the last sentence of the novel, the conversion is complete: ‘Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life.’

That line about pride and shame being "based on what you do, not who you are" strikes me as particularly apt -- there's a lot being discussed right now in Istanbul about whether or not the Aya Sofya should be opened to worship once more (some background here), and it seems that part of that debate revolves around the extent to which the museum's present use should be dictated by its past.

In any event, now all that remains is to visit the museum.