where do the lost memories go?

Read this wonderful interview with Orhan Pamuk by Nathan Gardels about Pamuk’s new book The Museum of Innocence. It’s very thought-provoking. (click here) Here’s an excerpt:

Orhan Pamuk: The habit of collecting, of attachment to things, is an essential human trait. But Western civilization put collecting on a pedestal by inventing museums. Museums are about representing power. It could be the king’s power, or, later, people’s power.

This has generally not been present in the non-Western world. There, the collector has been an individual who is doing something peculiar. He cannot be proud about what he is doing since his collection is not something that categorizes the larger human experience. On the contrary, it only signifies points of his own personal reality.

However, in the last 50 years, the non-Western world is catching up with museums because it wants to represent its power. Most of the time such museums are about the power of the state. They are crude exercises, like waving a flag. This new museum mania avoids representing reality in an artistic or personal way. Power is more important than art or the person. That is the trend.

So, in my novel, where Kemal collects the teacup, cigarette butts, bedroom door handle, and other items of Fusun’s, he is building a museum not to power, but to the intimate experience of love, to an individual life. My point is that, whatever a life is made of, its dreams and disappointments, is worth taking pride in…

Pamuk: The fashionable Istanbul bourgeoisie is clashing with the upcoming Anatolian bourgeoisie – this is the cliche by which Turkish intellectuals try to understand what is happening. There is some truth in this, but I look at it more ethically than sociologically.

For me, the old Istanbul money and the new Anatolian money are the same class.

What is happening is that a freer, more open, more fully democratic and egalitarian society is clashing with old-fashioned conservative modernism. To solve its problems, the old, conservative Westernized elite must yield to more free speech and more democracy for the aspirations of the whole country, not just the elites.

My problem in Turkey is the intolerant political culture, whether old guard or new. This is not only true of the secularists at the center but also in rural Anatolia, Islamists as well. On crucial issues they embrace each other’s intolerance…