La survie par les objets
[La survie par les objets]

[La passion de la collection dans le roman et le musée d’Orhan Pamuk]

Summary/Abstract: The rites of passage often imply the presence of objects meant to make easier the separation from an old state and the penetration into a new ontological status. The relationship between the owner and his objects seems to survive the departure, as there is a belief in the capacity of the instrument to seize something of the identity of the being it had served. A trigger of memory and a support of remembrance, the object writes a new history of the defunct on the edge between real and imaginary, providing a sort of interior comfort for those who suffer from the loss of a dear person. As if he wanted to convince us that the past can be revealed and lived again by some lighting effects of a collection – an imaginary and a real one – of objects, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk undertakes two complementary actions at a time. On the one hand, he builds the novel The Museum of Innocence (2008) on the love story between Kemal and Füsun, on the other hand he creates a museum meant to say, with the voice of its exhibits, the same love story, prematurely ended because of the protagonists’ separation, restarted after long years of trial and error and suddenly cut off, shortly after the reconciliation, by the absurd death of the beloved woman. From artefacts of loss, with a compensatory function for Kemal in the period of break, the objects tend to become signs of recuperation, of a delicate presence in the absence, reminding of the essential role the material elements play in the construction and maintenance of a feeling of the past. Objects of mourning and memory, the museum exhibits, together with the description of the objects in the novel, shape a genuine taste for collecting, meant to summon up the presence of the beloved, to reconstruct it, providing it with stability and permanence, in a game of recuperation that attempts to defy death.

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