“The Museum of Innocence” is the physical embodiment of Pamuk’s novel. The protagonist, Kemal, constructs a fortress against time using Füsun’s earrings, hairpins, and 4,213 cigarette butts. Terrified of forgetting, he chooses to solidify memory into physical space. This stands in stark contrast to Proust: while the taste of the madeleine cake visits Marcel by chance, Kemal’s collecting is an act of voluntary imprisonment. Instead of waiting for memory to find him, he builds a space with his own hands to lock it away.
In The Odyssey, Nolan has the Sirens sing to Odysseus: “What you want most is what you can never have; and what you can never have is what you once had and lost.” This functions almost as a prophecy of Kemal’s destiny—the exquisite torment of that itch is far more alluring than a mundane, comfortable reality.
If we understand this obsession as a form of Camusian absurd sovereignty—“I know this is all in vain, yet I still choose to endow it with meaning”—then judging Kemal’s inner experience by the standards of mundane happiness does indeed seem vulgar: outsiders have no right to decree whether he is happy. However, whether this self-contained harmony is truly “independent of others” remains open to question. Inside the museum, Füsun remains forever the object of the gaze. Kierkegaard long ago warned of the dangers of the aesthetic stage: a life structure that is highly self-contained and profoundly “meaningful” may simply be a more elegant disguise for despair.
Thus, Kemal’s parting words, “I have lived a very happy life,” are both his tight grip on the only oxygen tube left in the abyss, and his final claim of sovereignty, refusing to let anyone redefine his love. This is precisely where the charm of literature lies—it refuses to provide answers; it merely presents how a person, standing upon the ruins, stubbornly builds a spatialised time for himself.