Museum Of Innocence - Reviews, Sex

Have you noticed an interesting pattern? Recently, love stories in literature and cinema are increasingly devoted to explicit perversions or manifestations close to them. And at the same time romanticized: "Fifty Shades of Gray" by E. L. James - a novel about a sadomasochist, Orhan Pamuk's "Museum of Innocence" - about a hidden fetishist and others. A frightening trend. How can you explain it?

Normal perversions?

The beginning of the 21st century is the time of narcissistic values, when the other person is perceived not as a “subject” - an equal person with his own inner world, but as an “object” serving to satisfy needs.

Love for a narcissist is not a meeting of two equal planets, love is when he is a planet himself, and a partner revolves around him like a satellite.

Material benefits in a consumer society have their own price, making them forget about the psychological and spiritual component of life. There was a transition from subjective relations to object ones. Narcissists are not surrounded by living people, but by objects. An object-oriented relationship to a partner is characteristic just of perversions. So, the fetishist does not see the difference between a partner as a whole, a part of it (as in foot fetishism) or an item related to a partner (which is what happens to Pamuk's hero, secretly collecting things from his girlfriend).

Perversions are formed in childhood, when a small child refers to the world as an object: the world exists to satisfy his needs. Childhood love is always selfish: "An honest child does not love mom and dad, but cream rolls" (Don Aminado). He does not understand that the other person is his equal Universe, in which there are feelings, dreams, desires, etc. The sexuality of a person with perversion is distorted already in early childhood, plus fixation occurs at this age.

Perversions have appeared on the pages of books before: Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade, V. Nabokov with the history of a pedophile … But their contemporaries understood that the authors were not describing the norm. And at the beginning of the XXI century, many previously unshakable boundaries are being revised, including those between norm and pathology. Orhan Pamuk's “Museum of Innocence” is not a story of beautiful love for me, but a description of fetishism, alcoholism and infantilism - three “isms”. Which, of course, does not detract from the literary merit of the book.

Things instead of a person

A hero named Kemal is a young Istanbul rich man. He is going to marry a girl of his circle, but meets a poor relative - Fusun, flares up with passion and decides to enter into sexual relations without obligation. The girl immediately agrees, and then she accuses the whole novel of insidious seduction and manipulates her feelings of guilt. Having caught Kemal in a lie, Fusun disappears. Having lost the object of passion, the hero suffers and decides that it is love, and even breaks off the engagement.

But is this love? Throughout the novel, the hero describes the girl's body and his admiration for it. Her thoughts and feelings remain almost without attention, the image of Fusun as a person remains incomprehensible, only her incredible beauty and physical attraction of the hero are obvious. The hero romanticizes his love, but in fact, the girl for him acts as an inanimate object of his passion.

It is not surprising that this attraction develops into fetishism. Kemal likes her body and smell so much that in her absence he touches the objects that she touched, runs them over her body, makes up a secret collection … These objects replace Fusun and closeness with her. From contact with objects, he is sometimes excited, then calmed down. The hero refuses sex for almost ten years, receiving sensual pleasure from objects that touched Fusun's body. Plus, he has obvious problems with alcohol, which is not surprising: if the person is a dependent warehouse, she is prone to dependence on everything, be it Turkish vodka or a woman. Kemal lives his whole life with his mother, yearning for Fusun and getting drunk in the evenings.

The root of emotional and sexual addiction is relationships with parents.

Kemal did not separate from his mother. This is evidenced by the tendency to take excessive responsibility for a woman, and tormenting with a false sense of guilt. The missing Fusun a year later makes itself felt. The hero rushes to her astride a white Chevrolet and discovers that she is already married to a young filmmaker and needs money. Over the next eight years, Kemal visits them to at least admire Fusun, supports her entire family and secretly steals her things. Inanimate objects become substitutes for real living contact. A man is driven by both passion and guilt.

The inability to end a love relationship, recognizing a fiasco, speaks of unresolved problems with parents.

Adult girl

Now let's look at the manifestations of infantilism. Fusun uses her husband in the same way as Kemal: her husband saved her from "shame", and she lives with him, refusing sexual intimacy. Men help and save Fusun all the time, and only get the opportunity to admire her beauty from a distance. The exchange is not equal. He is normal not in adult relationships, but in child-parent relationships: dad - daughter.

Fusun does not look like a romantic heroine, but an infantile girl who refused to grow up. All her life she lived with her parents, even when she got married; did not study and did not get a profession, having failed in the exam; she worked only for a few weeks - as a seller in a boutique, where she was taken for external data. There she met wealthy men, went on dates with them, and one of them eventually fell in love with her and kept her for many years. In her youth, she participated in a beauty contest, then dreamed of becoming a film actress, without taking concrete steps, expecting to be helped by her husband or fans.

What did she do for the world? What did you give or wanted to give? Even an actress she dreamed of becoming only for fame, that is, for herself, and not others. This is an infantile consumer attitude.

A mature person thinks about what she herself gives to the world.

Apparently Fusun had unresolved oedipal problems with his father. It was not by chance that she chose relatives as partners: both Kemal and her husband were distant relatives, which is incestuousness. She transferred her claims to her father to men, playing the same scenario: a man owes her something, cares and gives, and she is capricious and makes claims. In conversations with Kemal, she constantly complains about men and laughs at her fans.

It seems that all these years she lived with an unconscious feeling that her father had not given her something, but must give. And she committed suicide immediately after his death: perhaps, unconsciously, she decided to follow her father, who remained the main man in her life. And Kemal only had her things …

This is a story of love or an unhealthy attachment - for the reader to decide.