In this paper I discuss narrativization of a museum space in line with museumisation of a narrative by providing a case study of Orahn Pamuk’s “Museum of Innocence”: a novel extended into a museum. Masumiyet Müzesi (2008), as a novel, tells the story of a passionate, long-lasting love accompanied by an arduous yearning to collect material traces of the beloved during several years in the Istanbul of 1970s. The idea of building up a museum to exhibit the collection is brought up, but remains unaccomplished, at the end of the novel and is indeed actualized in 2014 by the author and in the city of Istanbul. This specific case of self-adaptation (transformation of one medium into another by the same author) opens up interesting questions about the relation between the two media of novel and museum; processes of transmediation and remediation; and authorial strategies.  

My primary aim in this paper is to see what processes of transmediation and rememdiation are at stake in transforming the narrative, as well as extending it, into the intensified multi-media space of the museum. Approaching the two interrelated media products as alternative ways of “world-making”, I will look into the ways temporality of the narrative and spatiality of the museum are entangled to produce a “novel of things” and a “story-museum”, the latter being not only an adaptation of the former, but indeed a material extension of it. As I will argue, several intermedial authorial strategies and the intensified combination of media (in its broad sense) in the museum – audio guides, archival footages and photos, newspaper extracts, everyday life objects, etc.- goes further than representing the novel and remediates the historical Istanbul of the 70s in fractions.