ORIGINAL ARTICLE Of trauma and happiness: Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence Dhee Sankar 1 Ó The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022 Abstract This paper offers an interpretation of Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence (2008), and also the actual museum by that name curated by Pamuk in Istanbul. The museum differs fundamentally from any ‘‘real’’ museum in that it is a collection of objects memorializing the relationship between two fictional characters in Pamuk’s novel, and in particular one fictional individual—Fu ¨sun, the love of the fictional curator’s life. By relinquishing any claim to objectivity and embodying pure affect through actual objects of quotidian use, the museum conveys the trau- matic experience of a fictional personal history. The museum embodies metafiction, using verisimilitude to make a cathartic impact. My analysis seeks to understand how this verisimilitude of the eponymous Museum of Innocence in Istanbul pro- duces a cathartic rather than a neurotic effect on the fictional curator as well as on potential audiences. Keywords Museum of Innocence Á Pamuk Á affect Á fetish Á catharsis Over the last few years, museology has registered a paradigm shift. The curatorial approach has shifted its aim from objectivity to performativity (Boyd & Hughes, 2019, p. 4). Rather than aiming to inform the visitor about the attributes of individual objects and their histories, a performative approach marshals a narrative out of those histories and impacts the visitor on an affective level. This paradigm shift has been accompanied by the emergence of a different idea of the museum as a space: whereas a museum was understood earlier predominantly as an impressive body of public archives collected over a historical and/or archaeological timescale, smaller museums now appear with much more limited and specific areas of focus. & Dhee Sankar dheesankar@gmail.com 1 Presidency University, Kolkata, India Psychoanal Cult Soc https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-022-00277-1