Petronius and Pamuk?

A display from the Museum of Innocence

(Picking up on the theme of Trimalchio as author or craftsman raised by Katherine in the previous post, in a roundabout way...)

Last night at dinner we were making a list of things for friends to do on a trip to Istanbul.  Our friends are serious eaters, so most of the discussion revolved around where to eat, but I was also reminded of an article by Elif Batuman that I read in the April London Review of Books about the Museum of Innocence. This is a profoundly Borgesian project by Turkey's most famous (unreadable) novelist, Orhan Pamuk.  Here is part of Batuman's description of Pamuk's novel and its uncanny twin:

"Ten years later, Pamuk came up with an insane plan: to write a novel in the form of a museum catalogue, while simultaneously building the museum to which it referred. The plot of the novel would be fairly straightforward: over many years, an unhappy lover contrives to steal a large number of objects belonging to his unattainable beloved, after whose untimely death he proceeds to buy her family’s house and turn it into a museum.
You might think that Pamuk’s first step, as a writer, would have been to start writing. In fact, his first step was to contact a real-estate agent. He needed to buy a house for his future heroine, Füsun. During the 1990s, Pamuk visited hundreds of properties, trying to imagine Füsun and her parents living in them. It was beyond his means to purchase a whole building in Nişantaşi, the posh neighbourhood inhabited by Kemal, the hero of the novel. He could afford a single floor in a stone building in the old Ottoman commercial centre of Galata, but then the remodelling would be difficult. The beautiful rundown wooden houses near the old city walls were the right price, but those were in religious neighbourhoods, and this was a novel about the secular middle classes. In 1998, Pamuk finally bought a three-storey wooden house in Çukurcuma. Füsun, the petulant beauty, was thus neither a Nişantaşi socialite nor the scion of Galata bankers, but an aspiring actress living with her seamstress mother and schoolteacher father. The heroine’s socioeconomic position and much of her character were determined by real estate.
For the next ten years, writing and shopping proceeded in a dialectical relationship. Pamuk would buy objects that caught his eye, and wait for the novel to ‘swallow’ them, demanding, in the process, the purchase of further objects." The novel was published in 2008; the museum finally opened in April 2012.

A display of cigarette butts from the Museum of Innocence.

Among the objects obsessively collected by both the unhappy lover and by Pamuk are hundreds of lipstick-stained cigarette butts  smoked by the beautiful Füsun.  Something about the confluence of everyday objects, obsessive collecting, and house envisioned as display case brought Petronius to mind.  He stands out among all other ancient authors in his depiction of the 'thingness' of things, the stuff of daily life, from chamberpots and Priapic pastries to oversized jewellery and cheesy outfits.  The things he describes seem startlingly specific and tied to a particular class, time, milieu.  Petronius's tableware, his Corinthian bronzes and the ponticuli ferruminati that display dormice sprinkled with honey and poppy seeds, are distant cousins to Pamuk's evocative saltshakers, which Batuman acutely singles out:

"Late in the novel, no matter where in the world his Byronic gloom takes him, Kemal can’t stop running into Füsun’s mother’s saltshaker. Cairo, Barcelona, New Delhi, Rome: ‘To contemplate how this saltshaker had spread to the farthest reaches of the globe suggested a great mystery, as great as the way migratory birds communicate among themselves, always taking the same routes every year.’...Every few years, Pamuk writes, ‘another wave of saltshakers’ washes in, replacing the old generation. People ‘forget the objects with which they had lived so intimately, never even acknowledging their emotional attachment to them’. Unlike the Mona Lisa, which is always and only in the Louvre, the saltshakers are everywhere for a few years, and then they’re gone, shifting the dimension of rarity from space to time."

From Füsun’s mother’s saltshaker,  my mind turned to cheese dispensers, for we once were proud owners of a kitchen item that I feel Trimalchio would have appreciated:  a Leaning Tower of Pisa Parmesan Cheese dispenser (for your container of pre-grated Parmesan cheese product, of course). But I digress... what I wanted to point out is that in a later segment of the Satyricon (83), our hero Encolpius visits an art-gallery filled with erotically charged objects and paintings and delivers an emotional outburst; he meets the corrupt poet Eumolpus in the gallery.  In short, there is an interesting congruence the culture of collecting, eros, and fiction in both writers that would be worth exploring further.  The totalizing drive of Trimalchio to incorporate the entire world, including Athenian bees, into his own estates is not unlike Pamuk's and his narrator's obsessive urge to physically create the fictional/lost world of the beloved.