The Silent Life of Things : Reading and Representing Commodified Objecthood [1 ed.] 9781443886680, 9781443883689

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The Silent Life of Things

The Silent Life of Things: Reading and Representing Commodified Objecthood Edited by

Daniela Rogobete, Jonathan P. A. Sell and Alan Munton

The Silent Life of Things: Reading and Representing Commodified Objecthood Edited by Daniela Rogobete, Jonathan P. A. Sell and Alan Munton This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Daniela Rogobete, Jonathan P. A. Sell, Alan Munton and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8368-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8368-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements…………………………………………………

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Introduction………………………………………………………… All Things Considered… Daniela Rogobete

1

PART I: On Things and Thingness Chapter One…………………………………………………………. Things, Objects, Fetishes: The Current Critical Debate in Italy Maria Teresa Chialant

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Chapter Two......................................................................................... From Hand to Hand, from Country to Country Mihaela Irimia

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PART II: Cultural Commodifications Chapter Three....................................................................................... Macbeth’s Soup: What are Cookbooks Really For? Dana Percec

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Chapter Four......................................................................................... “The Diderot Project,” the Book as Object and Other Collectibles: A Palimpsestic Reading of Malcolm Bradbury’s To the Hermitage Elena Butoescu

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Chapter Five......................................................................................... Transcendent Commodities: Magical Materialism in the Short Stories of Bridget O’Connor Jonathan P. A. Sell

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PART III: Collectable Desires Chapter Six........................................................................................... Collecting Desire: A Comparative Analysis of John Fowles’s The Collector and Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence Hande Gurses

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Chapter Seven...................................................................................... Orhan Pamuk’s Neighbourhood: The “Western” Object Pallavi Narayan

123

PART IV: Postcolonial Reifications Chapter Eight………………………………………………………… 141 Multicultural Uniformity: Postcolonial Reification in the Novels of Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi Mehmet Ali Çelikel Chapter Nine........................................................................................ Commodification against Indianness: Symbolism of Things in R. K. Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi Ludmila Volná

153

PART V: Subject Objectification Chapter Ten........................................................................................... 165 Challenging the Commodification of Victorian Femininity: the Sensation Novel Elisabetta Marino Chapter Eleven....................................................................................... 182 Between the Aesthetics and the Pedagogy of Consumerism: Will Self’s My Idea of Fun and Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent Daniela Rogobete Notes on Contributors............................................................................ 203 Index...................................................................................................... 207

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We owe a great debt of gratitude to all those who helped us in our efforts to publish this volume. In particular, we would like to thank our contributors and friends not only for their creative and analytical endeavours but also for their patience and constant support. We are also grateful to Reghina Dascăl, Teodor Mateoc, Adrian Radu, Emil Sârbulescu, Lilijana Burçar, Cătălin GhiĠa and Dragos Ivana for their insightful comments and suggestions.



INTRODUCTION All Things Considered… Daniela Rogobete Life could not be conceived outside the realm of things no matter how uninterested in the material side of life we claim to be or how spiritually oriented we consider ourselves. Things and objects, if we are to stick to the distinction Bill Brown draws in his Thing Theory (2001), talismans and mementos, memorabilia and paraphernalia, family heirlooms and photo albums, identity documents, diplomas and certificates are an integral part of what we are, of how we define ourselves and how others perceive us, in short, of the luggage we carry through life though we pretend to be travelling light. This constant relationship with the materiality of our surrounding world has permanently shaped and reshaped our understanding of the world and of our own subjectivity. We have always managed to find different ways to relate to objects and to interpret them, in more or less analytical, descriptive, normative or metaphorical ways, embracing anthropology, semiotics, sociology, philosophy, aesthetics or history in pursuit of a better assessment. When it comes to reading objects and understanding what they tell us, how we act upon them and, conversely, how they shape our mind, as Lambros Malafouris tries to demonstrate in How Things Shape the Mind (2013), we cannot overlook the multiple roles they are asked to perform and the diverse values they embody. These values, theorised by Jean Baudrillard in his theory of object signs (1981) and included in a system of exchange, difference and signification, refer to: functional values (pertaining to the capacity of objects to perform utilitarian tasks and fulfill human needs), exchange value (the capacity of objects to reflect their value on the market when participating in the circulation of goods), symbolic exchange value (residing in the relationship established between objects and a subject, mainly visible in gift circulation) and sign value (the symbolic value attached to objects by virtue of the social status they offer their possessors).

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Introduction

That things are incessantly talking to us and telling us their silent stories cannot be contested; there seems to be a tight connection between texts and material objects in terms of shared narrativisation. Like the text, placed by its etymology between the idea of its actual production (textere > Lat. “to weave”) and the material result (text as a tissue woven of sounds, words, ideas, quotations, meanings and allusions), the object itself stands on the threshold between noumenon and phenomenon as Greek philosophy teaches us. The poetics/poietics of objecthood creates this metaphorical bridge between matter and idea. That we long ago ceased to listen to things, in spite of all our theories and speculations, cannot either be contested in this age of rapid disposal. It is difficult to say when exactly our disenchantment with things occurred. In Liquid Modernity (2000), Zygmunt Bauman placed it at the moment when solid modernity, oriented towards durability and security, turned into liquid modernity and when most of our certainties and fixed points of reference were accordingly “liquified” and reshaped by the instability of our never fulfilled desires and the insatiability of our newly engendered needs. Earlier, in The Sane Society (1955), Erich Fromm had called this disenchantment “alienation” and saw it as a moment of rupture between people and the things they produce, between consumption and the needs that initially engendered it. For his part, in The System of Objects (1968), Baudrillard placed it at the moment when objects stopped being judged according to their sign value, when they started being assessed according to their exchange value and when material culture mostly became a carrier of ideological instead of symbolic meaning. Since there can be no agreement as to when our magical, unmediated understanding of things ended, when things lost their meaningful transparency and became opaque to us, we could just as well look for a metaphorical explanation and a moment in the history of humankind that might provide it. This moment could be the fall of the Tower of Babel. Whenever we think of that we think of the annihilation of “a state of union” given by a common language and a common purpose (building a heaven-reaching tower) and of the Babelians’ fatal error, defined as a “craving to have” (Fromm 1984: 125), which led to the final destruction of their unity. We always see this Fall as resulting in the ultimate fragmentation of languages and selves and the ensuing misunderstanding that was to mar human relationships for ever. We never think of the amount of objects, possessions and belongings, amassed in that huge Tower, that must have been turned into a jumble of broken things, shards and scraps, remnants of a once coherent materiality that, from then on, lost its unitary meaning. What we got instead was a heap of fragments whose

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symbolic values and meanings leaked into each other, forever changing our manner of understanding and representing them. Still, as their users and possessors, we have always thought ourselves entitled to produce value judgements and make aesthetic assessments about objects, and to place them into categories that best suit our perception of things and our ideological stances. We have generally ranked them between instrumentality and adequacy, between craft and art, ready-mades and commodities, meanings and practices or copies and originals, and we have extensively theorised on the subtle borders that separate them. We are still looking for hidden meanings and untold stories behind things, we are still delving into the mystery of their impact on our subjectivity and even if we do not have all the answers, we have at least discovered, that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever”. *** Without pretending to come up with any ground-breaking perspective on objecthood, our volume proposes an analysis of objects, always open to ideological and media-based interpretations, as participants in what we hope to be a newly defined negotiation between postmodern subjectivity and objectivity. By combining cultural, literary and material culture studies, this volume aims at answering several basic questions: Do objects or their representations passively surrender to commodification, when their “thingness” is engendered by a highly consumerist culture, or do they subtly resist it, and in the process redefine the relationship with their possessors? And if the latter is possible, in what ways do these strategies of resistance function and how are they culturally represented? Where are these objects culturally and historically located and, on the other hand, how is the dialectics objectivity/subjectivity historically determined? As the title suggests, this anthology of critical and theoretical studies on material culture focuses upon the cultural treatment of materiality and the ever changing relationship between object and subject as determined by the intensified process of commodification and by what theorists called the irreversible “alienation” engendered by the postmodern society of consumption. The volume tries to explore in cross-disciplinary terms the manner in which literature and art—in various historical periods but reread according to postmodern paradigms—have generally responded to the changing modes of representing material objects. The rationale for this book stems from the attempt to offer an answer to these questions, to provide a practical analysis of our “material habitus” and its tight relation to identity and human relations, and to make an assessment of the attribute

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Introduction

of “objecthood”, which is situated on the threshold between everyday instrumentality, pure aestheticism and commodification. The eleven essays that make up this volume (some of them presented at the 11th ESSE Conference held in Istanbul in 2012) are all concerned with the ever wider scope of commodification and the analysis of its plural dimensions with a special emphasis on subject and cultural commodification. The first chapter offers a theoretical approach to “things” and their basic values and connotations in relation to their possessors, sociohistorical contexts and ideologies. The essay written by Maria Teresa Chialant, a specialist in the field of material culture, provides a survey of current trends in theoretical studies on things/objects and fetishes, mainly focusing upon the extensive Italian research in the domain and projecting it against the more general context of European and American material culture studies. The author refers to the manner in which the object has constantly been theorised and viewed as an instrument, an agent of mediation, a commodity or as “a narrative function, a symbolic element and a multi-purpose textual device”. In Chapter Two, Mihaela Irimia proposes a cultural incursion into what we generally assume to be the silent materiality of the world around us and attempts to give voice to the inaudible. The author aims at revealing the “historico-cultural embeddedness of things” in our vicinity, the subtle object-thing distinction that shapes our manner of envisaging them and the lessons they constantly teach us. Irimia refers to the subtle voice and insidious meanings things assume in their relationship with their producers, users and possessors, or in their passage from “hand to hand”. She specifically refers to the “talking coin” or “speaking specie”—a recurrent motif in eighteenth-century European “object tales” or “ittales”—that is eloquent not only of the circulation of objects, their subsequent accumulative symbolic value and their “power of assessing the human world” but also of the circulation of (in this case French, German, Romanian and Oriental) cultural ideas and their mutual influence. Chapter Three narrows down the scope of the analysis of “thingness” from theoretical aspects to more specific problems. Dana Percec’s study analyses materiality as represented by Stuart and Tudor culture and as appropriated and reinterpreted by twenty-first-century material studies. She pays particular attention to the material world—especially to food— depicted with “striking vividness and timeless relevance” in Shakespeare’s plays. Her intention is not only to discuss Shakespeare’s textualisation of the tight connection between objects and hierarchies and social roles, but also to demonstrate that the Bard’s treatment of objects reveals an early version of consumerism, both material and cultural.

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Developing the idea of cultural commodification’s latent presence in history, in Chapter Four, Elena Butoescu analyses the crucial moment of the “making of modernity” from the perspective of an altered conception of “objectivity vs. Objecthood”, choosing to exemplify it with the “Enlightenment Project”, reinterpreted from Denis Diderot’s perspective and rewritten by Malcolm Bradbury in his 2002 novel To the Hermitage. Starting from the syntagm that “books breed books”, the article theorises the text/manuscript in terms of “collectable commodities” whose obsessive accumulations of historiographies, layers of alternative realities, texts and paratexts are collected in encyclopaedias, libraries and museums as witnesses of a “culture of display”. In Chapter Five, Jonathan P. A. Sell resumes the problem of cultural commodification in his discussion of two collections of short stories by Bridget O’Connor. “The critique of materialist culture and commodified identity” present in these short stories offers him the opportunity to comment upon the problematic relation between objects and their cultural connotations and upon their status of commodities in an era of quick disposal, as well as to formulate a mode of writing he terms “magical materialism”. In the author’s opinion one particular feature of our postmodern times, disposability, further complicates the issue of the connection between objective referents, absent objects, implied connotations and “textual archaeologists” in search of lost significances. The third section of this collection makes the transition to more subject-oriented essays and to the specific relationship between objects and their possessors that has completely reformulated post-modern human identity and subjectivity. In this regard, Hande Gurses offers an interesting comparative analysis in Chapter Six of John Fowles’s The Collector and Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, from the perspective of the subtle link between “desire,” “possession” and commodity value. Using a Lacanian reading paradigm, the article theorises the “effects that collected objects have on the creation and realisation of the beloved as fantasy”. In Chapter Seven, Pallavi Narayan also analyses Pamuk’s fictional work, with a particular focus upon The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence. Her special interest lies in the problem of the neighbourhood regarded as a multiple interpretive site made up of material items, structures, images and objects that constitute a universal vocabulary of space. Narayan deepens the context of her study by discussing the palimpsestic texture of urban life through enumerations and analyses of objects and images and through various tactics of walking and experiencing the city. The author’s final aim is to show that the strong Turkish attachment to “Western” objects, as apparent in Pamuk’s novels,

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Introduction

results in a gradual transformation of the mental and emotional spaces of everyday reality and the Westernisation of the subject. The section entitled “Postcolonial reifications” focuses upon the even more complicated problems of objectification and cultural commodification within postcolonial spaces—Indian, in this case—where different, and sometimes conflicting, cultural influences are at work. The difficulty arises when the objects under scrutiny start to resist the general trend of cultural levelling and their possessors find themselves caught between the opposite drives of both embracing and rejecting reification. In Chapter Eight, Mehmet Ali Çelikel views the process of reification, illustrated in postcolonial texts published during the second half of the twentieth century, as marked by a visible tendency towards Westernisation, globalisation and rejection of native identities and values. His analysis of postcolonial cultural commodification is applied to the fictional work of Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi and his essay theorises the resistance to cultural hybridisation and reification of identities. His main goal is to demonstrate that reification within postcolonial contexts sometimes leads to the commercialisation of ethnicity and, finally, to “multicultural uniformity”. Ludmila Volná’s focus in Chapter Nine is on a similar phenomenon, the reification of Indianness and of India, in general, as apparent in R. K. Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi. She analyses the symbolic representations of objects in the novel, their metonymic relation to India, and the overall metaphorical connection between possessors and their various belongings, the idea of home and belonging and their material representations by means of family objects, the interplay of traditional and foreign influences rendered by means of reified cultural values and identitarian symbols. The final section of the volume is dedicated to analyses of the way in which subjectivity is restructured according to new forms of, mainly commodified, objecthood—mostly determined by market demands, consumerist habits and mass-media—and deals with various forms of reifying bodies, souls and identities. Collectable items and their capacity to define identity are explored by Elisabetta Marino in Chapter Ten. Marino is particularly interested in the manner in which Victorian women were inextricably connected to the objects they were adorned with or surrounded by, to such an extent that their individuality was gradually erased and turned into a “graceful, albeit anonymous and mass-produced, shape of an hour-glass”. Her essay aims not only to demonstrate how Victorian femininity was turned into an expensive commodity, as read by contemporary Neo-Victorian analyses,

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but also to argue that this commodification was challenged by the sensation novel and its strategies of constructing and deconstructing the villainess. Chapter Eleven, the last essay in the collection, focuses upon the new reconfigurations of post-capitalist subjectivity in relation to the exacerbated dimensions of material accumulation and consumption and to the problematic relationship between an objecthood neutralised by serial production and consumerist habits and this unstable subjectivity in constant transformation. The issues of the ultimate reification and commodification of people, human values, ideas and life itself—so much debated by sociologists and contemporary material culture theorists—are the main concerns of Daniela Rogobete’s essay which tries to enlarge upon the idea of “life-after-consumerism”. The essay analyses two postmodern productions, Will Self’s novel My Idea of Fun and Michael Haneke’s cinematographic production The Seventh Continent, from the perspective of an excessive consumerism and reification that dehumanises people, blurs identities, distorts reality and, in a final act of “subjective reobjectification” commodifies childhood itself. The sombre outcome of this failed transition between functionality and “hedonism” is a world of simulacra, of material surplus, addiction, lack of empathy and emotional transfer, that pushes humanity towards a final surrender to a shallow reality defined by brands, advertisements and trademarks. All things considered, we have tried to offer our readers a rewarding journey into the world of objects located in various cultural spaces and diversely displaying their “objecthood”. We have looked into their secret lives, untold stories and deceptive appearances in search of possible answers to the questions we initially formulated. Sometimes we found the answers we were looking for, sometimes things eluded us, tricking, deceiving and contradicting us, forcing us to search deeper and scrape away the layers of dust and habit that made them invisible. No doubt, they wanted to tell us something, but what it was exactly—that’s another thing...

Works cited: Baudrillard, Jean. 2005 [1968]. The System of Objects. Trans. James Benedict. London & New York: Verso Books. _____. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Trans. Charles Levin. St. Louis, Mo: Telos Press Publishing. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Introduction

Brown, Bill. 2001. “Thing Theory”, in Critical Inquiry 28.1, Things (Autumn): 1-22. Fromm, Eric. 2005. The Sane Society. London & New York: Verso Books. _____. 1984. To Have or To Be? London: Abacus. Malafouris, Lambros. 2013. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

PART I ON THINGS AND THINGNESS



CHAPTER ONE Things, Objects, Fetishes: The Current Critical Debate in Italy Maria Teresa Chialant Recent years have seen in philosophy and cultural studies something like a thingly turn, a neue Sachlichkeit, a nouveau chosisme. For at least two decades, there has been a slow, incremental, but by now immense stirring of things. (Connor 2010: 1)1

Introduction Thing Theory and Object Studies have recently gained more and more ground not only among philosophers and cultural analysts—as remarked by Steven Connor in the above-cited passage—but also among a growing number of literary critics who, as shown by the vast extant bibliography,

1

Connor refers here to the new interest in “thingness” which has emerged in the past decades, and to the new field of cognate studies in the humanities that has opened up. The secret histories of things, the social lives of things, the sense of things (to paraphrase some of the titles of books on the subject) have been investigated by anthropologists, historians and philosophers. In the area of anthropology, see: Douglas and Isherwood (1979); Appadurai (1986); D. Miller (2001, 2008, 2010). Among historians, see Roche (1997). A gender-oriented approach has been adopted in the following books: De Grazia and Furlough (1996); Kirkham (1996); Styles and Vickery (2006). In the field of philosophy, see: Foucault (1966); Baudrillard (1968); Latour (1993). Among Cultural Studies theoreticians, Bill Brown is probably the most relevant one; the founder of contemporary Thing Theory, he is the author of numerous works: Brown (1996, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2010).

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read texts in connection with material culture and the concepts of 2 commodity and fetish. Although Great Britain and the United States are the leaders in this heterogeneous field of studies, very interesting publications on things, objects and fetishes in such disciplines as philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, literature, media/visual/cultural studies have recently appeared in Italy too. But before starting a tentative survey of the state of the art in this country, a few general remarks need to be made. First of all, even if thing and object are often used as synonyms, fine distinctions between these terms have been drawn by philosophers as well as Cultural Studies analysts. As Bill Brown puts it, “as they circulate through our lives, we look through objects […], but we only catch a glimpse of things. […] We don’t apprehend things except partially or obliquely (as what’s beyond our apprehension). In fact, by looking at things we render them objects” (2001: 4). This position has been taken up and underwritten by Julia Breitbach who comments: The cultural transparency of objects is pitted against the opaque nature of things. […] Things seem to fall through the grid of legibility and escape the order of objects. […] things may be conceptualised as the “before and after” of objects, as the manifestation of “excess” and “latency”, but in the final analysis such temporal succession has to give in to an “all-atonceness”. (Breitbach 2011: 34)

From these statements, there emerges what could be called a sort of uneasiness regarding such elusive, impalpable entities as “things”, almost a sense of awe towards them, to which the more tangible, hic et nunc “objects” seem an apprehensible alternative. Steven Connor, on the other hand, refers “at intervals” to the distinction between things and objects, but claims not to observe it, mixing instead his usages “promiscuously, as the demands of [his] argument, or of alliteration, dictate” (2010: 1). I personally prefer the more concrete object when dealing with literary texts—and therefore, with stories, figures and images rather than with abstract concepts. Leaving aside the differences between Thing Theory and Object Studies, the critical material which has been produced so far seems to roughly fall within two main categories: academic research on specific 2

Particular attention has been given to the Victorian age. See: Richards (1990); A. Miller (1995); Frow (1997); Lindner (2003); Freedgood (2006, 2009); Armstrong (2008).

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topics in the various disciplines mentioned above, and books that present themselves as catalogues of objects accompanied by personal commentaries. The latter category can be further divided into two kinds of publications: actual lists of literary and artistic objects, and writings of an autobiographical kind on ways of looking at particular objects. The first kind includes a rather imposing volume, A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010), by Neil MacGregor, who, as a scholar working at the British Museum, London—which has for over 250 years been collecting things from all round the globe—has the necessary knowledge and competence to perform such a task. The second kind includes a collection of essays edited by Sherry Turkle Evocative Objects. Things We Think With (2007), Steven Connor’s Paraphernalia. The Curious Lives of Magical Things (2011) and Orhan Pamuk’s The Innocence of Objects (2012). The last three works explore the stories and meanings behind the everyday objects that shape our lives, and turn out to be idiosyncratic inventories of beloved things that are freighted with both ideas and passions. Evocative Objects consists of a taxonomy of objects grouped according to the tropes of “design and play”, “discipline and desire”, “history and exchange”, “transition and passage”, “mourning and memory”, “meditation and new vision”. The book’s six chapters are accompanied by elegant black-and-white photographs. The authors, who are scientists, artists and designers (the editor herself is Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT), adopt an approach that tends towards a sort of nostalgia in dealing with commonplace objects which have a particular role in their personal lives (such as a cello, ballet slippers, a radio, a bracelet, a silver pin, a suitcase, apples, and so on). Paraphernalia, which is organised around eighteen discrete types of “fidgetable” things (bags, buttons, combs, glasses, handkerchiefs, pipes, plugs, sweets, paper clips, clips, batteries, keys, toys, etc.), is mainly interested “in the things we do to things”, and probably tells us more about its author than the things themselves (Dillon 2011). The Innocence of Objects is a fine catalogue from the Museum of Innocence, which is named after Pamuk’s 2008 eponymous novel, and was opened by its author in Instanbul in 2012. It presents short essays, novel excerpts, autobiographical notes, photographs and relics of twentieth-century Instanbul life. As such, it is not only the writer’s guidebook to the museum he created to accompany his novel, but also a fetishistic and narcissistic gesture (like the museum itself) and a reflection on the act and art of collecting.

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These books have been mentioned not only because they are fundamental contributions to the debate on things and objects, but also because of their readability and attractiveness which are due to different factors: in Pamuk’s case, to his exceptional creativity; in Turkle’s and Connor’s, to their non-academic approach to the subject, in spite of their scholarly pedigrees; and in MacGregor’s, to the extraordinary erudition that permeates his research. These works are, in fact, both entertaining and thought-provoking, both light and profound. They also testify to the material turn that is being currently being taken in the humanities as well as in the social sciences, where an increasing number of researchers are switching their attention to materiality and cultural artefacts.

Lists, inventories, catalogues Inventories and catalogues are other words for the rhetorical figure of enumeratio, or enumeration, which consists of itemising terms that are connected to one another either by asyndeton (a list without conjunctions) or by polysyndeton (a list with conjunctions). The resultant sequence or juxtaposition of terms which belong to the same semantic cluster is known to rhetoricians as the figure of accumulatio, or accumulation. Umberto Eco’s Vertigine della lista (2009) is one of the most important investigations of the phenomenon of cataloguing and collecting. This lavishly illustrated volume sits squarely at the intersection of semiotics, art criticism and cultural history, and consists of an extensive work of 3 research into “things” in verbal and visual arts. Eco’s book starts with Homer’s Iliad, the poem in which he identifies two ways of representation. One is description, as in the case of Achilles’ shield, a self-contained, finite form, encompassed by its circular shape. The other, which suggests almost physical infinity since it neither ends nor achieves a formal closure, is the catalogue, or inventory, such as the list of Greek ships by means of which the poet wishes to give an idea of the immensity of the Achaean army but is not able to mention all the warriors 3

The opportunity for this research was offered to the author by his work at the Louvre, when he was asked to organise a series of activities, in November 2009, on a topic of his own choice; on that occasion, he suggested the list of the objects contained in the paintings exhibited in the Louvre Museum. The fine volume that emerged as a result of the research is made up of selected passages from renowned literary works belonging to the Western tradition, as well as illustrations from well-known paintings. For a review, see Beard (2009).

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who make up that mass of men. Eco observes that it is typical not only of primitive societies but also of medieval literature, the Baroque and the postmodern condition to have catalogues which contain items that are difficult to classify, or which blur the boundaries of the known and the describable, or whose objects are named at random, without order or 4 hierarchy (2009: 18) . These kinds of lists satisfy an artist’s pathological need to mention and include everything in his/her text, and reflect an author’s omnivorous ambition: Eco speaks, in fact, of the list’s greed and its giddiness. When a writer or an artist chooses enumeration, this is due to his/her fear of ineffability when confronted with an infinity of words as well as of things (Eco 2009: 82). Examples are adduced from various writers, among them Dickens (with the well-known description of London at the incipit of Bleak House, with its megalosaurus, dogs, horses, foot passengers and fog), Joyce (with the list of rivers in Finnegans’s Wake) and Borges (his attempt to represent an unlimited universe in The Aleph). Eco was not the first critic to discuss the importance and meaning of this device in literature. He himself mentions a previous study by Robert E. Belknap, The List. The Uses and Pleasure of Cataloguing (2004). Even earlier, Francesco Orlando, a scholar of French and Comparative literature, had published what can be considered a pioneering book in this area of research, Gli oggetti desueti nelle immagini della letteratura (1993) [Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination. 2006]. It is a dense, erudite book in which, adopting both a structuralist and a psychoanalytic approach, the author explains the appearance of catalogues and inventories of obsolete, useless and worn out objects in literature from the late eighteenth century onwards as “the return of the anti-functional” (original emphasis), thus interpreting this phenomenon in Freudian terms. Moreover, Orlando associates the manifestation of objects which oppose the very idea of commodity with the function of literature as the site of resistance to social order: According to Orlando things take a life of their own, and become endowed with a spectral life—a second life which reanimates them with the aura of emotions, and confirms their persistence despite their condition of decay, neglect and decomposition. […] Orlando’s remarks move into the area of

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In this regard, Orestano has written: “The epistemological horizon of postmodernity has indeed been described as a panorama crowded by competing discourses (Lyotard), leaving it to readers themselves to decide among particulars which constitute true contributions to knowledge” (2011: 206). Orestano refers to Lyotard (1997).

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Chapter One modern consumption, of the social life of obsolete things, and to this end he inserts a list culled from Little Dorrit. […] The way of assessing objects points to their condition as things that are used, worn out, and subsequently either aspire to the higher status of objets d’art or are forgotten, and turn into ghosts of their former existence. (Orestano 2011: 211-2)

Orlando notes that the rhetorical device holding these objects together is the list, which “does not include abstractions: no situations, conditions, valuations, consideration, or emotions, but rather things in the material sense of the word—physically concrete things presented on the imaginary plane of reality of the various literary works” (2006: 2). The collection of essays edited by Gian Mario Anselmi and Gino Ruozzi Oggetti della letteratura italiana (Objects of Italian Literature) also belongs to the semantic area of the inventory applied to literature. The editors point out in their Introduction that “twentieth-century culture in Italy has always been accompanied by a reflection on objects, and has produced—as in the case of Futurists and Surrealists—significant creative interpretations” (2008: 7). The book focuses on meaningful objects in Italian literature and offers a classification of those which recur most often in literary texts, organising them in alphabetic order, from “Abiti e accessori femminili” (attire and women’s accessories) to “Cartolina” (card), “Maschera” (mask), “Pianoforte” (piano), “Scarpe” (shoes), “Televisore” (television set), and so on. The aim of this volume is, on the one hand, to look at the social and cultural changes in a community through the things which inhabit the texts produced in specific historical moments; on the other, to identify narrative functions and archetypes related to particular objects. So, for instance, one of the authors points out various typologies of “boat” in some novels and poems: the enchanted boat; the boat as a shelter, an alcove, or a home; the boat as a metonym; the boat as a ghost, or a vision; and so on. A book with similar aims and structure, but with a wider disciplinary spectrum, is Estetica degli oggetti (The aesthetics of objects) by the art historian Ernesto L. Francalanci (2006), who, ranging from literature to cinema, from architecture to photography and contemporary art, analyses five objects from everyday life—a chair, a table, a door, a window and a veil—in order to identify “the responsibility of postmodernism in the 5 transformation of our relationship with reality”. Francalanci discusses the changes our post-industrial age has undergone in the field of aesthetics. In an age in which the world has become an immense, global commodity 5

My translation from book cover.

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experiment, things and objects—like events and phenomena—tend to conform to a widespread and popular idea of aesthetics in which content values, typical of modernity, are gradually substituted by the formal and spectacular elements that characterise postmodern ideology. Francalanci’s main merit consists in his scrutiny of particular objects from a plurality of disciplinary perspectives. For instance, when he analyses “the chair”, he juxtaposes such different works as Duchamp’s Portrait of Chess Players (1911), Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles (1888), F. T. Marinetti’s first drama of objects Vengono (They come) written in the 1930s, Joseph Kosuth’s experiment in conceptual art One and Three Chairs (1965), and Marlene Dietrich sitting astride a chair in the film The Blue Angel (1930)—an interesting example of textual contamination. If we compare these works with those discussed in the previous section, we notice how in spite of their erudition, the English and American catalogues address a wide and not necessarily learned readership, while the Italian ones have been produced within academe and are scholarly contributions to such specific disciplines as literary studies, semiotics, art history and visual arts. The one exception is Eco’s book which aims at a broader reading public thanks to its appealing layout and reproductions from museum collections.

Fetishes, multimedia performances, objects in movement Closely related to the works mentioned above, and characterised by its comparative approach, is a recent book by Massimo Fusillo, Feticci. Letteratura, cinema, arti visive (2012) (Fetishes. Literature, cinema, visual arts), which explores the function and meaning of objects whose investment with symbolic, affective and emotional values transforms them into fetishes. In the Preface, the author makes it clear that he does not attribute any negative connotation to the word “fetish”; on the contrary, he wants to rescue it from its traditionally low reputation. The term was first adopted by African colonialists to describe incomprehensible pagan rites such as the worship of wooden or stone objects; then its use spread to cover Western veneration of saints’ relics. By the time of Marx and Freud, the fetish had been extended from anthropology to political economy and psychoanalysis. What is common to these different approaches is the idea of the inauthentic: the fetish is something that is worshipped but should not be, the symbolic surrogate of a pristine plenitude which has been lost—as argued by Charles de Brosses in Du culte des dieux fétishes (1760)—or the morbid attraction to inanimate matter.

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Fusillo welcomes the new attitude to fetish which has emerged in the areas of Cultural and Gender Studies, of camp aesthetics and queer criticism, and mentions the German philosopher Hartmut Böhme (2006) who reaches the conclusion that fetishism is no longer an enemy to be exorcised, but something which lies within everybody and challenges us all to make difficult cultural analyses. Fusillo has chosen this topic for two main reasons: the existence of an important link between fetishism and artistic creativity, and the scarcity of critical research on the fetish in the field of literary studies and the arts. He maintains that “fetishism always works on details, […] and includes in its microcosm a whole macrocosm 6 of passions and narratives” (Fusillo 2012: 9). This means that, on the one hand, writers and artists use the object-fetish to project onto it symbolic and emotional values, thereby animating the inanimate world of things; on the other, objects as fetishes are present in literature and in the arts because of the strong attraction of anthropological origin exercised by inanimate, inorganic matter (Augé 1998) which finds its full expression during the twentieth century, from Marcel Duchamp onwards. In his Introduction Fusillo remarks that the object in literature is not only a theme, but also a narrative function (mainly in mystery stories and fairy tales), a symbolic element (in poetry) and a multi-purpose textual device. He argues that contemporary philosophical reflection on objects is enjoying a new efflorescence, perhaps because in our time, things have come to constitute a fourth realm alongside those of animals, plants and minerals: they have become “partners with which we interact […] intelligent protagonists of a fluid and fragmentary landscape, a mediascape” (2012: 16). In his wide-ranging research, he explores the history and typology of the object-fetish: from the object of seduction (Jason’s embroidered cloak in the myth of the Golden Fleece by Apollonius of Rhodes) to the “memorial” object, characteristic of the great tradition of the realistic novels of such writers as Goethe and Dickens; from the magic object (the dummy in Achim von Arnim’s Melück, Marie Blainville) to the materiality of the object with an evocative function (the painted dishes with images from One Thousand and One Nights in Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur) and to the object-icon (the ball in the account of a baseball game in Don De Lillo’s Underworld). Feticci shares some features with Bruno Di Marino’s Film Oggetto Design. La messa in scena delle cose (2011) (Film, Object, Design. The mise en scène of things), which deals with the centrality of objects in films and the visual arts. The book starts with a reflection on the importance of 6

My translation.

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both special and banal objects, and on their role in presiding over everyday life. Here, Di Marino most pertinently recalls Baudrillard’s Le Système des objets (1968), from which he quotes a crucial statement: one of the conditions necessary for the transformation of an object tout court into an article of consumption is its becoming a sign, which implies a different relationship with a human being. Di Marino adds that, more than in real life, “it is within the boundaries of the audiovisual imagination that a process of transformation of the object into a sign takes place” (2011: 8). The texts analysed by the author are various and belong to different media. When he considers an object—whether produced by design, or present in a video, film or installation—he always tries to determine the reasons why it plays a leading role in that text. The history of cinema, in particular, is full of meaningful objects, from the globe Chaplin/Hitler plays with in The Great Dictator (1940), to the red shoes in the eponymous film (1948) or the telephone in Jean Cocteau’s La Voix humaine and its film adaptation (the first episode of Rossellini’s L’amore, 1948). In Di Marino’s book, theory and close reading of films intertwine felicitously. The author commences with vanguard artists and “found art”, a term which describes art created from undisguised but often modified objects that are not normally considered art, mostly because they already have a non-art function. The object is rediscovered as a merely aesthetic object, the objet-trouvè, first introduced by Picasso, Braque and Duchamp. The use of found objects was quickly taken up by the Dada movement 7 (Man Ray and Francis Picabia), by the Surrealists (Breton), and later by Futurist cinema. In La cinematografia futurista, Marinetti speaks of “dramas of filmed objects”, whose protagonists are “animate objects, humanised objects, with the same clothes and passions as humans; civilised, dancing objects which are taken out of their usual environment and put into an anomalous condition; this, by contrast, emphasises their incredible non-human life and structure” (in De Maria 1981: 193). The next step in the occupation of human space by objects in visual arts is represented by the introduction of the robot in science fiction films, the invention of technological gadgets in the James Bond’s series, and the role of design in the Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, with Marco Ferreri and Michelangelo Antonioni. It is no coincidence that Di Marino 7

By the time of the Surrealist Exhibition of Objects in 1936 (held at the New Burlington Galleries in London), a whole range of sub-classifications had been devised—including found objects, readymade objects, perturbed objects, mathematical objects, natural objects, interpreted natural objects, incorporated natural objects, Oceanic objects, American objects and Surrealist objects.

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concludes his book with a mention of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, whose final explosion has to be read today, “not as a utopian message on the end of capitalism, but as the extreme exaltation of the object itself” (2011: 183). Although Fusillo’s and Di Marino’s books differ in their specific disciplinary areas (comparative literature and audiovisual studies, respectively), they share similar theoretical premises and methodological approaches to the symbolic and emotional values of material objects.

Philosophical perspectives Besides film directors, artists and writers, the authors and works discussed above also refer to intellectuals who have explored things and objects from a philosophical perspective. One of them, Remo Bodei, a phenomenologist and one of the leading contemporary maîtres à penser, has written a fascinating book, La vita delle cose (2009) (The life of things) in which he discusses the major philosophical pronouncements on this topic from Hegel, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, through Simmel, Bloch and Heidegger to Benjamin. In the process he points out the connections between philosophy and art, giving examples of the meaning artists, writers and poets attribute to things from seventeenth-century “still lives” and Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems early in the twentieth century, to Jorge Luis Borges’ “Las cosas” (in Obra poetica, 1923-1977) and Pablo Neruda’s “Oda a las cosas” (in Libro de las odas, 1972). Bodei draws a very neat distinction between objects and things: The meaning of “thing” is wider than the meaning of “object”, as it includes individuals and ideals, and all that we care for […] Keeping persons in the background, I choose to speak only of material objects, that are made or invented by humankind […] Objects become things when individuals, societies and history project all affections, ideas and symbols onto them; objects become things when they are no longer commodities, mere consumer goods or exchange goods, or status symbol expressions. (Bodei 2009: 22) (My translation)

As a consequence, Bodei argues, when an object transforms itself into a thing, it manifests both the traces of the natural and social processes which have produced it, and the ideas, prejudices, tastes and attitudes of a whole society.

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Bodei’s mention of “traces” is reminiscent of philosopher Maurizio Ferraris’ Documentalità. Perché è necessario lasciar tracce (2009) (Documentality. Why it is necessary to leave traces) in which he speaks of “social objects” (as distinct from “natural” or “ideal” objects) which “exist in space and time as dependent on subjects […] and exist only if at least two individuals think that they do” (44). So, social objects depend on a human subject genetically, but not structurally. Ferraris has recently started a debate with Gianni Vattimo (the philosopher of the so-called “weak thought”) which questions postmodernism itself and calls for a return to realism in philosophy. On the premise that metaphysics considers the essence of the world, he argues that truth lies in facts and that empirical reality itself is coincident with truth. So, while for Vattimo metaphysics is only ideology and facts are only empirical and contingent realities, for Ferraris truth is coincident with objective realities. Major contemporary philosophers have contributed to this debate in the volume of ten essays co-edited by Ferraris, Bentornata realtà. Il nuovo realismo in discussione (2012) (Welcome back, reality! A discussion about new realism). Without entering the complex philosophical querelle on postmodernism vs. realism, what is important in the present context is the fact that contemporary cross-disciplinary interest in things and objects is probably part of a reaction to the postmodern wave. Another important contribution in the field of philosophy, within the area of Material Culture Studies and from a gender perspective, is Wanda Tommasi’s Oggi è un altro giorno. Filosofia della vita quotidiana (2011) (Today is another day. A philosophy of everyday life). This book, which intermingles philosophical argument with narrative, starts with an illustration of theoretical positions on everyday life (from Freud to De Certeau, Heidegger, Lefebvre, Wittgenstein and Agnes Heller) in order to analyse the work of such writers as Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras and Franz Kafka. The result is a reflection on the ways in which repetition and invention alternate in the symbolic creation of ourselves: We all construct ourselves symbolically by dressing in a particular way, wearing certain jewels, hanging paintings and posters on the walls of our rooms, decorating our homes, choosing some objects instead of others. By these acts of self-fashioning, we mould our identity day after day. This gesture of artistic shaping is daily, and lasts for our whole lives. (Tommasi 2011: 123) (My translation)

Nuova filosofia delle piccole cose (New philosophy of small things) by Francesca Rigotti (2013) deals with a similar topic. One of Italy’s leading

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scholars in the field of metaphors and the philosophy of objects, Rigotti has devoted most of her studies to an investigation of the sublime in the quotidian. This little book helps us recognise the meaning of the objects that mainstream culture considers meaningless but which have, nonetheless, a great importance in our lives. To the question “how can one practice a philosophy of small things?”, the answer is by “taking a humble, banal object and drawing it out of usual perceptions and verbal mechanisms” (Rigotti 2013: 70), that is, discarding customary habits of mind and valorising such daily objects as a coffee cup, an iron, a colander, a bar of soap or a Smartphone, with the aim of finding the truth of great 8 things in small ones . This amounts to a new kind of philosophy (with several feminine aspects) that works on words and ideas through objects. Also focusing on our relationship with the objects that inhabit our lives, but from a psychological perspective, is Giovanni Starace’s Gli oggetti e la vita. Riflessioni di un rigattiere dell'anima sulle cose possedute, le emozioni, la memoria (2013) (Life and Objects. Reflections of a soul’s junk-dealer on properties, emotions and memory). Drawing on psychoanalysis, anthropology and sociology, the author has written a dense and passionate narrative merging criticism and creative writing, in which literary quotations, references to clinical pictures and autobiographical fragments alternate to rouse the reader’s identification. This book’s theoretical horizon is well illustrated in the following passage: Starting from the premise that objects always speak of those who own them, it is necessary to consider them as the product of a mixture of matter and mind, in order to pursue a continuity of meaning between the inside and the outside. The outside—that is, the object, the matter—contributes to materialise and shape the inside (the psychic, the world of ideas). Between the inside and the outside, between individual conscience and objects there is a continuity of sense, as well as a discontinuity of substance: psychic substance and material substance. […] The mind leaves traces of itself everywhere, in any manifestation—from the most abstract to the most concrete one. Everything is impregnated by the psyche: […] words, bodies, objects and the places moulded by its actions. (Starace 2013: 31-33) (My translation)

This perspective is a sort of pantheistic materialism, where the borders between an individual and his/her environment, between the Self and the Other are much more blurred and fragmented than one would imagine. But Gli oggetti e la vita also carries a “political” message in its connection of 8

See also Rigotti 2007.

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the discourse on objects to consumerism, commodification and alienation in contemporary society. Philosophy, obviously, has a leading role in Thing and Object studies, as it was probably the first discipline to seriously address the topic under discussion, whether in Aristotle’s auto to pragma or Hegel’s die Sache selbst (the thing itself), or in Husserl’s phenomenology. The authors mentioned in this section show an interest in literature and visual arts, which they draw on to strengthen their philosophical arguments; they also all share a strongly ethical stance in the way they connect major existential questions to everyday life.

English literature and Cultural Studies: the state of research A modest, but growing, interest in things and objects is also apparent in the area of English studies in Italy. Predictably enough, particular attention has been given to the Victorian period (see note 2), and to Dickens above all, for he constitutes a case in point as regards the presence of things in his fiction and journalistic writing alike, not only for the sheer quantity of objects “constantly shouldering people out of the way” (Brooks 1984: 26), but also for their narrative functions and cultural meaning (see Waters 2008, Buzard 2009 and Freedgood 2009). Two volumes, in particular, stand out: Yvonne Bezrucka’s Oggetti e collezioni nella letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento (2004) (Objects and collections in 19th-century English literature) and Marilena Parlati’s Oltre il moderno. Orrori e tesori del lungo Ottocento inglese (2012) (Beyond modernity. Horrors and treasures of the long nineteenth century in 9 England). The former explores the significance of objects in a period in which British expansionism was at its zenith, when Victorian middle-class homes were literally replete with exotic objects, and when collecting was widespread. On the one hand, collecting satisfied the taxonomic anxiety inherited from the previous century; on the other, it was the expression of disturbing idiosyncrasies and eccentricities (as in Dickens and Oscar Wilde), or of transgressive fantasies (as in Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker). Parlati’s book is wider in scope. In her Introduction, the author remarks that her aim is to go beyond the usual approaches of most 9

See also Parlati (2005a, 2005b, 2011) and Chialant (2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c).

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contemporary sociology and literary criticism, which only deal with modern things as commodities or fetishes. Thus she integrates the Marxian concept of commodity with the anthropological models developed by Arjun Appadurai and others in The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986). Quoting Appadurai, she underlines his injunction “to follow the things themselves” for it is only through “the analysis of [their] trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things” (1986: 5). She also shares Elaine Freedgood’s position which postulates the existence of a “thing culture”, a form of object relations that preceded “commodity culture” (Freedgood 2006: 8). One of the most original sections of Parlati’s book deals with the occult life of things, ghosts and “materials”, with reference to nineteenthcentury interest in the so-called pseudo-sciences—such as mesmerism and phrenology—which exercised a great influence on literature. The final chapter of her volume, “Un-escapable matter: dusts of modernity”, surveys the literary and visual figurations of such a pervasive and archetypal thing as “dust” in contemporary European art from Duchamp to Man Ray, Francis Bacon and, more recently, Paul Hazelton and Catherine Bertola.

A few closing notes As the present study has tried to demonstrate, in current academic research in Italy there is widespread interest in material culture. This is evident at a transdisciplinary level, and is also confirmed by the state of historiographic research. An important example is Renata Ago’s Il gusto delle cose. Una storia degli oggetti nella Roma del Seicento (2006), recently translated into English with the title Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome (2013). Following in the steps of, and going beyond, the seminal studies of Claude Braudel and Daniel Roche, Ago’s book reconstructs the material lives of seventeenth-century Romans, exploring new ways of thinking about the meaning of things (furnishing, clothing, paintings) as historical phenomena, “by focusing on the relation between people and things, the affection that men and women expressed for their possessions, and the ways in which these objects helped shape their owners’ identities,” as Peter Burke (2013) put it in his

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10

review . A previous book that deals with similar topics is Vita di casa. Abitare, mangiare, vestire nell’Europa moderna (Home life: dwelling, eating and dressing in modern Europe) whose author, Raffaella Sarti (1999), is an expert in gender and women’s history, the history of the family and domestic service, and the history of material culture in Europe and in the non-European countries around the Mediterranean. Another interesting example of this kind of approach to history is the special issue of Genesis. Rivista della Società Italiana delle Storiche (2006) (Genesis. The Journal of the Italian Society of Women Historians) on Oggetti (Objects), whose Introduction provides a wide-ranging assessment of recent research, with special attention to gender issues. The long historiographic tradition in Italy in this field of studies stretches back as far as 1976 when a whole issue of the prestigious academic journal Quaderni storici (History Notebooks) was devoted to “Cultura Materiale” (material culture). My survey would be incomplete if no mention were made of a few texts belonging to different literary genres, which have recently been published in Italy. First of all, a short story by a well-known novelist, Sandro Veronesi, Il ventre della macchina (The bowels of the machine) (2008), whose plot unfolds around a banal object—a cigarette lighter— which becomes the catalyser of the protagonist’s anxieties. As the book’s blurb reads, “it is a modern parable of the reification of feelings, and the impossibility to live, nowadays, without projecting one’s desires, ambitions and hopes on inanimate objects”. Likewise, Oggetti smarriti e altre apparizioni (Lost properties and other apparitions) (2009), by the writer and journalist Beppe Sebaste, is a sort of meditation on lost items (sets of keys, business cards, sunglasses) as well as ideas and stories that are forgotten until a gesture brings them back to memory; in the author’s words, “lost items are sentences, stories, adventures, opportunities which, like ghosts, are painful but necessary” (Sebaste 2009: 3-4). Two books with similarly eloquent titles, by the poet and essayist Antonella Anedda, intermingle erudite comments on art and literature with personal memories: La luce delle cose. Immagini e parole nella notte (The light of things. Images and words in the night) (2000) and La vita dei dettagli. Scomporre quadri, immaginare mondi (The life of details. 10

According to Nussdorfer’s review (2013) “This pathbreaking study looks at the development of an early modern consumer society in the only way that gives this history real texture—through the concrete materiality of things—things of increasing variety and quality distributed according to age-old hierarchies of wealth and gender but also innovative patterns of emerging ‘taste’”.

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Deconstructing paintings, imagining worlds) (2011). Finally, and very much concerned with the materiality of commonplace objects, are the works by two women poets: Roberta Dapunt and Anna Toscano. Dapunt has chosen to write on aspects and moments of her daily life in an alpine village in the Dolomites (Alto Adige-Südtirol), taking her inspiration from the land she works and the animals she looks after. In her collection La terra più del paradiso (Earth more than heaven) (2008), the materiality of the quotidian, connected to the passing of the seasons and the rituals of peasants’ life, seems to provide a safe haven against the doubts of faith. Toscano also practises a true poetics of objects in her collection Doso la polvere (Measuring dust) (2012), in which the author shows a special talent for transforming everyday epiphenomena into signs of empathic sharing. Last but not least, further proof of the interest that has been shown in thing and object studies in Italy over the last few years are the articles which from time to time appear in important daily papers. The very titles of some of those recently published are quite eloquent: “Se l’oggetto del desiderio è proprio un oggetto” (If the object of desire is just an object), and “Cara scrivania, quanto ti voglio bene” (My dear desk, how much I love you), which review two books: by the clinical psychologist Giovanni Starace and the anthropologist Daniel Miller—both mentioned in the present survey—(Marrone 2014; Caserza 2014); “Il trionfo amaro della modernità” (The bitter triumph of modernity), which illustrates an exhibition held at the Giardini di Venezia (Venetian Gardens) by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who retraces mankind’s history through its objects in his work “Elements”, displayed at the “XIV Biennale di Venezia” (Panza 1914); “Caro oggetto, ti voglio tanto bene” (Dear object, I love you so much), on things’ rebellion and revenge on humans (Favole 2014); “Ma oggi la merce sembra produrre senso solo al supermercato” (Goods seem to produce sense only at the supermarket, today), on the meaning of commodities in contemporary consumer society (Bordoni 2014); “La lunga vita della natura morta” (The long life of still life) on Caravaggio, Cézanne and Morandi (Scorranese 2014); “Dai jeans ai libri, la casa scoppia” (From jeans to books, our houses blow up”), which reviews James Wallman’s book Stuffocation: Living More With Less, published in 2015 (Franceschini 2015). All this varied and multifaceted cultural production corroborates the assumption of the present essay, namely that Italy is actively taking part in the “thingly turn” that characterises the current critical debate. From these initiatives, we can easily infer that new perspectives will open up for Thing and Object Studies in the next few years. Meanwhile, it is worth

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wondering whether we could explain this phenomenon, on the one hand, in relation to a more general tendency to question postmodernism and call for a return to realism and, on the other, to the apparently relentless growth of a commodity culture that characterises our age.

Works cited Ago, Renata. 2006. Il gusto delle cose. Una storia degli oggetti nella Roma del Seicento. Roma: Donzelli. Trans. Bradford Bouley, Corey Tazzara with Paula Findlen. Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Anedda, Antonella. 2000. La luce delle cose. Immagini e parole nella notte. Milan: Feltrinelli. _____. 2011. La vita dei dettagli. Rome: Donzelli. Anselmi, Gian Mario and Gino Ruozzi (eds.). 2008. Oggetti della letteratura italiana. Rome: Carocci. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value”, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 363. Armstrong, Isobel. 2008. Victorian Glassworlds. Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830-1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Augé, Marc. 1998. Le Dieu Objet. Paris: Flammarion. Baudrillard, Jean. 1968. Le système des objects. Paris: Gallimard. Beard, Mary. 2009. “Is there still life in the list?”, The Guardian, Saturday 12 December. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/dec/12/umberto-eco-listsbook-review. Accessed 28 February. Belknap, Robert E. 2004. The List. The Uses and Pleasure of Cataloguing. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bezrucka, Ivonne. 2004. Oggetti e collezioni nella letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento. Trento: a.r.e.s. Bodei, Remo. La vita delle cose. 2009. Rome-Bari: Laterza. Böhme, Hartmut. 2006. Fetischismus und Kultur. Eine andere Theorie der Moderne. Reinbek: Rohwolt. Bordoni, Carlo. 2014. “Ma oggi la merce sembra produrre senso solo al supermercato”, La Lettura. Corriere della sera. 13 July, 7. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1981. “Las Cosas”. Obra poetica, 1923-1977. Buenos Aires: Alianza Editorial, 333.

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Breitbach, Julia. 2011. “The Photo-as-Thing. Photography and Thing Theory”. M. M. Parlati/ Maurizio Calbi (eds). The European Journal of English Studies, 1. Special Issue, “Matter and Material Culture”. London / New York. Routledge: 31-43. Brooks, Chris. 1984. Signs for the Times. Symbolic Realism in the MidVictorian World. London: George Allen & Unwin. Brosses, Charles de. [1760] 1988. Du culte des dieux fétiches. Ed. M. V. David. Paris: Fayard. Brown, Bill. 1996. The Material Unconscious. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. _____. 1998. “How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story)”. Critical Inquiry, 24.4 (Summer), 935-64. _____. 2001.“Thing Theory” in Bill Brown (ed.). Critical Inquiry, 28.1 (Autumn). Special issue, “Things”: 1-22. _____. 2003. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. _____. 2010. “Objects, Others, and Us (The Refabrication of Things)”. Critical Inquiry, 36, 2 (Winter): 183-217. _____. (ed.). 2004. Things. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Burke, U. Peter. 2013. “Review” of Renata Ago. Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. In Review Quotes. Available at: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo9035480. html. Accessed 23 December 2014. Buzard, James. 2009. “Enumeration and Exhaustion: Taking Inventory in The Old Curiosity Shop”, in Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David (eds.). Contemporary Dickens. Columbus OH: The Ohio State University Press, 189-206. Caserza, Guido. “Cara scrivania, quanto ti voglio bene”. Cultura e Società. Il Mattino. 28 February 2014, 27. Cavallo, Sandra and Isabelle Chabot (eds). 2006. “Oggetti”. A special issue of Genesis. Rivista della Società Italiana delle Storiche 5/1. Special issue “Oggetti”. Chialant, Maria Teresa. 2010. “Un mondo di oggetti: The Return of the Soldier di Rebecca West”. Cuadernos de Literatura Inglesa y Norteamericana. 13, 1-2 (Mayo-Noviembre): 41-56 _____. 2012a. “The Dickens World, a World of Objects”, in Francesca Orestano and Norbert Lennartz (eds.). Dickens’s Signs, Readers’ Designs. New Bearings in Dickens Criticism. Rome: Aracne, 33-52. _____. 2012b. “Il romanzo vittoriano nella prospettiva degli Object Studies e della Thing Theory”, in Giulia Pissarello, a cura di, Figures in

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the Carpet: studi di letteratura e cultura vittoriana. Pescara: Edizioni Tracce, 45-54. _____. 2012c. “Things, Inventories and Commodities: the Current ‘Material Turn’ in Dickens’s Criticism”, Cultural Perspectives. Journal for Literary and British Cultural Studies in Romania, 17: 2144. Connor, Steven. 2010. “Thinking Things”, Textual Practice, 24, 1: 1-20. _____. 2011. Paraphernalia. The Curious Lives of Magical Things. London: Profile Books. Dapunt, Roberta. 2008. “Inverno” in La terra più del paradiso. Turin: Einaudi. De Grazia, Victoria and Ellen Furlough (eds.). 1996. The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Maria, Luciano (ed.). 1981. Marinetti e il Futurismo. Milan: Mondadori. Dillon, Brian. 2011. “Deep meditations on everyday stuff and ‘fidgetable things’”. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/08/paraphernalia-magicalthings-connor-review. Accessed 19 November 2014 Di Marino, Bruno. 2011. Film Oggetto Design. La messa in scena delle cose. Milan: Postmedia. Douglas, Mary and Baron Isherwood. 1979. The World of Goods. New York: Basic Books. Eco, Umberto. 2009. Vertigine della lista. Trans. Alastair McEwen, The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay. Milan: Rizzoli, 2009. Favole, Adriano. 2014. “Caro oggetto, ti voglio tanto bene”. La Lettura. Corriere della sera, 13 July, 6. Ferraris, Maurizio. 2009. Documentalità. Perché è necessario lasciar tracce. Rome-Bari: Laterza. _____. et alii (eds.). 2012. Bentornata realtà. Il nuovo realismo in discussione. Turin: Einaudi. Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Francalanci, Ernesto L. 2006. Estetica degli oggetti. Bologna: Il Mulino. Franceschini, Enrico. 2015. “Dai jeans ai libri, la casa scoppia”. R2 Stili di vita. La Repubblica, 27 January, 33. Freedgood, Elaine. 2006. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. _____. 2009. “Commodity Criticism and Victorian Thing Culture: The Case of Dickens”, in Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David (eds.).

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Contemporary Dickens. Columbus OH: The Ohio State University Press, 152-168. Frow, John. 1997. Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fusillo, Massimo. 2012. Feticci. Letteratura, cinema, arti visive. Bologna: Il Mulino. Kirkham, Pat (ed.). 1996. The Gendered Object. Manchester: Manchester UP. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. C. Porter. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Lindner, Christoph. 2003. Fictions of Commodity Culture: From the Victorian to the Postmodern. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1997. La condition postmoderne. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. MacGregor, Neil. 2010. A History of the World in 100 Objects. London: Penguin. Marrone, Titti. 2014. “Se l’oggetto del desiderio è proprio un oggetto”. Cultura e Società. Il Mattino. 28 February, 27. Miller, Andrew. 1995. Novels behind Glass. Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Miller, Daniel. 2001. Home Possessions: Material Culture behind Closed Doors. Oxford: Berg. _____. 2008. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity Press. _____. 2010. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press. Neruda, Pablo. 1972. “Oda a las cosas”. Libro de las odas. Buenos Aires: Losada, 836-40. Nussdorfer, Laurie. 2013. “Review” of Renata Ago. Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. In Review Quotes. Available at: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo9035480. html. Accessed 17 March Orestano, Francesca. 2011. “Charles Dickens and the Vertigo of the List: A Few Proposals”. Dickens Quarterly, 28. 3 (September): 205-14. Orlando, Francesco. 2006. Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination. Ruins, Relics, Rarities, Rubbish, Uninhabited Places, and Hidden Treasures. Trans. Gabriel Pihas and Daniel Siedel. New Haven: Yale UP. Pamuk, Orhan. 2012. The Innocence of Objects. Trans. Ekin Oklap. New York: Abrams. Panza, Pierluigi. 2014. “Il trionfo amaro della modernità”. Terza Pagina. Corriere della sera. 5 June, 31.

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Parlati, Maria Maddalena. 2005a. “Consuming Objects: Commodity Culture and Narrative Devices in Late-Victorian Popular Fiction”, in Atti del XXI Congresso Nazionale AIA (Modena, 25-27 settembre, 2003), Mark Silver et al. (ed.). Roma: Officina, 158-66. _____. 2012. Oltre il moderno. Orrori e tesori del lungo Ottocento inglese. Milan-Udine: Mimesis. _____ and Nicholas Daly (eds.). 2005b. Special issue “The Cultural Object: Maps, Memories, Icons”. Textus, XVIII, 2 (July-December). _____ and Maurizio Calbi (eds.). 2011. Special issue “Matter and Material Culture”. The European Journal of English Studies, 15.1 (April). Richards, Richards. 1990. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rigotti, Francesca. 2013. Nuova filosofia delle piccole cose. Novara: Interlinea. _____. 2007. Il pensiero delle cose. Milan: Apogeo. Roche, Daniel. 1997. Histoire des choses banales. Naissance de la consommation dans les sociétés traditionnelles (XVIIe- XIXe siècles). Paris: Fayard. Sarti, Raffaella. 1999. Abitare, mangiare, vestire nell’Europa moderna. Rome-Bari: Laterza. Scorranese, Roberta. 2014. “La lunga vita della natura morta”. Cultura. Corriere della sera. 24 August, 31. Sebaste, Beppe. 2009. Oggetti smarriti e altre apparizioni. Rome-Bari: Laterza. Starace, Giovanni. 2013. Gli oggetti e la vita. Riflessioni di un rigattiere dell'anima sulle cose possedute, le emozioni, la memoria. Rome: Donzelli. Styles, John and Amanda Vickery, eds. 2006. Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700-1830. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tommasi, Wanda. 2011. Oggi è un altro giorno. Filosofia della vita quotidiana. Naples: Liguori Editore. Toscano, Anna. 2012. Doso la polvere. Milan: La Vita Felice. Turkle, Sherry (ed.). 2007. Evocative Objects. Things We Think With. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Veronesi, Sandro. 2008. Il ventre della macchina. Milan: Special edition for Corriere della Sera. Waal, Edmund de. 2010. The Hare with Amber Eyes. A Hidden Inheritance. London: Chatto & Windus.

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_____. 2012. “Cultural Artifacts”, Review of O. Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, The New York Times—Sunday Book Review, 30 November. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/books/review/theinnocence-of-objects-by-orhan-pamuk.html?_r=0. Accessed 3 February. Waters, Catherine. 2008. Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods. Aldershot: Ashgate.

CHAPTER TWO From Hand to Hand, from Country to Country Mihaela Irimia To a large extent, things are certainly some of the “things” that populate our daily existence. They are matter and matters about which we pass opinions, utter judgments, produce narratives of varying length and substance and use as we best think. Not only are they there for the taking. They make “things” easier for us, though, at times, less easy, whether at the level of linguistic or other forms of expression, as well as in plain actuality. In a collection of essays about things that talk published about a decade ago, Lorraine Daston drove the case home with the warning: “Imagine a world without things. […] Without things, we would stop talking. We would become as mute as things are alleged to be. If things are ‘speechless,’ perhaps it is because they are drowned out by all the talk about them” (2004: 9). We hush them into a protracted state of muteness. As the only speaking, because the only reasoning, species, humans take pride of place among the identities around them. But what if other identities could or did talk under given circumstances? No wonder Daston implied the educational contribution made by things to the life/lives of humans: object lessons were spotted and formulated on both the art and the science fronts, while things and “things” were dealt with by the book’s contributors as sitting at the crossroads of Cultural, Literary and Material Culture Studies. Such interdisciplinary approaches are part and parcel of our assessments now and hardly anybody in the know would deny the historico-cultural embeddedness of the things of the world. Any of the critical stances we embrace nowadays is of the engagée kind and ascertains the situatedness of its object of interest, be it a thing, a person or an event. Featuring in Cultural Identity Studies, these are deictically crucial components. A recent movie about Stephen Hawking’s and his wife Jane’s married life couched a romantic biography drama in terms of a theory of everything. Theories of everything, of every thing, have been

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elaborated down the centuries in Western civilisation, all the way from Plato to Vattimo, from strong to weak thinking, from scientifically ambitious to culturally relativistic grounds. Not one of them has been able to detach the object from the subject of its enquiry. From our vantage point we can now fathom more or less persuasively the trailblazing change entailed by modernity, that enduring and entangled process which I define as the Long Modernity. By the same token, I regard the eighteenth century, a time of economic machine assertion, as Classic Modernity (aka the Enlightenment), which built on Early Modernity (aka the Renaissance) and flowed into High or Industrial Modernity (aka the nineteenth century) with Late or Post-Modernity as its present-bound end. What has become of things during these phases of Modernity? Has the deep-seated commodification of the things that make up our lives affected our identity/ies to the extent that we need a new reading grid to apply to the world? Has consumerism blunted our critical acumen and turned us into indiscriminate users of goods? And in what relation do we stand to the things that make our existence pleasurable? It could be that the effect of consumerist culture has spoiled us into “things” depending on things. It could be that what we have lost in terms of aesthetic appreciation now reads as mere utilitarian benefit. One “thing” is sure in all this, namely that humans, or else, societal-cultural subjects are impossible to isolate from things, or simply objects. That sheer objects serve us, humans, as things in varying cultural contexts, and that the dialectics of object and thing cannot be a matter of indifference to the human race. Perhaps thing theory can be debated with renewed critical energy now that alternative thing production has set a firm foot on the stage of interdisciplinary studies. In the nature–nurture debate not a few “things” have taken place that will presently reveal to us a new face of reality. According to Bill Brown, the establishment of Material Culture Studies, fortified by Material History, is proof of historicism’s “desire to make contact with the ‘real’ […] in accounts of everyday life and the material habitus, as in the ‘return of the real’ in contemporary art” (2001: 3). We are doubtless the only signiferous race and as such have made, used and left behind endless amounts and kinds of things. In “any particular time and place [these] are probably the truest representation we have of values and meaning within society” (Kingery 1995: ix). Chronotopically, that is, things are carriers of the human touch, hold or move, owing to which they circulate in a given cultural context. We could not possibly speak about civilisation without them for they have been “the accoutrements of human culture and society throughout history and prehistory […], [t]he grammar of things [being] related to, but more complex and difficult to decipher than the grammar of

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words” (1995: 1). As necessary cultural additions to nature, “[a]rtifacts are tools as well as signals, signs, and symbols” (1). Thing theory has called our attention to the pleasure taken by humans in objects of the external world, “however problematic that external world may be—however phantasmatic the externality of that world may be theorised to be” (Brown 2001: 3). We are used to reading books about the most trivial things that fill our daily existence. Where literature and above all poetry were once the domain of elevated and hard to gain details of the world in so far as they were deemed to be the reflection of a higher world than ours, of a reality peopled by more than human creatures and ordered by superior laws, the advent of Modernity put a decisive stop to this. As so many Hamlets, all inquisitive, doubting and apprehensive modern people, we seem to be telling our Horatios that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy. For one thing, there are more things on earth than we may be able to speculate about. And as so many Heideggerian offspring, we feel at home thinking of the world as made up of simple things capable of making our mean lives enjoyable with their immediate usefulness. This was “the ‘authentic experience’ of thingness by the Greeks, an experience of ‘the Being of beings in the sense of presence’” (Frow 2001: 270-271). Heidegger lamented the loss of this ontological purity of the thing and, like the Russian Formalists, found it regained in poetry. He looked for the untainted freshness of things in preSocratic thought and language very much in the way in which Shklovsky saw in art the retrieval of the sensation of life by making us feel things, by making “the stone stony” (Shklovsky 1988: 24). But, while this may appear more to the taste of a modernist poem which begins “in the street, with the smell ‘of frying oil, shag tobacco and unwashed beer glasses’,” (Brown 2001: 3), Long Modernity can boast a copious display of things testifying to the bourgeois taste for the trifling everyday: Dutch painting of Early Modern times, the English novels of Classic Modernity, Scottish domestic largesse or French interior pomp in High Modernity, American indoor wealth in jazz-craze times or the Robbe-Grillet nouveau roman type of interest in les choses et les mots rather than the Foucauldian reverse “order of things”—all these betray an exaggerated focus on descriptions of objects. In the 1950s the large screen was alert to it and encouraged cinévérité or observational cinema, with its obsession to show audiences the camera in the direct, raw process of shooting images. Real objects, as well as real people and real happenings were treated in the manner defined by T. S. Eliot as the handling by the modernist poet of an “objective correlative” (1972: 100), the catalyst of comprehensive situations reduced to their identitary “objecthood.”

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Postmodernity has since been sensitive to “a certain ‘methodological fetishism’ (which) refuses to begin with a formal ‘truth’ that cannot, despite its truths, ‘illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things” (Appadurai 1986: 5). Things circulate historically, they have their own social, economic, cultural, emotional, sexual and professional lives. We also circulate historically “through the thicket of things,” (Krakauer 1997: 309) looking for ideas no longer susceptible of leading to clear and pure truths. What were once regarded as universally valid certainties have been replaced by approximations and relativisations of convictions. “Things in any minimally complex system carry an indefinite number of actual or potential overlapping uses, significations, and values” (Frow 2001: 284). We can no longer rely on conclusions carved in stone. Instead of taxonomies comprehending all kinds of “orderings of things,” from custom-geared protocols to the formal ontologies of the sciences stemming from Kantian rigour, we are now faced with a challenging reality of always relative identities. We discover that “[t]hingness and the kinds of thingness” we are dealing with “are not inherent in things; they are effects of recognition and uses performed within frames of understanding” which may be the result of circumstantial situations or custom-validated or rationally patented axiological tools. “And persons, too, count or can count as things. This is the real strangeness: that persons and things are kin; the world is many, not double” (Frow 2001: 285). Frow’s assessment dovetails with Brown’s discussion of the thing– object dialectics. We routinely equate thing with object, while thing theory makes a point of differentiating the one from the other. Conceived as pure identities free from any cultural determination or conditioning, objects are, we could say, such stuff as thoughts or/and ideas are made of. Not so things. The latter are “what is excessive in objects, what exceeds their mere materialisation as objects”, as they are more than their mere “utilisation as objects—their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence; things are “the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems” (Brown 2001: 4). If we accept the thing = object + cultural cover equation, it follows that we do not simply look at things, but rather through them, deciphering the codes that underlie our interpretive attention. Only so do they become meaningful to us. Only so do sheer objects turn into culturally motivated things. “The story of objects asserting themselves as things […] is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject–object relation” (Brown 2001: 4) (emphasis added).

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In his profound critique of Western philosophy as a systematic forgetting of the question of Being, Heidegger (1962: 41-42) was alert to the historicity of the whole argument. He struggled to restore the erstwhile vigour of Western metaphysics and proposed a constructive destruction of the tradition originating in Parmenidian thinking, which came to fruition in Cartesian concepts and attained its climax in Kant’s transcendental ideas. In his resort to language and its huge capacity to store the freshness of Being—unluckily lost by and to metaphysics—he tried hard to rescue the human investiture of the world. Hence his appeal that philosophy start with the things at hand that make us feel comfortable in this world. Hence his emphasis on the care (Sorge) with which we should relate our identity/ies and the identities of the things around to being-in-the-world. Heavy with culturally specific values, functions, protocols, rituals, uses and meanings, things can only yield to thick description, we will conclude. Objects, in faithful observance of Heideggerian etymologies, stand for hindrances or impediments to human enterprises engaged in making sense of Being (ob- “against”, jacere “to throw”). Our caring look at and careful listening to the things of the world will make these indifferent entities into meaningful ones and into entities for which we care. Thing theory, according to Brown, maintains that “[t]emporalised as the before and after of the object, thingness amounts to a latency […] and to an excess […] of the object/thing dialectic” (2001: 5). Things are objects that have been culturalised, humanised, and can therefore be anthropomorphised. Placed in the circuit of human gestures and practices, things can be personified and made into narrative characters. Only in this way “have historians, sociologists, and anthropologists been able to turn their attention to things” (6). Placed in “particular temporal and spatial contexts,” objects turn into things, granted their potency, namely that of showing “how they organise our private and public affection” (7). Objects turned things discharge the chronotopic function of making the world usefully relevant to humans. Things depend on people. They are things owing to us, and we depend on them, we are humans owing to them. Things R us. The implicit jocular quality of the assertion underlines “how inanimate objects constitute human subjects, how they move them, how they threaten them, how they facilitate or threaten their relation to other subjects” (7) (emphasis added). There is another dimension to the cultural game engaging things and humans. Interested in The Nature of Things: The Secret Life of Inanimate Objects, Lyall Watson distinguishes between a simple thing and one which becomes, “as it were, ‘whole’ again,” namely “a talisman—from the Greek root telesmon meaning accomplishment, fulfillment and completion

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[…], something which does not exist on its own but in relation to things, and which might well have a tendency to seek completion in its own way” (1990: 21). It is an Augustinianism of sorts, in which figuram implere is literally of the “order of things.” This meaningful relationship holding among things makes of things co-authors, not merely co-actors, of the daily plays in which we are engaged. Watson recalls Jung’s definition of die Tücke des Objekts, the perfidy of inanimate objects, namely, what we are tempted to call our failures to have smooth and pleasant relations with the things around at any moment: accidents will happen and we find ourselves angry with things that do not listen to us. Jung, Watson reminds us, used to make fun of “books ‘hiding themselves’ and of his spectacles ‘seeking out’ a chair of a concealing pattern”; he mentioned “devils that go into objects and ‘play the most extraordinary stunts’, letting toast fall always on the buttered side” (1990: 21). And, like Jung, Watson concludes that it is not things as such that matter in this playful chaining of daily gestures so much as what we, humans, believe about them. The more we treat things as if they were people, the more we “insinuate life into them” (112). Once we have embarked upon a sustained dialogue with the things within our living sphere, we extend to them the capacity to speak, to hear, to feel and what not. By this symbolic extension of human qualities, things assume a humanity that makes them closer and more intelligible to us, while we cease being indifferent to them as we realise how useful and reliable they can be. Alice’s momentary wonder the minute she reads the urge “Drink me!” on a bottle found on a table in Wonderland vanishes once she accepts the “Eat me!” invitation written on a cake in the same realm beyond our dull current life. These two weird happenings are preceded by her encounter with the White Rabbit, whose speaking and therefore thinking capacity she does not doubt a single moment. From this moment onwards she will take her various physical metamorphoses for granted and play her role of wonder-oriented moves with an easy heart. “The incorporation of verbal identities” by such familiar objects says something about “their social and imaginative identities” (Tiffany 2001: 73). They are things owned and made by humans, “[y]et the grammatical construction of the owner/maker formulae undermines the peculiar agency of the artifact” (73). Speak as grammatical subjects they do, but they feature as objects on which an actual, i.e. real subject exerts his/her power. The effect is “a novel position suspended between subject and object, human and thing” (Tiffany 74), which goes hand in hand with the problematic ontological status of the world they inhabit. It is the fantastic, a world opening up within our own world, yet functioning according to

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laws which either stay utterly obscure and unconceivable to us, or are acceptable for a brief and transient interval, during which time our world is suspended. Todorov identifies three functions of the fantastic: (1) producing a “particular effect on the reader—fear, horror, or simply curiosity”; (2) serving the narration, “maintain[ing] suspense [… so] permitting a particularly dense organisation of the plot”; (3) permitting “the description of a fantastic universe, one that has no reality outside language” (1975: 92). Things can also talk to humans in the real world, even if only for short and normally worrying moments. As we attend to our own activities and mind our own business, seldom do we become aware of things within seeing or hearing distance that seem to be wanting to do the same for themselves in the relationship holding between them and us. We ignore them because we are too used to them and pass by them unawares so that suddenly, when we look for something and cannot find it, we start to rush, conjure spirits to succour us and feel ready to accept the least logical method to grab it. In various languages, this gap in communication is expressed as the failure of one of the senses to be on its guard and turn active. Quite often, the sense at fault is sight. “It was looking me in the face” has a perfect equivalent in the Portuguese “Estava a olhar para mim”. In Romanian on the other hand it is hearing that comes to the fore with “Nu vorbea”, literally “It was not speaking”, so it could not be found because it could not be heard. In Italian, touch is also involved as an assertive, bodily form of communication: “Quel che man non prende, canton di casa rende” meaning that what does not come to hand is held by some or other corner in the house. Historically, we are told, things have been said to talk for themselves in two diametrically opposed ways. There are “idols: false gods made of gold or bronze or stone that make portentous pronouncements to the devout who consult them,” and there is “self-evidence: res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself” (Daston 2004: 12). Both exclude human interpretation or mediation, supposed as they are to tell the pure truth. This recalls Barthes’s mythologies, those impostures of modern bourgeois life which will always weave a comforting type of language which vampirises communication. His “mythic objects talk by appropriation; myths ‘steal’ language in order to ‘naturalise’ contentious concepts like empire” (Daston 14). Comfortable and luxurious things can grow into hindrances too, instead of acting as props for the owners whom they are expected to serve. A usurer portrayed as monetary specie, a femme fatale featuring as a gorgeous dress and extravagant jewelry, even a monarch visualised as a crown are historically specific objectifications “incapacitating the subject”

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(Stallybrass and Hones 2001: 115). As we wind our way “through the thicket of things” we are in touch with ordinary daily life objects, of which “some seem to want, more than other objects, to be there” (Stern 2001: 335). Some of the things that we deal with are more thingy on account of our human needs, preferences, aims, emotional involvement, or merely basic activities. *** Things execute human manoeuvres, get involved in human activities and assume responsibilities in Classic Modernity, a period of time coextensive with the irreversible establishment of the novel, the fullfledged modern genre which is still alive and kicking in narratives of the same ilk displayed by the media. Like eighteenth-century serialisations extending at times to six, seven or even eight volumes, contemporary stories of the kind have undergone a sea change in terms of length and epic worth. Between the pioneer novelistic writing of the late 1600s and early 1700s and their great-great-great-grandchildren of the late 1900s and early 2000s, Long Modernity has never ceased to act as the one cohesive factor. Author and reader, protagonist and consumer, the humans at work in the novel business throughout these three centuries share the space of their novelistic universe with an impressive amount of things which in turn serve very pedestrian needs, as they populate the private space of the home in glib conviviality with the humans in whose possession, vicinity or mere circumstantial assistance they are placed. In the freshly founded public sphere, Classic Modernity witnessed the launch of the novel as such, but also of a subgenre of fiction which stood in even greater contrast to the received idea of respectability which drama and the epic traditionally represented. As for the novel, regarded as a bastard genre, it defended its virtues in terms of clever adaptation to the call of modernity: it dealt with lifelike characters in referentially recognisable contexts, it made for easy reading owing to its acknowledged preference for everyday speech, it was pleasant and instructive, and it found a welcoming shelter on individual readers’ night tables. Novel reading was an exciting pastime, a source of amusement and an outlet for feelings otherwise hard to release in public. As for the subgenre which successfully accompanied the eighteenthcentury novel, it is now commonly referred to as it-narrative, spy novel, novel of circulation or object tale. Writings qualifying for these umbrella terms shared the following characteristics: they had as their main and usually eponymous protagonist an inanimate performer, an “it” rather than

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a “he” or “she”, which is why they are more often than not called just itnarratives. They “depend[ed] upon observed actuality rather than ideals”; presented “low life in lieu of heroic, and manners rather than conscience and emotion”; were written entirely in prose, not in verse, and in descriptive rather than dramatic wording; and offered a fairly “catholic range” of subject-matter, reason enough to be “associated with the novel” (Chandler 1907: 78). Taken up with observing the reality that surrounded them, as spy novels they resorted to satire and humour rather than subtle irony and were content to unveil the seamy side of things, theirs being, in Frye’s terms, the low mode of vision (1973: 43). Quite often the central protagonist was an item of clothing or footwear and, even more often, a coin, hence their names of novels of circulation or object tales. It is worth underlining the circulatory in conjunction with the object status of their protagonists. Like the Spanish picaresque, this subgenre brings to the fore a “peregrinating object or […] personified trifle” (Aldridge 1972: 285), picking from “the literature of roguery” (Chandler 1907: 1) subaltern actors and allowing each of them to tell the story of their own life. To the autobiographical element is thus added the criticalsatirical one as these minor characters venture personal assessments and depictions of what they observe as they travel from one person to another, from one place to another, from one culture to another. Each travelling object may be as insignificant as the classic pícaro, yet his Lilliputianism, as it were, is a great advantage. Their minute social status helps them see more deeply into the interstices of the societies they visit. Jonathan Lamb suggests that these modest autobiographies exploited two dominant preoccupations of the century, “one with the ancient doctrine of metempsychosis and the other with the modern theory of sympathy” (2001: 133) (emphasis added). They were written in imitation of Ovid, whose Pythagorean belief in metamorphoses between humans and nonhumans was put to the service of modern sentimentality, whether for better or worse. Some could reveal cruelty exerted by species on things and humans when, stirred into acting like people, coins of varying worth, but especially the more valuable ones, would embark on disgraceful tales of humiliation at the expense of wicked, perverse, stingy or heartless humans. At other times, species could find in sentimental pleasure “a refuge from loneliness or self-loathing” (Lamb 134). Whichever way, coins act as circulating things that keep individuals and/or groups in a state of connectedness. As impersonations and performers of a literary motif, they help dramatise relations with humans in the successive unfolding of a power drama. As they follow their circuit in human society/ies, coins participate in the moral reshuffles of their

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owners, “poised between a world of puritanical doctrine and religious adjurations against the lucre of things, and a world of materialism, progress and empiricism” (Benedict 2007: 38). Mark Blackwell regards itnarratives as products of “an age of mechanical reproduction” and as therefore anticipating Walter Benjamin’s view of modernity and the place he claimed in it “for ‘the Ephemerae of learning’ [which] have uses more adequate for the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes” (2007: 191). Here is, we could add, a prefiguration of the 1936 movie starring Charlie Chaplin as a factory worker in Modern Times. The marketability of human subjects is a recognisable process of modern reproducibility: turned objects as the result of endlessly repeated mechanical moves, they function as objects and serve various purposes. They can, for instance, become favourite objects for those on the stage of life that prefer them. They can, in other words, play the role offered by the centre stage “at those moments when objects occasion the artless expression of affection which is the hallmark of sentimental fiction” (Lynch 2007: 75). So tenderly have they been cherished as the personal property of some owners that parting with them may amount to “losing a body part” (75). To sum up, eighteenth-century it-narratives starring species as main protagonists provide the modern equivalent of an old type of writing and personage construction. In the particular case of English literature, Charles Gildon’s New Metamorphosis (1708) is an explicit recognition of tradition modernised and adapted to contemporaneous preferences. This rewriting of Apuleius’s Golden Ass replaces the already metamorphosed human-ass character with a Bologna lap dog, perfect for a salon culture of petassociated entertainment. It makes for chronique scandaleuse tales spun and divulged by fashionable ladies. Gildon’s Golden Spy (1709) refines the disclosure of emotional intrigues by promoting a considerably more versatile and variegated institution of observation and critique. Gold coins of such different provenances as a French Louis, a Spanish Pistole, a Roman Crown and, of course, an English Guinea circulate in England and on the Continent and discharge a number of functions: they stand proof to prosperous communities, carry in themselves imagological characteristics which contrast with those of other coins, and make up a demotic chorus of voices which differs radically from those normally encountered in the novel, as Bakhtin would have it. Spies they may be, but they are gold spies and “malleable narrative agents” (Blackwell 2012: xi) whose precious substance is a warrant not only of economic prestige, but also of personal distinction. Their emotional stature is less eroded by circumstantial vicissitudes than if they were not so valuable and their lasting effect

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secures an open-ended tale, wonderful salon reading or bedtime pleasure for the fashionable readers of the day. They point to commodified feelings and to human commerce. As dominant representatives of the world of worthy things, they “underline the interconnection of economy, language, and possession” (Flint 2007:174). In terms of history of the book and history of reading, the century was coextensive with speaking-specie writings printed for pleasurable consumption yet also advertising a moral message. In observance of the classic utile dulci precept, titles were placed on the literary market which obsessively pushed to the foreground a tempting coin: The Golden Spy by Charles Gildon (1709), The Adventures of a Shilling by Joseph Addison (1710), The Adventures of a Halfpenny by Bonnell Thornton (1753), Chrysal, of the Adventures of a Guinea by Charles Johnstone (1764), The Adventures of a Six-and-Nine Pence by Edward Thompson (1774), The Adventures of a Silver Three-Pence by “Mr” Truelove (1780), The Adventures of a Rupee by Helenus Scott (1781), The Adventures of a Silver Penny by Richard Johnson, and the anonymous Argentum: or Adventures of a Shilling (1794). Like mainstream novels, these deal ad nauseam with “adventures” and fathom their readership’s patience and curiosity with conspicuous characters who otherwise would have remained utterly unnoticeable, because silent. They share their ontological status with other by nature silent characters, from “shoes, quills, coats, cats, dogs, cork-screws, coaches, kites, canes [to] pins, that often serve as homodiegetic narrators” (Brown 2001: 632). These things become persons and act as at once performers of a plot articulated as a profusion of adventures and as narrators disclosing to their readers the nooks and corners of the world in which they as protagonists move. They are both goods securing a life of leisure for their masters and mistresses and observers of the flaws and failures of the latter. They normally occupy silent seats in the theatre of Classic Modernity’s world, yet they are astute enough to become front-stage, voiced and even vociferous actors by “making sense of the opportunities and obligations, the delights and dangers created by that brave new world of goods” (Brewer & Porter 1993: 3). *** The metamorphosis of inanimate into animate things and of mere animals into voluble creatures is now a defining feature of literature for children, yet it was not until High or Industrial Modernity that it became part and parcel of the enchanted literary province of boy- and girl-hood.

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Dancing shoes, talking dolls or frolicking mechanical toys now share the world of wonders with the genie in the bottle or the flying rug, the speaking dogs and garrulous cats that fill screens of varying sizes and technological capacities. They bring together material and vision from romans à clef, oriental tales, spy stories and more directly children’s literature—all onetime secondary forms of writing. Romanticism conferred upon these initially insignificant protagonists a dignity and vigour that was inconceivable in the heyday of high mode writings. Once poems started being committed to paper in dedication to a field mouse, a fish in a bowl or a tiny little flower swept by the wind, literature changed its compass and felt at ease when narrowing down its scale. Talking specie, for instance, was made able to use human language in order to naturalise its worth and to cast critical glances around. In Romanian culture Romanticism is the token of modernisation and, consequently, of modern identity. French-influenced, when not downright Frenchified, Romanian letters went through a sea change in the nineteenth century, leaving behind Greek-speaking education and Slavonic script to embrace Western cultural values. In the historical provinces of Wallachia (a region lying north of the Danube and south of the Carpathians) and Moldavia (the eastern area of present-day Romania), Paris was the point zero of cultural splendour and French the language of cultural distinction. In contrast, the central area, known as Transylvania (literally the region beyond the forests) found in Vienna its cultural lighthouse and in German the proper linguistic vehicle for the cultivation of the mind. A minor prose writer based in the southern city of Craiova, Constantin Lecca, brought the two notable capitals of culture together with the foundation, in 1838, of a magazine entitle Mozaikul (The Mosaic). It was a short-lived project, but one that rose to its self-proclaimed ambition of opening up Romanian thinking to the West. Conceived as a kind of “family magazine” (Rezeanu 1988: 11), it assembled a “mosaic” of writings with the common denominator of “moralising aims” (Brutaru 1956: 11). It carved for itself a niche in the collective (un)conscious by enriching Romanian-speaking periodicals with translations from German and “capitalised on sentimentalism, sensationalism and melodrama” (Cornea 2008: 39). Lecca himself had been educated in a Transylvanian ambience and regarded French literature as “light, immoral and dry” (Theodorescu 1969: 11). He had shown reverence to The Mosaic by publishing a short-story called Moneda (The Coin), which, in five successive installments, was no more and no less than the Romanian translation of a German source in the manner of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s school. It amounted to quite a turn in the sense and sensibility of the local

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community. People in Craiova buying the issues of the newly-established magazine came across German names and German customs, mores and manners, and were, all in all, exposed to things with which they had not been in immediate touch before. Such was the little drama enacted by a gold coin on St. Galus’s day, breaking the routine of domestic life by its miraculous transformation into a speaking specie. This is the setting in which Theobald, an impoverished young man, suddenly recalls that on his christening day he was presented with a gold coin by his godfather. Theobald decides to bring to light the talisman so far hidden to the world around. The time is midnight and, most romantically, the moon sheds silver rays on the gold coin with an imperial head on its obverse and the Holy Virgin on its reverse. In keeping with the serendipitous course of time, this is also St. Galus’s day. The speaking coin embarks upon telling the story of its life, symbolically linked to that of its owner from day one. Theobald learns that it has been on dizzying peregrinations, from a usurer to a debauched youth, then to a haberdasher and a couple of bandits operating in a gang, that its “fatherland [has been exchanged] for all the capitals of Europe’s mainland” (Lecca 2005: 28), that an actress passed it on to an inn-keeper from whom one day it ended up in a Parisian chevalier’s palm, then in the purse of a wily banker, only to return to its and Theobald’s birthplace in Germany. On this third St. Galus’s day we find the gold coin in the hands of a goldsmith who is turning it into a pendant hanging from a gold chain. This is meant as a present to his daughter Maria, who once received the coin as a special asset from an old aunt. Theobald manages to entreat the artisan into returning the coin to him and makes the acquaintance of the graceful young lady. A series of amorous episodes lead to their wedding and the coin is eventually made into the bride’s gift, to be given subsequently to the young couple’s first baby on the child’s birthday. The temporal circuit overlaps with the spatial one, while the story proper is embedded in such other exciting narratives as The History of the Venice Arab, a prose rendering of Othello. Riddles and proverbs are interpolated between the successive episodes of The Coin and advice as to how one can become rich completes the context. Like the gold coin, its narrator has an “obverse face” (Theodorescu 1938: 58) in contradistinction to his Romantic visage. The Coin is a hotchpotch of sentimental and memoir-type literature based on late eighteenth-century it-narratives in which talking species ramble the world out there via the transactions in which they happen to be used. Not only does this gold coin, like its brother and sister species, circulate “from hand to hand, from country to country” (Lecca 2005: 59) though. Rather, it gradually assumes so many human traits that it becomes

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a human-like examiner of human practices, institutions and values. It participates in the human characters’ lives, notably in their rites of passage; it stands proof to their dignity; it takes delight in their joy; and it assists them in their times of trouble. Humanised to the extent of becoming inseparable from its successive owners, the coin is a messenger of happiness and welfare, a talisman in the etymological sense of the word, while it points (moneta in Latin) at once to monetary worth and to memory as a complex process of remembrance and/as warning against oblivion. Within years of its publication, a strikingly similar text, The History of a Ducat and a Para, was sent to the press. Its author, the canonical Romanian writer Vasile Alecsandri, had been asked to contribute a piece of prose to the newly founded Propăúirea (Prosperity) weekly. In 1844 “une histoire burlesque”, in Alecsandri’s own words, reached the salons and coffee houses of the city of Iaúi (Jassy). It was a narrative abounding in “real episodes culled from Moldavia’s backward social life, to which [the author] held the mirror of a thoroughly different future, a good one” (Bogdan-Duică 1926: 16). Alecsandri’s short-story was, in effect, an adaptation of Lecca’s Coin, capitalising on the latter’s German source, yet “conducted with an utterly French spirit,” pleasing its readership with “all the [writer’s] gifts, humour, pictorial skill, oriental narrative endowment,” (Călinescu 1980: 183) and laying before their eyes a whole gallery of human types, from the Frenchified young aristocrat to the uncouth Gypsy lover. This intended double history—the Dutch ducat’s and the Turkish para’s—is also hosted by midnight mysteries, as the narrator is “woken from [his] sweet sleep […] by two voices from another world” (Alecsandri 1960: 13), in a “commedia dell’arte type of scene” (Piru 1978: 180). The narrator confesses that he was thrilled by the event and for some time believed that he was seeing things embodied as “phantasms, ghosts, dragons and so many fantastic creatures dancing in a circle with the midnight in the moonshine” (Alecsandri 13). Reminded of the contemporaneous fabulist Donici’s verse, he concludes that gold and silver have their own soul and therefore their own voices. Thus prepared, he listens to their spirited dialogue with interest only to realise that the Turkish silver coin, the female partner of a onetime affair, reproaches her former lover, the Dutch ducat, for his bad manners. Hers is an aristocratic oriental background, his is a trader’s stock. They conclude though in one voice that “there is no more curious or vagabond fate in the world than the miserable creature’s called a coin […], too often kept as a saintly relic on the bottom of some iron box” (Alecsandri 17).

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The speaking ducat gives vent to a number of anecdotes, both happy and sad, which amount to notes on the character, habits and manners of people at large. This is the crux of the history: tales of either scandalous provenance or secret matters (Gr. ĮȞȑțįȠIJĮ: unpublished stories) will come to the fore once the two coins have found their unexpected and short-lived liberty. The ducat recalls his changing abodes, from a captain’s to a poet’s pocket, from a lawyer’s to a Jewish usurer’s purse, and from a provincial teacher’s to his private pupil’s palm, while the so-called pedagogue tries to buy his victim’s beauty for frivolous purposes. The ducat is outspoken: “the pocket shows the man” and evokes his experiences amidst “a medley population of Dutch and German gold coins, of old and new Turkish irmiliks, old Russian karbovs and petty farthings, all living in an amazing harmony, considering the discords separating nations today” (Alecsandri 19). Both coins agree that their “new nation of tinkling proofs” (20) are up to revealing exciting secrets. For instance, that a “new Romanian language is now being discovered in Bucharest,” (21) by which they mean the Italianate Romanian confected by Ion Heliade Rădulescu, a supporter of the Latin origin of Romanians in the mid-century debate over national identity; that “people and money get used to the worst societies” or that “Gypsy women have beautiful traits” (Alecsandri 24, 32) for all their slavish condition, as proved by Zamfira and Nedelcu’s love story, an interpolation with a thesis. The text ends with the sudden realisation that the Turkish para will not be able to narrate her own adventures, as it, or, rather, she was dropped between two boards in the author’s floor in the small hours of the morning. Daybreak brings the listening narrator, his readers and the acting coins back to their “normal” condition. The surrounding human world refinds its voice, the rest is silence; and that silent world of things resumes its wise observation of the noisy world of people, whose vices and shortcomings it has always observed. Critics point to this dichotomy: the story “uses a formula that was often applied during the romantic period, and which consists in making a coin speak in order to relate a series of events in which it has taken part,” while “the author’s interest in these episodes [is] social criticism” (Cioranescu 1973: 151). This “first full-fledged social short-story in [Romanian] literature” (Nicolescu 1980: 193) presents not a human narrator, but rather a “Dutch coin—the hero or witness to […] anecdotes” (Curticăpeanu 1980: 206) which, when disclosed, will make the human race less dignified in the eyes of the silent world of things. With the theatrical skills best deployed in his dramatic masterpieces, Alecsandri commits to paper an elegant chain of “cues shorn of

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commentaries” (GafiĠa 1960: 14) which condenses keen social and imagological observations and regales us with a fairly realistic tableau of mid-nineteenth-century life in the historical Romanian Principality of Moldavia. By entrusting talking coins with the power of assessing the human world of the espace-temps under scrutiny, the narrator positions himself at a necessary distance which enables him to provide a thoroughgoing chronotopic view of things while standing clear of possible personal attacks. Let the astute coins tell the tales of their lives in the wide world! Let us listen to them and take notes! They will tell us what they know.

Works cited Aldridge, A. Owen. 1972. “Fenimore Cooper and the Picaresque Tradition”, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 27.3 (Dec.): 283-292. Alecsandri, Vasile. 1960. Istoria unui galbîn, cu o prefaĠă de Mihai GafiĠa. Bucureúti: Editura Tineretului. Alecsandri, Vasile. 1974. Opere IV: Proză. Bucureúti: Editura Minerva. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value”, in Arjun, Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benedict, Barbara. 2007. “The Spirit of Things”, in Mark Blackwell (ed.), The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and it-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 19-42. Blackwell, Mark, Liz Bellamy, Heather Keenleyside and Christina Pulton. 2012. British It-Narratives, 1750-1830. London: Pickering & Chatto. Bogdan-Duică, G. 1926. Vasile Alecsandri, povestirea unei vieĠi. Bucureúti: Academia Română. Brewer, John and Roy Porter. 1993. Consumption and the World of Goods. London: Routledge. Brown, Bill. 2009. “The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and ItNarratives in Eighteenth-Century England”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 21.4 (Summer): 631-638. _____. 2001. “Thing Theory”, Critical Inquiry, 28.1, (Autumn): 1-22. Brutaru, Jack. 1956. C. Lecca. Bucureúti: Editura de Stat pentru Literatură úi Artă. Călinescu, George. 1980. “Proza, cea mai durabilă parte a operei lui Alecsandri”, in Ciuchindel, C. (ed.), Studii úi articole despre opera lui Vasile Alecsandri. Bucureúti: Editura Albatros, 183-189.

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Chandler, Frank Wadleigh. 1987. The Literature of Roguery. Boston & New York: The Riverside Press. Cioranescu, Alexandre. 1973. Vasile Alecsandri. New York: Twayne Publishers. Cornea, Paul. 2008. Originile romantismului românesc. Bucureúti: Cartea Românească. Curticăpeanu, Doina. 1980. “Călător cu darul perspectivei...”, in C. Ciuchindel (ed.), Studii úi articole despre opera lui Vasile Alecsandri. Bucureúti: Editura Albatros, 202-209. Daston, Lorraine (ed.) 2004. Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books. Eliot, T. S. 1972. “Hamlet and His Problems”, in T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen & Co. Flint, Christopher. 2007. “Objects, and It-Narratives in EighteenthCentury England,” in Mark Blackwell, (ed.), The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and it-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007, 162-186. Frow, John. 2001. “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole”, Critical Inquiry, 28.1 (Autumn): 270-285. Frye, Northrop. 1973. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Gildon, Charles. 1708. The New Metamorphosis, or, the pleasant Transformation: Being The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius of Medaura. Alter’d and improv’d to the modern Times and Manners[…]. London: Printed for Dan. Brown, G. Sawbridge, E. Sanger, S. Brisco, and J. Baker. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time, Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Schouten. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kingery, W. David (ed.). 1995. Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies. Washington & London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Krakauer, Siegfrid. 1997. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Lamb, Jonathan. 2001. “Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales”, Critical Inquiry, 28.1 (Autumn): 133-166. Lecca, Constantin. 2005. “Moneda (O Povestire fantastică într-o întâmplare adevărată)”, in Manolescu, Nicolae and Aurelia Florescu, Mozaikul (1838-1839). Un Proiect European. Craiova: Editura Aius. Lynch, Deidre. 2007. “Personal Effect and Sentimental Fictions”, in Mark Blackwell (ed.), The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and it-

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Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 63-91. Nicolescu, G.C. 1980. “Proza lui Alecksandri”, in Ciuchindel, C. (ed.), Studii úi articole despre opera lui Vasile Alecsandri, Bucureúti: Editura Albatros, 190-197. Piru, Al. 1978. Introducere în opera lui Vasile Alecsandri. Bucureúti: Editura Minerva. Rezeanu, Paul. 1988. Constantin Lecca. Bucureúti: Editura Meridiane. Shklovsky, Victor. 1988. “Art as Technique”, in K. M. Newton (ed.), Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader, London: MacMillan Education. Stallybrass, Peter and Ann Rosalind Hones. 2001. “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe”, Critical Inquiry, 28.1 (Autumn): 114-132. Stern, Lesley. 2001. “Paths That Wind through the Thicket of Things”, Critical Inquiry, 28.1 (Autumn): 317-354. Theodorescu, Barbu. 1938. Constantin Lecca. Bucureúti: Academia Română. _____. 1969. Constantin Lecca. Bucureúti: Editura Meridiane. Tiffany, Daniel. 2001. “Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and Poetic Obscurity”, Critical Inquiry, 28.1 (Autumn): 72-98 Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Watson, Lyall. 1990. The Nature of Things: The Secret Life of Inanimate Objects. London/Sydney/Auckland/Toronto: Hodder & Stoughton.

PART II CULTURAL COMMODIFICATIONS

CHAPTER THREE Macbeth’s Soup: What are Cookbooks Really For? Dana Percec Introduction For more than a decade, the study of food has been a topic of interest in academic and scientific discourse, becoming, from marginal, a central subject on the intellectual agenda. This increasing popularity is reflected in the great variety of media that bring food to the forefront, from print to television and cinema, with bestselling books of recipes, cooking shows and cookery TV channels, or fictional materials—novels, short stories and films—revolving around the notion of food and eating. Similarly, the ever more dynamic field of cultural studies has promoted, as an independent discipline, food studies, somewhere at the crossroads between history, economy, anthropology, and medicine. In fact, as pointed out by Watson and Caldwell (2005: 10), food has attracted the attention of scholars and the general public alike as a universal medium that illuminates a wide range of cultural practices. This paper investigates the vast phenomenon of Shakespeare’s appropriation by contemporary western popular culture with special emphasis on food-related cultural productions, ranging from cookery books to cinema. The Bard’s work is in itself a treasurehouse of food references, with concordances recording no fewer than 2,000 entries related to eating, drinking, recipes, utensils and ingredients, a rich food imagery bearing testimony to early modern practices and fashions which indicate an already diverse and substantial material culture. It was, in fact, during Shakespeare’s lifetime, in the Elizabethan period, that a radical change occurred in consumption patterns, with the Elizabethan elite creating what we call today material culture, or, more appropriately for that age, developing an ethos of consumption (Smith 2002: 11).

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In analysing contemporary texts of various genres and styles, this paper employs Roland Barthes’ theory of the functions of food, especially the commemorative function (Counihan and Van Esterik 1997: 28-29). This is based on the historical theme, frequent in the evocation of cooking recipes, methods and techniques, eating practices and experiences, which mobilise two types of values associated on the one hand with an aristocratic tradition and on the other with the survival of a very old, perhaps ageless and certainly idealised, society. Both types of values capitalise on the nostalgic value of food as a powerful signifier.

Food studies—from habits to politics Traditional scholarship may still associate the subject of food with triviality, but, in the past ten to twenty years, various areas of research, from anthropology to economics have turned to food studies as a window on the social, political, and cultural dimension of societies in all periods and geographical locations. Food is central in today’s explanatory discourses about warfare, religion, political theory, industrialisation, or commerce, to name but a few (Tannahill 1988). Food is at the same time one of the most concrete manifestations of human life and a mentality, in so far as it is defined in terms of preferences and aversions, as good or bad to eat, and also as good or bad to think (Harris 1998:15). According to Watson and Caldwell, food practices are involved in a rich network of relationships and expectations that are contested and negotiated, appearing in some of the most enduring anthropological debates: “When all else fails, people will always talk about food” (2005: 5). The success of food studies is probably to be explained by their accessibility as a means of understanding cultures. Food, Counihan and Van Esterik argue (1997: 10), is nowadays as much a scholarly as a real-life concern, while the soaring interest in this subject is supported by its interdisciplinary character. The attraction of food for disciplines such as cultural studies and literary criticism is justified by its symbolic potential, its ability to convey meaning: it has a rich alphabet with its diversity of colours, textures, and flavours, and it communicates in the numerous ways in which it can be processed and combined. In fact, the development of research interest in food goes back to the early twentieth century, with anthropology as a pioneer. In the 1920s, Marcel Mauss’ theory of reciprocity (1967), for example, presented foodsharing as one of the earliest forms of exchange. In 1966, Claude LéviStrauss wrote about the transformative power of cooking, coining the

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famous “culinary triangle” (in Counihan and Van Esterik 36-43) to describe human evolution from nature to culture and traditional gender divisions by means of three methods of preparing meat: roasting, smoking (natural methods, associated with men, involving no receptacle), and boiling (cultural, represented by women, involving a receptacle). Since the 1970s, nutritionism has been promoted as one of the major medical branches, the result being an ever growing number of guidebooks, whose international influence is clear from the ongoing debates about body image, the keywords being weight control, consumption, and healthcare. But, because eating, fasting, being fat or thin create links to cultural images of masculinity and femininity, food is also a major theme in gender studies. Eating is an enactment of gender, as men and women define themselves differently through their habits related to food and drink. More specifically, food consumption and food deprivation are especially meaningful for women, being employed as statements or weapons in social and sexual negotiations, as Rudolph M. Bell first pointed out in his seminal work on anorexia nervosa and fasting (1985), which was followed by a plethora of studies about female eating disorders. With the commodification of food, eating and food varieties, as well as access to food, have become symbols of empowerment and powerlessness which trigger the development of a critical discourse covering two major areas—the social and the geographical. Consequently, a great number of authors show an interest in food politics, a topic which can be defined with the mixed vocabulary of economics and geography (food industry, population growth, urban expansion), politics (governmental agendas), medicine (dietary principles), etc. Critiques of globalisation and the divides between various geographical areas are offered in books entitled polemically Food Politics (among many others, see Nestle 2007 or Paalberg 2010). More recently, food has become a topic of fascination to the general public, evidenced by the popularity of chefs—some of them as famous and influential as film and music stars—, the spectacularly high sales of cookbooks and other food-related printed materials, and the invention of new television formats to accommodate food shows, documentaries, and live competitions. Food studies are nowadays as much a part of academic discourse as cultural studies in general, gender studies, and others. Food is well placed at the centre of material culture as the most immediate manifestation of consumption, which encourages its perception as a new and promising framework for understanding social mechanisms (Smith 2002: 6). Much historical work in the area of food studies focuses on periods starting from the seventeenth century, through the eighteenth, into the nineteenth and

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the early twentieth centuries, because early modern societies were the first to see clear changes in consumption not only in terms of consumer demand and supply but, more importantly, in terms of a conceptual and behavioural twist, namely, the articulation of a variety of economic and cultural factors which simply made people want to consume more. Among the objects that make up this new material culture, foods and drinks and the acts of eating and drinking have meaning in several contexts simultaneously (Richardson 2011: 4). Since Renaissance historicism shifted its attention from subjects (characters and plots) to objects, they have become an important key to reading seventeenth-century texts, from medicine to literature. In this spirit, the topic of food in Shakespeare’s plays is one of the most effective instantiations of material culture, just as it is a successful illustration of how the early modern theatre negotiated meaning between words and things. By the same logic, among the most conspicuous appropriations of Shakespeare—standing out quantitatively as well as qualitatively—are those which employ food and food-related discourses.

Shakespeare, appropriation, and food A well researched phenomenon today is the process of integrating classical texts of the literary canon into contemporary cultural products, which are more marginal and more obscure, but also more popular. New literary genres, new modes of cultural expression, and new media can successfully interfere with classical texts in order to increase their public relevance and popularity especially among the younger segment of the public, the educational dimension being sometimes taken into consideration. Therefore, Shakespeare’s plays, loosely adapted for the big screen (the spin-offs) and for other media, and the Bard’s real or imaginary life, evoked in texts that vary from biography, through thriller, to historical romance and cookbooks, are peculiar manifestations of popular culture which constitute a distinct subgenre in its own right. This is possible because from a cultural perspective the identity of cultural forms is given by the inter-dependence of all productions. They are defined in connection with other cultural forms, of the same genre or not, of the same value or not, of the same period or not (Milner 2002). Consequently, the literary text can be regarded equally as an elitist emanation and as a democratised product. From the critical perspective of culture, literature finds itself between the aesthetic and the experiential, its main goal being to find the perfect balance between the complexity of life

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and the unity of art, between the timelessness and universality of the canon and the subjective response of isolated reading groups. Another specific feature of cultural studies regarding the criticism of literature is the effacement of the author—as a creative, autonomous personality, with obvious agency—in favour of an investigation of the institutional and material conditions which ensure the development of a literary text. This approach is especially rewarding for plays—the case of the Elizabethan theatre—which can be thus regarded in a manner closer to film productions than to isolated bodies of literary work. A film is never the creation of a single person, but the result of the collaborative effort of directors, producers, actors, script writers, critics, spectators etc. Similarly, a Tudor comedy was a piece of collective work, with one or more playwrights, a troop of actors, a playhouse manager, a patron, and a public imposing their own tastes. Even in its written form, the comedy is not the result of individual work, but the joint effort of editors, critics, translators, or biographers. The text is decentralised, relativised, dispersed. This stance transforms the text from a stable entity, firmly positioned in a hierarchy, into a flexible, fluid piece. The traditional evaluation of the literary canon is no longer at work in cultural studies, which read highbrow prose, poetry and drama alongside anonymous diaries, marginal manifestos, obscure medical treatises, and unrecorded pamphlets. This correlation is validated by the fact that these are all the productions of the same historical moment, that is, they were all occasioned by the same non-literary circumstances. The same play, then, can be at the top of elitist evaluations, because of the authority conveyed by its author, or it can fall into a sub-cultural niche if read through the lens of a marginal ideology. This enables today’s readers of Shakespeare to view him both as the “sweet swan of Avon” —as Ben Jonson called him in the seventeenth century, and as “a black woman,” as Maya Angelou (1985: 14) sees him. These are all facets of the vast process of appropriation, which is to be understood as a creative manner of interfering with themes, values, and practices, adapted to contemporary expectations. When it comes to tackling food-related topics in Shakespearean adaptations, I argue that the theory which is indirectly at work is Roland Barthes’ essay on the functions of food (in Counihan and Van Esterik 2829). In Towards a Psychology of Food Consumption, first published in 1961, Barthes considers food to be more than a mere collection of products with statistical or nutritional information; it is a system of communication and a set of images or usages, a combination of needs and techniques. Food has a spirit, with flavour and substance, it is a composite

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unit, like language. And just like language, it has various functions. The somatic or psychic function revolves around the concept of health, signifying, materially, a set of immaterial realities which underlie the body-mind divide. The anthropological function refers to feelings or moods attached to foodstuffs, as it is possible to associate eating with images connoting a variety of meanings. Finally, there is the commemorative function, which is employed by the plethora of fiction writers, historians, researchers, and chefs who publish extensive materials in the field of food studies. According to Barthes, food permits a person to partake each day of the natural past. Food techniques (ingredients, recipes, utensils) often have a historical quality, being repositories of ancient experiences, of a wisdom which is passed on from one generation to another. The historical theme of cooking food evokes an idealised world, a society which is invested with aristocratic traits and elicits feelings of nostalgia and escapist desires.

Food in print “Because all people eat and many people cook, the meanings attached to food speak to many more people than do the meanings attached to more esoteric objects and practices,” write editors Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (1997: 8) in their introduction to the collection of essential reading materials in food studies. No wonder, then, that literary criticism and history at their most serious have turned to foodstuffs. Although more numerous, Shakespeare-related cookbooks, accounts of culinary culture, food concordances, etc. are by no means alone. A veritable boom in this academic and popular subgenre in its own right can be seen in the past five to ten years in the English-speaking world especially, though not exclusively. Scholarly examples include cultural histories of eating fashions and culinary choices based on the literary evidence offered by authors like Jane Austen or Marcel Proust. The former, whose novels display domestic plots where the rituals of giving or sharing meals are crucial (despite the scarcity of detailed descriptions of foodstuffs and dishes and of material things in general) acknowledges the function of food as an important signifier of moral worth, social status, and accomplishment in housekeeping. Maggie Lane’s Jane Austen and Food (1995) offers just that cultural and historical insight, while more recent volumes take advantage of Austen’s transformation into a pop icon, advancing Austenian recipes, such as the Wine-Roasted Gammon and Pigeon Pie or

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Martha’s Almond Cheesecake (Black 2002) or even suggesting having tea with your favourite Regency romance author (Wilson 2004). The latter, who regales his readers with smells, tastes, and flavours throughout his Remembrance of Things Past, is an ideal pretext for a literary history of fin de siècle food (King 2006). Significantly, Proust offers a recipe from his childhood, Boeuf à la Mode, which he then uses as a metaphor for the whole process of writing a novel: in fiction individualities are constructed from numerous impressions, just as the famous Boeuf was made of carefully selected morsels of meats enriched with jelly. The literary pastiche in the form of a cookbook is another option for postmodernist authors practising a sort of literary ventriloquism. Mark Crick’s experiment, entitled Kafka’s Soup (2005), goes beyond the ingredients and methods to focus on food as text, as a language, as a system of signs, with a syntax and a style of its own. A photographer dissatisfied with traditional cookbooks, which, he says, have nice pictures and dull texts, Crick turns recipes into stories and even includes his own visual projections of ideal dish presentation, illustrating the book with his own photographs. Crick proposes seventeen recipes written in the style of as many authors, from Homer and Chaucer to Thomas Mann and Italo Calvino. All the recipes can be tried out in the readers’ own kitchens, even if the instructions for Clafoutis Grandmère à la Virginia Woolf commence as follows: “She placed the cherries in a buttered dish and looked out of the window. The children were racing across the lawn, Nicholas already between the clumps of red-hot pokers, turning to wait for the others” (2005: 60); or for Vietnamese Chicken à la Graham Greene, like this: “A recipe has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses at what point the cooking instructions become necessary, after the butcher has done his work and before care of the dish passes to the seasoning whims of the guests. I choose the moment when, looking into the refrigerator, I noticed the naked white flesh of the chicken. As I stared at the breasts I felt a pain across my head” (2005: 70). Popular literature in the form of cookbooks is already a distinct variety on the book market. Harry Potter fans can learn how to cook traditional British dishes, unknown to children in the countries where the book was translated, with the help of an “unofficial” guide (Bucholz 2010), while TV series with large followings have their own share of cookery fame. The HBO series A Game of Thrones has spawned a cookbook vaunting a medieval menu, which includes Honey-Spiced Locusts or Mutton in Onion-Ale Broth (Monroe-Cassel 2012) and Dr. Who enjoys a number of personalised recipes, one for each episode, and relevant to the plot

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(Oseland 2012). What all these cookbooks have in common is the notion that reading is an immersive experience, just like tasting food. Food histories of Shakespearean inspiration have a longer tradition, one of the first resources for seventeenth-century recipes dating back to 1976 and Madge Lorwin’s Dining with Shakespeare. The collection contains cooking instructions in the original, Shakespearean English, with translations into modern English and measurement explanations, as well as the first account of the culinary culture of Elizabethan England. Thirteen complete menus include dishes associated with some of the Bard’s most famous characters. In the 2000s, the variety of Shakespeare-inspired cookbooks was as vast as any other branch of Shakespearean or Renaissance studies. While Francine Segan proposed “Renaissance recipes for the contemporary cook” (2003), Mark Morton and Andrew Coppolino (2008) wrote about table habits, dining and festivities in Elizabethan times and plays, the chapters of their book being divided by food type: mutton, lamb, fish and seafood, vegetables, and so forth, and offering a survey of early modern cooking methods. An interesting theory is advanced by Joan Fitzpatrick (2013), who considers the eating habits illustrated by the Shakespearean text more relevant to the contemporary mind than those of historical periods closer to our own chronologically, but mentally and symbolically more remote because of the Cartesian body/mind divide. Before the eighteenth century, dietaries looked strikingly similar to twenty-first century nutrition guides, offering tips on what men and women should eat and avoid and mixing foodways with personality types. This approach owed much to Galen’s humoural theory, inherited from the Middle Ages, but significantly, it also subscribed to what we tend to assume are contemporary beliefs in consumption patterns influenced by lifestyle, or the conviction that diet and exercise are important rules which should be strictly observed. Shakespeare-based cookbooks are perfect illustrations of the way in which food studies have been embraced by history and literary criticism, at the crossroads between experimentation, appropriation, and marketing. This is the case of the collaborative project of Elizabethan performance historian Alycia Smith-Howard and celebrated master chef Alan Deegan, The Food of Love: A Shakespeare Cookbook (2012). Smith-Howard’s contribution is the result of extensive research into Elizabethan cookery books and a re-reading of Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets and poems in search of food imagery, without the support—which can often be deceptive and second-hand—of regular concordances. This creative investigation of the Shakespearean text disclosed thousands of references and led to the discovery that the play with the most abundant culinary

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vocabulary is not Twelfth Night, which lent its first line to the book’s title, but The Winter’s Tale, which contains probably the most complete grocery shopping list of early modernity available in a piece of literature: CLOWN: I cannot do’t without counters. Let me see; what am I to buy for our sheepshearing feast? Three pound of sugar, five pound of currants, rice […] I must have saffron to colour the warden pies; mace, dates – none, that’s out of my note; nutmegs, seven; a race or two of ginger, but that I may beg; four pound of prunes, and as many raisins o’ the sun. (WT, IV, 3, 36-48)

Alycia Smith-Howard distributes dishes for every season, offering anecdotes, quotes, and explanations from Shakespeare’s plays which precede the recipes and contextualise ingredients, methods, utensils, beverages, table manners, the use of flowers in the kitchen and at the table, and so on. Alan Deegan, a star chef who has cooked for royalty and heads of state, has run top establishments all over Europe and is a member of the British Culinary Federation, uses the 2000 culinary references in the Bard’s work to create 80 dishes, updating Elizabethan recipes for the contemporary palate. With lavish illustrations like any other luxury cookbook, The Food of Love includes such mouth-watering entries as Chilled Cherry and Rose Soup, Fricassee of Sole with Mushroom in Saffron Cream, Gratin of Plaice with Garlic and Shallot Marmalade, or Strawberry and Lavender Jelly. Literary pastiche with a tinge of parody and written in an operatic tempo, Francesco Attardi Anselmo and Elisa De Luigi’s A Feast for Lady Macbeth (1997, 2007) puts gastronomy onto the musical stage, reconciling Lasagna Verdi with Stratford-upon-Avon Pork Pie, as the authors themselves warn their readers in the Foreword (2007: 4). The book is, firstly, an intertextual exercise, bringing together two texts— Shakespeare’s Scottish play and the nineteenth-century Italian libretto for Verdi’s opera Macbeth. Secondly, it is a creative transfer from the medium of the written, printed text to the oral medium of the theatre, and then to the medium of musical performance. Thirdly, it is an example of postmodern imagination, as Attardi Anselmo and De Luigi mimic the fashion in today’s popular literature of producing countless prequels and sequels to the famous plots of classical literature. This particular mockprequel focuses on young Lady Macbeth before marrying the Scottish thane, a girl accomplished in all domestic arts and raised by her mother to be a housewife and an excellent cook and connoisseuse of the most jealously guarded culinary secrets of both the seventeenth- and the

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nineteenth centuries, in what is a deliberate and carefully planned act of anachronism. The cookbook is organised on the structural model of a play/libretto, with a list of characters, prologue/overture, four acts, intervals, and an epilogue. Each act includes, instead of scenes, recipes, which begin by following the discursive model of culinary language (with a list of ingredients); continue in the narrative mode, retelling the plot, then mixing styles and rhetoric (the thriller, literary criticism, musical theory, a lesson, and so on); and conclude, symmetrically, with the imperative mood characteristic of recipes and guidebooks. All this is seasoned with short biographical notes about Shakespeare and Verdi, literary commentaries about the Bard’s influence on the Italian composer, and quotes. The epilogue, entitled “The Castle Cellar,” provides advice on the selection of wines to accompany the great variety of dishes which have been introduced and devoured, at least at the level of the printed page. Instead of Conclusion, the book offers a discographic history of Verdi’s opera. An example: in Act One, Attardi Anselmo and De Luigi come up with a subchapter/scene entitled “The Witch’s Beard” (2007: 13-16). This includes the story of Macbeth’s encounter with the weird sisters, a historical and cultural description of bearded women, a commentary on the elegance and lyricism of the music Verdi chooses in his opera to suggest the importance of this moment in the economy of the entire story, and a recipe for four persons, containing anchovies and a salty chicory sauce. Or: “The Verdi Interval” (2007: 43-44) which, on the pretext of a recipe for Vol-Au-Vent alla Busseto, describes the complicated process of selection and creative intervention involved in appropriation, in this case, from literature to music. With the support of biographical evidence, the chapter explains Verdi’s fascination with Shakespeare before finally presenting the recipe for five persons, adapted from the cuisine of Verdi’s native region (Busseto), which is a courageous combination of chicken organs, dried mushrooms, onions, and local red wine. “The Elizabethan Interval” offers glimpses into the cultural history of Shakespeare’s contemporaries with contrasts between London and country life, and with juicy details of theatre rivalry in the late sixteenth century, as evidenced in the writings of Robert Green or Shakespeare himself, in pamphlets, letters, and diaries. The accompanying recipe for ten persons is a genuine feast: spongecake, orange brandy, raspberry jelly, cardamon powder, and whipped cream.

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Food on film One of the most interesting instances of appropriation is the Shakespearean spin-off, a film genre which adapts the original Elizabethan text to the contemporary cultural context. As argued above, the spin-off, frequently offering a subject and environment suitable for the taste and expectations of the younger segment of the general public, has considerable educational potential. This is the case of the Shakespeare ReTold series, a BBC production which uses the plot of the Bard’s plays to address today’s issues in British life. While The Taming of the Shrew brings sixteenth-century Padua to London and the House of Commons, with Petruchio, an impoverished aristocrat, and Katherine Minola a successful and resourceful politician who dreams of becoming Leader of the Opposition, Macbeth (2005), the only tragedy in the series, chooses the kitchen of a three Michelin star Glasgow restaurant as the scene for its tale of ambition, murder and retribution. Directed by Mark Brozel and with a screenplay by Peter Moffat, this re-told Macbeth features the sinful couple formed by talented and hardworking chef, Joe Macbeth (James McAvoy), and beautiful, elegant and graceful restaurant hostess, Ella (Keeley Hawes). Unlike other spin-offs such as Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet (1996), which sets the romance in contemporary America (Verona Beach, complete with sports cars, swimming pools and machine guns) but observes the original script and early modern English language, Brozel’s Macbeth (2005), like the entire Re-Told series, gives up the blank verse and keeps the Shakespearean references to a minimum. The characters’ names remain, with more or less significant additions (some of the original versions appear as family names—Joe Macbeth, Billy Banquo, Peter Macduff; others, as first names—Duncan Docherty). The three witches are replaced by three black garbage collectors who appear in the back alley of the restaurant at night to clear the place of kitchen leftovers and carry them to a recycling centre. The king’s power, envied by Macbeth and his wife in the tragedy, is revamped as master chef Duncan Docherty’s success and financial prosperity, while visions of ghosts take the form of recorded images on the cell phone. The significant aspect for the present paper, though, is the culinary dimension given to a tragedy about medieval warrior-noblemen. Surprisingly, the food metaphor works well, a marginal character’s line summarising the moral of the story like this: “The sins of a bloke what has made me work for my pound of flesh, if you’ll pardon my Shakespeare.” This is uttered by an inspector, paying a visit to Joe and Ella after

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Duncan’s murder, in order not to investigate a suspicious death, but to find evidence of rats and vermin in the restaurant kitchen. The Shakespearean allusion is not, of course, to Macbeth but to The Merchant of Venice, and works nicely as a commentary on human greed, gluttony, and excess, all of which are flaws associated closely with food consumption and most effectively illustrated by food imagery. The setting is well chosen, the tension which suffuses the plot being exploited creatively in the heat of a restaurant kitchen, full of speed and dynamism, of suspense and a competitiveness fuelled by the requirements of a Michelin evaluation and the expectations of the restaurant’s elitist clientele. At the same time, the viewers are invited to enter the atmosphere of the plot by means of the claustrophobic interiors. A high-tech kitchen with blue neon light and shiny metal surfaces is cleaned and polished at the end of each working day in a show of professional hygiene and inorganic order which contrasts with the noisy swarm during the opening hours and the mess entailed by food preparation. Another contrast is between the brightly lit kitchen and the dim light in the restaurant, decorated in red silk and plush. The obsessive repetition of one type of food imagery makes this contrast even more powerful and contextualises one of the most powerful symbols of the Shakespearean tragedy—blood. The dish which is being cooked continuously in Macbeth’s kitchen is pork, which means that the processing of meat occupies most of the time and space. The film opens with a demonstration offered by the master chef to his apprentices of how to carve a pig’s head without wasting anything. A little later, a pig is sacrificed in the same kitchen, its carcase carefully portioned and the blood washed off promptly. Macbeth’s obsession with blood is manifest as he fries pork chops, sizzling oil being replaced in the projections of his guilty conscience with a thick, dark red boiling liquid. Even the prophecy of the weird sisters—now public service workers—is about pigs. The Birnam Wood riddle turns into the casual “pigs will fly” proverb. When the garbage collectors’ predictions finally come true, a police helicopter is about to land on the restaurant roof to arrest Macbeth, who becomes aware of the polysemy of pig, which is also a slang term for “policeman.” The food references in Shakespeare’s Macbeth include one mention of “milk” as a metaphor of the hero’s initially good nature and tender heart: “the milk of human kindness,” in Lady Macbeth’s words, a reminder that gender roles have been swapped: while the man is “full of milk,” the woman would be ready to give up all maternal instincts, sacrificing her own baby in the name of political ambition. In the 2005 film, actual milk is employed at several crucial moments in the plot. In several scenes in the

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first part of the film, Joe Macbeth, a good chef, boss and tutor to Duncan’s son, is shown opening the fridge, taking out a bottle of milk and emptying it slowly. However, after killing Duncan, Macbeth cannot drink from a bottle of milk without breaking the glass and making the white liquid trickle down the fridge door under the bemused gaze of the kitchen staff. The film’s action has all the vibrancy and energy associated with working in the restaurant industry. At the same time, the choice of the chef’s profession and the replacement of political ambition with a hankering after the fame and fortune of a TV cooking show presenter are more than plausible. Food is such a complex part of contemporary culture and good cooking is such a sure way of achieving success that the theme of the 2005 adaptation is not simply the result of one director’s personal whim.

Conclusion Peculiar instances of cultural appropriation, literary cookbooks and other adaptations also attest a new mode of consumption. The fictional text is dissected with tools that once belonged to deconstructivism, and then enriched with styles, objects and formats from outside the predictable confines of literature. Since food studies are in themselves a mélange of disciplines, discourses, academic tendencies and fashions, this new model of cookbooks is always, and necessarily, the result of a morganatic union, like so many other products of contemporary culture: elitist and popular, vintage and futuristic, nostalgic and parodic, commemorative and iconoclastic—good and bad, to paraphrase a food anthropologist (Harris 1998), to eat and to think.

Works cited Angelou, Maya. 1985. “The Role of Art in Life”, in Connections Quarterly (September): 14, 28. Attardi Anselmo, Francesco, Elisa De Luigi. 2007. ReĠetele celebrei Lady Macbeth. Verdi úi Shakespeare în bucătărie. Trans. into Romanian by Raluca NiĠă. Bucureúti: House of Guides. Bell, Rudolph, M. 1985. Holy Anorexia. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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Black, Maggie. 2002. The Jane Austen Cookbook. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Bucholz, Dinah. 2010. The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook (From Cauldron Cakes to Knickerbocker Glory—More Than 150 Magical Recipes for Wizards and Non-Wizards Alike. Avon: Adams Media. Counihan, Carole, Penny Van Esterik (eds.) 1997. Food and Culture: A Reader. New York and London: Routledge. Crick, Mark. 2005. Kafka’s Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes. Orlando: Harcourt Books. Deegan, Alan, Alycia Smith-Howard. 2012. The Food of Love: A Shakespeare Cookbook. Glasbury-on-Wye: Graficas Books. Fitzpatrick, Joan. 2007. Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays. London: Ashgate. Harris, Marvin. 1998. Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture. Long Grove: Waveland Press. King, Shirley. 2006. Dining with Marcel Proust: A Practical Guide to French Cuisine of the Belle Epoque. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Lane, Maggie. 1995. Jane Austen and Food. London: The Hambledon Press. Lorwin, Madge. 1976. Dining with William Shakespeare. London: Macmillan. Mauss, Marcel. 1967. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Norton Library. Available at http://goodmachine.org/PDF/mauss_gift.pdf. Accessed 20 April 2014. Milner, Andrew. 2002. Re-Imagining Cultural Studies. The Promise of Cultural Materialism. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Monroe-Cassel, Chelsea, Sariann Lehrer. 2012. George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. A Feast of Ice and Fire. The Official Cooking Companion. New York: Bantam Books. Morton, Mark and Andrew Coppolino. 2008. Cooking with Shakespeare. Westport: Greenwood. Nestle, Marion. 2007. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Oseland, Chris-Rachel. 2012. Dining with the Doctor: The Unauthorized Whovian Cookbook. Amazon Digital Services, kindle edition. Pallberg, Robert. 2010. Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richardson, Catherine. 2011. Shakespeare and Material Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Segan, Francine. 2003. Shakespeare’s Kitchen. Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook. New York, Toronto: Random House. Smith, Woodruff D. 2002. Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800. New York and London: Routledge. Tannahill, Reay. 1988. Food in History. New York: The Rivers Press, Random House. Watson, James L. and Melissa L. Caldwell. 2005. The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating. Oxford: Blackwell. Wilson, Kim. 2004. Tea with Jane Austen. London: Frances Lincoln. Films Macbeth. 2005. Dir. Mark Brozel. Shakespeare Re-Told TV series, episode 2. BBC.Release date: 14 November. Available at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0453514/

CHAPTER FOUR “The Diderot Project,” the Book as Object, and Other Collectibles: A Palimpsestic Reading of Malcolm Bradbury’s To the Hermitage Elena Butoescu

Objects are not what they were made to be but what they have become. (Thomas 1991: 4)

Introduction Malcolm Bradbury does not hesitate to write a book that questions the very notion of the book, challenging literary and critical theory and debating the nature of contemporary writing and reading. Looking back to the intellectual origins of modernity and to the encyclopaedic projects promoted by the French philosophers of the Enlightenment, Bradbury engages in the process of re-writing a parallel dialogue between the promoters of the Enlightenment in Europe and Russia, on the one hand, and the postmodern critics of the Enlightenment Project on the other. The dialogue between geographically and chronologically distant cultures and societies reflects the author’s meta-narrative attempt to save humanist principles from being deconstructed in a postmodern manner imbued with uncertainties and thus restore humanist values and traditional beliefs. The author continuously reminds the reader of the fact that our contemporary world is not completely secularised, since “the grand human plot” was once and for all “written in the Book of Destiny above” (Bradbury 2000: 487). Along with heated debates surrounding the academia, the death of the author, the process of re-writing, the legitimacy of fiction, the fabricated biographies of Descartes and Diderot, and a sceptical analysis of “united

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Europe,” the novel puts forward the hypothesis that “books breed books,” a recurrent theme that calls for a palimpsestic reading of the novel. Have the book and the manuscript become collectable commodities in a culture of display? Can a book be considered outside the frame of its historical legacy? Are historical sources hidden below multiple layers of alternative realities? To what extent did the Enlightenment, an age of “originseeking” (Haywood 1986: 35), create a precedent for fictionalising history and recreating past cultures by collecting them in encyclopaedias, libraries, and museums? The present article will attempt to look into these issues and investigate how the author explores the notion of “object” in relationship with postmodernism and the making of modernity. Identifying and classifying things became common practices during the eighteenth-century, drawing on the private system of classification previously instituted by owners of cabinets of curiosities. Identifying, classifying and naming things represented the main means of structuring the world by determining a specific taxonomy of things and illustrating particular relations among these things. The identification and classification of both natural and material objects offer an insight into the historical ontology of the past and into the eighteenth-century curiosity in objects and their function. In “Of the Rights of Things,”1 William Blackstone expressed the century’s interest in things and the relationship between people and things. He made a clear-cut distinction between things and persons, separating “things real,” which he defines as permanent and immoveable property, such as lands and houses, from “things personal,” which can be moved from one place to another (Blackwell 2007: 10). Things grew in importance in eighteenth-century England and the emergence of a theory of things puts forward the new attitudes of a public that gradually became aware of the objects surrounding them. Thus, Britain witnessed various changes in attitudes, either regarding its society and the material environment, or in connection with “the things it valued and the things it took for granted” (12). This commodity culture avant-lalettre was to be explored three centuries later, in the fiction of postmodern writers. The commercialisation of eighteenth-century England did not pass unnoticed and did not happen only in a new consumerist society; it overwhelmed human thought to such an extent that it started influencing their way of thinking and of making history.

1 See Blackwell (2007: 9-18). Of the Rights of Things is the title of Volume II of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1766).

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Written in 2000, shortly before Malcolm Bradbury, its author, passed away, To the Hermitage is a novel that focuses on issues such as history and its (lack of) relevance for the (post)modern age. It also takes into account the process of re-writing and objectifying history by turning it into a “noisy museum” (2000: 285) which collects both historical objects and tourists in an attempt to create a redundant cabinet of curiosities. The narrator is a novelist who tells two stories: one of his research on “The Diderot Project” in Stockholm and Russia, whereas the other focuses on the cultural and political exchanges mediated by the actual encounter in eighteenth-century Russia between Catherine II and Denis Diderot. A narrative that investigates “The Enlightenment Project,” To the Hermitage belongs to the type of postmodernist fiction classified as “historiographical metafiction” that presents an alternative reality based on historical sources and determined by formal and rhetorical structures. Borrowing the eighteenth-century habit of blurring the distinction between history and fiction, historiography and literature, Malcolm Bradbury turns his hand to re-writing “The Enlightenment Project” from the perspective of the French philosopher, Denis Diderot, the Encyclopaedist. “The Diderot Project” of the 1990s is, in fact, the global and cosmopolitan version of the Western project of the Enlightenment. On the other hand, Bradbury builds up on the spirit of the “The Diderot Project” in order to satirise academic life in the West. This project appears to be another excuse for travelling for research purposes on the expense of an academic institution: “I suppose what I don’t understand, then, is if you’re so anti-reason why did you come on this Diderot Project?” “The same reason we all come on the Diderot Project. Free air-ticket, free food and drink, free visit to Russia. What’s the first rule of academic scholarship? Never, never look a gift grant in the mouth” (Bradbury 11920)

Actually, “The Diderot Project” is just a pretext introduced to help the development of the idea according to which “one thing leads to another” and “books often breed books” (492). “The Diderot Project” goes nowhere. The academics engaged in solving its mystery are convinced that everything is relative. The Great Library of Reason consists of books that re-wrote previous books which, in their turn, were re-written by former authors. Books thus become mere objects that have lost their capacity to transmit knowledge and have simply been converted into imitations of other books piled up on the library shelves. Unsurprisingly, in the novel readers are more important than authors, objects are more significant than

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their users, and fiction should be taken for granted, since it is preferable to history. In Bradbury’s historical palimpsest, which proves to be a complexity of layers of influences that mould the chronology of the narration, the characters engage in a perpetual dialogue on the origins of modernity, written underneath the layer of our contemporary world. This palimpsest displays the inscriptions that were written throughout the ages and that the reader can simultaneously interpret in an attempt to find out whether the philosophical and political Enlightenment projects have failed or have trapped us in. There are no beginnings or endings in Bradbury’s novel, and it appears that transitions and layers are more significant in this novel where juxtapositions need to be deciphered: Books breed books. The end of one is often the beginning of another. Which then ends itself, no doubt then to become the start of yet another. But, perhaps because nothing ever ends in the way it was originally meant to, the author sometimes goes back into it again, begins to rewrite it, starts to revise the story, or even begins to tell the whole thing over again […] (414).

The Museum of the Enlightenment The Enlightenment developed a specific turn of mind dedicated to human reason, science, and education, the necessary ingredients to build a stable society of free men on earth. The eighteenth-century view of the world relied on differences and faced opposite directions. On the one hand, it looked to the classical world of reason, and on the other, it anticipated the Romantic age, surrounded by its fantastic and magical attributes. These differences illustrate a plurality of forms of rationality, and they also express the need for a counterpart in order to keep the age balanced. This double-edged characteristic of certain terms places the eighteenth century on the border between the classical and the modern. Barbara Benedict argues that in the late eighteenth century there occurred a shift from the classical order, where language and objects coexisted within the realm of representation, to the modern world, where we witness the birth of the “historical” in the separation of the sign from the signifier (2001: 6). By the same token, Robert Wokler states that “all the rhetoric of modernity […] can be found in the Enlightenment” (1999: 8). While most of the theoreticians of modernity describe its origins in terms of industrial revolutions and political changes, it cannot be denied that the true starting

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point of modernity happened around the 1630s, when Descartes came up with the principle of rationality and with his offer of new ways of thinking about nature and society. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter consider that experience and reason are the universal concepts that played a central part in the “progressive, liberal intellectual tradition” (1990: 1) initiated by the project of the Enlightenment, which continues even in our contemporary world. As a process present in all the domains of study as well as a broad socio-cultural configuration, multiple-faced modernity can be thought of and portrayed in terms of economic, political, scientific, and philosophical issues. Printing brought about a radical structural change in European society and, as a consequence, the concept of knowledge was revised. Starting from the premise that reason did not come alone in this world and that it is overshadowed by its sentimental counterpart, Niklas Luhmann distinguishes between the two facets of the Enlightenment. According to Luhmann, The eighteenth century’s belief in reason is based on differences. The Enlightenment sees itself in a world that must be enlightened. It irrationalises everything that is in the way. Along with reason, there is history; along with Newton there is Münchausen; along with rationality there is pleasure; along with modernity with its work, language, and science there is romanticism's fantasy, portraying the unity of the world as strictly decorative—as magic, as long as one does not believe in it (1998: 24).

It was Paul Hazard who, in his 1935 La Crise de la conscience européenne drew attention to the transformations in European culture and mentality that occurred in the late seventeenth century, a period associated with the rise of modern science. Hazard put forward the idea according to which the Enlightenment stemmed from the moral and spiritual “crisis of the European mind” (1973: 447) that took place in the late seventeenth century, and despite the fact that his thesis has been sometimes challenged by historians of the Enlightenment, the fundamental consequences of the critical period between 1680 and 1715 that he pointed out cannot be refuted. The narratives of the Enlightenment should have driven out ideology and have promised instead collective emancipation. Consequently, it appears that “The Enlightenment Project” which promoted “the advancement of learning” should have been accomplished

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at all costs in order to conform with the intellectual and political programmes that developed in Britain between 1650 and 1700.2 R. G. Collingwood regards the Enlightenment’s “restriction of interest to the modern period” (2005: 78) as an anti-historical outlook. The fact that historians of the Enlightenment as well as philosophers ignored ancient history, the Middle Ages and religion, while focusing more on the “reasonable” present, meant that “with their narrow conception of reason, they had no sympathy for, and therefore no insight into, what from their point of view were non-rational periods of human history; they only began to be interested in history at the point where it began to be the history of a modern spirit akin to their own, a scientific spirit” (78).3 In a “modern scientific spirit” Enlightenment writers denied “superstition and darkness, error and imposture” (80). Instead of identifying the historical origin of the Enlightenment, they substituted miracles as its source: “They had no satisfactory theory of historical causation and could not seriously believe in the origin or genesis of anything whatever” (80). According to Collingwood, the historian’s task is to use his own picture of the past “to justify the sources used in his construction” (245). These data are considered as sources “only because they are in this way justified” (245): For any source may be tainted; this writer prejudiced, that misinformed; this inscription misread by a bad epigraphist, that blundered by a careless stonemason; this potsherd placed out of its context by an incompetent excavator, that by a blameless rabbit. The critical historian has to discover and correct all these and many other kinds of falsification (245).

The Enlightenment struggled to produce a rationalistic view of the world and re-invent the system of knowledge. Intellectuals of the Enlightenment wanted to refute previous modes of knowledge by promoting a general and arbitrary form of understanding, one that stemmed not from the ultimate truth as a universal principle, but from the new generalising values of equality, authenticity, rationalism, and tolerance. Encyclopaedias played a key role in the expansion and improvement of knowledge and as Lawrence E. Sullivan has it, after the European geographic and economic expansion, “the reshaping of knowledge took place especially in works that laid claim to universal

2

For further comments on “The Enlightenment Project” and the War of Religions, see Pocock (1998). 3 Hume’s History of England and Voltaire’s writings best exemplify this theory.

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knowledge, encyclopaedias being the paradigm of such works” (1990: 316). The Encyclopaedia of Diderot and d’Alembert—the first volume was published in 1751—was an enormous collective Enlightenment enterprise, whose purpose was to educate and instruct the readers in a global and systematic way. Diderot’s article “Encyclopédie,” one of the first manifestos of the Enlightenment, points to the guiding principles that reflect the project of “modernity” itself: The aim of an encyclopaedia is to assemble knowledge scattered across the earth, to reveal its overall structure to our contemporaries and to pass it on to those who will come after us, so that the achievements of past ages do not become worthless for the centuries to come, so that our descendants, in becoming better informed may at the same time become more virtuous and content, and so that we do not leave this earth without having earned the respect of the human race (1992: 21-2).

Such an enterprise could not have been accomplished unless men of letters were “bound together by the general interest of humanity and by a sense of mutual goodwill” (22) in order to produce a collective exhibition of valuable words and ideas. The eighteenth-century encyclopaedia was the exact equivalent of the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities: global knowledge was assembled in a single place which displayed exotic exhibits and products crafted by artisans and included in their cabinets by knowledgeable collectors. Obviously enough, the value of an object depended to a great extent on new-found knowledge, on the social and financial status of the collectors, and on their intellectual and professional curiosity. “Collecting natural objects therefore became a means of creating a didactic and professional resource” (Olmi 1985: 6), in the same way that the Encyclopédie became the book of those individuals who wanted to instruct themselves. The museum as a scientific institution par excellence hosts objects gathered from all around the world; the Encyclopaedia brings together knowledge spread across the earth. The museum receives its visitors and future generations embrace this culture of display and commodities; the Encyclopaedia passes on useful knowledge to future generations in the form of ideas, concepts, and definitions. Museums have enormous educational value and they represent an exercise in forming our perception of the world that contributes to the morality of the soul; the Encyclopaedia informs people in such a manner that, at the end of the day, they become “more virtuous and content,” pleased to know that they will leave a trace behind them. By virtue of this similarity, Diderot’s

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enterprise, his book, becomes a metonymic object displayed in the Museum of the Enlightenment. Since the value of an object is created through a cultural exchange between viewer and exhibit, the objects would become worthless if no one came to visit the museum or, “worse, if they derived nothing useful from the visit” (Conn 1998: 24). We shall see how Malcolm Bradbury crams his pages with books, philosophes, and other commodities and collectibles, in order to derive something useful from the reader’s visit to historical places and times; and we shall see how the author translates the project of the French Encyclopaedia onto Russian soil, challenging certainties as to the nature of space and the meaning of historical time. Unlike the material interest a museum takes in objects and artifacts, in Bradbury’s novel objects are recontextualised and revalued. Historical recontextualisation is the key to creating a metahistorical fiction. Not only does the author imagine the circumstances in which Diderot and Catherine’s conversations about the reformation of Russia took place, but he also “specifically focuses on the asymmetrical relationship between Europe’s Eastern and Western halves as illustrated by Catherine’s Diderot Project in the past and Russia’s postcommunist condition in the 1990s” (Kostova 2012: 212).

The hermit in the Hermitage It is within this time-space continuum that a contemporary Western European author decided to engage in an overt imaginary dialogue with the past and to settle his story in a different cultural space, that is, Russian spirituality, where the Tsarina identifies autocracy with progress. Malcolm Bradbury represents Catherine the Great as an object of display, “a living statue in herself,” or “the Hermit of the Hermitage” (2000: 5), as she calls herself, an empress whom Voltaire initially highly praised and who engaged in a sustained correspondence with Frédéric-Melchior Grimm, “the press agent, as it were, of the republic of letters” (Malia 1999: 48). Before she completed the partitioning of Poland in 1795, Catherine, who was not Russian-born,4 had been strongly supported by the French 4

Catherine’s arduous ambition to illuminate Russia by disseminating Enlightenment precepts at home can be viewed, in fact, as a consequence of the fact that she did not have Russian blood, although it is well-known that German thinkers did not approve of the Enlightenment principles. Mason and Wokler explain how she ascended to the Russian throne: “Catherine was German-born, French-educated, and Russian only by marriage; her husband was a grandson of Peter the Great. Soon after he came to the throne in 1762 as Peter III, he died in

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philosophes in her endeavour to implement the Enlightenment ideals in Russia.5 Jean D’Alembert was an advocate of Catherine’s cause, whereas Voltaire “boasted his intimacy with power by referring to her as ‘la belle Cateau’ in correspondence with philosophic friends” (Malia 48). In her turn, Catherine II desired to be acknowledged by the Western monarchs as the enlightened ruler of the other half of the world. Diderot assiduously corresponded with Catherine and in 1773 he went to St. Petersburg to visit her. He spent five months6 at Catherine’s court and after he had completed his contribution to the French Encyclopédie, the monarch offered him financial help: “he sold her his library and in return was provided with a pension for the rest of his life” (Mason and Wokler 1992: xxi). She attracted admiration from the Encyclopedists for her rationalistic theory of progress, which capitalised on such enlightened values as material progress, instruction, public reforms, and toleration. Martin Malia contends that in order to legitimise her actions at home, Catherine II sought help from the philosophes in a practical attempt to secure her absolutist position abroad: Certainly there was much self-interested politics and disingenuous propaganda on both sides in Catherine’s idyll with the children of light. After all, the empress had first sought out the philosophes and exploited their prestige to bolster her shaky legitimacy at home. And later she would employ the republic of letters to win friends for Russia’s voracious ambitions abroad. In return, the philosophes obtained an ally during the “battle of the Encyclopédie,” at a time when they were politically vulnerable, impecunious, and harassed by censorship. So the support of the Russian empress, as well as of the Prussian king, against the proscriptions of their own monarch and of the Sorbonne’s theologians was of real practical importance. For this mutual aid, each side was willing to pay the price of a measure of duplicity, even self-delusion. (54)

Catherine II secularised the monasteries in Russia for financial reasons, but her enterprise was warmly welcomed by the French philosophes, “who condemned the contemplative life as useless” (Dixon 2009: 154). After mysterious circumstances (Catherine herself was suspected of ordering his murder), and she assumed power. Her aim was to continue the process of Westernisation which Peter the Great had begun in the early years of the century.” (Mason and Wokler xxi) 5 For an overview of the diplomatic and cultural relations between Russia and France, see Alain Besançon, (2013); Martin Malia (1999); Albert Lortholary (1951). 6 On this subject, see Michael Streeter (2007: 47-48; 91).

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she had purchased Diderot’s library for 15,000 livres, she paid him to attend to the library himself, in an attempt to save him from financial trouble and impoverishment.7 Bradbury includes all these historical data in his novel in order to justify both the origins and the consequences of modernity in the context of a relationship that echoes the Enlightenment project: the relationship between an absolutist monarch and a rational philosopher, whom Catherine playfully addresses as Mr. Librarian. Paintings of Catherine hang on the imperial walls. They usually portray her in male regimentals, sitting aside her horse. However, “beneath the simulacrum there sits the real thing” (Bradbury 167), the Tsarina herself, who is interested in philosophical matters and who enjoys reflecting on life in her long conversations with Diderot. Sometimes, their philosophical conversations involve objects that physically represent an abstract concept. When they engage in debates on time, Catherine presents Diderot with a Swiss watch that she received from Voltaire. Diderot’s ironic reaction against his fellow philosopher is also directed at Russian political affairs. When Catherine tells him that Voltaire sent her five hundred watches, he amusedly replies: “Five hundred? Soon Russia will have more time than it knows what to do with” (Bradbury 2000: 304). Catherine II has all the time in the world to spend with European Reason and Lumières, but this is what she does in her spare time. She still considers Diderot a dreamer. At the heart of Catherine’s “Pan-Europeanism” lay, according to Martin Malia, a certain vulnerability caused by her awareness that the whole of Europe knew “she had attained power by deposing her husband and excluding her son from the succession” (1999: 47). Catherine’s embracing of Europe stemmed from her desire to be considered one of the most progressive and enlightened monarchs of Russia. Her desire was none other than the attempt to seek legitimacy in Europe by supporting the enlightened thinkers when their country of origin banned them or did not subsidise their work.8 “The Hermit of the Hermitage” is herself depicted as an object among other objects that are skilfully displayed in a museum which brings together trophies and collectibles that can be historically read as a palimpsest of chronological events. If all these layers are removed, if 7 For a detailed reference to this episode, see Simon Dixon, Catherine the Great. London: Profile Books Limited, 2009, p. 153, and Malia (1999: 49). Bradbury’s novel also mentions this detail as factual information and on this occasion the author has the Tsarina say that “it would be a cruelty to separate a wise man from his books, the objects of his delight, the source of his work, the companions of his leisure” (2000: 40). 8 See, in this respect, Martin Malia (1999: 48-50).

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we leaf through all the files in “the great Book of Destiny above,” we shall discover that century after century, nations and individuals contributed to the writing of History. In their exuberant appeal to the tourists, museums perfectly preserve the collections set up by people through personal enterprise and maintained for private entertainment. Armies of tourists invade History: For, where the people surged and the great gates tumbled, American backpackers knock back their cans of coke, Japanese tourists photograph each other standing next to something or other, and weary-looking Russian army conscripts smoke on the steps and eye up the endless supplies of young foreign girls. Inside, in the great buildings, vast tour parties sweep past each other, going in all directions, up and down the staircases, along the thirteen miles of stone corridors, into the twelve hundred rooms of paintings, objects, every kind of treasure, two million different items from all over the world. […] Today the world seems to be one museum after the other. […] Hermitage now means museum; museum now implies Hermitage. Tzar after tzar added to its boodle and multiplied its trophies. Collector after collector added their private contributions, general after general came home with more trophies. […] Paintings and objects take the place of history and power. (Bradbury 284-5).

The novel puts forward the idea that contemporary civilisation and institutions have been fundamentally shaped by Enlightenment values. The legacy of the Enlightenment surrounds our modern society. Contemporary individuals walk in the museums of the past, but they do so at a price: namely, traditional values have been replaced by the abstract exchange or commodity value. The “Diderot pilgrims” look back to the past in order to resist the decadence and degradation of the contemporary world. In postmodern times, the book as a formerly valuable artistic production has undergone a fundamental transformation in relation to a society imbued with a culture of simulacra and dominated by mediated experience: it has lost its aesthetic dimension and has become indistinguishable from consumable products or commodities. Even the ambitious “Diderot Project” is a “simple banner” that “has been raised over a small table” (Bradbury 262), whereas underneath it, “the Diderot Pilgrims” involved in it are described not in terms of academic interests and ideas, but in terms of fashion brands and shallow preoccupations. These people are represented as chatty figures arrested by the consumerist syndrome. They definitely know how to converse in an era of effective communication and the academic project is just a means to getting to taste the Russian caviar:

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Beneath it stand Bo and Alma Luneberg, he having added a black woollen snow-hat to his Burberry, she in her northern furs. Our conflicts and problems have all been forgotten; […] They’re smiling, handing out documents, answering all our questions, reminding us about the charms of the Petersburg places and opera houses, the dangers of dark streets at nights, the quality of the caviar and the infinite ambiguity of the rouble. […] Here comes Agnes Falkman and Sven Sonnenberg. […] He smokes a huge self-crafted pipe, she has donned ever more radical denim and folkwear. […] While they have dressed down for labour and the country, Anders Manders reappears, quite evidently dressed for town. In elegant loden coat and fine fur hat, he’s ripe for the metropolis (i.e. Sankt Petersburg), a capital city where taste is everything and daily life is art. (Bradbury 262-3).

The interests of present-day academia, as outlined by Bradbury, are related less to scientific research and more to the “pink Russian shampanski” (112). The narrator announces the end of Reason and of History as well: “Ours is no longer a time of ideology; in fact, it’s the Age of Shopping. Politics have turned into lifestyle, Star Wars to Nintendo, history into retro” (86). These topics are actually embedded in the larger problematic of the cultural, rather than the geographical, understanding of the Western paradigm, the Western creation of a literary canon, the eighteenth-century imitation of classical writers, and ultimately, the elements that establish the border between history and fiction. Empirical knowledge and reason were the basic universal notions that the Enlightenment was built on and to some extent the characters involved in the project speak of how these foundations were shaken by replacing empirical knowledge with beliefs and opinions, or, as most characters in Bradbury’s novel put it, words and stories. In his famous essay, The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes considers that the author comes second in the literary arena, the reader being of more importance. Barthes celebrates the death of the Author9 as origin, and is closely followed by Foucault in this respect. The death of the author remains a theoretical concept, authored by Barthes and based on a history of authorship, and continued by Foucault, who questions the nature of the author, deconstructing the author's position as the origin of something original (emphases mine). Not only does Bradbury praise the death of the author, but he also announces the birth of the reader, who is eager to respond to the writer’s text, deconstruct the edifice of the book, or

9

Roland Barthes replaces the figure of the author with what he calls “écriture,” the kind of writing which is detached from any sort of agency, of authority.

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engage in self-expression: “in accepting the Death of the Author we’re announcing the Birth of the Reader” (2000: 152). One of the characters in the novel, Jack-Paul Verso, who is a Professor in the Department of Contemporary Thinking at Cornell University, comes up with a story about the birth of the encyclopaedia and the end of history. He tells his colleagues about mystifications and the absence of reason and he explains Barthes’ theory in terms of the death of Authority: “there are no writers, only writing, because writing is trapped in language and is not attached to a real world” (Bradbury 194). His talk arouses distress and initiates a debate on issues such as fiction and history, the role of language and plagiarism. The recurrent phrase “books breed books” (387) echoes an already existent concern with imitation, plagiarism, originality, and copyright. When people ceased to believe that knowledge was something that came from divine revelation and transmitted through the ancient texts, and when the eighteenth-century philosophes promoted the idea of knowledge as coming from the human mind in the form of original and new ideas, the questions of originality, creativity, and intellectual property became essential for literary production. It was quite difficult for the eighteenth-century writer to refrain from imitating the classics or from becoming creative when “adapting” or “rewriting” in the mock-heroic form as long as piracy was the only prohibited form of copying at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Moreover, there is a very strong argument that could be used in order to explain why at the beginning of the eighteenth century intellectuals were not concerned by the legal status of literary property. People like Voltaire, Condorcet, or Rousseau in France rejected the existing social and religious arrangements and considered that progress could only be achieved by breaking with the past and traditional values. It was in the name of emancipation and rational knowledge that the law of copyright was considered unnecessary, because it could have prevented education and instruction from being available to all social classes. Even if some books imitated or even plagiarised other volumes, as long as they instructed and entertained the public according to the classical principle of utile dulce, they were accepted and even promoted by the learned men of the time. By the same token, Bradbury orchestrates his contemporary characters when they go ahead with their project, even if this project is less about Diderot than about the shallowness of the contemporary world. The people that take part in this project come from all walks of life: a singer, an academic, an actor, a carpenter, a diplomat, a writer, and a philosopher. The context of this project is distinctly material, since the presence of

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useful objects and consumable goods leaves little room for intellectual debate: In the conference section, things are quieter, more studious. I find the glasswalled chamber assigned to the Diderot Project, and stare through the glass walls. Yet even here things have changed overnight; […] The room’s been rearranged into a large square of tables, covered in green baize. On the tables are places laid with neat new notepads, pencils, bottles of Russian fizz, large cardboards wallets stuffed with maps and restaurant tickets and marked “Diderot Project”. (Bradbury 149)

Objects and things have replaced the interest in rational thinking and the new ideology expresses the novel’s guiding motif that “books breed books.” Like in a large hall of mirrors, one cannot distinguish the copy from the original source. It is in this sense that memory plays tricks on both the characters and the readers of the novel. Being constantly on the move between now and then, between the historical past and the chaotic present, the readers get the impression that what has been disregarded before is now re-written and re-created under their own eyes. Both processes illuminate certain connections between the Enlightenment and modernity, and eventually explain that there has never been a Diderot Project at all (i.e. an Enlightenment Project), so that any intention to evaluate modernity with reference to it must be mere fabrication. The narrator as a writer contends that “fiction is infinitely preferable to real life, which is a pretty feeble fiction anyway” (Bradbury 84). To illustrate this position, the narrator presents a paper that is not a paper, the perfect title for the plot of the novel is “The Mystification,” the whole world is a mystification (20), the Russians playfully call Diderot Dionysius Didro, objects emanate “simulacra,” books have become “objects of delight” (40), and our world has already acquired “a random and ever multiplying set of signs, signals, systems that lay beyond any philosopher, any philosophy, any encyclopaedia” (193).

Post-mortem collectibles Is this the “pain inside modernity” (2000: 411) that Bradbury mentions when Galina, the twentieth-century Russian guide, keeps opening books, magazines, cupboards, and boxes showing the narrator-novelist plates and engravings, processions and parades, papers and letters, photographs and old documents? To what extent did the Enlightenment, an age of “originseeking” create a precedent for fictionalising history and recreating past

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cultures by collecting them in encyclopaedias, libraries, and museums? According to Baudrillard, the basic ordering principles in arranging interiors or objects, as they were dictated by Nature in traditional societies, have come to an end in postmodern times: the project initiated by technological society “implies putting the very idea of genesis into question and omitting all the origins […]; the notion of a world no longer given but instead produced” (Baudrillard 1996: 28). The Enlightenment was a search for origins, whereas postmodernity has rejected those origins, despite showing interest in the past. It appears that the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries promoted a literary project whose concern with the fabrication of eighteenth-century history and fiction10 denotes an obsession with the past,11 not in the sense of preserving and perpetuating it, but of re-evaluating it according to the new chronotopes of postmodernity: The postmodern psyche in all arenas seems compelled to rewrite the Enlightenment past as Other in order to construct, and perhaps vindicate, itself and to confront the promise of Enlightenment epistemology (Elias 1996: 535).

On delivering his lecture, the narrator introduces a new theory of postmodernism, one that is necrologically connected with the past: postmortemism (Bradbury 153). According to him, the end of a story is in fact “the opening shot in the next story,” the sequel and the after-life story. Postmortemism is imbued with objects that live on even after the story has come to an end. They stand for all the things that are laid out for a distant posterity. It is at this point that Postmortemism, another name for Postmodernism and also a satire upon it, overlaps with a palimpsestic perspective on history, “the shadowy theatre where we all bury, disinter, translate, interpret, study, revise, amend, re-edit, parody, quote, misquote, traduce, and transcend […]” (153). Statues and collections are here to remind us of a past presence. The eighteenth-century fiction that was re-

10

Take, for instance, the entire genre of Robinsonades, Jorge Luis Borges’s Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1932), J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (1987), Andrew Miller’s Ingenious Pain (1997) and Casanova in Love (1998), or Malcolm Bradbury's To the Hermitage (2000), to mention only a few. 11 The obssession with the past has been identified in postmodern manifestations by contemporary critics such as Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, Charles Jencks, and others.

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written by contemporary authors lay hidden behind pages which are crammed with objects that remind us of “Posterity:” Wakes and processions, cemeteries and dripping yews. Obituaries, eulogies, epitaphs, inscriptions, tombs, catafalques. Statues, plinths, busts, poets’ corners, writers’ houses, pantheons. Libraries, collections, lost manuscripts, translations, collected edited editions, complete works (they almost never are). (153)

The Tsarina collects libraries and their possessors, whereas problems of representation are debated in Étienne Falconet’s atelier, where he moulds people into statues for Posterity. Diderot and Falconet argue over the role of art and the paradox of representation and Falconet eventually breaks Diderot’s “other little self” (375) to pieces. The presence of an object replaces the absence of the work of art which can be destroyed by its own creator. The narrator and the other characters are all concerned with the system of objects, since these interfere with the organisation of “The Diderot Project” as well as with other debates on the nature of reading, writing, and authorship. In Sweden, we are told, simplicity is attained at a high price and the Swedish Nature and Soul are mediated by the function of useful objects, that is, “carpentered chairs,” “handmade tables,” and “woven fabrics” (11). Objects from the past surround our everyday lives and we interpret their use and function according to our subjective perception. The novel is infused with enumerations whose purpose is to emphasise the lack of endings and the continuous transitions from the eighteenth century to the contemporary age. The Tsarina is seen as a collector not just of things, but of people, as well: “And, truth to tell, in the course of her great Enlightenment shopping spree she has purchased our Thinker himself” (25). The Enlightenment had its philosophers who offered “the highest metaphysical advice” (30) to kings and queens. Our postmodern age has its thinkers (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Kristeva), who live in “our own age of philosophical cafés and personal thought-trainers who’ll advise whenever you’ve a window in your corporate day” (33). Apart from being pleasurable and comfortable, modern life is “commercial, corporate, and capitalist” (111). Various goods and objects overwhelm the project and the ship that takes the academic pilgrims to Russia: Barbie dolls, Western CDs, mobile organisers, mobile phones, whole hams, entire cheeses, silk scarves, old socks, strangely-shaped brown-paper

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In Bradbury, objects do not become general symbolic and metaphorical themes. The action of the characters seems less significant than the meaningless descriptions given to objects of utility. Things and objects are spread everywhere in the novel, now and then, a fact which impedes to a large extent the accomplishment of “The Diderot Project”.

Conclusion “The Diderot Project” is doomed to failure even before it starts. Being merely a pretext for a sponsored journey to Sweden and Russia, a free ferry-trip to Saint Petersburg, a visit to the Hermitage and the Library of Reason, this project “just ain’t going to happen” (Bradbury 80). The reason might appear quite abstruse, but it’s real and justificatory. Our contemporary narrator feels so worn out by the everyday events he has to cope with12 that he can hardly focus on writing an academic paper on a rather ambiguous subject. The modern-day world has completely exhausted the mind of the narrator in such a way that, at the end of the day, despite pitying the state of the advancement of learning, he admits that he feels “far too drained to write an academic paper” (80) on something that he cannot grasp precisely. He does not know exactly the purpose of his task, and that makes him declare that history is chaotic and creates confusion. So many objects have interposed themselves between the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment Pilgrimage, and so many statues have been built to remind the modern urban dweller of Posterity, that present-day lives have turned into a vast array of commodities which have gradually lost their value. Bradbury’s novel criticises and subverts at the same time the postmodern world in relation to the Age of the Enlightenment, which it imitates in a poor manner. The focus is not on academic matters, but on consumer behaviour and fashion designers. The American Professor JackPaul Verso is introduced not as an outstanding expert in his field, but as an 12

This is how he describes the tiring events of a day: “the early morning check-in at postmodern Stanstead, the briny Stockholm air, the visit to the Vasa, the long and wearying quest for Descartes, the herring dinner in the midst of an alkoholfri bohemia, the silent Kierkegaardian postmodern concert” (Bradbury 80). All these obligations distract him from his intellectual preoccupations and prevent him from following the track initiated by the Diderot Project.

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Armani wearer who, contradictorily enough, loves to deconstruct the contemporary world: “Jack-Paul Verso, in Calvin Klein jeans, Armani jacket, and a designer baseball cap saying I LOVE DECONSTRUCTION” (89). The presence of material objects highlights an absence: the absence of the Author and authority, the absence of landmarks, the absence of coherence, and the absence of certainties. Postmodernism is an absence that can hardly be filled up with things and objects. Books and manuscripts have become collectibles, commodities exhibited in museums and libraries; the role they have played throughout the years is not satisfactorily grasped by the hoards of tourists which continuously invade the cultural space of a museum.

Works cited Barthes, Roland. 1997. “The Death of the Author,” in K. M. Newton (ed.) Twentieth-Century Literary Theory. A Reader.. London: Macmillan Press, 120-123. Baudrillard, Jean. 1996. The System of Objects. Trans. from French by James Benedict. London & New York: Verso. Benedict, Barbara M. 2001. Curiosity. A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Besançon, Alain. 2013. Sfânta Rusie. Trans. from French by Vlad Russo. Bucureúti: Humanitas. Blackwell, Mark. 2007. “Introduction: The It-Narrative and EighteenthCentury Thing Theory,” in Mark Blackwell (ed.), The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 9-18. Bradbury, Malcolm. 2000. To the Hermitage. London: Quality Paperbacks Direct. Collingwood, R. G. 2005. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conn, Steven. 1998. Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Diderot, Denis. 1992. Political Writings. Trans. from French and edited by John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dixon, Simon. 2009. Catherine the Great. London: Profile Books Limited. Elias, Amy J. 1996. “The Postmodern Turn on (:) the Enlightenment.” Contemporary Literature, 37. 4 (Winter): 533-558.

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Haywood, Ian. 1986. The Making of History. A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James MacPherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth Century Ideas of History and Fiction. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. Hazard, Paul. 1973. Criza conútiinĠei europene. 1680-1715. Trans. Sanda ùora. Prefaced by Romul Munteanu. Bucureúti: Editura Univers. Kostova, Ludmila. 2012. “A Voluptuous Tsarina in the Republic of Letters? Catherine “The Great” in Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch’s Russian Court Tales and Malcolm Bradbury’s To the Hermitage,” in Ludmila Kostova, Iona Sarieva, and Mihaela Irimia (eds.), Comparisons and Interactions Within/Across Cultures. Veliko Turnovo: St. Methodius University Press, 201-232. Lortholary, Albert. 1951. Le mirage russe en France au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Boivin. Luhmann, Niklas. 1998. Observations on Modernity. California: Stanford University Press, MacGregor, Arthur. 1985. “The Cabinet of Curiosities in SeventeenthCentury Britain,” in Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (eds.), The Origins of Museums. The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 147-158. Malia, Martin. 1999. Russia under Western Eyes. From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Mason, John Hope and Robert Wokler. 1992. “Introduction” in Denis Diderot. Political Writings. Trans. from French by John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ixxxxv. Olmi, Giuseppe. 1985. “Science-Honour-Metaphor: Italian Cabinets of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (eds.), The Origins of Museums. The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 5-16. Pocock, J. G. A. 1998. "Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment," in Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa (eds.), Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 7-28. Rousseau, G. S, and Roy Porter (eds.). 1990. Exoticism in the Enlightenment. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press. Streeter, Michael. 2007. Catherine the Great. London: Haus Publishing Limited.

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Sullivan, Lawrence E. 1990. “Circumscribing Knowledge: Encyclopedias in Historical Perspective.” The Journal of Religion 70.3 (July): 315339. Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects. Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Whittaker, Cynthia Hyla. 1998. “The Idea of Autocracy among Eighteenth-Century Russian Historians,” in Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel (eds.), Imperial Russia. New Histories for the Empire. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 32-59. Wokler, Robert. 1999. The Enlightenment: The Nation-State and the Primal Patricide of Modernity. Budapest: Collegium Budapest, Institute for Advanced Studies.

CHAPTER FIVE Transcendent Commodities: Magical Materialism in the Short Stories of Bridget O’Connor Jonathan P. A. Sell Introduction This essay raises the question of whether commodity culture can be critiqued textually without condemning the text that formulates the critique to immediate obsolescence. To this end, it considers Bridget O’Connor’s two collections of short stories, Here Comes John (1993) and Tell Her You Love Her (1997), which together offer a wry, sometimes biting, criticism of materialist culture and commodified identity in 1990s Britain. At the same time, and perhaps inevitably, O’Connor’s stories actually textualise their own status as nodal points in a network of economic-aesthetic parameters and canons; in other words, they constitute themselves as commodities endowed with certain culturally determined economic and aesthetic values. By running formally and stylistically so close to the winds of the very materialism they seek to condemn, the stories are at risk of rapidly falling out of date. The essay therefore asks whether literary texts such as O’Connor’s, which are so tightly imbricated in a particular set of historical and economic circumstances, can ever aspire to more than the status of perishable goods with a short shelf-life. Can any transcendence be on offer for literary commodities which align themselves so closely with the transience of printed circuits and polyethylene and with a culture which enshrines the trivial and finds fulfilment in instant gratification? By way of an answer, an analogy is proposed between the interpretation of literary texts and the subversively creative uses to which consumers may wittingly or otherwise put commodities in what amounts to an act of resistance to an ideologised market and the interests of those who control it. This analogy ultimately says nothing new about the nature

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of literary texts, but it does serve as a reminder of what elevates art above the everyday, and of why, despite the buzz of her contemporaneity, Bridget O’Connor, who died prematurely in 2010, will remain a writer worth reading. Better known perhaps for her plays for radio and television and her screenplays, O’Connor was a fine writer of a body of short stories which, despite their critical success, have received little scholarly attention.1 Apart from anything else, this paper is a modest bid to awaken academic interest in an unduly neglected author.

O’Connor’s critique of commodity culture Italo Calvino, one of the masters of the modern short-story, has this to say about objects in fiction: The moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic. (Calvino 1992: 33)

This is almost true of the objects with which O’Connor’s stories are replete, all of them carefully selected for their socio-economic nuance, often referred to straight by their brand name. It is by alluding to the consumer items with which they stock their lives that O’Connor delineates the character of the people who inhabit the world of her stories. In this way, character is reduced pretty much to a question of purchasing power or socioeconomic niche, and becomes less a question of individuals than of Dreiserian types arrayed according to an advertiser’s categories. If not quite what they eat, the characters are what they consume, or would like to consume. 2 In “There Will Always Be a Felicity” (O’Connor 1997: 119-30), Gary offers the following analysis of a particular sector of the girl market: “Take your average Harvey Nichols girl, she don’t drink tea. She’s expensive. Cappuccino.” Felicity herself tries to tempt Gary back by inviting him to see Jurassic Park, eat a “veggy burger” at McDonald’s, 1

Her best-known play is Flags (2006); her screenplay, co-written with husband Peter Straughan, of John Le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy won the BAFTA award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2012, being shortlisted for an Oscar in the same year and category. As for critical studies, see Lázaro (2001) and Sell (2010). 2 For a fuller examination of O’Connor’s critique, see Sell (2010).

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“come to the Freud exhibition at the Whitechapel”, “row on the Serpentine? She had a bottle of pink champagne”, “go to a Phil Collins concert” or “eat pizza”. Thus is Gary presented to the reader as basically conservative working-class with middle-brow cultural pretensions. And of course, Felicity knows her man, for Gary himself plans to woo Mandy, a building society cashier with a lip-ring, over a candle-lit dinner—“Yellow candles bought in bulk from IKEA”. In other words, not a discreet pair but a whole boxful—and a boxful of mass-produced designer candles to boot. Gary is a prole who likes his culture and style pre-packaged and off-the-shelf. Inevitably, Felicity ends up with her man, for she knows her customer, while Mandy’s lip-ring is ultimately a bit too transgressive for the likes of Gary. Successful wooing is therefore reliant on the sort of canny profiling which is the stock-in-trade of the market analyst. Inhabitants of a material world, O’Connor’s characters are no more than statistics in a marketing campaign, or items that can be traded for a quick profit, as in “Reader’s Wife” (O’Connor 1993: 83-91), where Rolf has no scruples about sending off an intimate photograph of his wife to a pornographic magazine without her permission and in exchange, presumably, for a tenner or two. O’Connor’s girls, in particular, are disciples of Madonna, material girls living in the material world of the eighties and nineties like Tina in “I’m Running Late” who, on a shopping arcade spree, snottily compares the “really special Mexican necklace” she buys with the “pink bum-bag” and “matching baseball cap” purchased by ill-starred Sandy: “At the counter”, she observes, “it’s obvious, the difference between us” (38-39). If this story is set in a shopping arcade, others take place in—or their protagonists work in—pubs, newsagents, designer clothing chainstores, banks, market research firms and building societies. All centres of commerce, the jangle of cash as another sale is rung up on the till is never far away; and the commodities that appear on the print-out from the till are what define our identities. In this sense they are symbolic. The materialist world that O’Connor scrutinises is enacted in her very manner of writing. M.A.K. Halliday has suggested that “Writing puts language in chains; it freezes it, so that it becomes a thing to be reflected on” (1987: 148). This is certainly the effect of O’Connor’s prose style. Nouns proliferate, duplicating neighbouring verb-stems and thus drawing attention to the very substantiveness of the verb’s lexical origin: for example, “the whole cave of his chest caved in”, “I hope Hope comes into the shop. I hope Hope buys something”, “The doors squeeze open, and in for a squeeze steps Mr Head” (O’Connor 1997: 108, 124, 159). Alternatively, nouns act as verbs in their own right: for example, “lumbagoed”, “berried” (81, 159). In fact there are times when nouns take over the function of verbs in whole

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passages, as in Eve’s description of the Leyton sky where all the verbs could elsewhere be substantives: “Pubs dot it. Cars clog it. In winter, black limbless trunks wrist up it. In summer, leafy branches splash right across it. Lorries thunder through it all hours, like trains. Helicopters (even) police above it” (4-5. My emphasis). This concentration on the thinginess of language, this usurpation of the role of verbs by verbalised nouns is just one step away from the total banishment of verbs altogether, as in Sal’s reply to the question “What did you do last night, Sal?”: “TV. Dinner. Bed.” O’Connor continues in a verb-free account of what ensued: Fight. * Loll’s armchair. Her couch. (O’Connor 1997: 21)

This intimate connection between substantive and verb, between what a thing is and what it does, is so crucial to Barry’s world-view in “A Little Living” that when the link is shattered, he comes close to breakdown himself: There is something … different, something not quite … There are no flowers in the flower beds! I spin with the trees. And the ducks! The ducks no longer have interesting foliage to duck into! Why not? […] because the council is far too poor to put park in the park. (152. Original emphasis.)

Indeed so fixed is O’Connor’s gaze on the material that she is even prepared to undercut her own metaphors by allowing the literal to encroach upon the non-literal. In “Tell Her You Love Her”, Kyle tries saying it to Monica with flowers: He bought her white lilies next time. She centred them on the dining room table, in a tall clear vase. The flowers were so fresh he could almost hear them drink. They quivered with the music pumping out of her stereo. In the late afternoon they gathered in all the light, grew still and luminously green like a set of startled brides. (53)

This is a good instance of O’Connor’s writing at its best, limpid and lyrical, clear-cut, not cloying. But no sooner has the image of the demure brides been conjured up than it is deflated by Kyle’s crass intrusion into the extra-literal, non-material illusion: “He found himself approaching them sideways, peering, weirdly aroused, up into their rustling flute-shaped skirts” (53). The promise of the metaphorical, of some imaginary release from the solidly material, is brutishly whisked away, leaving us once more with language stripped down syntactically to its nominal, reifying core, and

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things—or in this case living beings—divested of the trappings of the imagination. In other words, O’Connor’s very style alludes to the materialist world dissected by her stories in which flickers of transcendence are, like her metaphors, soon smothered by the dead weight of commodification. This is why Calvino’s ideas are “almost true” of O’Connor’s objects: they are symbolic of status, but they never quite become magical. At times O’Connor’s treatment of objects seems to be an admission of defeat by the recalcitrant ineffability of things: if her verbs often remit the reader to their nominal origins, her tautologies remind us of the essential circularity of verbal definition (“A cow is a bovine quadruped”—but what does “bovine” mean?): when Kyle says “That’s what flowers do, flower, flower” (1997: 49), he merely reiterates the ultimate tautology of quiddity. This is where brand names can press a temporary advantage: linguistic equivalents to ostensive definition (“What is a cow?” [Pointing] “That is!”), they allow for instant recognition of individual articles within a category. But that advantage is temporary because they only signify in a particular set of historical, economic and social circumstances. Some will enjoy longer currency than others, but the majority are the fleeting playthings of commercial vicissitude and changing taste. In the brief space of “Shop Talk” (1997: 21-27) the reader is regaled with a veritable compendium of brands: Hoover, Vosene, Nissan, Ghost, Nicole Farhi, French Connection, Sturgeon, Safeway’s, Laguna, Golf GTI, M&S, Donna Karan and Sony—all this to a soundtrack composed of assorted pop artists, whose names also amount to brands in the music trade: Gypsy Kings, Björk, Madness and Seal. All these allusions to commodities, most of which are already obsolete or threatened with obsolescence, illustrate the parasitical relationship O’Connor’s style engenders between her stories and the particular society that plays host to them. Once the circumstances and tastes that define that society change O’Connor’s stories, bereft of the host that sustained them, appear doomed to the same obsolescence which menaces many of the commodities with which they are stocked. In all these respects, O’Connor’s handling of objects differs considerably from that of Charles Dickens and his famously anthropomorphised chattels of everyday nineteenth-century life. Writing around “the first outburst of the phantasmagoria of commodity culture” (Williams 1990: 18), Dickens so quickens his objects that they are transformed from mere status symbols into metaphors for the character or personality of their owners, when not material extensions by which they are prosthetically enhanced or otherwise. The “[h]ideous solidity” of Podsnap’s plate springs obviously to mind, and particularly, at the centre of the table, the “corpulent, straddling epergne, blotched all over as if it had broken out in an eruption rather than been

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ornamented” (Dickens 1985b: 177). Here there is that characteristic “transposition of attributes” which Dorothy Van Ghent identified as being symptomatic of a world in which “people were becoming things, and things […] were becoming more important than people” (1961: 128-9). In Dickens, it is not so much brand that indicates status, as material: the tarnished silver of Podsnap situates him in a different class from grasping loan-shark Grandfather Smallweed, whose tea-trays and breadbasket are iron, plates pewter (Dickens 1985a: 344). But not only purchasing power is indicated by the material of Smallweed’s tableware: so too is their owner’s hard-edged lack of human sensibility, cast-iron indefatigability in collecting his money, and the vice-like grasp in which he holds his victims. Dickens’s objects are magical in Calvino’s sense—magical because metaphorical. Although, like O’Connor, Dickens makes of “the proprietary selection of goods a method of differentiating character” (Roston 1996: 77), his objects, unlike O’Connor’s, have a very material, often massive (in the physical sense of the word) presence: what they are made of is more important than the brand they belong too, and that focus on their elemental essence rather than on accidental details of manufacture seems to guarantee them greater significational durability than O’Connor’s commodities, which are known not so much by their physical properties as by their brand names, as often as not marketing nonce-words whose capacity to signify will last no longer than the objects they denote. The contrast between Dickens and O’Connor in this respect is no doubt due to the historical shift, noted among others by Margaret Freedgood (2006: 140-2), in the locus of value from material to brand, from the object itself to its abstract status as commodity whose worth lies in its exchange value. But it does raise the question of whether O’Connor’s short stories may ever attain any greater transcendence than that which belongs to literary relics pored over by textual archaeologists keen to reconstruct the material context of their production from the traces left by their allusions. That brands and brandnames are, in this sense, perishable transforms them into kitsch memento mori. Much as they are here today, gone tomorrow, so we who consume them have a relatively short shelf-life allotted to us. The word “time” crops up often among the titles of O’Connor’s stories, while one in particular, “I’m Running Late”, manifests how a preoccupation with not letting the moment pass can harden us as individuals. Of Tina, who is too busy to accompany fried Sandy to hospital, O’Connor writes: “I looked at my watch. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I can’t, I’m running a bit late.’ When I got home I fell on my bed and cried and cried. Then I looked in the mirror: oh no, centre parting” (O’Connor 1993: 45). Tina’s feelings of guilt are soon dispelled when she spots the offending division in

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her hair. As well as making us callous, this urge to live in the present converts human relations into commodities: in “Time in Lieu”, “breathless” Fiona, aware that “time is short”, remarks that “sometimes you just grab sex, like you grab fast food, and hope it’s safe. Anyway, you haven’t got the time. You are always very busy” (34, 27). Elsewhere, another character jots down in her notepad that “only the very fast survived” (O’Connor 1997: 136). O’Connor’s characters are consumers who need to consume in order to replace the already consumed in what amounts to an endless, self-replicating cycle in which each new act of consumption is effectively a replay of the previous act and a rehearsal of the next. Thus the vortex of consumerism conflates time into a giddy present from which concepts such as durability or intrinsic worth are violently ejected. Returning to O’Connor’s style, Halliday would claim that its richness in nouns renders it “synoptic” rather than “dynamic” in its scrutiny of “a world of things, rather than one of happening; of product, rather than process; of being rather than becoming” (1987: 146-7). What is more, the tendency of O’Connor’s sentences to shortness and of her stories to brevity dovetails perfectly with this synoptic take on the world:3 it can be taken in all at once, is permanently available for instant consumption by readers who do not have time as they strap-hang on the underground or are afflicted by the short-attention spans symptomatic of the consumer age. All this, together with their reliance on brandname-dropping, allows O’Connor’s stories to be regarded as perfect fusions of form and content, as exemplars of that harmonic integration which holistic appreciations of artistic productions are supposed to reveal. Yet, as already suggested, their own status as works of art appears to be threatened by the potentially short shelf-life of their allusive frame and by their stylistic investment in the materialist economy they seek to disparage. In content and in form, O’Connor’s stories fly so close to the flame of commodification that they flirt with their own consumption by it. The relationship between commodity and art, and how the former may aspire to, and even generate, the latter, if at all, is the subject of the next section.

Resisting commodity culture The question that remains is whether O’Connor’s own art, and any other art, is in the last analysis anything more than a commodity. As we have seen, the success of O’Connor’s critique of materialism depends in large part on 3

Montrose (1993: 21) calls her a “minimalist writer”.

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the reader’s ability to identify the connotational significances of the objects and brands she names. So long as the objective referents of O’Connor’s commodities remain current and her readers can parse their significance by inference, her short-stories present the sort of hermeneutic challenge associated with “Literature” with a capital “L” and therefore flatter their readers that they are buying into “Culture” with a capital “C”. But it is in the nature of brands and consumer goods to be short-lived, and many of O’Connor’s references have already been removed from the shelves, whether of actual commercial emporia or of the collective memory. Less than two decades after her collections of stories were published, Jason Donovan, Slade and daleks, or Rolodexes and Filofaxes, to cite just some of the names and brands that O’Connor drops, will for many people already be undecipherable allusions that have long since passed their sell-by dates. But does that mean that the literary goods O’Connor purveys are necessarily perishable too, that her significance will only be available in future to literary archaeologists picking among her texts’ social, economic and historical coordinates?4 As quoted earlier, Calvino claimed that an object in a piece of fiction was “a knot in the network of invisible relationships”, including, no doubt, economics and aesthetics. Elsewhere he notes how aesthetic preferences change over time in line with scientific and technological developments. For example, in his lecture “Cybernetics and Ghosts”, he suggests that cultural praxis has oscillated through time between tendencies to synthesise and to analyse, to posit continuity or discreetness (Calvino 1989: 7-10). More to the present purposes he has written that .

[T]hroughout the centuries two opposite tendencies have competed in literature: one tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above things like a cloud or better, perhaps, the finest dust or, better still, a field of magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the weight, density and concreteness of things, bodies, and sensations. (1992: 15).

I think it would be wrong to characterise O’Connor’s language as being weightless and Dickens’s as being weighty; after all, as we have seen, O’Connor’s substantive-laden style is concomitant with an absorption in objects. Yet, as we have also seen, O’Connor’s objects are usually reduced to the evanescence of a brand-name whereas Dickens supplies us with irreducibly massive and durable elements. Are these just differences in style? If we rewrite “style” as “technique”, O’Connor’s stories on the one hand illustrate Walter Benjamin’s point about how the latter allows “the 4

I am adopting some of Udo J. Hebel’s terms (1991: 139).

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sterile opposition between form and content to be overcome” and on the other lend themselves to a materialist analysis which would seem to prove Benjamin’s point about the indivisibility of the literary and the political—in a broad sense—qualities of artistic productions (see e.g. Benjamin 1970: 12). O’Connor’s stories constitute themselves as literary commodities intended for consumption at a particular historical juncture: synoptic, brief, noun-rich, their forms of expression replicate habits of consumption and imply a series of related aesthetic values. Just as Dickens’s massive objects with their metaphorical potentialities are consonant with a society which prizes commodities for the material of which they are composed, ascribes value to physical weight, consumes triple-deckers and still half-believes in transcendence, so O’Connor’s more ephemeral brands are consonant with a society which attaches value and ascribes quality to brands rather than to the material they are made of, chooses short-term gratification before long-term pleasure, prefers culture in bite-sized pieces and has no belief at all in any sort of transcendence. By drawing attention to their own commodification, O’Connor’s stories are a reminder that, as publishers well know, art is as much a matter of consumer habits as anything else and that hard economics will always condition aesthetic canons. They also prompt the question of whether durability through time need always be a desideratum of art. Can there be an art which, instead of aspiring to the longevity of brass, revels in the fragility of printed circuits and polyethylene or in the extreme transience of virtual reality? This is not the place to theorise on such large issues, but I would like to suggest that the transcendence of art is not some mystical property somehow immanent in it, but is instead the outcome of ongoing engagements with it by those who in one way or another consume it. A person’s engagement with art may quite easily issue in a creative response on the part of that person. That response may take manifold forms, but by literally recreating the work of art in question, that response ensures that the work enjoys a short lease on transcendence. The more creative responses over the greater period of time, the longer that lease will become—and incidentally, this could well mean that works of art stashed away in safe deposits and Swiss strong-rooms may, in their excessive commodification, actually cease to be art, much as to the good Bishop Berkeley the world ceased to exist once he shut his eyes on it. Certain authority for formulating such an aesthetic may be found in theories regarding the relationship between consumer and commodities. As we have seen, it is tempting to infer from Dickens’s metaphorical economy a relation of identity between people and things, as does Dorothy Van Ghent. In a broader context, John Frow allows himself to be carried away by

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his own rhetoric when in his influential statement of “thing theory” he claims that “persons, too, count or can count as things. This is the real strangeness: that persons and things are kin; the world is many, not double” (2001: 285).5 But people and things are not the same, nor should consumers be identified with the commodities they consume, as John Fiske reminds us: “The fact that the system provides only commodities, whether material or cultural, does not mean that the process of consuming those commodities can be adequately described as one that commodifies the people into an homogenised mass at the mercy of the barons of the industry. People can and do tear their jeans” (1989: 25-6). For Fiske, building on the social theories of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre and Stuart Hall,6 people should rather be defined by the uses to which those commodities are put, uses which, like tearing jeans, are always enunciative and in varying degrees creative: flowers, for example, can be purchased in order to say a variety of things. Thus the system or the “power bloc” always contains within itself the means for its own subversion by the people’s capacity to “use guerrilla tactics against the strategies of the powerful, making poaching raids upon their texts or structures, and play constant tricks upon the system” (Fiske 1989: 32). Although in late capitalist society we are all consumers, our acts of consumption are enunciative in so far as they have a semioticcultural significance. The car we drive, the food we cook thus become speech acts by means of which we can define ourselves, our relations with others and with society at large, and so on: think of the creative use to which punks put studded dog collars and safety pins. This sort of creativity is illustrated by the use to which Tony Wornel puts his plaster cast even after his leg has mended—personal injury is a great conversational gambit” (1997: 36)—or by the sensual pleasure the anonymous heroine of “Nerve Endings” derives from the metal-detecting machine at airports and assumes the inanimate device must feel too: “She felt an empathy with, and was touched by, the little metal-detecting machine: it cried out, like her, at every single scrape of metalloid skin. ‘Touch me!’” (1997: 69. Original emphasis). In “Paper Clips”, Emelda comes to realise how she has been injecting daily doses of happiness into her life in the form of the snack and its container which she has taken to work daily for the last three years: “three years of sturdy Tupperware. I see, in my mind, an itemised vat of banana skins. A day-by-day blast of yellow cheer 5

This confident assertion of potential identity between human and object is somewhat qualified in Frow’s earlier postulation of “a mixing in which things and persons exchange properties and partly resemble and partly don’t resemble each other” (2001: 285). 6 See de Certeau (1984), Hall (1981) and Lefebvre (1991).

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me up!” (O’Connor 1997: 165). In “Enquiries (General)” (1997: 55-65), O’Connor shows how even knowledge may be commodified, reduced to the factoids memorised and instantly expendable in bar trivia quizzes in exchange for the instant and short-lived gratification of the winners: Tricia’s proficiency in such knowledge lands her first a tawdry relationship with her History teacher, then more satisfying apotheosis in a pub contest: “And, as I answered, I felt the floor revolve and suddenly elevate me up, right up into a goldy band of brilliance I’ve somehow always known was burning just ten feet above my head. […] I was in my element, yelling in the heat like I could fly” (1997: 65). Illness, too, can be commodified and exploited for personal gain, like Lucy’s “little lump”, supposedly cancerous, thanks to which she builds a lucrative career as TV and magazine celebrity in “Remission” (1997: 75-90). All these characters are creative in their use of commodities or creative commodification of adverse circumstances. Yet any victory they might claim is deeply equivocal: you may use Tupperware to make you feel good, but you are still a victim of the market in so far as you have to buy it in the first place; you may trade socially or economically on your own afflictions, but you have to be afflicted in the first place. Resistance to the system, then, means that you are nevertheless in some way part of the system. Furthermore, though sometimes poignant, individual acts of creation like those O’Connor describes are hopelessly puny and sadly banal. It may well be that creativity with commodities opens a gap between the “power bloc” and the individuals who consume its products but are not consumed or commodified by it, but it is only a gap, not a severance, and the sale has been rung up all the same. In much the same way, although, like her characters, O’Connor herself is being creative in her use of commodities in order to denounce commodity culture, there is a sense in which she nonetheless seems to be writing under their spell, their life-blood coursing through her stories which, once more, feed parasitically on the society that hosts them, incorporating it in their consumption of it—one becomes, after all, what one eats.

Transcending quiddity Individual acts of creative resistance which put commodities to unexpected uses or commodify unexpected objects only uncertainly break the hold of the power bloc; and O’Connor’s stories are in this respect no different from Emelda’s Tupperware. However, there are two aspects of O’Connor’s style which do introduce magic into the world of objects,

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thereby suggesting how resistance may become more effective and how her own stories may transcend the vice-like grip of their highly specific social, economic and historical coordinates. The extract just cited from “Nerve Endings” illustrates both aspects. Firstly, there is the subversive play of language itself which, by allowing categories to be confused or identities to be mistaken, opens up a space for genuine hermeneutic creativity on the part of the reader. This, in turn, by ultimately yielding a unique, personal interpretation, ensures a freedom from any sort of social, political or economic interpellation. The passage is worth repeating: “She felt an empathy with, and was touched by, the little metal-detecting machine: it cried out, like her, at every single scrape of metalloid skin. ‘Touch me!’” The ambiguity of “was touched by”—is Emelda physically or emotionally “touched”?—is followed by, and partly enables, the more radical ambiguity of “at every single scrape of metalloid skin”—are we to imagine Emelda’s skin as being “metalloid” or the metal-detector as having skin? Thus, and this is the second aspect, language permits identity or category—animate or inanimate, human or thing—to be confused and necessitates the emancipatory act of interpretation. This verbal blurring of distinctions by means of ambiguity severs the hamstrings of that doltish tautological quiddity through which the material world of objects bespeaks itself. It generates an uncertainty which, as we saw earlier, Barry could not deal with once the tautological knot had been loosened and there was no longer any “park” in “park”. And it also breathes sufficient life into the world of objects for human subjects to empathise with them. A similar confusion of category underpins a striking use of simile in “Paper Clips” where, we are told, pacing up and down the next floor, “Warner Baxter Jones moves above our heads, light like light” (1997: 165). The homographic and homophonic identity of items from grammatically and, therefore, semantically different categories in what at first sight looks like a tautology unleashes endless interpretative and creative responses, none of which can be definitive. Once the illusion of the visual and audible tautology (substantive “light” = substantive “light”) has been dispelled, Baxter Jones is taken to be treading lightly, in some way “like light”. But the topic of the simile inevitably asks us to consider how Baxter Jones may also be like “light”, Baxter Jones who, as Emelda’s handsome boss, is in many ways what lights up her day. Once the simile has been read back on itself, so to speak, the grammatical identity “light”(s) = “light”(s) is restored but our creativity has magically broken the bonds of semantic tautology since Baxter Jones is now also like light and light is now also like Baxter Jones: each is now no longer only itself, but also something else. As if touched by Calvino’s magic the self-defining circularity of quiddity no longer applies as

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here human and natural identities are creatively confused in liberating uncertainty. Something similar occurs at the opening of “Heavy Petting”. Once more the reader encounters a simile, in which this time vehicle and topic are identical in absolutely every way except in their intended reference. I come from a long line of pet deaths. Bunny and Clyde … Tiny and Twinkle. Sid and Nancy. Mungo … But it’s Godfrey who haunts me. At night, when the cistern gurgles, it’s like he’s back with a splash. Majella hooped him at a fairground and brought him home, dangling from her thumb, gulping mist in a plastic bag. He wasn’t expected to live for long. She plopped him in the dead terrapin’s tank: watched him loop. Blessed his tank: named him after her ex-fiancé, the paratrooper, the one who’d chucked her out on the street, howling. Godfrey. Godfrey was like Godfrey: he was quick, ginger, flash, but he was never mean. (1997: 133).

“Godfrey was like Godfrey”. Is goldfish being compared with exfiancé, or ex-fiancé with goldfish? Whichever is the case, an identity is established between the human and the animal, in this case the archetype of animal as object. The upshot of this apparent tautology, the selfdefining circularity of which is sundered by its construction as a simile where “like” forces us to see difference instead of identity, is once again an emancipatory space for interpretation. As the story unfolds we are free to choose who brightened up the home, who blew smoke rings, and whether they are actual or metaphorical ones: “He was so bright in our dingy house. He blew air kisses all day, puffed out silvery smoke rings … link chains”. Sometimes we are more certain in our identification as when we are told: “A stray sunbeam hit his glossy water and he sparkled. Round and round: an endless U-ey” (although this too could have a metaphorical force); sometimes less so, so that when Majella “hit the clubbing scene, got, as she called it, ‘loved up’, she hated him”, the possibility that “him” is her ex flares once more. When we then read Listening outside her door I heard her chant above her telly, “Ignore me now army boy. You bastard. You bastard Godfrey. What are you? You bastard Godfrey …” I didn’t think pretty Godfrey could live for long. (133)

we cannot be certain whose life—the goldfish’s or the paratrooper’s— Majella’s sister, the narrator, really fears for. This uncertainty adds a

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further dimension to our interpretation of the narrator’s relationship with Majella, as the possibility now suggests itself that the narrator was herself rather attracted by her elder sister’s erstwhile boyfriend. Thus, for all their heavy investment in the very culture they seek to disparage, by prising apart the tautology of quiddity, by undermining the certainties of material identity through their verbal play, O’Connor’s stories create a space for her readers to be creative when interpreting, thereby transforming her texts hermeneutically into their own. Despite being historically signed commodities, once they have passed the point of sale O’Connor’s stories become free agents within the circle of her readers, who may contest through their readings the economic culture their book-buying helps to sustain, much as the stories may dissent from the culture they incorporate. In the last resort, this is one of the compensations of art, a compensation unavailable to other sorts of commodity, and O’Connor’s stories are simply another instance of how, by doing things with words, we can create the world anew. The function of plaster-casts, Tupperware and metal-detectors may be subversively rewired, but they will never usher us into a space of individual hermeneutic freedom where we can create worlds almost at will. In contrast, even the most apparently commodity-ridden and commodified cultural products such as O’Connor’s short stories, regain for themselves the birthright of transcendence through their readers’ potentially endless recreation of them which their contents, forms and techniques seemed at risk of forfeiting. The question remains, perhaps, of whether this sort of readerly creativity differs only in degree from Kyle’s head, stuck crassly up the skirts of his wish-fulfilling floral brides. That it is different in kind may only be our own self-serving fantasy.

Magical materalism All said and done, this article is only a reactionary reaffirmation of Wordsworth’s transforming power of the imagination, while the emancipation it locates in hermeneutic uncertainty is a throwback to Keats’s notion of “negative capability”, that capacity of great writers like Shakespeare to be “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Keats 1948: 71). It might seem odd to stake a claim for any contemporary writer like O’Connor on the hoary mantras of English Romanticism, but O’Connor’s verbal play, her sensual imagery and the chime of her homophonies bear a certain affinity with the art of Keats, one of the great poets of the material world. “Paper clips”

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begins with what amounts to a statement of the tautological nature of rain, of the impossibility of saying it is anything other than it is: It’s raining. It’s always raining in Romford. Even in the shopping arcade and in the subway tunnels it’s raining. There’s rain strung down the strobe lighting like dirty diamanté. Outside, where the rain, in the main, is, it’s berried on the trees grey and glimmerless. It slashes and it curtains and it drops down in nails. It tries to be other, but it’s rain. (1997: 159)

All O’Connor is here. The mundane (“It’s raining.”); hyperbole (“It’s always raining in Romford. Even in the shopping arcade and in the subway tunnels it’s raining”); the lean descriptive precision coupled with assonance and alliteration (“There’s rain strung down the strobe lighting like dirty diamanté”); the exact material reference (“diamanté”—what else?); the chime and playful allusion (“where the rain, in the main”); the verb coined from a substantive (“berried”); another coinage (“glimmerless”); and the inventory of dead metaphors (“It slashes and it curtains and it drops down in nails”). All this linguistic activity only serves as prelude to an assertion of rain’s inescapable, material rain-ness; but in the process, that same rain has already been metamorphosed in the imagination, and with it that most prosaic of locales, Romford. When, at the other end of the story the rain returns, it does so materially transformed into the metal links of a chain, a transformation which, after the opening paragraph, we are disposed to entertain, even accept: “The rain falls down on Romford in glittering breaking chains” (1997: 167). By the magic of metaphor rain has indeed become other in a change of material states, chemical elements and physical properties which, if we like, will from now on leave the self-defining circularity of rain’s material objectivity permanently ruptured, the chain of tautology broken as anticipated in the “breaking chains” themselves. This is the magic of O’Connor’s short stories, a magic that brings them close to poetry with their rhythms and their rhymes: “The rain falls down on Romford in glittering breaking chains”. It is a magic Italo Calvino would have acknowledged, a magic that makes O’Connor a poetess of the material of the same ilk of Keats; it is, finally, a magic which ensures O’Connor’s transcendence of her own, sadly curtailed, material existence through the transcendent literary commodities which are her bequest.

Works cited: Benjamin, Walter. 1970. “The Author as Producer”. Trans. John Heckman. New Left Review I/62 (July-August). Available at

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http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=135. Accessed 30 June 2012. Calvino, Italo. 1989. The Literature Machine. Trans. Patrick Creagh. London: Pan. _____. 1992. Six Memos for the Millenium. Trans. Patrick Creagh. London: Jonathan Cape. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dickens, Charles. 1985a. Bleak House. Harmondsworth: Penguin. _____. 1985b. Our Mutual Friend. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fiske, John. 1989. Understanding Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Freedgood, Elaine. 2006. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frow, John. 2001. “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole,” Critical Inquiry 28.1, “Things”: 270-285. Hall, Stuart. 1981. “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular”. Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge, 227-40. Halliday, M. A. K. 1987. “Language and the order of nature”. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe (eds.), The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 135-54. Hebel, Udo J. 1991. “Towards a Descriptive Poetics of Allusion.” Heinrich F. Plett (ed.), Intertextuality. Research in Text Theory/Untersuchungen zur Texttheorie. Volume15. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 135-64. Keats, John. 1948. The Letters of John Keats. Maurice Buxton Forman (ed.). London: Oxford University Press. Lázaro, Alberto. 2001. “Los cuentos de Bridget O’Connor: historias de una parálisis”. José Francisco Fernández Sánchez, ed., Breves e intensos: artículos sobre relatos cortos de autores británicos contemporaneous. Almería: Universidad de Almería, Servicio de Publicaciones, 171-82. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1. Trans. John Moore. London: Verso. Montrose, David. 1993. “Review of Here Comes John, by Bridget O’Connor”. Times Literary Supplement (20 August): 21. O’Connor, Bridget. 1993. Here Comes John. London: Jonathan Cape. _____. 1997. Tell Her You Love Her. London: Jonathan Cape. Roston, Murray. 1996. Victorian Contexts: Literature and the Visual Arts. New York: New York University Press.

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Sell, Jonathan P. A. 2010. Allusion, Identity and Community in Recent British Writing. Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá. Van Ghent, Dorothy. 1961. The English Novel: Form and Function. New York: Harper and Row.

PART III COLLECTABLE DESIRES

CHAPTER SIX Collecting Desire: A Comparative Analysis of John Fowles’s The Collector and Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence Hande Gurses Introduction Karl Marx distinguished between the use value, the exchange value and the price as the three major components of a commodity. For Marx these three distinct levels of valuation are essential to designate the overall value of a commodity. While this materialist criterion constitutes the predominant tendency to evaluate a commodity, it is not always sufficient to address the complex role objects play in our lives. Collections, on the other hand, may offer an insight into this intricate relationship, since they display how, irrespective of the use or exchange value, the objects acquire worth through the meanings assigned to them by the collector. The powerful effect of the collection is not limited to the objects but also includes the collector, who emerges as the source of authority by designating the new meanings that the objects in his/her collection will have. The acquisition and preservation of objects enable the collector to feel empowered against the ephemeral and decaying effects of time. The collection, in other words, emerges as the epitome of the deepest human desire to control that which is uncontrollable. Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk and The Collector by John Fowles are two novels that centre on the notion of collecting as a way to explore the dynamics of this desire. Both novels portray how the affection of their protagonist for the beloved is experienced through a compulsive desire to collect. In this paper, from a comparative perspective I will discuss the operation of the collection as a means to access and fulfil this desire. Focusing on the dynamics between the male protagonist and the female beloved I will study the parallels connecting the construction of the archive and the construction of the beloved. I will discuss how the effect

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of the archive on memory emerges as a more fluid and flexible one, enabling a perpetual reconstruction.

Desire The New Oxford American Dictionary defines desire as “a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen” (2001: 463). While this definition of desire alludes to a familiar feeling that is easy to recognise, from a psychological perspective the operation of desire takes place in more intricate ways. By pointing to libido as the primary trigger of desire, Sigmund Freud highlights the link between desire and childhood sexuality. Freud defines libido as “the name of the force by which the instinct manifests itself” (1976: 355) and suggests that the initial desire is directed at the mother who by providing nurture fulfils every need that the child may have. Following the Oedipus complex, the child needs to direct his libidinal energy to an outside object, that is, to a new object of desire: The human individual has to devote himself to the great task of detaching himself from his parents, and not until that task is achieved can he cease to be a child and become a member of the social community. For the son this task consists in detaching his libidinal wishes from his mother and employing them for the choice of a real outside love-object, and in reconciling himself with his father if he has remained in opposition to him […] (Freud 1976: 380)

According to Freud neuroses occur when the child fails to channel the libidinal energy to an outside object during the post-Oedipal stage. Neuroses occur as fixations either on a period of the psychosexual development—oral, anal, phallic—or on a parent. In other words the object of desire, for Freud, provides an insight into the direction of the individual’s libidinal energy. The Freudian definition of desire thus locates the origin of desire as emanating from the child-parent dynamic. While desire is directed towards different objects or people throughout the individual’s life, the source of desire remains accessible. For Jaques Lacan, on the other hand, desire is always ambiguous since its origin lies in the other. In his definition of desire Jacques Lacan uttered what probably remains his most widely known motto: “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other” (2005: 201). Through the ambiguous use of the preposition “of” Lacan hints at the two distinct levels that coexist within desire. Desire is not only a desire that is directed towards the other, but

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also denotes that which is desired by the other. Whether it is the desire for the other or for that which is desired by the other, Lacan’s definition of desire is fundamentally attached to the other. The evident implication of this attachment is for the subject the impossibility of fully accessing desire. Like Freud, Lacan traces the origin of desire to early childhood where the mother, or the principal caregiver, fulfils the child’s needs. In return, the child too wishes to fulfil the mother’s desire by becoming her object of desire. Accordingly, the child strives to become the mother’s object of desire but this process is interfered with by the father who introduces the “name-of-the-father (nom-du-père)” (Lacan xii) as a form of social order. It is through the “name-of-the-father” that the child enters the symbolic order of language where meaning is perpetually deferred from one signifier to another. It is with the passage into the symbolic order of language that the child becomes “castrated”, that is, deprived of a phallus.1 The entry into law and language deprives the child of the primordial bodily experience and casts him/her into the symbolic world of language where each signifier is explained with further signifiers without ever reaching a final ultimate meaning. For Lacan, desire does not express a request for love or expect to be satisfied; rather, it marks a rupture that finds expression in the role of the phallus as signifier. Thus desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung). (2005: 219)

Desire thus manifests itself in the splitting of demand from satisfaction. The introduction of the subject into the symbolic order causes the disappearance of the phallus as the ultimate signifier and eventually condemns all meaning to be associated with the other. Once the subject is within the symbolic order, deprived of the phallus, all meaning will eventually be created through signifiers that constantly refer to other signifiers. This process of perpetual reference to another establishes the link between desire and the other. Far from having direct access to his/her 1

The term “phallus” in Lacanian contexts does not refer to the body part but rather connotes the ultimate signifier. It indicates an ultimate meaning that does not require further signifier. Thus Lacan eliminates the biological hierarchy of Freudian analysis and instead suggests that all subjects—both male and female— are castrated as they enter the symbolic order of language.

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desire, the subject can only remain within a chain of signification that points to the other. The fact that the phallus is a signifier means that it is in the place of the Other that the subject has access to it. But since this signifier is only veiled; as ratio of the Other’s desire, it is this desire of the Other as such that the subject must recognise, that is to say, the other in so far as he is himself a subject divided by the signifying Spaltung. (Lacan 220)

Since it is impossible to fully know what the Other desires, desire remains impenetrable to the subject. Rather than operating as a prospective aspiration, desire becomes the scene of impossibility. …the subject desires only in so far as it experiences the Other itself as desiring, as the site of an unfathomable desire, as if an opaque desire is emanating from him or her. Not only does the other address me with an enigmatic desire, it also confronts me with the fact that I myself do not know what I really desire, with the enigma of my own desire. (Žižek 2006: 42)

This enigmatic position of desire is problematic for the subject as the unknowable nature of the Other’s desire constitutes a source of anxiety and trauma. It is at that stage that fantasy comes into picture and “provides an answer to the enigma of the Other’s desire” (Žižek 47). As Žižek notes, the impenetrability of desire can only be overcome through fantasy, which “teaches us how to desire” (7). Through fantasy the subject discovers what he or she means for the other while also alleviating the anxiety caused by the impasse of desire. In both The Collector and The Museum of Innocence the desire of the protagonist is represented through a fantasy of the archive, which involves a compulsive urge to collect and thus have control over the impossible desire of the other.

Fantasy From a Freudian perspective, fantasy is defined in opposition to reality as the manifestation of the imaginary. Freud (2001) differentiates between fantasies that are the product of a conscious mind and fantasies that are connected to the unconscious desires. Although these two operate on two distinct levels, fantasy nevertheless remains within the subjectivity of the self. For his part, Lacan focuses on the link between desire and fantasy and offers a distinct definition. Fantasy’s link to desire is further problematised

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in so far as desire is not something that simply belongs to the subject, but rather is, as discussed, the desire of the other with the different meanings the phrase entails. Thus fantasy, according to Lacan, cannot be explained exclusively in terms of the individual’s subjectivity for it embodies the other and his or her desires. In other words, fantasy allows the subject to construct an image of the other’s desire yet it does not transform the subject’s desire into an evident reality. Fantasy rather creates an ambiguous space where the boundary between the subjective and the objective is blurred. As Žižek puts it, the fundamental paradox of fantasy resides in the fact that it subverts the standard opposition of “subjective” and “objective”: of course, fantasy is by definition not objective (referring to something that exists independently of the subject’s perceptions); however, it is also not subjective (something that belongs to the subject’s consciously experienced intuitions, the product of his or her imagination). Fantasy rather belongs to the “bizarre category of the objectively subjective—the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don’t seem that way to you. (2006: 51)

Consequently fantasy lingers in a blurred space which is neither subjective nor objective; it is this ambivalence that defines fantasy as that which cannot be acted out. This ambiguous nature of fantasy is present in modern forms of art, which according to Žižek rather than presenting an “objective reality” depict the “objectively subjective” fantasy. Žižek claims that the “ethical duty of today’s artist [...] is to stage fantasies that are radically desubjectivised, that cannot ever be enacted by the subject” (57) Fantasy finds expression as a compulsive urge to collect and archive in both The Collector and The Museum of Innocence. The act of collecting and archiving in the two novels emerges as an attempt to control the unknown domain of the other represented by the figure of the female beloved. Both novels portray how desire of the other and for the other, turns into a fantasy of collecting that eventually proves to be impossible to enact. In the following sections I will discuss the different forms that this fantasy takes, while also investigating the eventual impossibility of control and command that the collection inevitably entails.

The Collector Frederick Clegg, the protagonist and the narrator of The Collector, is a clerical worker who collects butterflies in his spare time. His obsession for

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the art student Miranda Grey is the only diversion in his otherwise mundane everyday life. Clegg’s initial passive stalking of Miranda takes a turn for the worse when upon winning the football pools he decides to quit his job and buys a house in the country where he will keep her captive. Clegg’s emotional incapacity and the failure of Miranda’s various attempts to connect with him add to the claustrophobic atmosphere of the narrative. Clegg gradually loses touch with reality as he becomes more obsessed with collecting and preserving Miranda, just like a butterfly. He fails to take the necessary precautions and ignores the extent of Miranda’s illness, which eventually leads to her brutal death. The novel ends with Clegg working on his plans to capture yet another beautiful woman, thus further emphasising the extent of his insensitivity. The Collector is organised into three parts. Clegg is the narrator of the first and the last parts, where he narrates the events from his individual perspective, while the second part is composed of Miranda’s journal entries written during her captivity. While on the one hand this narrative structure permits readers direct access to Miranda’s voice, on the other it makes explicit the emotional and intellectual gap between the two characters. Miranda’s affectionate disposition is thus juxtaposed with Clegg’s cruel and cold-hearted nature. The disparity between Miranda and Clegg is made apparent in their first encounter, when Clegg lies to Miranda about a run-over dog, using it as an excuse to bring her near the van: I said, excuse me, do you know anything about dogs? She stopped, surprised. “Why?” she said. It’s awful, I’ve just run one over, I said. It dashed out. I don’t know what to do with it. It’s not dead. I looked into the back very worried. “Oh the poor thing,” she said. She came towards me, to look in. Just as I hoped. (Fowles 2004: 27)

Their initial encounter highlights Clegg’s ruse in juxtaposition with Miranda’s kindness. The discrepancy between the two characters is also substantiated through their intellectual and social backgrounds. Differing from Miranda, an intellectual art student unable to reconcile middle-class values with her artistic ideals, Clegg is depicted as a working-class man lacking all intellectual sophistication. Clegg accurately notes this social gap: She often went on about how she hated class distinction, but she never took me in. It’s the way people speak that gives them away, not what they say… Stop thinking about class, she’d say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to

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stop thinking about money. I don’t hold it against her, she probably said and did some of the shocking things she did to show me she wasn’t really refined, but she was. When she was angry she could get right up on her high horse and come it over me with the best of them. There was always class between us. (41)

Miranda is also aware of the class distinction between them. She not only believes herself to be “so superior to him” (130) but also notes that Clegg’s class is even worse than her own, which she already despises. I know it’s pathetic, I know he’s a victim of a miserable, non-conformist suburban world and a miserable social class, the horrid timid copycatting genteel in-between class. I used to think D and M’s class the worst. All golf and gin and bridge and cars and the right accent and the right money and having been to the right school and hating the arts…Well, that is foul. But Caliban’s2 England is fouler. (162)

Accordingly Miranda and Clegg are portrayed as two incompatible entities, enabling their respective labelling as the “self” and the “other” within the framework of Lacanian analysis; Miranda, with her dissimilarities operates as Clegg’s “other”, simultaneously the source and the object of his desire. It is in Clegg’s daydreams that the double genitive used in Lacan’s definition of desire becomes evident: Clegg not only desires Miranda but also wishes to become the object of her desire. That was the day I first gave myself the dream that came true. It began where she was being attacked by a man and I ran up and rescued her. Then somehow I was the man that attacked her, only I didn’t hurt her; I captured her and drove her off in the van to a remote house and there I kept her captive in a nice way. Gradually she came to know me and like me and the dream grew into the one about our living in a nice modern house, married, with kids and everything. (18)

Clegg hopes to accomplish his desire by taking Miranda hostage since he believes that keeping Miranda captive will eventually result in him becoming the object of her desire. The inherent impossibility of desire, however, becomes evident as soon as he locks her up. Clegg acknowledges this impossibility by establishing a parallel between the odds of catching a rare butterfly and Miranda: “It was like catching the Mazarine Blue again or a Queen of Spain Fritillary. I mean it was like

2

Miranda re-names Clegg after the villain in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

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something you only dream about more than you ever expect to see come true, in fact” (31). The impossibility of desire forces Clegg to resort to fantasy by way of alleviation. The inaccessibility of desire as the desire of the other personified by Miranda is thus transformed into a fantasy of the archive. It is by collecting and preserving her like a butterfly that Clegg aims to have access to the unknown desire of the other. For Clegg the archive is the space of stability and thus offers reassurance as opposed to the unpredictability of Miranda. Subscribing to the time-honoured cliché, he states that Miranda “was just like a woman. Unpredictable. Smiling one minute and spiteful the next” (56). By having her in his archive, Clegg hopes to overcome the unsettling effect that Miranda has. The illusionary effect of his fantasy resides however in his ignorance of the effect of the archive. Clegg believes that having her in his archive just like a butterfly would be a passive act of preservation that opposed Miranda’s unpredictability. He explains his reasoning by naïvely distinguishing between having and doing: What she never understood was that with me it was having. Having her was enough. Nothing needed doing. I just wanted to have her, and safe at last. (95)

His distinction suggests that in contrast to “doing”, the “having” of the archive is equivalent to a state of inactivity. For Clegg, having Miranda, and the butterflies, as part of his collection is an innocent act of possession. What he is blind to is the fact that the archive is never innocent or passive; it is the space where new discourses are generated through the preserved objects and documents. In other words archive is ultimately never merely about “having” but is rather a perpetual “doing” through the “having”. Thomas Richards states that the archive as the “utopian space of comprehensive knowledge” (1993: 11) emerged during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Richards further notes that the archive is not limited to a physical construction but rather connotes the desire for universal knowledge: The archive was not a building, nor even a collection of texts, but the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire. (11)

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The archive, in other words, represents a fantasy of domination by becoming the expression of the desire to assemble all the knowledge in the world. Its connection to empire highlights how knowledge emerges not as innocent data but rather as a very powerful weapon of dominion. Thus the concept of the archive originally represented an imperial ideal of confining and mastering knowledge, of making it exhaustible. Clegg’s butterfly collection hints at this imperial fantasy as he refers to himself as an entomologist: I’m an entomologist. I collect butterflies. “Of course,” she said. “I remember they said so in the paper. Now you’ve collected me.” She seemed to think it was funny, so I said, in a manner of speaking. “No, not in a manner of speaking. Literally. You’ve pinned me in this little room and you can come and gloat over me.” (Fowles 44)

The use of the scientific title highlights the link between knowledge and the archive; the butterfly collection thus ceases to be a simple and passive “having” and becomes an active process of generating information. Derrida underlines this active force of the archive by focusing on the etymology of the word: Arkhe, we recall, names at once the commencement and the commandment. This name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence—physical, historical, or ontological principle—but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given—nomological principle. (1998: 1)

While commencement highlights the retrospective function of the archive, commandment draws attention to the future. In other words, the archive does not simply store its content but rather re-organises it in order to obtain the required narrative. the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivisation produces as much as it records the event. (Derrida 17)

Although Clegg associates the archive with an innocent desire to possess, it is this prospective effect of the archive that inherently guides his fantasy. As evidenced in the imperial dimension of the butterfly

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collection, Clegg’s archivisation of Miranda aims to take under control the unpredictable and unknown other. It is by making Miranda part of his archive that he hopes to eliminate the unsettling effect of the desire of the other. For Clegg the commandment that the archive embodies contains a promise of control and dominion. It is by archiving Miranda that he hopes to produce the knowledge about her, thus putting an end to her unpredictability and instead re-inventing her according to his wishes. By archiving Miranda as the desire of the other, Clegg hopes to have command over that mysterious domain and consequently to have mastery over her. Yet rather than providing Clegg with the key to his desire, as the desire of the other, this fantasy remains in the ambiguous zone that Žižek defines as “objectively subjective”, a fantasy that is impossible to enact. Žižek claims that the “ethical duty of today’s artist […] is to stage fantasies that are radically desubjectivised, that cannot ever be enacted by the subject” (2006: 57). It could be argued that The Collector is one such work of art in its portrayal of a fantasy that is impossible to enact. Clegg’s fantasy of the archive, far from allowing him command over the desire of the other, remains in the ambiguous zone of the “objectively subjective”. The archive represented by Miranda emerges as a fantasy that is impossible to realise, as illustrated by Clegg’s inertia when she provokes him sexually. Far from offering an insight into the desire of the other, the act of collecting makes explicit the constitution of fantasy as impossible to enact. Miranda’s eventual death makes explicit the inherent violence of the archive. The desire to command and control the unknown other that prevails in the fantasy of the archive culminates in depriving that other of everything that makes it what it is. While appearing to be the space of preservation and collection, the archive modifies its contents so as to turn its perplexing constituents into a manageable entity. This process of transformation, however, also deprives the constituents of the archive of all the qualities that make them what they are. This privatory effect of the archive is what makes this fantasy “impossible to enact”. While trying to re-create Miranda as a manageable and “predictable” entity Clegg destroys Miranda, resulting in a fantasy that is impossible to enact. Clegg’s attempt to preserve Miranda as she is is bound to fail since the archive’s commitment to conserve and re-invent is incompatible with the unpredictable flow of life itself. Miranda’s own words acknowledge prophetically the destructive force of the archive: I know what I am to him. A butterfly he has always wanted to catch. I remember (the very first time I met him) G.P. saying that collectors were the worst animals of all. He meant art collectors, of course. I didn’t really

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understand, I thought he was just trying to shock Caroline—and me. But of course, he is right. They’re anti-life, anti-art, anti-everything. (Fowles 123)

The Museum of Innocence The Museum of Innocence presents a similar fantasy of the archive elicited by the complex dynamics between two lovers. Spanning a period of over thirty years, the novel tells of the passionate and obsessive love affair between Kemal,3 the son of the wealthy Basmaci family, and Füsun,4 the daughter of a distant middle-class relative. Kemal’s future plans to marry Sibel are interrupted when he initiates a passionate love affair with Füsun. The secret meetings of Kemal and Füsun at his bachelor flat in Merhamet apartments come to an end as Kemal proceeds with his engagement to Sibel. Füsun vanishes from Kemal’s life leaving him in a melancholic state. Unable to overcome his longing for Füsun, Kemal breaks off the engagement and leads a secluded life in the apartment where they used to meet in the company of the various objects that she left behind. It is through these objects that Kemal aims to alleviate the pain caused by Füsun’s absence. Following his father’s death, Kemal resumes contact with Füsun only to discover that she has married Feridun, a failed scriptwriter, who promises Füsun a glittering career in the movie industry. As a way of remaining close to Füsun, Kemal decides to fund the movie that they are going to shoot. He thus not only reconnects with Füsun but also initiates the process of collecting as he starts stealing objects from Füsun’s house each time he pays them a visit. Following the failure of Füsun’s marriage the two lovers reunite, yet their reconciliation is short-lived. During their journey to Paris, the car driven by Füsun crashes into a tree killing her and leaving Kemal seriously wounded. Whether this tragic ending was accidental or attempted suicide on the part of Füsun remains unclear. It is following Füsun’s death that Kemal decides to build a museum with the objects that he had collected over the years. In a final metafictional twist he explains how he had commissioned the novelist Orhan Pamuk to write the catalogue for the museum in the form of a novel. Kemal’s and Füsun’s various qualities, as well as their social backgrounds establish them as the self and the other, as were Clegg and 3

The word derives from the Arabic word kamal meaning perfection, the state of being intact. 4 The name Füsun derives from the Persian word fus’n, which means magic or enchantment.

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Miranda in The Collector. Kemal’s bourgeois family and respectable education and life-path are juxtaposed with Füsun’s more humble origins, lack of education and unconventional life-choices. Kemal’s mother remembers the time when Füsun entered a beauty contest with her mother’s endorsement. This anecdote is significant since it depicts not only the dissimilarity between Kemal and Füsun as individuals but also the distinct backgrounds of the two families. Aunt Nesibe [Füsun’s mother], without saying a word, had allowed her sixteen-year-old daughter, then a student at Niúantaúı Lycée for Girls, to enter a beauty contest; and on subsequently learning that Aunt Nesibe had in fact encouraged her daughter, even taking pride in this stunt that should have caused her to feel only shame, my mother had hardened her heart toward Aunt Nesibe, whom she had once so loved and protected […] “They were desperately poor,” my mother said […]. (Pamuk 2010: 8)

This initial memory foreshadows the way Kemal later on perceives Füsun in its emphasis on her beauty and femininity as well as on her distinct social background and upbringing. All these qualities make Füsun a mysterious other that is “exotic and alluring” (15) and will eventually need to be taken under control. Very much like Miranda, Füsun too represents the domain of desire in Lacanian terms, that is, the desire of the other. The mysterious and uncontrollable exotic other can only be accessed through the fantasy of the archive, which would enable Kemal to have command over Füsun. The underlying commandment aspect of the archive is highlighted when Kemal acknowledges the pleasure he gets from “mastering” Füsun: But when we made love that day, rather than tumbling into the usual childish bliss, in which playful curiosity mingled with exuberance, I found myself in the grip of what the newspapers call the urge to “master her”, and making my own desires plain with ever harsher force, I was surprised by my own behaviour. (60)

Kemal perceives Füsun to be in need of mastering not merely because she is the object of his desire but because she is also the subject of his desire: Füsun as the unknown domain of the other tells Kemal how and what to desire. She thus emerges as a source of anxiety for Kemal, which he aims to overcome by means of the fantasy of the archive. The desire to control and dominate that is made explicit through the archive is not limited to the relationship between Kemal and Füsun but reverberates within the wider framework of an imperial desire to master. When

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comparing himself to an anthropologist, Kemal confirms the underlying imperial trope of his fantasy of the archive. I was coming to see myself as someone who had travelled to distant countries and remained there for many years: say, an anthropologist who had fallen in love with a native girl while living among the indigenous folk of New Zealand, to study and catalog their habits and rituals, how they worked and relaxed, and had fun (and chatted away even while watching television, I must hasten to add). My observations and the love I had lived had become intertwined. Now the only way I could ever hope to make sense of those years was to display all that I had gathered together—the pots and pans, the trinkets, the clothes and the paintings—just as that anthropologist might have done. (496)

Like Clegg the entomologist, Kemal also identifies the imperial dimension of his fantasy of the archive by referring to himself as an anthropologist. This imperial quality puts Kemal in the position of a superior observer rather than an equal actor in his relationship with Füsun. The information he collects and rearranges about her enables him to have command over her, or, in other words, over the unknown desire of the other. Only by transforming his desire into a fantasy can he overcome the anxiety caused by the mystery of his desire, as the desire of the other. Once transformed into a fantasy, Kemal’s desire not only puts into perspective the unknown nature of his desire by marginalising Füsun as the exotic other, but also assigns Kemal the role of a superior observer who through his tools and knowledge can command that unknown other. Kemal can thus study this objectified, unknown other and domesticate her through his archive. The stability of random everyday objects offers Kemal a safer footing from which to exercise control over the mysterious domain of the other. These otherwise insignificant objects are deprived of their use value and are assigned new meanings by Kemal; by thus re-inventing them, he hopes to command and domesticate everything that Füsun represents. Slipcovered armchairs, a table, a buffet holding a candy bowl, a set of crystal tumblers, and a television crowned by a sleeping china dog—I found these things beautiful, because they had all assisted in the making of the wondrous miracle that was Füsun. (162)

The objects that are part of Kemal’s collection do not operate as souvenirs reminding Kemal of Füsun but are re-invented and assigned new meanings. This capacity to assign new meanings empowers Kemal, granting him commandment over the eventual meaning that he wishes to

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attain with his archive. The empowering aspect of the archive works towards the elimination of the frustration caused by the ambiguity of desire. With this archive Kemal accordingly hopes to reconstruct the unknown other, Füsun, as a controllable entity that would enable him access to the desire of the other. The ultimate illustration of the uncanny status that Kemal assigns to his object of fantasy is his collection of 4,213 cigarette butts that allegedly belonged to Füsun and which he meticulously orders and categorises out of his desire to archive and control through the archive. To the meaningless, desubjectivised cigarette butts he assigns new meanings so that they become part of a homogenous whole, a whole that can be tamed through the archive. The commencement dimension of the archive is made manifest in Kemal’s longing for an originary moment of happiness. While trying to have command over the unknown desire of the other Kemal also hopes to revive that originary moment that is expressed in the opening lines of the narrative: “It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it” (3). With the aid of his collection Kemal aims to construct an archive that will restore that lost moment of commencement. The fantasy of the archive thus not only works to establish authority over the unknown other but also to restore the originary moment of happiness. Yet both the commencement and the commandment that Kemal wishes to achieve through the archive remain unfulfilled as the archive condemns Kemal’s fantasy to the domain of the “objectively subjective”, thus making it impossible to enact. The archive’s capacity of commandment proves ineffective since it deprives Füsun of life, eliminating her altogether. Immediately before the car accident that kills her, Füsun accuses Kemal and her ex-husband Feridun of preventing her from living the life that she wanted. Her expression of resentment, which may or may not be entirely justified, nevertheless pinpoints Kemal’s desire to keep her to himself. “You and Feridun, you deliberately kept me from having my chance in films. Is this what you’re sorry for?” […] But you two were jealous, so afraid I might find fame and leave you, that you had to keep me at home.” (486)

Füsun identifies the fantasy of dominion embodied by Kemal’s archive and as a final gesture illustrates its impossibility. The accident not only kills her but also deprives Kemal of his fantasy since there can be no control over Füsun once she is dead. Füsun’s self-erasure shows that this fantasy of the archive cannot be enacted.

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Concluding remarks Both The Collector and The Museum of Innocence insist on the futility of constructing a fantasy of archive in order to achieve the object of desire. In both novels, the female domain, represented by Miranda and Füsun respectively, is the scene of the unknown other that needs to be domesticated and mastered. The mystery attending the domain of the other poses a threat to the order of the self that Kemal and Clegg represent. This unsettling feeling emerges as a desire for the other which can only be accessed through the alleviating effects of fantasy. Kemal and Clegg resort to fantasy in order to transplant the uncertainty of the other into a familiar, governable terrain; and this is a move which is symptomatic of what Derrida terms le mal d’archive: It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminable, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it an archives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. (Derrida 1998: 91)

This mal d’archive not only marks the obsession with which Clegg and Kemal collect, but also highlights the desire of the Western metaphysical tradition to obtain an originary meaning. The fantasy of the archive in both narratives enables Pamuk and Fowles to call into question this drive to command an originary meaning. Collection and conservation convey the inherent violence of this desire as it aims to have control over the possible meanings that can be generated. The fantasy that proves impossible to enact in both novels thus indicates the ultimate impossibility of controlling meaning. Instead, The Collector and The Museum of Innocence show how the desire for meaning eventually results in a fantasy that cannot be enacted. The deaths of both Füsun and Miranda are acts of erasure of a sort which intimate the further dissemination of meaning that can never be archived.

Works cited Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Fowles, John. 2004. The Collector. London: Vintage Books.

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Freud, Sigmund. 1976. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. _____. 2001. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. V. London: Vintage. Lacan, Jacques. 2005. Écrits: A Selection. London and New York: Routledge. New Oxford American Dictionary 2001. Elizabeth J. Jewell and Frank Abate (eds.). New York: Oxford University Press. Pamuk, Orhan. 2010. The Museum of Innocence. London: Faber and Faber. Richards, Thomas. 1993. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and Fantasy of Empire. London and New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1998. The Plague of Fantasies. New York and London: Verso. _____. 2006. How to Read Lacan. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.

CHAPTER SEVEN Orhan Pamuk’s Neighbourhood: The “Western” Object Pallavi Narayan Istanbul has been the capital of four empires, while Ankara was declared the capital of Turkey by the Young Turks in 1923. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, “father” of modern Turkey, set about transforming the primarily Islamic Ottoman Empire into a secular, modern nation-state. The programme of modernisation—in terms of transformation in patterns of consumerism due to changing political and economic affiliations—was already a part of the city’s contemporary fabric, due to rulers who sought inspiration from the West, and was now performed by the Turkish Republic. With each change in government, Istanbul experienced radical transformation in its everyday architecture. Changes to the city’s architecture (primarily through zoning, a practice that divided the city into zones so as to regularise them zone by zone) were made on the insistence of European merchant-settlers. In the drive to modernise Istanbul, the Ottoman rulers sought to emulate the European scene. But the ambitious goal of the Ottoman political elite to bring Istanbul up to the standards of the European capitals could produce only a piecemeal “regularisation” of the urban fabric, initiated by Baron Haussmann, who redesigned Paris and was invited to provide his views on regularising Istanbul. Consequently, the city lost the integrity of its Turkish-Islamic character but did not achieve a uniformly Western façade, not even in the quarters largely inhabited by Europeans. This came to a head during the First World War, when the Allies occupied Turkey, leading to the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire. Post-1830s Istanbul made a conscious break with its Turkish-Islamic heritage. After the dramatic changes that the city had undergone, such as the conversion of Byzantine Constantinople to Ottoman Istanbul in the fifteenth century, the Europeanisation of the cityscape resulted in a new phase of modernisation sweeping the city, which carried on until the late twentieth century.

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This chapter addresses the aspiration of Turkey towards Europeanisation or Westernisation—Istanbul being the point of conflation of the continents of Europe and Asia—with the transforming neighbourhood veering towards identification with the West. The Turkification of commodities too could indicate Westernisation. The troubled conversion of identity from Ottoman subjects to Turkish citizens frequently resulted in a clash between interior and exterior spatial materiality (the neighbourhood) and commodification (the individual). Viewing the city through the lens of Orhan Pamuk’s novels The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence: A Novel provides an entry point into the discussion, as well as specific instances of the Westernising neighbourhood. This chapter then aims to further understanding of the implicit forces at work in a city that is struggling to come to terms with a set of identities—Turkish, European, Mediterranean, Eastern, Western. Its particular focus is on the regularised neighbourhood in the city where the state agenda, with its focus on aesthetics at the expense of use value, leads to a tussle between the two in Istanbul’s process of transformation.

The Turkish Neighbourhood The mahalle (neighbourhood) city system of Turkey is “the system of intimate daily life in the Turkish urban context” (Mills 2007: 335). Viewed from the outside, it appears to be a straightforward residential community. Jeb Brugmann points out that it “reveals an urbanism with roots in the Ottoman era, which solved the problem of integrating diverse migrant ethnic groups into a city as relatively self-reliant, disciplined units. The mahalle system adapted ancient village modes of living into a solution for urban life” and could be ethnically or religiously mixed (2009: 106). Ten or fifteen streets at most, grouped around a thoroughfare or perhaps around a small square, and one or two mosques (or a church or a synagogue, depending on the ethnic makeup of the neighbourhood) defined most of the residential Istanbul mahalles. The neighborhood also usually contained a public fountain or two and a few shops catering to basic necessities or services. There might also be some public utility buildings (a public bath, or perhaps, a dervish convent or a primary school). (Behar 2003: 4)

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The characters in The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence, in particular the protagonists, Galip and Kemal, walk through semts— nondescript areas, districts much larger than mahalles, hence constituting larger sections of the city. These were named after landmarks such as gates, large markets, or buildings, so functioning as geographical markers. A person’s address was referred to by mentioning the name of the semt and perhaps a local landmark like a well-known mosque, city gate, monument, wharf, etc. The mahalles within these were, no doubt, of vital importance to those who lived there but were not usually known to the public at large (Behar 2003: 5). When Kemal refers to a church opposite his home in Niúantaúı, Taksim, the former would be the mahalle (and not a good example of one since it was well-known as the haunt of the élite class) and the latter the larger semt. Neighbourhoods are composed of homes and structures of public gathering and utility; each one is an accumulation of objects. Novels, with their conscious verbal depictions of places, are a perfect site of collective memory. The built environment, especially the neighbourhood, can become “a poetic expression of longing for a lost past, voices of a lived present, and dreams of an ideal future” (Bertram 2008: 9). A reading of neighbourhoods therefore makes it possible to see how Istanbul is transformed into a symbolic universe. Arjun Appadurai writes: The central dilemma is that neighbourhoods both are contexts and at the same time require and produce contexts. Neighbourhoods are contexts in the sense that they provide the frame or setting within which various kinds of human action (productive, reproductive, interpretive, performative) can be initiated and conducted meaningfully. Because meaningful life-worlds require legible and reproducible patterns of action, they are text-like and thus require one or many contexts […] A neighbourhood is a multiplex interpretive site and is comprised of material items, structures, and objects that make up a universal vocabulary of space. (1996: 184)

A neighbourhood is composed of objects—buildings, houses, places of congregation, institutions of education and religion—and may be seen as a living museum, a city laboratory, which keeps alive some everyday practices while memorialising others. Elements of the neighbourhood are constituted of objects within the interior, which assume a social signification all their own. Indeed, Appadurai indicates that “commodities, like persons, have social lives” and “value is embodied in commodities that are exchanged” (1986: 5). These objects, in the uses they are put to and the value they assume, reflect the changing city. Appadurai goes on to echo Georg Simmel’s argument that value “is never an inherent property

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of objects, but is a judgment made about them by subjects”, that is, objects that are out of the reach of the subject—here the individual or neighbourhood community—and resist the desire to possess them are the ones that become most invested with value (Appadurai 1986: 3). To say that the neighbourhood aspires towards a Westernised aspect— that is just beyond reach—is simplistic for the situation is far more complex: despite being regulated by boundaries, the neighbourhood space is problematic for it brings together a host of identity issues in an uneasy coexistence. This may include how the neighbourhood is perceived in the city, but more importantly, how it is perceived within, and the identities it simultaneously attempts to portray. The situation is further complicated by the introduction and presence of objects that clash with the existing norms and culture of the neighbourhood, subconsciously bringing about a change in its daily fabric. Commodification of national emblems, such as images of Kemal Atatürk, in terms of, for instance, their replication, may be viewed as an aspect of this perceived Westernisation. The proliferation and circulation of his images speak to a mechanical reproduction of the icon. The consequence of this mechanisation is seen in “[Atatürk’s] appearance in strange, new places and in novel poses” (Özyurek 2006: 93). This commodification of the leader seeks to put him on a level with the Turkish Western bourgeois, those who think of themselves as secular and as Turkish citizens. Hence Atatürk is found attired in “European outfits, eating food at a table rather than on the floor, drinking alcohol, bathing in the sea, and being in the company of unveiled and stylish women” (94). The aspiration of Turkey towards Europeanisation or Westernisation, which Pamuk examines, acquires a new form in this “privatisation of Turkish state symbols through their consumption” (95). The message this sends out to the people, as well as to those they wish to present themselves to, is that they fully embrace the founding ideals of the Turkish Republic—this is quite apart from their acceptance and emulation of these ideals in their daily lives, where they may find themselves in the midst of conflict between what is “good for them” now, according to state diktat, and what they were habituated to before the Republic came into existence. In fact, it would appear to be that the citizens do not feel as much admiration or respect for the leader or the Republic as they are expected/supposed to, a charge often brought against major authors, including Pamuk and Elif Shafak, in accordance with Article 301 of the Turkish Constitution, on “insulting Turkishness”. Obviously, there are mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at play, and strategies of legitimisation propagated by the changing form of the state. Thus there

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was the miniaturisation of Atatürk icons in order to reduce the abstract authority of the state and constitute the icons in the interior space. Kemal often mentions his namesake, almost as if in passing, and “miniaturises” (see Özyürek 2006) the idea of Atatürk when he speaks of street hawkers “around the base of the Atatürk statue” (Pamuk 2009: 368), thereby turning a regal park into a market and effectively commodifying the icon itself. Towards the beginning of the novel Kemal states that his parents are neither particularly religious nor particularly secular but hide their “lack of interest” behind a professed love “for Atatürk and their faith in the secular republic” (37), possibly because this is just easier. He further mentions that “forty-five years after Atatürk’s revolution and the founding of the Republic, the Turkish people had still not worked out how to go to the beach in bathing suits without embarrassment” and that his beloved “Füsun’s fragility reflected the bashfulness of the Turkish people” (203); he also mentions the beauty contests that were held during the first years of the Republic but which have since been replaced by fashion shows in which women are heavily veiled, indicating the clash between Islamisation and modernisation yet again (see Navaro-Yashin 2002). Later in the novel, Kemal maps the lower middle-class areas of the city and identifies their very being as enunciated in the objects owned and used by their inhabitants—the china dogs that rest on doilies atop the television in the living room, the patriarch’s armchair that faces said television, the quince grater in the kitchen, the open sewerage system that runs along the street, the mothers cooking, the wives sewing—the surface trappings of happy middle class-ness, in the seams of which lurk the frustrations, the unexpressed, unarticulated desires which undermine the seeming content of the family sitting down to dinner in front of the television every evening. While dining with Füsun’s family, whom Kemal views as the model for a happy family life, he reflects on the silent presence of millions of other families […] and the throng that was the nation, and the power of what we called the state, and our own insignificance. It was when we were watching flags, Atatürk programs, and the official clock ([...] the radio would refer to the “national time”) that […] domestic lives existed outside the official realm. (Pamuk 2009: 287)

A similar notion of middle-class life is defined in the enumeration of objects in a minor character’s (Galip’s absent wife Rüya’s first husband) home in The Black Book, which are all there by design and not at all by chance: “because a house like this had to have such a clock on its walls. Because there was always a television on in such houses all night long”; there was a “hand-crocheted doily on top of it because houses like this

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always had them”; and so it goes on to include a box of chocolates serving now as a sewing box, a coffee cup with a broken handle, the clothes drying near the stove. He would sometimes “sit back to watch the scene, watch it like a film” (Pamuk 1994: 130). State intervention into domestic life indicates political insecurity with regard to private life conforming to the notion of the Turkish citizen that the state promulgates. Around both The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence hovers the governmental television broadcast of “images of the flag, Atatürk’s mausoleum, and ‘our boys’ in the army” (Pamuk 2009: 310). Television shows, with titles like “The Conquest of Istanbul: Its Place in World History, Turkishness: What Must It Reflect? and Coming to a Better Understanding of Atatürk”, seek to numb the viewer into a placid acceptance of state control (353). Indeed, through the medium of films, Pamuk scatters a plethora of visual imagery throughout the novels to indicate how Western images affected the general populace to the point that they felt a sense of loss that they did not quite know how to assuage until they began emulating what they saw on the screen. In The Black Book, for instance, Galip muses on how the collective memory is being eroded by movie music, and how the “children of today […] were blinded by the proliferation of new images” (1994: 128). He mentions a man with two cans of gasoline at the entrance to a theatre, who demands to be given his eyes back, “yes, the eyes that could see the old images”, again bringing to the fore the conflict between Turkification and Westernisation (128). A director and producer Hayal Hayati notes, in The Museum of Innocence, that films are a mediator of public taste. This is a sarcastic comment on Article 301 again, as Hayati observes that the Turkish film industry was free to do more or less what it liked, provided that films did not include “lewdness or sex scenes, or unacceptable interpretations of Islam, Atatürk, the Turkish army, the president, religious figures, Kurds, Armenians, Jews, or Greeks”. This translated, for the censor board, into banning not only any subject that made those in power uneasy, but “banning whatever happened to annoy or offend them”; Hayati narrates stories of films he banned for “degrading” or “insulting” just about any section of the populace or any “institution”, sometimes for no conceivable reason. A few mentions of “the flag, the nation, Atatürk, and Allah” would, he feels, soften the script, making it more appealing to the censor board (Pamuk 2009: 330). Kemal and Füsun’s romance is conducted in the dream world inspired by Western films. The characters in both novels not only produce spaces where they can retire to in order to get away from the humdrum of life— such as the theatre—they also consume spaces which may not be theirs for

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the taking: Kemal, for instance, makes his daily appearance in Füsun’s family life while Galip insinuates himself into Celâl’s home with its objects of memory, and thereby into his identity, so as to live out a life which is not his for the living. To a rationalised, expansionist and at the same time centralised, clamorous, and spectacular production corresponds another production, called “consumption.” The latter is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order. (de Certeau 1984: xiii)

The statement above encompasses the “Westernisation” effect, which points to the influence of the West on contemporary Turkish society to such an extent that Western commodities are accorded higher prestige than local goods, and those who practise a Western way of living—women wearing short skirts and men donning hats in order to be seen as “modern”, kissing on the lips because this is what is done in Western films, a “good” Turkish girl permitting her fiancé to have sexual relations with her after their engagement so as to echo a perceived Western ideal of women’s behaviour, and so on—think of themselves as different or forward thinking. Conforming to Western ideals has benefits and drawbacks, for “being Western” in one context may be looked upon approvingly (as in the case of Sibel, a member of the élite class who is briefly engaged to Kemal) but in another context spoil an individual’s reputation, as happens with Füsun who, coming from the lower middleclass, has the “audacity” to participate in a fashion show and wear miniskirts. De Certeau elaborates on this by mentioning that “a similar ambiguity creeps into our societies through the use made by the “common people” of the culture disseminated and imposed by the “élites” producing the language” (1984: xiii); this can further be seen in Füsun applying “Western” make-up and in Kemal purchasing a European handbag for his fiancée Sibel as it is important for her to display her high class in society. Kemal’s impression of what comprises the “modern” woman does not take into account the fact that such a woman could possibly have similar desires to the more traditional, more marriageable sort of woman. He sees her as an embodiment of the concept of the free woman, who can indulge in an affair simply for the thrill of it but who will, nevertheless, remain loyal to him, hopefully as a mistress (this for Füsun). Further, Kemal’s cohabitation with Sibel while only being engaged to her may be viewed as an effort to actively engage in the modernisation project; yet, though Sibel

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is “modern” enough to agree to live in with Kemal, she is still “traditional” in that she agrees to the arrangement only after their engagement. Engaging with being modern also involves museumising the past, and the novels catalogue not only their protagonists’ impressions but also all kinds of object lists, especially those connected with the beloved. For “if classification is the mirror of collective humanity’s thoughts and perceptions, then collecting is its material embodiment. Collecting is classification lived, experienced in three dimensions” (Elsner and Cardinal 1997: 2). The question of lists and catalogues is important in the context of both the fictional city and its historical counterparty. After all, “the social order is itself inherently collective: it thrives on classification, on rule, on labels, sets and systems” (2). Istanbul comprises various collections of groups and objects—classified buildings, for instance, or ethnic communities—that are translated by the state into binaries of desirable/undesirable, centre/periphery, and collectors/collectibles. Public “collecting” was obviously a mode of containment and regulation in the unevenly regularising city. Pragmatic and literary lists are “repositories of information” in Pamuk’s novels and: are meaningful to those who read or access them. Connections between elements in a list may be readily apparent or vague and indistinct, depending on what role the list is intended to serve. On the one hand, a list may fulfill a reference function, acting as a resource in which information is ordered so it can be swiftly and easily located. On the other, a list may convey a specific impression; its role is the creation of meaning, rather than merely the storage of it. In such a way a writer might present numerous entities to a reader, setting them side by side in display, or might particularise an individual object, indicating its components or qualities. (Belknap 2004: 3)

“Lists,” writes Belknap, “take a number of sizes, shapes, and functions, ranging from directories and historical records to edicts and instructions” (7); “they grow by the will of the compiler, by whose discretion the number and order of elements are decided. The ability to select gives the writer enormous power in determining which things to enumerate, what will appear in the procession, exactly how and in what relations an object will be perceived. When a writer creates a list, he or she makes choices of inclusion or exclusion based on some desired criteria” (19). Walter Benjamin’s figures of the collector and the flâneur reside “within as well as outside the marketplace, between the worlds of money

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and magic”, for they are “figures on the threshold” (Benjamin 2002: ix– xiii). This insight illuminates Istanbul as an interstitial space: The historical object of interpretation […] under the divinatory gaze of the collector, is taken up into the collector’s own particular time and place, thereby throwing a light on what has been. Welcomed into a present moment that seems to be waiting just for it, in a sense, actualised, the moment from the past comes alive as never before [… ] the “now” is experienced as performed in the “then”, as its distillation. (Benjamin 2002: ix–xiii)

Galip and Kemal view moments of transformation in the city through the lens of nostalgia, seeing in them the ghosts of material things: “Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by ‘progress’, is the urhistorical, collective redemption of lost time, of the times embedded in the spaces of things” (Çelik 1993: 80). Playing with memory in his notes on the city, the flâneur reconstructs them, embroidering them with fanciful imaginings before transmitting them. As a flâneur, Pamuk combines in his novels the remembering activities of history, literary history, criticism and storytelling. His Istanbul is caught in an uneasy coexistence between the gossip and the familiar faces of the neighbourhood, on the one hand, and on the other, the global city of countless nodes and networks of anonymous faces. The flâneur is, of course, a collector, and as a writer, he records scenes from the city. In his writings are stored memories of the city, which may then be collectivised and reactivated. Galip and Kemal belong to the class of the literati and Istanbul is a literary city, enticing inspired literature over the ages. Much of my thinking on collecting objects coalesces with Orhan Pamuk’s actual museum, the Museum of Innocence (Masumiyet Müzesi) on Çuckurcuma Caddesi in Beyo÷lu, Istanbul. Pamuk intended to construct the museum alongside the novel and, indeed, there are abundant references to the museum throughout the novel as if it were already in existence when the novel was published (it finally opened in 2012, and The Innocence of Objects was published the same year). A record of a decade in Istanbul, it is a tribute to the city in its everydayness. Conceived in rooms named after groups of chapters, it is a unique work of art and literature of a kind never seen before, presenting flânerie in a complex form: as a combination of the intellectual (individual) and the collective (public).

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The museum sets itself against the traditional notion of the museum as promoted by the state. Recalling his childhood, Pamuk writes wistfully in the museum catalogue that most museums “were historical monuments or […] places with an air of a government office about them” (2012: 54). The museum he hoped to build would be based on the model of “the small museums in the backstreets of European cities” which “can also speak for individuals” (54). Though he admires the Louvre, the British Museum and Topkapı Palace, he is “against these precious monumental institutions being used as blueprints for future museums” (54) for they are dominated by stories of the nation and History, rather than the histories of individuals. The latter, Pamuk feels, are more important for gaining a deep understanding of humanity, especially of the “new and modern man emerging from increasingly wealthy non-Western nations” (54). Statesponsored museums represent the state whereas Pamuk’s museum focuses on “ordinary, everyday stories of individuals” that “are richer, more humane, and much more joyful” (55). The “real challenge”, indeed, “is to use museums to tell, with the same brilliance, depth, and power, the stories of the individual human beings” (55). Pamuk reformulates the museum as a “smaller, more individualistic, and cheaper” space so that it can tell stories of the neighbourhood, that is, the real stories of the city, on a “human scale”, and encourages people to turn “their own small homes and stories into ‘exhibition’ spaces” (56). Such exhibitions will honour the neighborhood and its streets, homes and shops. Big museums, he believes, make one forget one’s humanity and get sucked into state illusions and the human masses, while “the stories of individuals are much better suited to displaying the depths of our humanity” (55). Spaces such as the Museum of Innocence are evidence of the extent to which the individual, in contemplating and interpreting how his city and the nation are transformed, may comprehend how the media affects him in such a way that his thoughts, habits and even his daily life are reshaped.

Objects and Collecting The collector necessitates the museum, be it public or private. Ideas are complex but things simple, present in all their there-ness. Ideas about things or around things can, however, lead to an uncanny effect. Indeed, ideas give Francis Ponge a queasy feeling for: Ideas seek my approval, demand it, and it is only too easy for me to offer it; this offering, this consent, produces no pleasure in me but rather a kind of queasiness, a nausea. On the other hand, objects, landscapes, events,

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individuals of the external world give me much pleasure. They win my trust. For the simple reason that they don’t need it. Their concrete presence and evidence, their density, their three dimensions, their palpable undeniable aspect, their existence […] (1972: 83)

Speaking about the best books which, in his opinion, “are by dead writers”, Pamuk evokes the uncanny by speaking about great writers: “Even if they are not yet dead, to sense their presence is to sense a ghost. This is why, when we see great writers in the street, we treat them like ghosts, not quite believing our eyes as we marvel from a distance” (2007: 4). Ackbar Abbas mentions Benjamin’s notion of the collector as “motivated by dangerous though domestic passions” (1988: 217). He elaborates on this “provocative characterisation […] which places him in a paradoxical social space”, that is, “the social space of modernity” (217– 218). For Abbas, most of Benjamin’s writings refer overtly or obliquely to the collector, “as if collector and modernist, two social metaphors, were tied together, back to back, all the more strongly for the ties being negative ones”. In a modernising Istanbul, the figure of the collector is all the more doomed to a “mythic […] destructive passion” (217–218). The collector, usually associated with possession and preservation of objects, exhibits the dangerous tendency to place them in a new context, thereby alienating them from their cultural history. Benjamin notes that memory propels the collector to build his collection: as he “contemplates his possessions”, his “passion borders on the chaos of memories” (1969: 60). The elements of an object—“the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock”—enable “a true collector” to familiarise himself with “the whole background of an item” which, for him, adds up to “a magic encyclopaedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object” (60). Objects thus complementing each other in an arrangement acquire magical properties, which Pamuk emphasises in his museum. “The interior is the asylum of art. The collector is the true resident of the interior. He makes his concern the transfiguration of things” (Benjamin 2008: 104). He divests things of their commodity character by taking possession of them, which bestows on them a connoisseur value rather than a use value, and dreams his way into the bygone where “things are freed from the drudgery of being useful” (Benjamin 2006: 39). Interiors in Pamuk’s novels are arranged is such a way that certain homes and rooms appear to come alive, sometimes with creepy, malevolent qualities and at other times with memories of happy times. The furniture in Celâl’s apartment in The Black Book, for instance, is invested with sensations of shock and confusion, for it:

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exactly replicated the room of twenty-five years ago. If there was anything new, it was a simulation of something old. […] The objects emerging from this terrible darkness were not new. […] It was as if the old tables, faded curtains, dirty ashtrays, and worn-out armchairs had refused to bow to the fate … to escape that fate by taking refuge in a new world of their own creation (1994: 237).

For his part, Kemal, in The Museum of Innocence, seeks distractions to take his mind off the pain of unrequited love by embracing objects in the Merhamet Apartments, where his mother’s own apartment is “a depot for old furniture she deemed to have gone out of fashion and new acquisitions that she immediately found tiresome” (Pamuk 2009: 20). Amidst “the old vases and dresses and dusty discarded furniture, going one by one through [his] father’s amateurish snapshots” (21), he finds consolation in the collection of recollections from his childhood and youth, these artefacts giving him comfort. He shares with Füsun objects that trigger childhood memories for both of them: “trunks packed with clothes reeking of mothballs, and the tricycle that we’d both ridden as children, [...] a chamber pot, […] the hats” (22). As his obsession with Füsun grows, he starts collecting objects that she has used or touched, deriving relief for his feelings of jealousy, possessiveness and loss in caressing, smelling and sucking them; later he categorises them in terms of precise moments in his pointless “love” for her and, as time passes, classifies them into years. He starts picking up bigger objects from her home, sometimes even those of common family use, to add to his collection, together with other objects he imagines would appeal to her. As the concept of the museum is itself Western (drawing inspiration from Paris, Turkey inaugurated its own museum boom in the early twentieth century), Kemal may be seen as a liminal figure at the threshold of Turkification and Westernisation. Edgar Allan Poe provides minor treatises on furnishings such as curtains, carpets, tapestry, lamps, and glass in a near-encyclopaedic narration, tying in aptly with Pamuk’s descriptions of the interior. For if the interior is organised, it is assumed that the shelves of memory will be too; in the absence of order, clutter and disruption could easily result (Poe 1840). As the flâneur abandons himself to the phantasmagorias of the market, the collector willingly subjects himself to the phantasmagorias of the interior, which are “constituted by man’s imperious need to leave the imprint of his private individual existence on the rooms he inhabits” (Benjamin 2002: 14) and which represent, for the private man, the universe. As the individual’s place of work is separated from home, “he needs the domestic interior to sustain himself in his illusions” (19). From the collector’s perspective, the living room coalesces the interior and the

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exterior, displaying the proclivities of those who live in the home through objects that are displayed as if in an arcade or a museum. To return to the image of Galip entering Celâl’s living room in the latter’s absence, the objects appear to leap out at Galip from their places; when he turns on the light, however, he finds they are all in the same positions they were set in decades ago. These objects from a time past still accomplish the same functions in the present, except that they are tinged with the aura of the past. They acquire a museum value for Galip, who may then be viewed as a collector not only of Rüya’s belongings and Celâl’s newspaper columns, but also of furniture, of photographs, of objects that fire up the interior. Though these are, for the most part, massproduced goods and commodities, Galip, as the collector, strips them of their use value and imbues them with a connoisseurial one, thereby turning them into art. “In the process, however, art turns into mere objects of contemplation” (Abbas 217–218), giving rise to an uneasy relationship between art and commodity fetishism. The collector is opposed to universal commodification, though the objects he includes in his collection may be available as commodities in the market. He is also the purveyor of taste and in fact seeks to create it through his objectival machinations. Pamuk’s use not merely of narrative but also of language to examine objects and collecting is itself connected with the problematic of taste, as Abbas has written (217–237) in a comparison of the poet and language against the buyer and the commodity. It should be remembered that the collector in general, and in Pamuk’s novels in particular, is usually an upper or upper middle-class male, used to certain privileges and possessing a kind of ennui or even lassitude in his attitude towards life. This in turn gives him the leisure and motivation to step out in search of new sensations and the required aesthetics to pursue a journey as flâneur-collector. For the collector would necessarily need to be also a kind of flâneur—how else would he locate items to add to his catalogue? “With the collector’s appearance”, therefore, “the art object begins to lose its rootedness in place and prepares itself for its future career in an art market of potential buyers” (Abbas 219). But this only holds for the collector who is not averse to selling. What of the collector who is engaged solely in acquiring objects for his own collection, a collection he may or may not exhibit? Pamuk introduces an interesting exercise into the museum catalogue titled “Spot the Differences between the Novel and the Museum”. Though this is precisely what the reader/viewer of the museum is already doing, the inclusion of this exercise in the catalogue reintroduces the notion of play into the object-laden text. The subtext then is one of mischief, which

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reflects the presence of the author in most of his novels as a minor character, penetrating the work towards the end and frequently turning out to be its narrator, his role being the accomplishment of something beyond the narrative. For instance, he is Kemal’s confidant and sets up the museum on his behalf, both within the fictional world of the novel as well as, of course, without. Pamuk thus permits fiction to actively enter the realm of reality and assume a natural space in it. This intersection of fiction and reality is the point of Pamuk’s novelistic endeavour. Indeed, thoughts are as much a part of an individual’s reality as “concrete” occurrences and phenomena. Imagination and memory operating in conjunction with the fictional/actual presence of objects result, in Pamuk’s particular case, in the Museum of Innocence and the neighbourhood that surrounds it. Objects constitute the imaginary-actual museum as well. The Museum of Innocence houses lush and beautiful arrangements of objects: the objects object-ify the museum itself, as well as the street and the neighbourhood. Pamuk thus sites memory in the built environment; the museum itself, as a neighbourhood institution, cuts across state attempts, expanding the city’s vocabulary of space.

Works cited Abbas, Ackbar. 1988. “Walter Benjamin’s Collector: The Fate of Modern Experience”. New Literary History, 20.1 (Autumn): 217–37. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value”, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 3–63. _____. 1996. “The Production of Locality”, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 178–99. Baudrillard, Jean. 1997. “The System of Collecting”, in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (eds), The Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion Books, 7-24. Behar, Cem. 2003. A Neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul: Fruit Vendors and Civil Servants in the Kasap ølyas Mahalle. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Belknap, Robert E. 2004. The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2002. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. New York: Belknap Press.

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_____. 2006. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. _____. 2007. “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting”, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken. Bertram, Carel. 2008. Imaginingthe Turkinsh House. Collective Visions of Home. Austin: University of Texas Press. Brugmann, Jeb. 2009. Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World. New Delhi: HarperCollins. Çelik, Zeynep. 1993. The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Elsner, John and Roger Cardinal. (1994) 1997. “Introduction”, in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (eds), The Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 1-6. Gül, Murat. 2009. The Emergence of Istanbul: Transformation and Modernisation of a City. London: I. B. Tauris. Mills, Amy. 2007. “Gender and Mahalle (Neighbourhood) Space in Istanbul”, Gender, Place and Culture, 14.3: 335–54. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pamuk, Orhan. 1994. The Black Book (Kara Kitap). Trans. Güneli Gün. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; London: Faber & Faber. _____. 2007. Other Colours: Essays and a Story. Trans. Maureen Freely. New York: Knopf. _____. 2009. The Museum of Innocence (Masumiyet Müzesi). Trans. Maureen Freely. New York: Knopf. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1840. “The Philosophy of Furniture”. Available at: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/POE/philfurn.html. Accessed 13 April 2013. Ponge, Francis. 1972. The Voice of Things. Ed. and trans. Beth Archer. New York: Mc-Graw Hill Book Company. Özyürek, Esra. 2006. “Miniaturizing Atatürk: The Commodification of State Iconography”, in Esra Özyürek, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 93-124. Stewart, Susan. 1994. “Objects of Desire”, in Susan M. Pearce (ed.), Interpreting Objects and Collections. London: Routledge, 254-58.

PART IV POSTCOLONIAL REIFICATIONS

CHAPTER EIGHT Multicultural Uniformity: Postcolonial Reification in the Novels of Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi Mehmet Ali Çelikel The main concerns of postcolonial and postmodernist texts in the second half of the twentieth century include identity problems, hybridity, gender and cultural clashes caused by the multicultural condition. If postmodernism is what Fredric Jameson calls “the cultural logic of late capitalism” (1992: 179), then it has something to do with commodification. In the novels of contemporary authors such as Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi that have been identified and categorised within the multiple theories of post-colonial and postmodernist fiction, a reflection of the multi-layered cultural condition caused by aggressive global capitalism constitutes their narrative styles. However, the novels of the authors in question cannot be placed under a generalising heading like “novels of commodification” or “novels of the logic of globalisation” because the margins of the postmodern cultural condition are flexible and these margins cannot possibly be defined as a singular and unified entity. Nevertheless, in the novels of these particular authors, the narrative discourse still reflects postmodern fiction’s susceptibility of trademarks, names of consumer products and deterritorialisation of cultures. Multiculturalism is a term coined to celebrate the cultural condition that came into being chiefly as the result of post-colonial migrations to the imperial centres of the former colonies in the aftermath of their independence. London, as the capital of the British Empire, has been the home to migrants from former colonies since the disintegration of the British Empire. Thus, it has turned into a city of cultural contrasts and the centre of a metropolitan identity. This new cultural condition does not necessarily function only as a reference to its colonial past, but also as an indication of London’s unique culture generated particularly by postcolonial migrants.

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A migrant is naturally an opponent. As he cannot identify himself with the local culture, he begins to alienate himself from the values of his new homeland. This is not only a process of alienation from the values of his new homeland but also an inevitable time-space distancing from the values of his own homeland. This alienation leads him to rebel against his hybridised situation. Yet, migrants have a crucial need within this process of alienation and rebellion: survival. They realise that the post-colonial world is a capitalist one that leads them to ambivalence as to whether to integrate into the new culture and reject their identities or to hold on to their own values. As a result of the need for survival, the post-colonial migrants begin to detach themselves from post-colonial identities attached to them and succumb to the values of the western capitalist world, turning their cultural products into commodities. Thus, the post-colonial migrants begin to lose their identities and are hybridised in multicultural London. This study, therefore, aims to scrutinise the concept of reification from three different perspectives. The first is the reification of the cultural values and cultural objects of the migrants. This process includes the commodification of the migrants’ traditional food, clothes and garments in order for them to survive in their new dwelling place. The second one is their cultural fetishism manifest in their obsession about using western products and trademarks in order to appear more western. The third one, finally, is the reification of local traditional and religious values and ceremonies through the influence of western products and brand names before the independence in the colony. This process of reification stands out as the rejection of identities and beliefs. Postcolonial novels by postcolonial British authors reflect not only an anti-imperialist stance in the aftermath of the colonial enterprise, but also a new form of hybridised identity for the characters of both Indian and English origin, thus suggesting a new postcolonial culture. Dislocation of culture and identity through the process of hybridisation produces its own resistance towards the changing of values, principles and beliefs. In this respect, Salman Rushdie’s and Hanif Kureishi’s novels portray postcolonial individuals who attempt to resist cultural hybridisation by preserving their traditional and religious identity. However, their resistance turns out to be commodified in terms of their meals, clothes and even beliefs. Within this intense reification in post-colonial texts, identities succumb to the models constructed by the market which totalises and accumulates all individuals under a cultural uniformity. From the “coca-colonisation of the planet” in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses to the reification of both colonial and postcolonial identities via the insistence on ethnic clothing in

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opposition to popular brands in Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, literature of the postcolonial period, then, reflects Western products as forms of cultural fetishism in order for postcolonial migrants to become more westernised, while it also reflects the ethnic characteristics of postcolonial individuals not only as the sources of their means of cultural preservation but also as their means of financial survival. In Hanif Kureishi’s novels, London is presented as a global city that accumulates global differences and cultural varieties, which function well to exemplify the reification of cultural values and cultural objects of the migrants. John Clement Ball refers to Kureishi’s use of London in his texts as his “remarks that reflect [the texts’] overlaying of analogous global space on local metropolitan space” (1996: 21). As an author of culturally diverse characters and stories, he not only embodies the local space as the reflection of the globalised cultural condition but also internalises cultural diversity as the core of his characters’ identity. In a sense, the global space becomes the local space in London. In Gabriel’s Gift, the global cultural products that seem to be alien leak into the local space: The city was no longer home to immigrants only from the former colonies, plus a few others: every other race was present, living side by side without, most of the time, killing one another. It held together, this new international city called London—just about—without being unnecessarily anarchic or corrupt. There was, however, little chance of being understood in any shop. Dad once said, “The last time I visited the barber’s I came out with a bowl of couscous, half a gram of Charlie and number two crop. I only went in for a shave!” (2001: 8)

A daily practical need like having a shave at the local barber’s is combined with the introduction of “couscous”, a type of food which is alien to the local environment. Since food functions as the intensifier of immigrants’ cultural representation, it not only turns into a means of survival but also into the representation of the immigrants’ cultural background, while simultaneously becoming commoditised. Thus, “couscous” becomes reified because it is stripped of its cultural identity and is turned into a commodity. Besides, it is not only unusual to see “couscous” being sold at a barber’s, but also surprising to find a type of non-English food in the local neighbourhood. Thus, the metropolis becomes a melting pot of cultural contrasts and the marker of an identity which is an amalgam of these contrasting cultures. Kureishi does not depict the multicultural condition with reference to the colonial past, but to the cultural characteristics of London. Kureishi’s London is, therefore, a

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setting for many global cultural motives, which originate from within London. Bart Moore-Gilbert suggests that Kureishi’s themes and concerns are perceived as cosmopolitan or “even exotic” by the readers outside Britain, but they seem local particularly to London-based readers (2001: 1). The multicultural condition in Kureishi’s London not only stems from the colonial past, but also from the objectification and commodification of global capitalism. Therefore, the introduction of global motives functions to modify the local habits and interests in his novels. In Gabriel’s Gift, coffee is presented as one of these modifiers of habits: Even ten years ago it was difficult to get a decent cup of coffee in this town. Now people threw a fit if the milk wasn’t skimmed to within a centimetre of its life and the coffee not picked on their preferred square foot of Arabia. (2001: 8)

The change in daily habits like having coffee in the above example appears to be caused by the commodification of the immigrants’ cultural products. Sukhdev Sandhu suggests that Kureishi is “relaxed about the changes the capital might wreak” on immigrant identity as well as on the cultural identity of London, because for many immigrants London is not a place to refashion themselves, but a place to migrate and inhabit for financial reasons (2000: 154). This process is taken further by Arif Dirlik and defined as the “global unity” created by the trans-nationalisation of production (1994: 349), obviously made easier in the aftermath of colonialism. Dirlik’s assumption is that the world is homogenised both economically and culturally. In Something to Tell You, Kureishi focuses on this homogenisation in order to foreground the reification of the figures of divinity: When I had more time, I liked to walk up through Shepherd’s Bush market, with its rows of chauffer-driven cars parked alongside Goldhawk Road Station. Hijabed Middle Eastern women shopped in the market, where you buy massive bolts of vivid cloth, crocodile skin shoes, scratchy underwear and jewellery, “snide” CDs and DVDs, parrots and luggage, as well as illuminated 3-D pictures of Mecca and of Jesus. (2008: 10)

Ethnicity becomes not something to be integrated into the host culture, but a rarefied commodity. The “3-D pictures of Mecca and Jesus” sold side-by-side are no more the representatives of their spiritual “use value”. On the contrary, they are stripped of their religious meaning by acquiring, in Marxist terms, an “exchange value”, and the improbable cooperation

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between Jesus and Mecca is presented to consumers’ tastes on a street market stall. Angela McRobbie interprets the street markets as places that function “as a daytime social meeting place” where “money and goods” are exchanged, and she stresses that “wherever immigrant groups have arrived and set about trying to earn a living in largely hostile environment a local service economy in the form of a market has grown up” (2008: 374). For his part, in his discussion of globalisation and commodification, Timothy Bewes asserts that “the concept of reification presupposes the assimilation of all cultures to a single culture” (2002: 21). Multiculturalism is, then, the commercialisation of ethnicity itself, in which case hybridity, as defined by Kureishi on the streets of London, is commodified rather than hybridised, like the illuminated picture of Mecca and Jesus sold on the same stall. Thus, commodification and reification disguise the postcolonial cultural scene. When it comes to speaking of cultural fetishism, the characters that Kureishi describes, despite being analogous with the multiplicity of the global cultural representation in a local setting, appear to be similar to each other in that they all reflect consumerism in the clothes they wear, each of them being fashionable global brands. His non-white characters like Karim and Changez in The Buddha of Suburbia or Shahid in The Black Album, both representatives of second generation post-colonial immigrants, are all presented through their body ornamentation, mutilation or deformity. Karim and Shahid decorate their bodies by their hair style and their clothing. Their body decoration, in most cases, functions to cover their cultural identity rather than emphasising it. Karim, for instance, dresses up like a pop icon in order to perform Englishness and whiteness more effectively: I wore turquoise flared trousers, a blue and white flower-patterned seethrough shirt, blue suede boots with Cuban heels, and a scarlet Indian waistcoat with gold stitching around the edges. I’d pulled on a head band to control my shoulder-length frizzy hair. (1990: 6)

Karim’s room is a cultural collage including a Jimi Hendrix poster, a poster of the “Easy Rider” movie, a poster of “The Doors” and retro clothes scattered around the room that bears all the kitsch elements of the ’70s. However, his brown body signifies his ethnicity and cultural clash with the western cultural domination in his room. When Karim is together with his English friend Charlie, whom he idolises, he is reduced to a merely bodily existence. Charlie advises him to “dress less” because he looks “a bit like a pearly queen” (16); he also advises him to wear “Levi’s” jeans and take his headband off, which Karim immediately does (16). In

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order to look more English and be accepted more fully into Englishness, Karim represents his body in western brands. His body, then, turns into a performance of cultural fetishism. Through his desire of being and feeling like a westerner, he makes Levi’s a cultural fetish to complete his performativity. Judith Butler asserts that What are being performed are the cultural norms that condition and limit the actor in the situation but also in play are the cultural norms of reception, which may or may not accord with the ones that are constituting a situation so that we actually have a retrospective of constitution of the performance through the norms of reception—and this can produce really interesting problems of cultural translation and cultural misunderstanding. And those problems are very productive. (in Salih 2004: 346)

Butler suggests that racial identity depends upon the representation of bodies, both in physical and performative terms. In this way, people outside of a certain race classification like Karim are Othered and must choose to either perform their societal racial norms or take on the potential problems of racial performativity. Karim’s purpose is to conceal his otherness by using garments and objects that are culturally attributed to the west. He experiences otherness in his racial identity and thus he attempts to repress this experience by rejecting the fixed racial roles and models of Indianness attached to him. As a result he acquires an English identity falsely constructed via culturally western clothing garments. Karim’s ethnic identity and cultural mix multiply the collage and connotations created by these western products. Kureishi offers a version of multiculturalism similar to the demands of performativity that change according to societal needs. His search for authenticity rejects any self-definition which is based solely on them. The challenge of the novel is how Karim fails to identify himself in a multicultural space based on race and ethnicity. Kureishi demonstrates performativity in practice, creating a visualisation of some of the tenets of the theory as Karim struggles to define himself. Karim’s characterisation offers, then, a literary example of how performativity through the reification of cultural values and objects can work in conjunction with the search for identity. In The Black Album, Shahid, the protagonist of the novel, is a young member of the second generation of post-colonial Pakistani immigrants. Born in London, he feels English very much like Karim in The Buddha of Suburbia. His desire to conceal his otherness and look more English to be admitted into the English culture is provided by means of clothing

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garments bearing famous western brand names, as was the case with Karim. In the dormitory of the London college where he studies, Shahid is surrounded by a group of radical Islamic students who are originally from Pakistan. Shahid’s “Gap jeans”, “Fred Perry” and “Paul Smith” shirts and “Italian T-shirts” (1995: 22) function to emphasise his integration within western culture by concealing his otherness. At the same time, however, these brand names also function to emphasise his difference from his radical friends who insist on wearing traditionally non-western garments to signify their anti-Westernness. The third type of reification in this study is the reification of the local traditional and religious values in the colony itself as an outcome of the colonial venture. In terms of its cultural deterritorialisation and commodification of myths, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses ruptures the conventional narration by not only forming a multi-layered structure but also recreating and satirising religious myths through the deployment of commodities. This type of reification stands out as a result of the western products introduced in the colony by imperialism and the colonial venture. Gibreel Farishta is a film star famous for acting in theological movies in India. In satirical contradiction of his roles in theological movies, for which he is famous, he loses his faith soon after his arrival in London. His new identity offers what Amin Malak calls “the clash of cultures and the conflict of representations” (1989: 183). A theological movie star turns into a non-believer, and a theatre actor becomes a voice-over actor for commodities. Catherine Cundy regards the condition of Rushdie’s characters as the result of a cultural “dislocation” (1996: 68). By ironically reformulating these post-colonial identities, Rushdie satirises the aggressive capitalist tendency of imperialism by harshly deploying aggressive marketers, brand names and strong commodification. In the opening pages of the novel, when the two expatriates fall off the crashed aircraft, Gibreel begins, in the air, to sing an old Indian song that foreshadows the novel’s cultural bricolage: “O, my shoes are Japanese,” Gibreel sang, translating the old song into English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation, “These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart’s Indian for all that.” (1992: 5)

Gibreel and Saladin represent a hybridised nation that has lost its national identity. According to the song, this loss of identity is caused by the economic hegemony of non-national products. This song not only suggests a cultural bricolage, but also informs the reader of the upcoming

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tone of the novel that clashes myths with commodification. Both religion and nation are under the same economic hegemony. Hal Valance, one of the minor characters in the book, is a racist advertising executive who used to “employ [Saladin] for the voice-overs in his commercials” (Finney 1998: 82). However, he “uses market research to justify removing all signs of black immigrants from his commercials” and sacks Saladin (82) because he is too alien. Finney regards this as Rushdie’s use of black comedy “evident in the passages concerning politics, capitalist greed and racism” (82). The use of black comedy through representations of aggressive capitalism and racism enables Rushdie to retell and parody the mythical and heroic images in a contemporary setting. The most striking religious myth that clashes with commodification is Gibreel’s final dream about a walk of pilgrimage organised by Ayesha. She is a girl who eats nothing but butterflies and persuades a whole village to go on a pilgrimage with her. Mishal, who has cancer, is one of the villagers to join Ayesha. She believes that her cancer will disappear if she walks to Mecca: It is the angel’s will that all of us, every man, and woman and child in the village, begin at once to prepare for a pilgrimage. We are commanded to walk from this place to Mecca Sharif, to kiss the Black Stone in the Ka’aba at the centre of the Haram Sharif, the sacred mosque. There we must surely go. (Rushide 1992: 235)

Her husband Mirza’s attempts to stop her are humorous and suggest a realism that overtakes magic: “When the waters of the ocean part, where will the extra water go? Will it stand up sideways like walls?” [...] He began to cry, and fell on his knees, with his forehead still pressed against the wall. His dying wife came up and embraced him from behind. “Go with the pilgrimage, then,” he said, dully. “But at least take the Mercedes station wagon. It’s got air-conditioning and you can take the icebox full of Cokes.” (239)

Rushdie creates a grotesque image by parodying an Islamic duty and a holy myth. The burlesque generated by the clash of eastern magical reality with western products indicates how powerfully capitalism dominates religious and national identities and how influentially it demonises them. An air-conditioned car and cold fizzy drinks are suggested as facilitators of a religious duty, thus decreasing the reverence of such a task. The duty of pilgrimage is taken out of its local and spiritual paradigms and converted into a secular task through an impious commodification.

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Salman Rushdie presents the post-modern cultural condition of the world as an impediment to authenticity and religious and national identities. In one of his interviews, Rushdie points to the fact that television, which is a cheap and crude source of information, has a coarsening influence (1996: 57). He thinks of the religious soap operas produced for Indian television channels and observes how greatly they changed the concepts of divine concepts, because one just sits in the living room and can switch off the TV set that “fits in the corner of the room” (57). Considering that television has become the greatest source of information that can be switched off at any time, everything presented on television is crudified. Rushdie calls this “Coca-Colonisation” in The Satanic Verses: Amid all the televisual images of hybrid tragedies—the uselessness of the mermen, the failures of plastic surgery, the Esperanto-like vacuity of much modern art, the Coca-Colonisation of the planet— […] (1992: 406)

Akbar S. Ahmed considers the world as a “television box” that consolidates “Western consumerism” and identifies postmodernism “as the era of the media” and in this era, television “constitutes a radical break with the past” (1992: 210-211). In Rushdie’s representation of the eclecticism and juxtaposed images of the postmodern condition, consumerism and media surround everything, including religion, in contemporary culture. The walk of pilgrimage organised by Ayesha succeeds in eliciting the attention of the media and the business world in The Satanic Verses, but this interest in the pilgrimage is far away from its spiritual content: The story of the village that was walking to the sea had spread all over the country, and in the ninth week the pilgrims were being pestered by journalists, local politicos in search of votes, businessmen who offered to sponsor the march if the yatris would only consent to wear sandwich boards advertising various goods and services (1992: 488).

In Damian Grant’s words, Rushdie’s fiction calls into question the “value-free world of contemporary culture” wherever it may be found (1999: 87), and he presents capitalist marketing as what demonises divinity. The values of consumer culture become more important than the values of religion and nationality. While Grant reads the text as the representative of the value-free world, this study reads the novel in terms of its representation of greedy commodification of values, which, in a very

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similar manner to that of Grant, eventually leads to a world devoid of nonmonetary values. Rushdie recycles images, deconstructs religion and turns it into a commodity for the culture of television. He not only parodies religious myths through commodification, but also satirises the consumer culture that interferes with everything. The interference of consumer culture provides capitalism, in Lyotard’s terms, with “the power to derealise familiar objects, social rules, and institutions to such a degree” that reality can only be realised as nostalgia or mockery (1984: 74). If religion is an institution, then it is derealised by capitalism in Rushdie’s text. The holy pilgrimage is derealised to a degree of mockery, since it is a contemporary attempt that cannot avoid the bombardment of brand-names and advertisements. When power is possessed by capital, to quote Lyotard once again, contemporary culture becomes eclectic (76). Rushdie uses the eclecticism of contemporary culture in his representation of the religious and national values of the post-colonial migrants, who lose their identity not only after the post-colonial migration, but also through the commodification of their values. To conclude briefly, the multicultural condition as the outcome of postcolonial migrations in the second half of the twentieth century has been subjected to reification. This reification, however, has functioned in various ways. The first type of reification is the commodification of cultural values and objects like traditional types of food and icons of religious beliefs, which were regarded as the means of survival for the immigrants. The second type of reification has emerged as cultural fetishism in which the post-colonial immigrant adapts himself to the local culture by using western cultural icons and symbols to appear more western and to conceal his authentic origin. The third type, on the other hand, mostly occurs in the form of the intrusion of western brand names in the colony, in which case the colonial local culture is dominated by western products. The common feature in all three types is the objectification of culture which leads to uniformity. The more the cultures are reified the more they become alike since reification strips them of their spiritual and traditional meaning and content. Last but not the least; multiculturalism is juxtaposed with the cultural uniformity introduced by global capitalism, which leads all cultures to sameness. No matter that London, as the imperial centre, is populated with immigrants from the former colonies in all parts of the world: the objectification and commodification of their cultures into exchange value conceal the multicultural scenery of London and turn it into a cultural

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uniformity. Thus, it is no longer the differences that count but uniformity which dominates the new internationalism.

Works cited Ahmed, Akbar S. 1992. Postmodernism and Islam. London & New York: Routledge. Ball, John Clement. 1996. “The Semi-Detached Metropolis: Hanif Kureishi’s London,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 27. 4 (October): 7-27. Bewes, Timothy. 2002. Reification or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Cundy, Catherine. 1996. Salman Rushdie. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press. Dirlik, Arif. 1994. “The Postcolonial Aura: third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry, 20 (Winter): 328-356. Finney, Brian. 1998. “Demonising Discourse in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 29.3 (July): 67-93. Grant, Damian. 1999. Salman Rushdie. Plymouth: Northcote House. Jameson, Fredric. 1992. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London & New York: Verso. Kureishi, Hanif. 1990. The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber. _____. 1995. The Black Album. London: Faber and Faber. _____. 2001. Gabriel’s Gift. London: Faber and Faber. _____. 2008. Something to Tell You. London: Faber and Faber. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Malak, Amin. 1989. “Reading the Crisis: The Polemics of Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’”, ARIEL: A Review of the International English Literature, 20.4 (October): 176-186. McRobbie, Angela. 2008. “Second-Hand Dresses and the Robe of the Ragmarket.” In Rayford Guins and Omarya Zaragoza Cruz (eds.), Popular Culture: A Reader. London: Sage Publications, 372-382. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. 2001. Hanif Kureishi: Contemporary World Writers. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rushdie, Salman. 1992. The Satanic Verses. Dover: The Consortium. _____. 1996. “Interview: Salman Rushdie talks to the London Consortium about The Satanic Verses’”, Critical Quarterly, 38.2, (Summer): 51-70.

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Salih, Sara. 2004. “Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical Resignification,” in Sara Salih and Judith Butler (eds.), The Judith Butler Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 325-356. Sandhu, Sukhdev. 2000. “Pop Goes the Centre.” In Laura Chrisman and Benita Parry (eds.), “Postcolonial Theory and Criticism,” Essays & Studies 1999. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 133-154.

CHAPTER NINE Commodification against Indianness: The Symbolism of Things in R. K. Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi Ludmila Volná Indian writing in English abounds in representations of things and objects. A significant example occurs in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) where the protagonist Saleem is accompanied throughout the novel by a silver spittoon, an ancestral object that performs as a significant identity marker even as Saleem himself undergoes a substantial change in personality. Another instance that can be mentioned here is a tea package and a shawl found in Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting (1999) to symbolise patriarchal hierarchy meant to accompany the protagonist on his spiritual journey, but which he in the end refuses to carry with him. Indian authors writing in English often use objects as symbols or emblems of notions and thought lines they want to emphasise. Apart from that the incompatibility of Indian traditional values with the invasive capitalist economy is an important theme for them too. R. K. Narayan, a south-Indian writer who started to publish in the mid1930s, is widely acclaimed throughout India for his capacity to depict what is called Indianness: the Indian perception of reality, the Indian psyche and character. His fiction, both novels and short stories—written between 1935 and early 1990s—is typically situated in an imaginary town called Malgudi. The town is portrayed in such a way that it can be read as a case of materialisation of India, which becomes thus objectified. The inhabitants of Malgudi are as varied as the people of India itself, and they have to deal over many decades with the impact of colonisation, as Indians themselves have done. Malgudi represents what Meenakshi has called “the quintessential Indianness” such that the town has “a metonymic relation with India as a whole” (Mukherjee 2002: 170-174). This chapter is a case study of R. K. Narayan's The Man-Eater of Malgudi which focuses on the cultural treatment of materiality. What will

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be analysed are the ways in which objects are positioned in relation to the main characters and defined, what purpose this positioning serves, and how these relationships develop throughout the novel. A historico-cultural perspective will be applied for the analysis of the manner in which the Indian traditional values and those who stand by them are treated in the novel when confronted by the foreign, its representatives, their codes of behaviour and moral standards. The ways in which the town’s inhabitants react to the impact of colonisation and cope with the consequent changes embody the metaphorical passage of India itself through times of overwhelming “newness” and its many outcomes. Narayan’s characters encounter varying external forces that they experience as an attack on their environment and as a challenge to the coherence of their cultural identity, which is the Malgudi identity. Again, this can be read as a challenge to India itself, to its cultural traditions and values, and to the collective spiritual unconscious that shapes identity. Narayan’s earlier novels were written in the period of the British Raj: the first, Swami and Friends, was published in 1935, and three more appeared before independence. In them, material objects and things perform as symbolic representations that relate to, or represent, the forces accompanying colonisation. Objects convey the emerging contradictions between the traditional and the new. Natural and man-made objects perform this purpose, so that water acts as a symbol of personality transformation, whilst the statue of Sir Frederick Lawley divides the liberated sphere of Malgudi from the part that is still colonised.

Setting: the harmonium as an identitary symbol The Man-Eater of Malgudi, a novel published in 1961, offers two sets of circumstances in which objects play a major role in conveying a message. The first may be designated as an initial setting from which what follows departs. Nataraj, the protagonist, narrates the history of his family, and first establishes a sense of home as a family home: “I was content to live in our house as it had been left by my father [...] when the legal division of ancestral property occurred between my father and his brothers. I well remember the day when his four brothers marched out with their wives and children, trundling away their share of heirlooms” (Narayan 1983: 10). However, even though each of the five male sons receives his part of the heritage, a quarrel occurs over those things that cannot be divided into five parts. One of these, claimed by two of the

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brothers, is an ancient harmonium, acquired by the grandfather and consequently a family object par excellence. The grandfather however “died before he could sell and realise its value, and his successors took the presence of the harmonium in the corner of the hall for granted until this moment of partition” (1983: 11; emphases added). India, understood by analogy as Nataraj’s original family, has faced here a moment of partition, indeed the tragedy of Partition, each of the two—India and the family—having at first been an established community out of which a quarrel, a conflict, arose. While Partition is understood as a conflictual division of India into India and Pakistan, and later also Bangladesh, the family quarrel can at the same time be read as a division within an “actual” India with its religious, political, ethnic, social and other clashes. The harmonium is an object that can be read as a symbol of prePartition India, one which points still to the idea of a harmonious and united co-existence between the different ethnic, cultural, and religious entities; it performs as a symbol of identity, as a guarantee of identitary stability in which Mother India is represented by the grandmother: “It was my father’s old mother who had kept them together, acting as a cohesive element among members of the family. [...] When my grandmother died the unity of the family was also gone” (Narayan 11). Nataraj’s uncles do not care for the harmonium as an object of use, or for the realisation of a musical talent; for while nobody has noticed its presence in the house hitherto, at the moment of “partition” they begin to appreciate its material value. By contrast, the grandfather was not interested in selling the harmonium and thereby treating it as commodity. He had, indeed, acquired the object as a way of giving financial help to people in need. Nataraj reveals that his own position is quite similar to that of his grandfather in the very first words of his narration: I could have profitably rented out the little room in front of my press on Market Road, with a view of the fountain; it was coveted by every wouldbe shopkeeper in our town. I was considered a fool for not getting my money’s worth out of it, since all the space I need for my press and its personnel was at the back, beyond the blue curtain. But I could not explain myself to sordid and calculating people. (7)

Nataraj is the inheritor of ancestral Indian values, beliefs and behaviour, and these are structured, in the words of Sudhir Kakar, by “a cluster of ideas” at the heart of which “is a coherent, consistent world image in which the goal of human existence, the ways to reach this goal, the errors to be avoided, and the obstacles to be expected along the way

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are all dramatically conveyed” (Kakar 1981: 15). Nataraj was formed early by these values: “Mediated through persons responsible for the infant’s earlier care, cultural values are, from the beginning, an intimate and inextricable part of the ego” (Kakar 11. See also Hall 1994: 392-93). The set of Indian cultural values inherited from ancestors appears in the novel as what may be called Indianness, a notion explained by Mukherjee as “a good-humoured inertia and a casual tolerance which almost any reader [of Narayan] in the country is expected to recognise as familiar” (2002: 170-71). Besides recognising this pattern in the way in which Nataraj treats his clients, visitors and neighbours—that is with a light, accommodating and mild-hearted attitude that proves how little impressed he is by the accumulation of material profit or the passage of time—he shows great respect for both human and animal life, as do the other inhabitants of Malgudi. All this is firmly rooted in the Hindu concepts of reality, dharma and karma, and varying concepts of time. Tolerance, respect for human and animal life, and the specific perception of time have their roots in the cosmological image of the succession of worlds where the life-span of a human does not equal even a wink of God’s eye, as well as in the concept of the succession of birth and rebirth of a single creature (human in one birth, perhaps not so in another). Being good to other creatures is necessary for each individual’s goal in life to be fulfilled (according to the laws of karma and dharma), so that the next birth could assure a new incarnation closer to salvation as the Unity with the Divine Absolute (Volná 2006: 102). Even though artha, material gratification, is a part of the pleasure of life for a Hindu, a penchant for materiality which ensures decent living, health, security, and free and happy life, it is nevertheless governed by the laws of dharma and karma and as such prevents material enrichment from becoming the primary goal in life and fulfillment.

The blue curtain: conflict between traditional and capitalist values This brings us to the second set of circumstances in the novel in which objects play a significant role: the interaction between the culture of India and influences reaching it from outside. The latter are either looked upon favourably by Indians, or are perceived as inconvenient, disturbing, even hostile. The opening phrases already indicate a disproportion between what can be called, on the one hand, a modernity brought to India by the British colonisation, and on the other, a traditional way of perceiving

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things and the material as such. Nataraj, the Malgudi printer through whose voice the narrative is rendered, contemplates his satisfaction with a life devoid of attempts to work only for profit: “I did not do too badly [...] I could not explain myself to sordid and calculating people” (Narayan 1983: 7). This conflict is a significant incompatibility. Nataraj’s own uncles and some of his neighbours can no doubt be defined as “sordid and calculating people”, but this foreshadows only mildly what is to come. Nataraj’s printing press, and specifically the front parlour where it stands, may be recognised as a site of repose in the heart of Malgudi; here, everybody is welcome to sit, talk, contemplate and relax. It is where Nataraj and his closest companion, Sen the poet and journalist, can almost always be found. It is a kind of harbour where everything, from politics to the printing business, is discussed between the printer, the poet, and the journalist, all three intimately acquainted with the production of the word. In the parlour a Queen Anne chair stands amongst the traditional Indian furniture where it creates a hybridised setting that testifies to Nataraj being perfectly at ease within the equally hybridised Indian reality and with the mingling of Indian and European cultural values: his son is, as he was himself, a student of the Albert Mission School, which marks the incursion of European Protestantism into Indian culture. If Nataraj is at ease in this environment of cultural hybridity, with the Queen Anne chair as an object symbolising the foreign cultural input, this is far from being so, as will be shown, in the case of other incoming values. This is represented by a conflict between contradictory forces of the kind that is omnipresent in Narayan’s fiction and is taken to its extreme in The Man-Eater of Malgudi in the shape of the two antagonistic main characters, Nataraj and Vasu, the latter a person of an overwhelming appearance and behaviour who challenges the very foundations of what Nataraj and his neighbours's reality consists of. The interaction of conflicting forces is rendered as related to space. If Malgudi is a metonymic representation of India itself, then Nataraj’s press can be understood as a kind of intellectual-cultural location within an idea of India. The outer space, the parlour, has a counterpart: the inner room of the press where the actual printing is done, the heart of the press from which the printed material emerges. The parlour (which can be accessed from outside, from the street) and the press itself are adjacent spaces, separated by an object of the utmost significance: a blue curtain that is by far the most consequential object in the novel. No visitor is allowed behind this curtain and no one dares to enter: “No one tried to peer through [the curtain]” (8).

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As Nataraj remarks, the printing is done on the “the original Heidelberg” press (8). The word Heidelberg, and the object to which it is attached, is immediately striking in the Indian context because foreign to it, signifying Germany and, by extension, Europe. Its presence confirms Nataraj’s willingness to accept things coming from outside. It is an object that represents, in the same way the Queen Anne chair does, all that comes from outside and yet can easily be absorbed by Indian culture, found useful and, because useful, enriching. Original, the other concept in the syntagma “the original Heidelberg”, which seems at first overshadowed by the more powerful implications of the place name, nevertheless conveys much about the secluded space behind the curtain: placed first in the phrase, it points to a crucial facet of that part of the press, namely its originality, which is highly valued. Originality is to be seen as a cherished area of the heart, a firmly established ground of the traditional Indian perception of reality, a space to be protected and not disturbed by any unwelcome intruder. The blue curtain, as an object meant to protect the sanctity of this inner space, itself acquires the status of a sacred thing. Furthermore, the emphasis on originality highlights the purpose for which the object (the press) is kept: printing, and the spreading of information, the source of the materiality of the word. The originality of the Heidelberg coincides with the most distinctive member of Nataraj’s staff who does the printing: Sastri, who belongs to the space behind the blue curtain, is described as “an orthodox-minded Sanskrit semi-scholar” (72). Highly educated in the sacred Hindu texts, the basis and origin of the IndianHindu tradition, he is Nataraj’s advisor, teacher, a guru. Nobody in Nataraj’s entourage challenges the blue curtain and the space behind it until an unknown person “came forward, practically tearing aside the curtain, an act which violated the sacred traditions of my press” (15). The person responsible for this violent and outrageous entrée is Vasu, repellant to Nataraj because of his physical appearance, “a tanned face, large powerful eyes under thick eyebrows, a large forehead and a shock of unkempt hair, like a black halo. […] He gave me a hard grip. My entire hand disappeared into his fist—he was a huge man, about six feet tall […] his bull-neck and hammer-fist revealed his true stature” (15: emphasis added). Nataraj’s impression is of an overwhelming power that challenges the intimate and sacred world represented—and formerly protected by—the blue curtain. Nataraj and Vasu’s interaction becomes one between antagonistic value systems. Nataraj represents the values defined as Indianness, whilst Vasu, coming from beyond Malgudi, affronts them. Acting with a purpose, making a challenge and seeking material profit, which he calls a scientific

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approach, are the means by which Vasu makes himself recognised as he imposes his alleged superiority on all those he encounters in Malgudi. He imposes first upon Nataraj, and is ready to use his physical strength for the purpose. The excessive power of this man with a black halo shows itself when he violates both human and animal lives (he once killed his master, and is a hunter and taxidermist by profession) and goes as far as to plan to kill a sacred temple elephant for profit. Vasu transforms everything about him into an object, an object of knowledge and profit that is a commodity, so that his actions and behavior attack the very essence of Indian “cultural identity” (see Chrisman and Williams 1994: 7-9; Foucault 1970; Volná 2006: 101). Nataraj and Vasu become antagonistic forces representing two irreconcilable sets of values: Nataraj defends traditional values and his blue curtain, whilst Vasu brings capitalist values into this same culture, introducing an order based on economic power, “the world capitalist economy” (Giddens 1994: 184), a globalised system, indeed an order where market, commodification and consumerism dictate the rules by which societies function. Vasu’s immense thirst for profit at the cost of others shows in his unwillingness to compensate for the services provided to him. For example, he never pays either for the visiting cards Nataraj prints for him or for using Nataraj’s attic. In what perspective does Narayan view the development and outcome of the impact of capitalism? And how does this impact change, if it does at all, the significance of the objects discussed? If what happens in The ManEater of Malgudi can, in Anthony Giddens’s words, be understood as a “[l]ocal transformation,” [which] is as much a part of globalisation as the lateral extension of social connections across time and space” (181), Narayan allows Nataraj, his narrator, to adopt a position firmly rooted in his own culture. Not surprisingly, Nataraj’s standpoint coincides with how the position of the objects in question can be perceived at the end of the story. After a lengthy and profoundly antagonistic interaction between Nataraj’s and Vasu’s respective value systems, the situation cannot remain unchanged. The significance of the principal object of the story, the blue curtain, is redefined, as is Nataraj’s own perception of reality. In the end Vasu dies after accidentally hitting himself on the forehead while aiming at killing the sacred temple elephant, whereas Nataraj states with a certain nostalgia that “[t]he sanctity of the blue curtain was destroyed, gone forever” (Narayan 161). Nevertheless, Nataraj’s perception has evolved in accordance with a significant trait of the Hindu system: its profound doctrinal tolerance where the variety and variability of its different streams, visions and concepts have always permitted the absorption of

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those foreign influences it repeatedly encounters, influences which become part of its corpus. If Nataraj then gains an understanding, thanks to Sastri’s guidance, of Vasu as a demoniac creature bringing harm to the living but nevertheless destined to also bring destruction upon himself, then he also comes to advocate a “scientific” approach, which was Vasu’s self-proclaimed belief. In doing so he becomes more assertive of the need for a financial reward for his work (Narayan 155, 170. See also Volná 103). Even though “the sanctity of the blue curtain is destroyed, gone forever”, the blue curtain itself remains there to protect the redefined space of tradition where Sastri, the Hindu scholar, resides and works, the tradition of values which Nataraj, theoretically Sastri’s boss, continues to embrace: “Yes, Sastri, I am at your service” (Narayan 174). As to the harmonium, no further explicit information is furnished and even though it has certainly been, as an object of use, partially compromised by certain members of Nataraj’s family at its partition, it can still be considered a piece of furniture in Nataraj’s house that stands for the ancestral unity of tradition. The Queen Anne chair and the Indian furniture still peacefully coexist in Nataraj’s parlour and in the company of his friends and neighbours, especially the poet and the journalist. The original Heidelberg does not acquire any material value either; and the printing press continues to serve its purpose of spreading the word.

Conclusion The Man-Eater of Malgudi can be read as a metaphor of colonial impact on India, more precisely of an interaction between the colonised and the coloniser. In order to depict the character of the colonial enterprise as perceived by the colonised, Narayan starts by using the symbolism of objects to create a peaceful setting, an environment where traditional objects are found in harmony with the imported ones. The emphasis is on tradition as represented by a harmonium, a family object inherited from ancestors. It is the character of power-based relations which interests Narayan and which he presents as an interaction of conflicting forces embodied in the characters of Nataraj and Vasu, who represent, respectively, the traditional values presented as life-preserving, and a challenging and ruthless materiality coming from outside. In the end the relations are inevitably redefined and altered; nevertheless the foundations of the tradition remain unshattered: the harmonium is still in Nataraj's

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possession and the blue curtain, even though not looked upon as sacred as such any longer, still guards the interior space of Indian sacred learning.

Works cited Chrisman, Laura and Patrick Williams. 1994. “Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: An Introduction,” in Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock. Giddens, Anthony. 1994. “From The Consequences of Modernity,” in Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1994. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Kakar, Sudhir. 1996. “The Inner World” in Sudhir Kakar, The Indian Psyche. Delhi/Bombay/Calcutta/Madras: Oxford University Press. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. 2002. “The Anxiety of Indianness,” in Mukherjee, Meenakshi, The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Narayan, R. K. 1983. The Man-Eater of Malgudi. London: Penguin. Volná, Ludmila. 2006. “R. K. Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi and Indian Modernity: Value crisis in the Perspective of Indian Tradition,” in University of Bucharest Review: A Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, 8.3: 98-103.

PART V SUBJECT OBJECTIFICATION

CHAPTER TEN Challenging the Commodification of Victorian Femininity: The Sensation Novel Elisabetta Marino Engaged in a dialectical relationship with one another, material culture and identity—both individual and collective—are so intimately entwined that, in the words of Christopher Tilley, “without the things […] we could neither be ourselves nor know ourselves” (2006: 61). Even though this statement may be successfully applied to any age of history, it perfectly exemplifies the close association between the world of objects and English society in the period ranging from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century. As Asa Briggs has elucidated, Victorian life was securely scaffolded on the acquisition, the collection, the display, and the consumption of commodities (1988: 14), increasingly available due to the newly developed means of production coupled with territorial expansion in Asia and Africa, triggering a westward flow of valuable goods. Objects held such a pivotal position among the higher ranks of the population that, to quote Briggs, “the things possessed [the wealthy people] rather than they the things” (12). A similar assumption was also voiced by Karl Marx, who gathered most of the materials for his Das Kapital (first volume published in 1867) in Victorian England, pondering on the consequences of capital accumulation, namely (among others) a “mania for possessions” and alarming forms of “fetishism” (Briggs 15). Even the lower classes, eager to climb the social ladder, attached progressively greater importance to commodities: they were viewed as markers of a class distinction that, disturbingly enough, could be easily feigned given the affordable costs of factory products. Hence, starting from the 1850s, telling the classes apart by simply judging from the appearance of garments and accessories was becoming rather difficult and quite problematic (Clayson 2013: 133): consumerism was subtly undermining the hierarchical system of social stratification. In his seminal volume entitled The Social Life of Things (1986), Arjun Appadurai establishes the difference between “physical objects”,

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belonging to the realm of commodities, and people, “who represent the natural universe of individuation and singularisation” (64). Nonetheless, as the scholar has highlighted, over the centuries slavery (in all its countless facets, from actual captivity to legalised subjugation through the institution of marriage) has often turned human beings into property endowed with an exchange value and liable to be sold, purchased, traded, or given. Regarded as the most precious ornaments of the domestic sphere (whose boundaries they were not supposed to cross), Victorian women began to be inextricably linked with the luxurious objects they were surrounded by in their home environment, such as their jewels, rich furniture, perfumes, elaborate tapestry, sophisticated dresses, and fashionable bonnets. Their very identity as ladies, their social status and intrinsic moral depth were connected to and paralleled with the quality and the quantity of the costly goods that could be showcased in their mansions. Their fascinating, delicate, and slender bodies,1 unfit for any physical exertion or practical activity, doomed them to indolence and submissiveness. As sociologist and economist Thorstein Vablen emphasised in his 1899 treatise on the leisure class, wives and daughters were meant to be “supported in idleness by [their] owner” (99); degraded to the rank of material possessions, “[they were] useless and expensive, and [they were] consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary strength” (99-100). After exploring the impact of material culture on the fabrication of the controversial feminine ideal in Victorian times, this chapter will focus on the way the popular genre of sensation fiction compellingly challenged and exposed the limits as well as the dangers and contradictions of this social construction by featuring villainesses whose seeming perfection and adherence to the highest Victorian standards artfully concealed their wicked nature and ambition, thus posing a serious threat to communal stability. The main female character in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (one of the most representative authors of sensation novels) will be the subject of a thorough investigation. As will be shown, the histrionic protagonist of the narrative deceitfully managed to transform the sacred domestic hearth into a stage; moreover, far from accepting the role of a mere commodity, she actively used the very objects she was assimilated to in order to reinvent her identity.

1

For a thorough study of the relationship between extreme slenderness and Victorian womanhood, see Krugovoy Silver (2000).

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The fabrication of the Victorian feminine ideal Contradiction lies at the heart of the Victorian feminine ideal, thus exposing the cracks on its seemingly perfect surface. If, on the one hand, women’s vocation was biologically determined and rooted in their bodies (owing to the centrality of their reproductive functions), on the other hand ladies were consistently portrayed as asexual, almost disembodied, figures, whose lack of any sensual drive, together with their willingness to submit to their husbands’ emotional and physical needs, turned them into angellike creatures (Pykett 1992: 14). The words of Scottish physiologist and aesthetician Alexander Walker, aimed at legitimating as natural the asymmetrical relationship between men and women in Victorian times, may contribute to casting light on the ongoing process of indoctrination leading to the construction of the feminine icon: “the man naturally governs; the woman as naturally obeys. The qualities of sensibility, feebleness, flexibility and affection enable woman to accommodate herself to the taste of man, and to yield without constraint, even to the caprice of the moment” (1840: 129-130). To be successful in the marriage market and to achieve the longed-for status of wife, Victorian girls had to trade their bodies in return for financial support and a comfortable living. Not unlike prostitutes, therefore, they strived to look appealing by complying with the enslaving demands of fashion which, as well as stifling individual expression, created mass-produced models. Corsets made with whalebones compressed women’s waists to an unimaginably tiny size; turned into elegant—albeit anonymous—hourglasses, ladies wore hoops and crinolines, “the first great triumph of the machine age […] the application to feminine costume of all those principles of steel construction employed in the Menai Bridge and the Crystal palace”, as James Laver remarked (Briggs 1988: 26), highlighting the artificiality of women’s self-creation in their boudoir. Conduct books taught young girls how to behave with grace and propriety which, as Sarah Stickney Ellis, the author of a best-selling series on the women, daughters, wives and mothers of England pointed out, often implied sacrifice, since the “highest duty” of a woman—who, incidentally, “has nothing and is nothing, of herself”—“is so often to suffer, and be still” (1843: 73).2 Other widespread publications dealt with 2

Her other widely renowned works included The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (1839), The Wives of England: Their Relative Duties, Domestic Influence, and Social Obligations (1843), and The Mothers of England: Their Influence and Responsibility (1843).

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female beauty and its inextricable connection with ethics and morals since, to quote Robyn Cooper, “the good and the beautiful [were regarded as] one and the same” (1993: 50).3 A dignified, attractive lady was unfailingly endowed with a rosy complexion, perfectly coiffed fair hair, and childlike blue eyes. Paradoxically enough, however, these volumes provided practical advice on how to hide and repair the defects of nature by means of artifice, thus alarmingly implying (without the readers’ fully realising it) that even modesty and integrity could be strategically affected given the existing relation between physical appearance and moral interiority.4 Apart from sensation novels, literature forcefully contributed to consolidating the ideals of the meek and dutiful wife, the innocent and compliant daughter, and the selfless, affectionate mother, apparently overlooking the unquestionable ambiguities of the Victorian manufactured femininity. In his 1864 lecture entitled “Lilies. Of Queen’s Garden”, John Ruskin offered a clear-cut definition of the “separate [albeit complementary] characters” (1865: 90) of gentlemen and ladies in nineteenth-century British society. While the mind of a man was designed “for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest” (90), a true woman had to be “enduringly, incorruptively good; instinctively, infallibly wise—wise not for self-development, but for self renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but she may never fail from his side” (92). Banned from the outer world and the public sphere, her only province was the domestic environment, her gilded cage filled with commodities, “the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division” (91). The consecrated Vestal of the “temple of the hearth” (91) envisioned by Ruskin strongly resembled the ethereal heroine of Coventry Patmore’s “The Angel in the House” (first published in 1854), a narrative poem which was received enthusiastically by critics and readers alike. Inspired by the flawless virtues of his wife Emily, Patmore’s literary creation epitomised the Victorian icon of womanhood: aware that “Man must be pleased, but him to please / Is woman’s pleasure” (1863: 109), she was “pure dignity, composure, ease” (20).

3 Alexander Walker wrote, for example, Beauty: Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Woman (1836); his wife, Mrs Alexander Walker, wrote Female Beauty as Preserved and Improved by Regimen, Cleanliness and Dress (1837); while their son Donald wrote Exercises for Ladies Calculated to Preserve and Improve Beauty (1836). 4 Cosmetics were not allowed as a tool to improve one’s looks, since their use was viewed as a fraud (Cooper 1993: 48).

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Conversely, the female offender deviated from the paradigm of feminine perfection outlined above by adopting the male prerogatives of action, domination, mobility, and ambition. Moreover, since she often acted as a life-taker, she rejected her natural role of life-giver and nurturer, thus trespassing the boundaries of her sex that were sanctioned by social conventions. Hence, drawing on Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Victorian criminologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and physicians strived to establish that the perverted and unnatural character of those abnormal women stemmed from “racial degeneration” (Pal-Lapinski 2003: 111). In fact, according to the studies of Cesare Lombroso (professor of hygiene and forensic medicine at the university of Turin), women were naturally inclined to inertia and, therefore, less prone to murderous and unlawful acts. Nonetheless, in his influential 1893 treatise entitled La donna delinquente (The female offender), Lombroso argued that an immoral and violent disposition was a hereditary taint which, reassuringly enough, could be immediately detected by observing anomalous bodily and facial features, such as a flat and deformed nose, a diastema of the teeth or strabismus (Lombroso and Ferrero 1895: 86). Furthermore, female offenders were positively unfeminine and, for that reason, they displayed essentially masculine attributes (among them, physical strength and mental agility), as well as behaving like animals or primitive creatures (in literature, the monstrous and grotesque figure of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre is a notorious example). This meticulous and detailed portrayal of the female delinquent provided an obvious, negative counterpart of the Victorian feminine icon, thus indirectly consolidating its standardised features besides contributing to its fabrication.

Unsettling the ideal of the domestic angel: the Sensation Novel The three elements that have been discussed so far in this essay, namely, the importance attached to commodities in Victorian times, the significance of women’s bodies, and the construction of an idealised femininity, are somehow all problematically connected to the new literary genre of the sensation novel, which attained enormous popularity in the 1860s.5 “Ephemeral, formulaic, [and] mass-produced” (Pykett 1992: 8), 5

As Andrew Maunder has underlined, this genre probably stemmed from sensation drama, and incorporated typical features of melodrama, gothic literature, and “Newgate” tales of crime and villainy (2005: 5).

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these mass-consumed narratives interpreted the tastes of the broadening reading public and appealed to all social classes. The term “sensation” is undoubtedly linked with bodily pleasure and excitement rather than emotional or intellectual enjoyment. In his 1863 article, Henry Mansel actually inferred that the very purpose of sensation novels was “electrifying the nerves of the reader” (in Maunder 2005: 5); a similar opinion was shared by the reviewer in The Christian Remembrancer, who deemed these writings “extravagant and unnatural”, capable of “drugging thought and reason, and stimulating the attention through the lower and more animal instincts, rather than by a lively and quickened imagination” (Anonymous 1863: 210). Sensation novels stirred controversy: they were considered particularly disturbing since they placed the most atrocious crimes (murder, bigamy, forgery, adultery, arson and property destruction) in the seemingly untouchable and sacred haven of the upper-class domestic sphere. Furthermore, unlike gothic fiction—traditionally set in faraway countries, in remote periods of history—they featured realistic and contemporary settings, dangerously close to the readers’ experience (Zipfinger 2010: 43). In addition to that, the conventional lady in distress, often persecuted by a dark and treacherous villain, was replaced by a cherub-like figure who was the unexpected executor of the most atrocious and savage acts of felony. Far from resembling the unmistakably abnormal female offender sketched out by Lombroso, the main protagonist of sensation novels looked harmless, amiable, and charming: her moral character was disquietingly dissociated from her physical appearance (Talairach-Vielmas 2007: 154), thus insinuating that the countless qualities of the domestic angel, mirrored in her immaculate façade, were often nothing but counterfeit products, the mere result of a skilful marketing operation. As Lyn Pykett has underlined, sensation novels were regarded as a literary “form which was not only deviant, but also threatening and dangerous” (1992: 34) especially for women, who were thought to be more susceptible to and easily affected by the negative influence of gruesome and subversive plots (Maunder 15) due to their “delicate nervous system” (Allen 2011: 408). In actual fact, by granting sympathy to the villainesses (Tatum 2007: 506), ladies (the most avid consumers of these novels) could blamelessly indulge in acts of “vicarious violence” (Ritchie 2006: 1) and rebellion, while escaping—albeit only in their imagination—from the stifling domestic environment they were confined to. What is more, sensation novels offered a safe outlet for those sexual fantasies and undisclosed desires which would, otherwise, have remained

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concealed and unexpressed (Zipfinger 47) since they were not consistent with the male-fabricated Victorian ideal of womanhood.6 Consequently, providing “addictive excitement” (Garrison 2011: 37), the authors of this genre were often held responsible for poisoning innocent minds and accused of inspiring rather than discouraging extravagant passions and transgressions (Schipper 2002: 25). Professional women writers (already guilty of trespassing the boundaries of gender roles by invading the realm of literature) were viewed with even greater anxiety. Margaret Oliphant, who penned conventional domestic novels of manners, expressed her harsh criticism towards the disgraceful creators and the readers of these anti-conduct books in the following words, in which she emphasised the threat sensation fiction posed to the stability and the welfare of society: It is a shame to women so to write; and it is a shame to the women who read and accept as a true representation of themselves and their ways the equivocal talk and fleshy inclinations herein attributed to them […] A woman has one duty of invaluable importance to her country and her race which cannot be overestimated—and that is the duty of being pure. There is perhaps nothing as such vital consequences to a nation […] there can be no possible doubt that the wickedness of man is less ruinous, less disastrous to the world in general, than the wickedness of woman. That is the climax of all misfortunes to the race. (In David Bernstein 1994: 234)

Lady Audley’s Secret Among the specialists in sensation novels, Mary Elizabeth Braddon is perhaps the most outstanding and skilled representative.7 Meanwhile, her own reputation was not above suspicion.8 Unsurprisingly, her narratives— 6

In Emily Allen’s opinion the popularity of sensation novels and their appeal to women were somehow connected to the “Matrimonial Causes Act” (1857), known also as the “Divorce Act”, a liberating decree which granted wives the possibility of filing for divorce, if they were mistreated or deserted by their husbands (2011: 404). 7 The anonymous reviewer of The Spectator described her achievement as follows: “if the first object of the novelist be to excite a morbid curiosity, if blood and poisoning and intrigue, the most hateful passions, the vilest actions, form the best ingredients of fiction, then it must be owned that no one has mixed them together more skilfully than Miss Braddon” (quoted in Helfield 1995: 174). 8 Braddon’s mother separated from her husband, a “disreputable solicitor” (Pykett 2011: 123), when her daughter was four, because he was unfaithful to her. In order

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dealing with “revolting topics” and dismissed as “one of the abominations of the age” (Fraser Rae 1865: 104)—were accused of lowering the cultural standards of the nation, by “making the literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing-room” (105). Nevertheless, Lady Audley’s Secret (her real masterpiece) achieved such popularity that it went through eight editions in only three months after its publication in 1862 (Lee 2011: 136). The novel tells the story of a charming, twenty-year-old governess, Lucy Graham, who temporarily succeeds in raising herself to the rank of a lady by marrying Lord Audley, a distinguished, elderly man. Lucy’s real name is Helen and she has already tied the knot with George Talboys, a dragoon who had been disowned and disinherited by his father for marrying below his station. A few months after the birth of their child, George had unexpectedly deserted his wife in order to look for better prospects in Australia. Three years later, he had returned a rich man, only to find out that his spouse had passed away in rather mysterious circumstances. In truth, Helen was still alive: weary of dragging herself through a miserable existence, she had abandoned her son and changed her identity to Lucy, thus beginning a fresh life. The plot unfolds by following the strenuous efforts on the part of Robert Audley (Lord Audley’s nephew as well as George Talboy’s best friend) to prove that Lucy Graham/Lady Audley is actually Helen Talboys and therefore a vile impostor and a bigamist. After attempting to murder her first husband and setting fire to the inn where Robert is lodged, maddened Lucy is eventually unmasked and confined in a mental asylum in Belgium, where she dies quietly a year later. A former governess—a problematic figure in herself, given her liminal status between the public and the domestic spheres (Wetzel 1994: 80)— Lucy Graham is presented as an actress playing the part of the quintessential Victorian icon, even if she is actually a “female Mephistopheles”, to quote Margaret Oliphant’s derogatory remark (Tomaiuolo 2010: 8). Endowed with a delicate, almost “fragile figure” (Braddon 2007: 43), she always appears “light-hearted, happy, and contented under any circumstances” (7). In one of the first lengthy descriptions of her, her childishness (a synonym for innocence) is strongly emphasised, as well as her seemingly untainted beauty, which turns her to support her family, Mary Elizabeth decided to pursue an acting career, under the fake name of Mary Seyton. In 1859 she abandoned the stage to devote herself to writing. In 1860 she began a liaison with a publisher, John Maxwell, whose wife was mentally insane. Before eventually getting married in 1874, they had already had six children together (Ritchie 2006: 72).

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into an object worthy of admiration, a commodity whose main features are listed like items in an inventory: [Her] very childishness had a charm which few could resist. The innocence and candour of an infant beamed in Lady Audley’s fair face, and shone out of her large and liquid blue eyes. The rosy lips, the delicate nose, the profusion of fair ringlets, all contributed to preserve to her beauty the character of extreme youth and freshness. (43)

Lucy looks so pure that she “might have served as a model for a mediaeval saint” (171) while, other times, she is compared to “a Madonna in an Italian Picture (207), whose “wonderful curls […] soft and feathery, always floa[t] away from her face, and mak[e] a pale halo round her head” (9). Like a proper lady, this “babyfied little creature” (111) is fond of her piano, but “she hate[s] reading, or study of any kind” (43). She enjoys being the main focus of people’s gaze and, once settled in Lord Audley’s lavish mansion, “surrounded by new and costly toys” (43), she establishes herself “as the belle of the country[, p]leased with her high position and her handsome house; with every caprice gratified, every whim indulged” (43). As Lyn Pykett suggests, “Lucy Graham is staged as spectacle” (1992: 89): it is not by chance, therefore, that her garments are often called “costume[s]” and that the “heavy velvets and stiff rustling silks” she is constantly dressed in (clearly clashing against her simple and candid appearance) make her look “like a child tricked out for a masquerade” (Braddon 43). Nevertheless, her artificial and fraudulent (self-)fabrication of ideal womanhood, together with Braddon’s bitter sarcasm towards the marriage market in Victorian times, are clearly visible in the very first pages of the novel, even before Lucy’s secret is revealed. Distastefully enough, Lord Audley’s marriage with his first wife is described as nothing but “a dull, jog-trot bargain, made to keep some estate in the family” (8). Moreover, the aging patriarch’s blunt and unromantic marriage proposal to Lucy is openly defined as a convenient deal for both parties, as “a bargain” that—as she quite honestly states—the attractive girl accepts on the grounds of the financial security and all the advantages she could benefit from: “From my very babyhood I have never seen anything but poverty. […] Do not ask too much of me, then. I cannot be disinterested; I cannot be blind to the advantages of such an alliance. I cannot. I cannot!” […] “Lucy, Lucy, speak plainly. Do you dislike me?” “Dislike you! No, no!” “But is there anyone else whom you love?”

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She laughed aloud at his question. “I do not love anyone in the world”, she answered. […] “Well, Lucy, I will not ask too much of you. I dare say I am a romantic old fool; but if you do not dislike me, and if you do not love anyone else, I see no reason why we should not make a very happy couple. Is it a bargain, Lucy? “Yes”. (11)

As already noted, youth and beauty were the only saleable goods many women possessed in order to secure the protection of an affluent spouse; hence, trapped as she is in this sordid form of “legalised prostitution” (Schipper 5), Lucy’s cynical behaviour seems to be partially justified by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Exploiting her charms, the villainess first of all buys her way into high society and accepts to be transformed into a highpriced ornament; then, she manages to use the very commodities that abound in her husband’s “Aladdin’s palace” (Braddon 234) to consolidate her newly acquired identity as a lady. Consequently, the author indulges in the depiction of all the pricey items her character flaunts in her willing self-display: her magnificent fur coats (86), “silks and velvets” (303), “satin cushions, and Sir Michael’s presents spread out in her lap”(43), “fragile teacups of turquoise china” (234), and “gilded mirrors, shimmering satin and diaphanous lace” (234). It is the lady’s dressing-room, however, that most plainly reveals the ambiguity and the dualism that, far from being simply expressed through Lucy’s devious actions, pervade the very core of Victorian society, namely, the domestic hearth. Like “the abandoned costumes of an actress” (Pykett 1992: 91), “two or three handsome dresses [lie] in a heap upon the ground, and the open doors of a wardrobe revea[l] the treasures within. Jewellery, ivory-backed hairbrushes, and exquisite china [are] scattered here and there in the apartment” (Braddon 56); yet, the excessive opulence of the place is disquieting and suffocating, and the atmosphere is unnatural and stifling “from the rich odours of perfumes in bottles whose gold stoppers ha[ve] not been replaced. A bunch of hothouse flowers [is] withering upon a tiny writing table” (56). The character of Lucy is assimilated to commodities to such an extent that her real personality, hidden behind a seemingly unblemished façade, is ironically revealed through an expensive object, a meaningfully unfinished portrait by a painter belonging to the “fleshly school” of artists, who significantly grasped what is commonly not “perceived by the eyes” (Buchanan 1871: 58):

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No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have so exaggerated every attribute of that delicate face as to give a lurid lightness to the blonde complexion, and a strange sinister light to the deep blue eyes. No one but a pre-Raphaelite could have given to that pretty pouting mouth the hard and almost wicked look it had in the portrait. It was so like and yet so unlike. […M]y lady, in his portrait of her, had something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend. Her crimson dress, exaggerated like all the rest in this strange picture, hung about her in folds that looked like flames, her fair head peeping out of the lurid mass of colour, as if out of a raging furnace. Indeed, the crimson dress, the sunshine on her face, the red gold gleaming in the yellow hair, the ripe scarlet of the pouting lips, the glowing colours of each accessory of the minutely-painted background, all combined to render the first effect of the painting by no means an agreeable one. (57-58)

As Sophia Andres has pointed out, Braddon probably chose a PreRaphaelite painter since she wished to challenge the conventional ways in which Victorian society was usually observed and represented, while exposing the contradictions of gender construction. The Pre-Raphaelites paid the same attention to the background and the foreground; they also disregarded the traditional law of light and shade that produced a hierarchical order capable of confirming the viewers’ “own preconceived notion of hierarchical social structures” (Andres 2011: 563). Works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti or William Holman Hunt, therefore, compelled spectators “to see hitherto overlooked details, further disturbing them by subverting their hierarchical modes of perception” (563). In addition to that, paintings such as Rossetti’s “Ecce Ancilla Domini!” (1849-50) mingled spirituality and sensuality, showing that the sacred and the profane paradoxically coexisted in the same person: nobody was immaculately pure, not even Our Lady. Holman Hunt’s “Awakening Conscience” (1853), on the other hand, powerfully revealed the “dark side of domesticity” (Clayson 2013: 136), since it featured the unrestrained sexuality of a fallen woman, portrayed against the background of a Victorian house. Braddon’s clever and sardonic criticism of the commodification of Victorian femininity is also evident in the fact that in Lady Audley’s Secret, as products of artifice mass-produced women are all alike and often interchangeable. Helen Talboys has no difficulty in finding a body that resembles her own in order to stage her fake death and burial. Furthermore, skilled in the use of cosmetics to enhance her beauty, Lucy can recommend some useful tricks to her maidservant Phoebe, who would actually resemble her mistress if she only had more colour in her face:

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alike?” “I have heard them say so too, my lady”. Said the girl quietly, “but they must be very stupid to say it, for your ladyship is a beauty, and I am a poor plain creature”. “Not at all, Phoebe”, said the little lady superbly, “you are like me, and your features are very nice; it is only colour that you want […] with a bottle of hair dye, such as we see advertised in the papers, and a pot of rouge, you’d be as good-looking as I any day, Phoebe.” (Braddon 47)

In passing we might note how the use of cosmetics is another element of material culture which can serve to blur social class distinctions. As Nancy Knowles and Katherine Hall have emphasised, the plot of Lady Audley’s Secret “has two structural moments, destabilising and stabilising” (2012: 46). Consequently, after undermining the figure of the “angel in the house” by mixing her ethereal bodily features with the fiendish moral attributes of the female offender, and after exposing the construction of Victorian womanhood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon apparently chose to reconcile her defiant perspective with more traditional assumptions, clearly prompted by marketing issues: she wished to please even the most conservative among her readers. Hence, Lady Audley’s criminal behaviour is often defined as “unnatural”: for example, when she plots her murderous plan against Robert Audley, the adjective is used seven times to describe her altered mood and distorted facial traits (Braddon 2007: 256-61). Moreover, Lucy is endowed with “unwomanly” strength, which she displays when she throws George Talboys into a well, hoping to rid herself of the burden of her first family (it should be noticed incidentally that, unlike any decent mother, she had already selfishly abandoned her child). Finally, the very explanation she eventually adduces for her abnormal conduct is the taint of the madness she had inherited from her mother, which makes her only partially liable for her actions.9 In Jan Davis Schipper’s opinion, ascribing mental derangement to women whose behaviour violated social norms and expectations was a powerful 9

Her physician, Dr. Mosgrave, is not fully persuaded by Lucy’s argument since, as he notices, all her actions were driven by greed and ambition: “she ran away from her home, because her home was not a pleasant one, and she left it in the hope of finding a better. There is no madness in that. She committed the crime of bigamy, because by that crime she obtained fortune and position. There is no madness there” (Braddon 299). The reader is left to wonder whether Lady Audley’s secret is her madness or, on the contrary, her mental sanity. In any case, apart from bigamy, Lucy is not technically guilty of any other crime, since both George Talboys and Robert Audley survive her murderous attempts.

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tool employed by the dominant gender to restore order and reassert male authority; reassuringly enough, insanity denied the possibility that the weaker sex could deliberately commit “crimes of passion, anger, and selfpreservation” (2002: 52). As a result, Lucy is obliged to play the last of her roles, the part of a lunatic—“a certain Madame Taylor” (Braddon 354), who is disposed of like a useless object. Prevented from undergoing a fair trial, treated once more like a possession (this time, awkward and unwanted), she is “surgically excised from the ‘clean and proper’ body of England”, in the words of Pamela Gilbert (1997: 95), and “buried alive” (Braddon 303) in a madhouse in Belgium. Her estrangement from the healthy British context is suggested by the language she is forced to use, for French suits her vicious and snake-like nature perfectly, as Braddon underlines: “the sibilant French syllables hiss through her teeth as she utters them, and seem better fitted to her mood and to herself than the familiar English she has spoken hitherto” (310). Addicted to commodities, desperately clinging to them in order to maintain her fabricated identity, Lucy tries to smuggle as many goods as possible from her apartment in the vain hope of recreating in her shabby place of confinement the splendid environment she had grown accustomed to: Her mercenary soul hankered greedily after the costly and beautiful things of which she had been mistress. She had hidden away fragile teacups and covered vases of Sèvres and Dresden among the folds of her silken dresses. She had secreted jewelled and golden drinking cups amongst her delicate linen. She would have taken the pictures from the walls, and the Gobelin tapestry from the chairs, had it been possible for her to do so. She had taken all she could. (Braddon 304)

Notwithstanding her efforts, the maison de santé looks like a cheap imitation as well as a monstrous mockery of Lord Audley’s elegant mansion. Once more, objects are ominously connected with social status and, in this case, with the protagonist’s unrecoverable fall from the social ladder. Just to quote a few instances, the floor is “paved with alternate diamonds of black and white marble, but of a dismal and cellar-like darkness; a saloon [is] furnished with gloomy velvet draperies, and with a certain funeral splendour which is not particularly conducive to the elevation of the spirits” (309); what Lucy believes are “costly mirrors” are “in reality wretched mockeries of burnished tin” (309); instead of being comfortably surrounded by precious furniture and expensive textiles, she is confronted by “the faded splendour of shabby velvet, and tarnished gilding, and polished wood” (309). At the end of the novel, Lucy

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“expire[s] peacefully” (354), dying of a maladie de langueurs (possibly anaemia). As the curtain falls on her tantalizing drama of violation, her final retreat from the stage is emblematically expressed through an object, her tell-tale picture, which is eventually hidden and covered: “a curtain hangs before the Pre-Raphaelite portrait” (354). Remarkably enough, the progressive unmasking of Lucy’s fraudulent identity triggers Robert Audley’s development into a reputable and dependable Victorian gentleman; even in this case, material culture is intimately linked with identity and its significant changes. At the beginning of the narrative “Bob” is an idle, feminised, un-English barrister, surrounded by foreign commodities: he reads French novels, and smokes Turkish tobacco in his German pipe. “Bob” “ha[s] never either had a brief, or tried to get a brief, or even wished to have a brief” (27). However, as the story proceeds and he takes responsibility for his family, he discovers inside himself all the positive male qualities listed by John Ruskin in the lecture cited earlier. In the end, therefore, the possessions he once cherished are discarded— “the meerschaums and the French novels have been presented to a young Templar, with whom Robert Audley had been friendly in his bachelor days” (355)—and Robert marries George Talboys’ sister Clara, a pure, simple, and indisputable “angel in the house”. The author concluded Lady Audley’s Secret with a moralising observation aimed at soothing the most unkind of her detractors, as well as the most inflexible of her readers: “I hope no one will take objection to my story because the end of it leaves the good people all happy and at peace” (Braddon 2007: 355). Despite such an exhibition of affected propriety and notwithstanding the gloomy fate she reserved for her main female character, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the queen of sensation fiction, undeniably succeeded in exposing the mechanisms and the limits of gender construction, in questioning the fabrication of Victorian womanhood, and therefore in unsettling the pivotal assumptions of patriarchal power.

Works cited Allen, Emily. 2011. “Gender and Sensation.” In A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Pamela K. Gilbert (ed.). Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 401-13.

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Andres, Sophia. 2011. “The Pre-Raphaelite Realism of the Sensation Novel.” A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Pamela K. Gilbert (ed.). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 559-76. Anonymous. 1863. “Our Female Sensation Novelists.” The Christian Remembrancer, vol. 46 (July): 209-36. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. 2007. Lady Audley’s Secret. Ware: Wordsworth Classics. Briggs, Asa. 1988. Victorian Things. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd. Brontë, Charlotte. 1850. Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. New York: Harper and Brothers. Buchanan, Robert [Thomas Maitland]. 1871. “The Fleshly School of Poetry. Mr. D. G. Rossetti”, Contemporary Review, Vol. 18 (October: 334-50. Clayson, Sara. 2013. “Shopping to Survive: Consumerism and Evolution in M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret,” in Jonathon Shears and Jen Harrison (eds.). Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians. From Commodities to Oddities. Aldershot: Ashgate, 129-45. Cooper, Robyn. 1993. “Victorian Discourses on Women and Beauty: The Alexander Walker Texts.” Gender and History 5.1: 34-55. David Bernstein, Susan. 1994. “Dirty Reading: Sensation Fiction, Women, and Primitivism.” Criticism, 36.2: 213-41. Fraser Rae, W. 1865. “Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon.” The North British Review, XLII: 92-105. Garrison, Laurie. 2011. Science, Sexuality, and Sensation Novels. Pleasures of the Senses. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Gilbert, Pamela K. (ed.). 1997. Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, Kimberly. 2011. “‘Come Buy, Come, Buy’: Sensation Fiction in the Context of Consumer and Commodity Culture,” in Pamela K. Gilbert (ed.). A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 528-39. Helfield, Randa. 1995. “Poisonous Plots: Women Sensation Novelists and Murdresses of the Victorian Period.” Victorian Review, 21.2 (Winter): 161-88. Knowles, Nancy and Katherine Hall. 2012. “Imperial Attitudes in Lady Audley’s Secret,” in Jessica Cox (ed.). New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 37-58. Krugovoy Silver, Anna. 2000. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lee, Louise. 2011. “Lady Audley’s Secret. How Does She Do It? Sensation Fiction’s Technologically Minded Villainesses,” in Pamela K. Gilbert (ed.). A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 134-46. Lombroso, Cesare, and Guglielmo Ferrero. 1895. The Female Offender. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Maunder, Andrew. 2005. “Mapping the Victorian Sensation Novel: Some Recent and Future Trends.” Literature Compass, 2.VI: 1-33. Pal-Lapinski, Piya. 2003. “Chemical Seductions. Exoticisn, Toxicology, and the Female Poisoner in Armadale and The Legacy of Cain,” in Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox (eds.). Reality's Dark Light. The Sensational Wilkie Collins. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 94-130. Patmore, Coventry. 1863. “Part I.” The Angel in the House. London: MacMillan. Pykett, Lyn. 2011. “Mary Elizabeth Braddon,” in Pamela K. Gilbert (ed.). A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 12333. _____. 1992. The “Improper” Feminine. The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. London: Routledge. Ritchie, Jessica. 2006. Revisiting the Murderess: Representations of Victorian Women’s Violence in Mid-Nineteenth and Late TwentiethCentury Fiction. Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Canterbury. Ruskin, John. 1865. Sesame and Lilies. Two Lectures Delivered at Manchester in 1864. New York: John Wiley & Son. Schipper, Jan Davis. 2002. Becoming Frauds. Unconventional Heroines in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Sensation Fiction. New York: Writers Club Press. Stickney Ellis, Sarah. 1843. The Daughters of England: Their Position in Society, Character, and Responsibilities. New York: D. Appleton. Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. 2007. Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate. Tatum, Karen E. 2007. “Bearing Her Secret: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd.” The Journal of Popular Culture, 40.3: 503-25. Tilley, Christopher. 2006. “Objectification,” in Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Mike Rowlands and Patricia Spyer (eds.). Handbook of Material Culture. Los Angeles: Sage, 60-73.

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Tomaiuolo, Saverio. 2010. In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Walker, Alexander. 1840. Woman Physiologically Considered as to Mind, Morals, Matrimonial Slavery, Infidelity and Divorce. New York: J & H.G. Langley. Wetzel, Grace. 2012. “Homelessness in the Home: Invention, Instability and Insanity in the Domestic Spaces of M. E. Braddon and L. M. Alcott,” in Jessica Cox (ed.). New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 75-91. Zipfinger, Karin. 2010. Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Social Criticism of the Women’s Situation in 19th Century England. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller.

CHAPTER ELEVEN Between the Aesthetics and the Pedagogy of Consumerism: Will Self’s My Idea of Fun and Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent Daniela Rogobete Introduction In the long tradition of artistic representations, people have found innumerable modalities to figuratively or non-figuratively depict their surrounding material world, thus nuancing, commenting upon or exposing their relationship with “objecthood”. A considerable part of the artistic productions created over the last decades of the twentieth century focused on a more or less subtle critique of the increased tendency towards commodification that extended from material things to human values, emotions and relationships, towards, in other words, what Zygmunt Bauman called the “annexation and colonisation by consumer markets of the space stretching between human individuals” (2007: 14). Many pop art visual productions (Warhol, Lichtenstein) and cinematographic (Night of the Living Dead, Fight Club, American Beauty etc) or photographic projects (Barbara Kruger) offered ironical parables of consumerism and set out to demonstrate its dehumanising and addictive effects. They also analysed the processes of blurring individual identities, of reifying and commodifying people, feelings and dreams, and generally warned against the drawbacks of a consumerist society that transformed its consumers into prisoners of their never satiated desires and longings. This study analyses two representations of commodified materiality with dramatic impacts on human relationships (parents vs. children in this case) in terms of sublime experiences marked by the “glaciation of affect” (in Haneke’s terms) that culminates in what has been termed “the commodification of childhood”. Both texts under analysis, Will Self’s My Idea of Fun (1993) and Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989)

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focus upon an ideological reconstruction of childhood according to new market demands, to a new aesthetic of fake appearances and constantly engendered desires, and to the pedagogy of the new exigencies of consumerism. The Austrian film maker Michael Haneke, creator of the “Trilogy of Glaciation” (The Seventh Continent, 1989; Benny’s Video, 1992; and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, 1999) analyses the deadening effect of corporate media and consumerism upon the young generations born at the end of the millennium. The same concern is shared by Will Self, the extravagant enfant terrible of British contemporary literature, whose writings have consecrated him as an analyst of the dark recesses of the human mind and nature, a writer plumbing the depths of the articulations of postmodern neuroses, of artificial, media-created realities, of social and personal taboos. The strategies these two authors employ are centred upon an inherently human violence that engenders extremely grotesque images and gruesomely gory episodes that shock both readers and viewers into awareness of our moral and spiritual downfall. The two texts, though belonging to different media—literature and cinematography—display striking similarities in their threatening representations of a material world that comes to annihilate the childsubject and in the bleak perspective they project on “life-afterconsumerism”. In this representation of commodified childhood, both authors share the same preference for a symbolically depicted materiality whose encounter with the fragile world of childhood results in unexplained violence, for a “shock technique” that repels, intrigues and raises questions about some of the newly engendered psychoses and complexes of the postmodern consumerist society and its newly engendered psychoses and complexes. With the aid of the specific imageries and techniques characteristic of their media, Self and Haneke both deconstruct the discourse of commodification articulated around the processes of representing life in terms of object transactions, buyable items and consumed objects, of reifying people and hopes, of gradually weakening human bonds and of emphasising the inherent loneliness of the consumer. At the beginning of the 90s both Self and Haneke placed their little heroes in the enchanted, labyrinthine realm of appealing commodities, where they were left and forced to find a way out or a way back to the innocent realm of childhood from where they had been tragically expelled. The general questions they ask, subtly attuned to contemporary theory, are whether there is anything after consumerism and whether we have the choice or the means to escape it once it has taken over our existences.

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Life after consumerism In My Idea of Fun and The Seventh Continent nothing can escape commodification: things, people, feelings, hopes and relationships. Both authors take a step forward in this direction by presenting childhood as a possibly commodifiable item that could be traded for supernatural capacities (Self) in a reenactment of the Faustian pact or for an illusory happiness (Haneke). Life itself becomes a disposable element in both texts, quantifiable alike in terms of objects, goods and services. Its market value is given by the capacity to absorb what the market offers in terms of commodities and by the eagerness to pursue the pleasure promised through market strategies. This is visible in Haneke’s film where life is terminated at the moment when possessions cease to bring happiness and have to be destroyed. “To have” and “to be” come to annihilate each other. The same happens in Self’s novel where the main character loses his grip on reality. In the illusory reality his mind projects, life loses consistency and becomes an abstract notion. The passage from consumption to consumerism is generally taken to have marked the transition from a society of producers reliant upon a set of values that emphasised work ethic, stability and security, to a society of consumers, based on unstable desires, self engendering needs and “inbuilt obsolescence”, from a “solid” to “liquid modernity” (see Bauman 2007). The “consumerist revolution” has produced profound mutations at the level of social structure which now relies on the urge to dispose, replace and enjoy commodities and on short term durability and punctuated time. At the level of community, consumerism generally dilutes the sense of belonging to a specific peer group by creating a feeling of global membership of a larger community of undifferentiated consumers. At the level of individuals it provokes a blurring of identity which ceases to be the sum of an entire process of becoming, of building upon education, experience and personal encounters, and amounts instead to a flexible selfconstruct which is mainly defined by the accumulation of brands. Shopping, the new leisure activity of contemporary society, becomes in Bauman’s opinion the means of “making and remaking self-identity” (2007: 48) that leads to an individualisation which is seen as “the weakening and/or crumbling of human bonds” (49). Theoretically embodying the fulfilled promise of an endemic world of endless freedom of choice, unencumbered by any repressive principle or coercive restriction other than that of selecting the best brands, consumerist society flatters itself on creating the awareness of a deceptive individual freedom of choice, on its alleged lack of gender, age or class

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distinction and discrimination, and on its creation of a global community of undifferentiated consumers. In the two texts under analysis childhood has to mature between desire and choice and is condemned beforehand to “the desire of identity” and to “the horror of satisfying that desire, the attraction and the repulsion that the thought of identity evokes, mix and blend to produce a compound of lasting ambivalence and confusion” (Bauman 2005: 28). Ambivalence and confusion prevail in both Self’s and Haneke’s productions. Both authors investigate from different perspectives but sometimes with strikingly similar images and techniques what Haneke calls “the death of affect” and the degree to which childhood, generally caught between emotional family ties, market strategies and consumer demands, is susceptible to undergoing the same process of “progressive emotional glaciation”. Childhood is not envisaged as a happy realm of innocence, purity and security but as a dangerous place of ominous fantasies, impossible dreams and inexplicable fears that finally lead to unleashed violence. Alone most of the time, vulnerable and potential preys of a sterile image of commodified reality, children get lost in the middle of shifting values, discarded items and disposable people, among all the false desires, needs and longings that shape their identities. In the contemporary culture of here and now, submitted to transient fashions and changing marketing strategies, they discover the world with a “mind born of the world of objects” (Bourdieu 1977: 9).

Sublime material encounters: the aesthetics of consumerism The passage from a society of producers to one of consumers engendered its own aesthetics. The old principles of duty, authority, solidity, reliability and patience have been gradually replaced by eternal promises, alluring choices, illusory beauty and immediacy. Work ethic has been exchanged for the aesthetics of consumerism that charms, disguises profit beneath shiny appearances and allures with the deceiving beauty of commodities. “It is the aesthetics, not ethics, that is deployed to integrate the society of consumers, keep it on course, and time and again salvage it from crises. If ethics accord supreme value to duty well done, aesthetics put a premium on sublime experience” (Bauman 2005: 31). The pursuit of the sublime and the possibilities of aesthetically experiencing it represent both Self’s and Haneke’s main concerns. One common aspect of the sublime experience in both texts is the constant, obsessive search for a

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form of happiness understood exclusively in terms of satisfying desires, longings and needs, and quantifiable in objects and signs. The characters in both texts need to rely on a materiality completely devoid of symbolic and magic values which is now reduced to the apparently harmless and comfortable concreteness of commodities. This commodified beauty seems to have lost its ancient Platonic connections to truth, goodness, order, proportion and harmony and even its Socratic relation to functionality, giving way instead to an illusionist magic and a perpetual hedonist search for pleasure. In Self’s novel pleasure becomes synonymous with a sterile “idea of fun” mostly translated into violent images, whereas in Haneke’s film it relates to the self-sufficient bourgeois satisfaction of a well-off existence meant to disguise existential emptiness. Two different stories, then, reach the similar conclusion that beneath the lustre of shiny normality lies an unreliable reality where the material world, no matter how harmless and domestic, acquires threatening aspects and, as a consequence of their engagement with it, places people on the dangerous border between fantasy and desire. Ian, Will Self’s protagonist in My Idea of Fun, is a child who grows up in a dysfunctional family, abandoned by his father at an early age and raised by a possessive mother. Possibly an autistic child, Ian proves to be a gifted eidetiker, endowed with a remarkable photographic memory and a vivid imagination that engenders a highly ambiguous part-fictional, partreal and part-invented character who comes to dominate his consciousness. In a very suggestive episode of eidetic vision, standing in front of a shop window, Ian catches a glimpse of the juxtaposition of three different images: his own reflection, that of the shop window arrangement that reminds him of the Isle of Sodor, the land of talking engines, and that of his guardian, Mr. Broadhurst, the character strangely identified in his mind with the Fat Controller, the character in Rev. Awdry’s stories of steam engines and now a metaphoric embodiment of the Spirit of Consumerism. From that moment on, Ian’s personality is torn between his “normal” self and his fantastic projection as the disciple of The Fat Controller, the “Brahmin of the Banal”, “The Magus of the Quotidian” (1993: 82), the “Great White Spirit” of the fifth dimension (89) who introduces him into the world of products and their history. Images, real or hallucinatory, most often endowed with ominous powers, become the central axis of Ian’s world, an iconography of childhood longings and fears—fear of not being loved, fear of solitude, fear of the others, of their judgmental gaze and longing for an absent father/ absent parents. This iconography is made up of a superimposition of real and fictitious persons and events on an adult representation of the

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world, permeated by an aesthetic of the grotesque. Ian’s imaginary extrasensorial powers are tested, analysed and diagnosed at an older age during Dr. Gyggle’s long-term psychoanalytical therapy, as “the complex delusion” (Self 1993: 167) of a “borderline personality with pronounced schizoid tendencies” (168). His eidetic powers are deemed to rest on “a misconception of the nature of consciousness itself” (167), while The Fat Controller’s haunting persona, Ian’s imaginary tormentor, is represented as his “personified id” (177), his mental compensation for a lost father and a psychic punishment for an Oedipal deviation. For Ian, pleasure, the necessary condition of a successful “being in the world” is equated to the fun of imagining a fantastic world where objects are personified and acquire magical attributes, whereas people are objectified, thus allowing reckless handling, abuse and violent disposal. This leads to a fetishisation of representation, to scopophilia and voyeurism. Everything acquires visual dimensions and, in a universe dominated by photographic memories and eidetic minds, the descriptive and the pictorial prevail and culminate in descriptive, gory details. When analysing Will Self’s idiosyncratic fiction, Hunter Hayes characterises My Idea of Fun as a “satire of an age of capitalist excess” and as “a moral allegory concerning the psychopathology of addiction” (2007: 60-61) which focuses on the type of gaze Self forces his readers to adopt, as a “corporeal looking” (61). The same vital importance is bestowed upon image and representation in Haneke’s film through a particular set of cinematographic techniques that emphasises the director’s idiosyncratic style. The interest in visual details and the disambiguation of the “dead gaze” (Speck 2010: 81), the one that makes his characters difficult to understand and often opaque for the viewers, is the task Haneke summons his viewers to perform. The plot of Haneke’s 1989 production featuring Dieter Berner, Brigt Doll and Leni Tanzer and based on a real incident hotly debated in the Austrian media, narrates in three parts spanning three days in three successive years, the story of a well-off, middle-class Austrian family whose members unexpectedly decide to destroy all their material possessions and commit suicide. At the beginning of the film two immobile silhouettes trapped inside the car—as well as the camera shooting the scene—and seen from behind, patiently wait in total silence for their car to be washed, while the car cleaning devices move in frenzied agitation. The foam accumulating on the wind screen and then wiped away by huge brushes induce a hypnotic state emphasised by extremely long takes and the obsessive swish of the wipers. The disturbing lack of any other sound, the characters’ lack of

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movement and the rotating movement of the mechanical washing devices create a feeling of entrapment, stagnation and inertia that is further deepened by the next frames of the film. DO NOT BRAKE is the first written message of the film, stressing the suggestion of inertia and inevitability that pervade the entire film; and even when the car emerges from the garage (after a three minute shot), the sensation of entrapment is enhanced by the image of the immobile, faceless characters in the car. The huge poster the car passes by, which shows a dreamy seascape captioned Welcome to Australia, becomes one of the recurrent images in the film, hinting at an unattainable realm of promised bliss and granted desires. The monotonous description of a quotidian bourgeois lifestyle, fragmented and obsessively repetitive, suits Haneke’s preference for very long takes, sinuous camera movements, alternations between close-ups and wide angle perspectives, cuts and narrative ellipses. This technical repertoire helps Haneke represent the domestic universe of the Schobers. A typical working day records in disjointed images the banality of the morning routine, alternating between close-ups on familiar objects and images of disembodied hands and feet interacting with these objects. Nothing is special or threatening about them except for the camera’s unsettling lingering on every object in the room (all obsessively white—a recurrent strategy with Haneke—except for the red slippers). These objects preserve their supermarket impersonality and coldness instead of creating an intimate space of domesticity imprinted with the auras of their possessors. The lack of any emotional involvement is also suggested by the fact that the camera avoids revealing the faces of the people in the house, cropping their bodies in tight frames and creating the impression of a “materialistic incarceration” (Croce 2006). The repetition of the same scenes with no alteration in the second part foretells a tragic outcome, stressing the automatism and paralysis of an apparently flawless life. Self’s treatment of objects is equally methodical as in his case “everything has to do with seeing things as processes rather than reifications” (McCarthy 2001). Ian tries to go back to a meaningful approach to objects as more than products but he nonetheless succumbs to a marketing superficiality. Under the tyrannical guidance of The Fat Controller, he learns how to go back in his mind to the origins of a product and visualise its history and evolution. He proceeds to a total identification with the object and its material essence which, instead of making him understand its symbolic values or the force of human agency and subjectivity, condemns him to “a cosmos of brand names, a metaphysics of motifs, a logic of logos and an epistemology based on EPOS” (Self 1993: 148). That seems similar to the voyage Daniel Harris proposes in his

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Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetic of Consumerism, “a psychic voyage into the aesthetic unconsciousness [that] places the refuse of consumerism under a microscope and concentrates on minutiae, on the uses of the useless, the significance of the insignificance” (2000: xi). Both texts share the same strategy of drawing the readers/viewers inside the story and of forcing them to find the explanations both text and film refuse to offer. “Here’s the hook”—Ian says— “when I’m done we’ll decide on it together, you and I” (Self 13). What the reader has to decide upon is not an easy matter. It implies disentangling Ian’s narrative loose ends, distinguishing between his real deeds and his imaginary atrocious “outrages” and establishing whether he is a cold-blooded serial criminal or just a delusional lunatic. In Haneke’s case, the viewers are summoned to detect the flaws of an apparently normal, happy family and to come up with logical explanations for their deeds. These flaws are soon revealed in the clash between characters and their material surroundings, in their awkward encounters that reveal their lack of empathy, and in what Haneke calls “emotional glaciation”. During the first ten minutes of Haneke’s film there are no faces, no occasions to analyse emotional reactions and no dialogue, no opportunity to judge characters on voice inflexion, tone, modulation and intonation. This refusal to return the gaze is a strategy for making one’s emotions and feelings invisible, as Georg Simmel contended in his Sociology of Senses, first published in 1907. Haneke refuses to reveal his protagonists’ faces for ten minutes and when he does, he is ironical enough to start with Eva’s closed eyes that refuse to see and, in the following shot, with the hugely distorted eye of one of her mother’s patients. Of all the alienating modern appliances that people became very fond of during the twentieth century, Haneke considered that the TV screen was a major tool for making people socially invisible and making them refuse to relate to other real people. In his films TV sets and radios play the part of mental and emotional screens, rendering people completely opaque and desensitised. “I wonder what it would be like”, Anna’s brother asks after the dinner they have together in the first part of the film, “if people had a screen instead of a head so everybody could see their thoughts?” In Haneke, watching TV not only helps people hide their thoughts and emotions but also saves them from the obligation to talk to each other. There is a strange attempt in both Self and Haneke to silence and destroy any vestiges of the old subjectivity and to adopt instead a cold, almost hypnotic emotional detachment: Haneke pushes his characters into a state of emotional deprivation whereas Self uses sensory deprivation therapy in the episode of Ian’s recovery.

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The first face Haneke’s camera reveals is Eva’s, at school, feigning blindness. Her teacher tricks her into admitting the prank but the symbolism of her gesture cannot escape the viewer—her refusal to see, her need for attention and care, her rejection of a reality she finds unacceptable. Ian makes the same gesture when passing by a blind people’s home. He pretends to be blind and tries to empathise with those people, thus getting his second eidetic vision which makes him aware of his schizoid capacity to project his inner sight as “a free-floating steadicam that can move wherever it wishes at will”: “I was inside my own representation and that representation had become the world” (Self 1993: 55). Feeble attempts at empathic connection are treated as dangerous deviations and gradually reduced to an autistic refusal to relate to others. According to Christopher Sharrett, Haneke uses a “kind of television aesthetic” suggested by his frequent use of the “tight shot, usually to emphasise the plasticity of commodities” (2005). This helps him create a profusion of consumerist landscapes: shots of endless supermarket shelves crammed with neatly arranged products, images of disembodied people synecdochally represented by walking feet and suggesting useless agitation and never satiated desires, or the automatic gestures of the shop assistant, creating the image of a hypnotic shopping ritual, or the obsessive shot of the poster advertising a trip to Australia, whose surreal image invades their dreams and finally engulfs them. The aesthetic of consumerism totally excludes boredom and inertia, setting a premium on the pleasure principle and the experience of the sublime. Ian’s predicament in this regard is paradoxical. He fears the boredom that drove his father away from his family yet he dreads giving too much freedom to his vivid imagination and counteracts it with a complete set of daily routines that keeps him attached to a palpable reality: “I became certain that if I didn’t do something I might be sucked out of the fuselage of reality altogether and sent rolling and tumbling into the void. I found salvation in the development of personal rituals” (Self 1993: 58). Repetition and habituation dictate one of the basic principles of consumerism, namely, that “habituation through repetition” (Appadurai 2010: 67) becomes an inherently “self-effacing habit” (166) and creates an entire pattern of ritualistic gestures. These body rituals1 are at the same time Ian’s condemnation and salvation. The same automatic

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Also theorised by Marcel Mauss (1973) as “techniques of the body” in his seminal work The Techniques of the Body and explained as being engendered by an automatic existence and inducing a form of social inertia.

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gestures and repeated rituals keep the Austrian family isolated within a self-constructed reality that finally pushes them to self-destruction. The adult characters in both works make the effort to cling to a reality that turns out to be fabricated and illusory but offers them the advantage of disengagement. The Schobers seem to rely on love, affection and financial comfort but in fact everything in their lives conceals an emotional vacuum. The same happens in Self’s text where the illusionist effect of Ian’s fabricated reality is intensified by his schizophrenic bouts. The consumerist aesthetics embraced by both authors depict modernity as a “fallen from grace” state, expelled from the “arcadia of fun” (Self 1993: 196), which makes us lose our “collective innocence” (196); it is a drug induced trance state, perpetuated by the mechanical gestures of our daily life that reifies everything and finally commodifies humans, their relationships, their consciousnesses and even fun itself. There’s no fun any more, just my idea of it […We’re] always attempting to crank the last iota of abandonment out of our intrinsically empty and mechanical experience […] That’s our fun now, not fun itself, only a tired allusion of it. (195)

They all tell us the same story: the pedagogy of consumerism Both Self and Haneke seem to embrace the same perspective of pediocularity, whereby the filtering consciousness of the text belongs to a child. Theorised by Thomas Cook, pediocularity is defined as a means of privileging the child’s perspective over the adult’s, as a slip into impersonal narrative modes that enlarges the gap between the two representational perspectives rather than as a simple shift of focus from parents to children. It “repeats and reinscribes childhood innocence in the ways that it encodes children’s ‘special nature’ in their presumed and presumably unpolluted gaze” (Cook 2004: 68). Ian and Eva, children endowed with “special natures”, find themselves trapped in two worlds they both reject. Ian is caught in the web of his childhood traumas and frustrations, of his fantastic eidetic visions haunted by grotesquely sadistic representations inspired by The Fat Controller. He is advised to seek refuge in the stable, comfortable world of commodified objects. Eva is also trapped within a commodified reality her parents have devised for her and her only escape is the fantastic world of her sombre drawings. Her status in the family is symbolically suggested in the shot where she is

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shown doing her homework beside the fish tank, a metaphorical expression of her illusory freedom of choice as proclaimed by consumerism. The frame is composed in such a way that the viewer perceives Eva as part of a Chinese shadow theater made up of the shadows and the reflected glaring images coming from a TV set (always a menacing presence in Haneke’s filmography) projected upon the wall and furniture behind her. The china on her left stresses her fragility and extreme vulnerability. Even if narrating different stories, Haneke’s film and Self’s novel overlap in certain regards and techniques and both remind us of the Hansel and Gretel story in terms of parental abandonment, childhood fears and phobias and desperate attempts to escape being “consumed”. From this perspective the two works suggestively play upon the connotations of “to consume” and “to be consumed”, “consumption” and “consumerism”, which engender ambiguous interpretations. Children are forced to “consume” their parents’ (in Eva’s case) or their surrogate parents’ (in Ian’s case) ideas on reality, life and the bliss of consumerism, only to find themselves “consumed” by these very worldviews. This semantic oscillation is reinforced in Haneke’s film by alternating shots of crammed supermarket shelves suggesting consumerist drives and shots of family dinner, literally depicting consumption. Both Ian and Eva are introverted children in desperate need of affection who find it difficult to express their feelings and relate to others. Ian’s mind is invaded by the Fat Controller, the otherwise perfectly harmless character in Rev. Awdry’s stories, to whom he becomes apprentice of the art of understanding the secret life of objects and black magic. Eva seems to be trapped inside a continuously shrinking crystal ball her own parents’ indifference has created. She uses blindness in order to obtain the attention she longs for: one frame shows her mother coming across a newspaper article entitled Blind but less alone on Eva’s desk at home, but this discovery only triggers Anna’s empty gaze out of the window. She is gradually absorbed into the same emotional vacuum inhabited by her parents, where she verges on total annihilation. Though the stories diverge when it comes to the strategies the two characters devise in order to escape their confining realities, the endings share the same pessimistic perspective. Ambiguity and violent disruption totally annihilate the thin line between reality and surreality, conscious and subconscious. In Self’s novel Ian, an apparently normal person, submits his sanity to the close scrutiny of the readers who have to decide if he is the murderer of innocent people, of his wife and his unborn child, or a harmless schizophrenic whose story is entirely made up. In Haneke’s

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film, on the other hand, viewers have to decide whether the Schobers’ final self-destructive gesture is an act of defiance and delivery or simply a helpless surrendering to an artificial reality they produced and allowed to destroy them. When confronting their little heroes with the world surrounding them both authors become didactic. Will Self is ironically so when he teaches consumerism through the voice of The Fat Controller and in a more direct manner than Haneke. Ian’s apprenticeship to Mr. Broadhurst/The Fat Controller takes the form of a Faustian pact “measured in television time” (Self 1993: 64) and sealed in blood and semen, a magical concoction that heals Ian’s acne as the first gratification of the pact. What Ian learns is the power of the ritual, the fact that “habit was ritual and ritual was habit” (73). In this case the object of the pact concerns Ian’s psyche, virility and his eidetic abilities which could be lost if the pact were broken. Self’s Mephistopheles, Mr. Broadhurst, takes Ian on a journey to the realm of the omnipotent God of the century, Money and its Holy Trinity of marketing, advertising and consumption. Self’s manner of dealing with the Faustian pact in the age of consumerism is similar to the way in which Jean Baudrillard analyses the same myth in La société de consommation (1970). In Baudrillard’s opinion striking this pact, which he considers one of the most important and violent of our age, means selling one’s mind, one’s soul and one’s image to the devil. He explains our reflected image as the significance of our deeds given by the transparency of our relationship with the world and translated into our unspoilt relation with our mirror reflection. Society provides the mirror that reflects a highly commodified image and this reflection engenders an irreversible alienation. Baudrillard considers that everything that we lose—shadow, image, dreams—remains somehow attached to us and comes back to haunt us as an avenging spectre (1970: 305). The conclusion of Haneke’s and Self’s texts seems to be that there is no transcendence and no way out of the pact. Killing the reflected image means in fact killing oneself. A profound alienation marks both texts. Ian cannot and is encouraged not to relate to anybody for fear of translating his sadistic visions into reality. He is tempted instead to relate to products, to indulge in the desire they engender and in the absolutely illusory freedom of choice they promise though he is fully aware of their utopian goal. “The Marginal Theory of Preference,” he confesses, “only served to deepen my confusion. For in a world of such demonstrable irrationality, how could there be a predictable quantification of choice?” (Self 1993: 96).

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Ian’s “eidetic voyages” and overwhelming imagination render his social inertia less visible than in the case of Haneke’s characters, whose automatic, mechanical gestures become obsessive and repetitive, thus suggesting the emptiness of a life wasted on alienating consumerist rituals that blur the boundaries between object and subject and offer a reformulation of the Cartesian dichotomy in which the opposition is now between consumed object and consumer. Inertia operates at the level of emotions, mind and consciousness, rendering people vulnerable to the newest maladies of the twentieth century that absorb their souls into “the crushing vacuum of modern existence” (Bingham 2004). “It is me after all,” Ian confesses, “who has been subjected to the direct marketing of my very soul. You’ve heard of the rogue male, I am his modern descendent, the junk male” (Self 1993: 188). From the first pages of the novel Self dwells on the general confusion of empathy and sympathy, anticipating thereby the focus placed in the novel on the lack of emotions, the incapacity to feel and empathise. The shocking meditation upon Ian’s idea of fun (beheading an old dosser at the Tube and “addressing himself” to the corpse) prepares the reader for the shock treatment he is going to receive and for the “dirty magical realism” which Self considers his own style (Self 2003: 44). Self speaks about the addictive feature of consumerism and devises an alternative therapy strategy by introducing a group of junkies whose consciousnesses Ian enters when subjected to a deep-sleep trance. Addiction is treated as the major disease of the consumerist society and similar to autism, due to their common alienating and isolating effects: borderline disorders and schizophrenia, distortion of perception that blurs the thin line between fantasy and reality, desire and deferral of satisfaction, endless promise and repetitive frustrations. In Haneke’s film people seem to have embraced a cool detachment that does not allow them to enjoy anything any longer. This blasé attitude is eloquent of their incapacity to live life in a meaningful way, to empathise or to communicate. Ian’s shame at his unbridled imagination and compensatory clinging to the reality of material things are echoed in Haneke’s film by Georg and Anna’s similar cling to the perfection of their small universe of material possessions. The frequent shots of the fish tank, the repeated car wash scene and the obsessively long shots of domestic objects metaphorically suggest a type of empty life that fails to strike the proper balance between public and private spaces. There is an absolute obsession with cleaning and washing, as if the family were trying hard to remove any kind of trace of their encounter with the outside world. This is particularly poignant in the second part when, after they drive by the scene

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of a car accident on the highway and passively witness from the locked-in safety of the insulated space of their car the removal of the dead bodies, they take their car to be washed. This is the moment when Anna breaks down in a cathartic attempt to reach out to her daughter and husband. Since Haneke is reluctant to offer explanations, Anna’s extraordinary emotional outburst can be interpreted through what Günther Anders called “Prometheus’ shame” (2001: 30). In Anders’ opinion, “Prometheus’ shame” is an individual feeling arising from profound alienation, from complete separation from others, from the shame of one’s imperfection measured against the perfection of objects, or from the bitter awareness of one’s failure to be different; its contrary is “Prometheus’ pride”, a sentiment engendered by a spiritually rewarding and daunting challenge in the service of humanity. Georg and Anna learn how to be perfect consumers in a perfect society of consumers but they fail to be perfect parents. Everything boils down to pure functionality and utility though the bright promise of consumerism (recurrently displayed under the guise of the advertisement for Australia that gradually comes to life and thereby suggests their total identification with a self-constructed reality) teaches them to travel light among commodities, discarding all feelings, attachments and any burdening emotional luggage. This might ensure their success in the pleasure-seeking quest of the end of the millennium and provides the means of escape from the awareness of their empty existences. The shooting style emphasises this “progressive emotional glaciation” of Austria, a country used here only as an emblematic space and not a definite locus, illustrated by the characters’ general lack of emotional involvement. Georg and Anna are absolutely incapable of communicating: dialogue is reduced to a bare minimum and details about their family life can only be found in Anna’s two impersonal letters written to her in-laws and in Georg’s suicidal note. TV empty noise, radio news and, most importantly, (radio or TV, diegetic or non-diegetic) music seem to be the perfect substitute for dialogue, the perfect excuse not to communicate and a most suggestive means of revealing more than images do.2 All the scenes where the family members appear together emphasise their solitude, alienation and emotional void: the breakfasts taken together are depicted by means of tight close-ups of the table and of their disembodied hands, culminating in the scene of Eva’s breakfast where an impersonal bowl of cereals hurriedly filled with milk is pushed in front of a little hesitant hand 2

Haneke repeatedly states his preference for sound as he considers film to be closer to music than to literature

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holding the spoon that translates the parents’ incapacity to relate to their own child. There is an inherent solitude nobody is willing to break except for Eva and Anna’s brother, confirming what Bauman theorised as the impossible “collective consumption”, since consumption “remains a thoroughly lonely individual lived-through experience. Consumers are alone even when they act together” (2005: 30-31). Food plays an important role in the film as Georg and Anna seem to derive a particular pleasure in buying food.3 Instead of bringing people together and inspiring communion and commensality, food only serves to ironically suggest the etymological origins of consumerism and the dichotomy consumption–consumerism. There is no sharing but an egocentric “absolute separateness” (Fromm 1984: 124). The same play upon etymology is also used by Self when he imagines the marketing strategies for the “Yum-Yum” financial product (an edible credit card for food products), materialised in sixty standing booths scattered around London and gradually transformed into places of addiction as they become the shabby shelters of junkies, debased “platonic forms” (Self 1993: 348), symbolic combinations of desire, commodification, addiction and deceiving transparency. There seems to be no transcendence in either Self’s or Haneke’s texts beyond the material world. All the useless agitation of disembodied hands and feet does not acquire any transcendental meaning. Nothing can escape material contingency and images suggesting this kind of entrapment abound in the film. Will Self goes a little further and ironically imagines a counterpart of transcendence which he calls “retroscendence”, the complex understanding of the nature of a product through extension of eidetic capabilities.4 Retroscendence, the return to commodified materiality, becomes the key moment of the pedagogy of consumerism in Self’s novel: “Fun exists solely in retrospect, in retroscendence” (Self 1993: 197). It is a paradoxical process of alluring people into the realm of

3

Food is generally seen as one of the basic forms of taking possession as it offers a combination of symbolic and magic incorporation and possession, hence the frequent associations between consumerism and various forms of addiction. “The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world. The consumer is the eternal suckling crying for the bottle” (Fromm 1984: 36). 4 The concept Self invents resembles Bill Brown’s “retroprojection”, which he defines as a mutual constitution of object and subject. It is a concept that defines the process that makes objects return to the amorphousness out of which objects are materialised as objects or utilisation as objects. Things are accordingly theorised as what is excessive in objects (Brown 2001: 5)

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fantasy, binding them to the world of objects through the elusive attachment of ephemeral pleasure. True to its aesthetic of an ephemeral satisfaction that engenders new desires, consumerism enhances the fear of death, promoting instead commodified eternal youth and beauty. Death and money, present and strangely associated in both texts, are envisaged as the ultimate endlessly fascinating taboos of the twenty-first century. The human corpse is regarded as an object of revulsion and fascination and Self is renowned for his habit of constructing his narratives around death and its humble remains. For Self, death is “the ground zero of all mutations” (McCarthy 2001), a definition which ties in with his interest in “transmogrifications” and the horrible mutations that pester his characters’ lives. The space of death becomes palpable and real, bringing in its wake a particular type of spiritual insight beyond what Self calls “the shackles of habit” (in Testard 2003) and the modernity’s desperate attempt to ignore death. The most significant episode in this regard occurs in the North London Book of the Dead, a deeply ironical comment on death in consumerism, inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It represents a “counterincantation ritual”, a materialist ceremony where the junkies in the therapy group recite names and brands of products in order to prevent the soul of the deceased from being reincarnated; it is “a kind of mantra of built-in obsolescence that reminds the dead soul that it’s not capable of reincarnation, that Western personality, so conceived, is a redundant and reified thing” (McCarthy 2001). “This is the North London Book of the Dead, a set of instructions to be recited to the dying […] in order that their immortal soul should be cancelled out, voided, put on the spike, deleted, wiped and crashed utterly beyond recall” (Self 1993: 362) in a total annihilation of the spiritual. For their part, the realisation that something is utterly wrong with their lives makes the Schobers decide to terminate it: “Looking back at the lives we have led,” Georg writes in his suicidal note, “makes it easy to accept the end in any form”. And the form it takes is shocking, messy, gruesome and disturbing. After quitting their jobs, selling their car and closing their bank account, they lock themselves in the house which they have stocked with an impressive quantity of food, burn all bridges to the exterior world (disconnecting the telephone and the door bell) and methodically proceed to vandalise and destroy all their possessions in cold blood and with no emotional reaction. What could have been their last moment of affective binding, of nostalgia and of liberating outbursts of emotion turns out to be a sterile gesture like all the others, symbolically paralleled by the last

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supper, similar to all the other silent, emotionless meals they have taken together. In an excruciatingly long scene, the camera locks on every object that is being smashed to show in full detail every instance of their destruction: pictures, drawings, furniture, clothes, books and records, family photos and toys are destroyed in a futile act of resistance against consumerism that engenders no liberation and no transcendence. The most impressive scenes are the smashing of the fish tank and the fish’s death (connoting their daughter’s symbolic internal death which they had provoked) and the flushing down the toilet of all their money,5 the ultimate gesture of rejecting a spiritually paralysing element which, however, brings no cathartic effect. There is no catharsis in their deaths either, just a silent cry for help that comes too late and does not find any addressee. Possessions have become extensions of their bodies so that killing the body automatically means destroying its commodified appendages.

Conclusion Will Self’s utopian “fifth dimension”, the place where objects retrieve their lost essences destroyed by commodification and peacefully coexist with human consciousnesses, finds its correlative realm in the idea of the “Seventh Continent” in Haneke’s film. Permanently longed for and alluded to, Australia represents the symbolic distant land of transcendence and liberation; but what the Schobers actually reach is not the sixth but the seventh continent, an Antarctica of glacial feelings and sterile desires. The oppressive atmosphere of both texts comes from the gloomy perspective of a life reduced to automatism and pure mechanical functionality that tends to mutilate childhood itself and becomes “a horrendous announcement of the demise of a civilisation” (Sharrett 2005). Both texts share an aesthetic dimension related to the means of depicting the sublime experience of people’s pleasurable encounters with the material world and a “pedagogical” one that concerns the moral they derive from those encounters. This pedagogical aspect also involves a reappraisal of public taste, which has to be re-educated by means of this “awakening slap on the face” (in Haneke’s words), which is meant to warn 5

There seems to be an allusion here to Freud’s well known association of money with faeces in the story of the devil whose gift of gold turns into excrement upon his leaving: “How old this connection between excrement and Gold is can be seen from an observation by Jeremiah: gold, according to ancient oriental mythology, is the excrement of hell” (Freud and Oppenhaim 1958: 187).

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against the dangers of cultural consumerism. Perhaps this is why intertextual approaches abound in both My Idea of Fun and The Seventh Continent: Rev. Awdry, Marlow, De Quincey are authors whose texts Self revisits and recontextualises, but a multitude of other intertexts might be spotted inside his text with its allusions to James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, to Louis Ferdinand Céline’s dazzling journey into an absurd, hallucinatory reality, to Kafka and to Alasdair Gray’s visual tricks, to Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical world, to Jonathan Swift’s bitter satire, to limericks and to children’s jokes.6 Meanwhile, Antonioni’s distressing urban landscape, Robert Bresson’s naturalism and Polanski’s austere style are cinematographic intertexts that can be spotted in Haneke’s film. Both Self and Haneke cleverly combine high and low cultural codes and perfectly exemplify the idea of cultural/textual consumption. This is obvious for example in Self’s juxtaposition of canonical literary texts, children’s jokes and pop culture references and in Haneke’s of popular/commercial and classical music. The two texts under analysis propose an unsettling annihilation of norms, conventions and habits in the shape of a coherent manifesto intended to shock the readers/viewers into awareness, to push them to the edges of normality, understanding and acceptance. Playing with classic literary/cinematographic/musical texts, violating boundaries and mixing codes and genres, combining types of discourses and techniques, both My Idea of Fun and The Seventh Continent offer a disturbing journey into the human psyche when confronted with violently consumerist and soulconsuming contemporary society. They both raise more questions than they answer and offer ambiguous endings which force us to reconsider our values, our priorities and, ultimately, our lives lest the time should come when we are left with just “an idea of them”.

Works cited Anders, Günther. 2001. L’Obsolescence de l’homme. Sur l’âme à l’époque de la deuxième révolution industrielle. Paris: Éditions Ivrea. Appadurai, Arjun. 2010. “Cultural Dimensions of Globalisations”. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 66-85.

6

See Rogobete (2011) for a more extensive analysis of instances of textual and visual intertextuality in My Idea of Fun.

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_____. 1986. “Commodities and the Politics of Value.” Introduction to The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3-36. Baudrillard, Jean. 1970. La société de consommation: ses myths, ses structures. Paris: Éditions Denoël. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2005. “From the Work Ethic to the aesthetic of consumerism.” In Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. 2nd edition, London: Open University Press. _____. 2007. Consuming Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bingham, Adam. 2004. “Life or Something Like It, Michael Haneke’s Der Siebente Kontinent.” Kinoeye – New Perspectives on European Films, 4.1 (8 March). Available at: http://www.kinoeye.org/04/01/bingham01_no2.php. Accessed December 15, 2011. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Bill. 2001. “Thing Theory” in Critical Inquiry. Vol 28, No 1, Things. (Autumn, 2001): 1-22. Croce, Fernando. 2006. The Seventh Continent Review (May 3). Available at:http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-seventhcontinent/2138. Accessed May 21, 2012. Cook, Thomas. 2004. The Commodification of Childhood. Durham: Duke University Press. Freud, Sigmund and David Ernst Oppenheim. 1958. Dreams in Folklore. Madison CT: International Universities Press. Fromm, Erich. 1984 [1976]. To Have or To Be? London: Abacus. Harris, Daniel. 2000. Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetic of Consumerism. Boston: Da Capo Press. Hayes, Hunter. 2007. Understanding Will Self. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Mauss, Marcel. 1973. “Techniques of the body.” Economy and Society, 2.1: 70-85. McCarthy, Tom. 2001. Interview with Will Self, Writer (03.04). Available at: http://www.necronauts.org/interviews_will.htm. Accessed May 21, 2012. Rogobete, Daniela. 2011. “Between the Sublime Abnormal and the Grotesque Normality.” In Annals of the University of Craiova, Series Philology – English, Year XII, no. 2. Craiova: Universitaria, 81-88. Self, Will. 1994. My Idea of Fun. London: Bloomsbury. Testard, Jacques. 2003. “Interview with Will Self,” in The White Review (July). Available at:

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http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-will-self/. Accessed March 27, 2013. Sharrett, Christopher. 2005. “The Seventh Continent.” Cinemateque – Annotations on Film, 34 (Feb. 8). Available at: http://sensesofcinema.com/2005/cteq/seventh_continent/. Accessed January 17, 2012. Simmel, George. 1997. “The Sociology of Senses”, in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (eds.), Simmel on Culture. London: Sage, 109-19. Speck, Oliver. 2010. Funny Frames. The Filmic Concepts of Michael Haneke. London & New York: Continuum International Publishing. Filmography: The Siebente Kontinent. 1989. Haneke, Michael (dir.), Michael Haneke & Johanna Teicht (script).

CONTRIBUTORS Elena BUTOESCU is a Lecturer in British Literature (Eighteenth Century) at the Department of British, American, and German Studies, University of Craiova, Romania. She earned her Master’s Degree in British Cultural Studies at the University of Bucharest and her Master’s Degree in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Leeds. In 2011 she defended her PhD thesis in the field of eighteenth-century British literary studies at the University of Bucharest. Her research interests include print culture and modernity, travel literature, literary imposture, and British travellers to the Romanian Principalities. She is the co-author of a recently published book, An Imagological Dictionary of the Cities in Romania represented in British Travel Literature (1800-1940) (2012). Mehmet ÇELIKEL graduated from Hacettepe University, Department of English Linguistics, in 1993. He completed his MA in English Language and Literature at the University of Hertfordshire in England in 1997. He earned his PhD with a thesis entitled “The Post-Colonial Condition: The Fiction of Rushdie, Kureishi and Roy” at Liverpool University in England in 2001. He has published a book on the post-colonial novel in Turkish, entitled Sömürgecilik Sonrası øngiliz Romanında Kültür ve Kimlik (Culture and Identity in Postcolonial English Novel) (2011). He currently works as an Associate Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, Pamukkale University, Denizli, Turkey. Maria Teresa CHIALANT is Professor of English literature at the University of Salerno. Her main fields of research are the Victorian novel, Literary Genres and Gender Studies. She has published two books on Dickens (one co-edited with C. Pagetti), and has co-edited several collections of critical essays, such as: L’impulso autobiografico (2005), Viaggio e letteratura (2006), Literary Landscapes, Landscape in Literature (2007), “Eve’s Ransom”. George Gissing e le sfide del romanzo tardo-vittoriano (2010) and Time and the Short Story (2012). She has contributed to numerous international journals and volumes such as The Reception of H. G. Wells in Europe (2005), Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers and Travellers (2010), Writing Otherness: The Pathways of George Gissing’s Imagination (2010), Dickens’s Signs, Readers’ Designs. New Bearings in Dickens Criticism (2012), George Gissing and the

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Woman Question. Convention and Dissent (2013), Reflections on/of Dickens (2014) and Texts, Context and Intertextuality. Dickens as a Reader (2014). Her publications include the translation of three lateVictorian texts and Conrad’s “To-morrow” (2008). Hande GURSES, Assistant Professor at Yildiz Technical University, received her BA in English Language and Literature from Bogazici University in Istanbul, her MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths College, London, and her PhD from University College, London. Her thesis entitled “Fictional Displacements: An Analysis of Three Texts by Orhan Pamuk” focuses on the experience of liminality that marks Pamuk’s narratives. Her research interests include critical theory, representations of identity, autobiography and memory. Currently she is working on a comparative project on contemporary autobiographical texts, exploring the various representations of authorial, cultural and individual identity. Michaela IRIMIA, PhD, is Professor at the University of Bucharest. She teaches British Literature and Culture, as well as Cultural Theory. She is Director of the Centre of Excellence for the Study of Cultural Identity and Director of the Doctoral School for Literary and Cultural Studies of the same university and is the author of “Romanian Romanticism”, in Stephen Prickett (ed.), European Romanticism: A Reader, (2010); “The Ineffectual Angel of Political Hijacking: Shelley in Romanian Culture”, in Michael Rossington & Susanne Schmid (eds), The Reception of Shelley in Europe (2008); “The Byron Phenomenon in Romanian Culture”, in Richard Cardwell (ed.), The Reception of Byron in Europe (2004); DicĠionarul universului britanic (A Dictionary of Britishness) (1999, 2002); and The Stimulating Difference: Avatars of a Concept (1999, 2005). She has edited and/or coedited Literature and the Long Modernity (2014); Lures and Ruses of Modernity / Leurres et ruses de la modernité (2007) and is currently preparing a volume entitled Literature and Cultural Memory. Elisabetta MARINO is tenured assistant professor of English literature at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata.” She has published a book on Tamerlane in English and American literature (2000) and edited the proceedings of the 2001 “Asia and the West Conference” organised at “Tor Vergata”. She co-edited Transnational, National, and Personal Voices: New Perspectives on Asian American and Asian Diasporic Women Writers (2004), and in 2005 she published a volume entitled Introduzione alla letteratura bangladese Britannica. She has translated poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan (Talismans/Talismani, 2006), and edited New Asian

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American Writers and News from UK, Italy and Asia: Literature and the Visual Arts, vol. II (2007). In 2010 she edited Una città tra Oriente e Occidente. Istanbul Shanghai (A City between East and West. Istanbul Shanghai), vol. II. In the same year, she co-edited Positioning the New: Chinese American Literature and the Changing Image of the American Literary Canon. In 2012 she co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Transnational American Studies dedicated to Sau-Ling C. Wong. Her book on Mary Shelley and Italy (Mary Shelley e l’Italia) was published in 2011. The volume she co-edited entitled Europe Facing Inter-Asian Cultural, Literary, Historical and Political Situations was published in 2014, while another collection she co-edited, The West in Asia and Asia in the West, Essays on Transnational Interactions, was published in 2015. She has published extensively on travel literature, on the English Romantic writers, on Italian American literature, Asian American, and Asian British literature. Alan MUNTON is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Exeter, UK. He has worked extensively on the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, and has recent publications in the Cambridge Companion and in the Edinburgh University Press Guide to Lewis’s work. He has also published on Will Self, Picasso’s reception in Britain, the Spanish Civil War, contemporary poetry, the process of quotation, and jazz. He is preparing a book on Lewis.

Pallavi NARAYAN is a doctoral candidate in literature at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, where she has lectured on the Communication Skills course for PhD students. Her research interests are the city and architecture, and their interaction with fiction. Currently based in Singapore, she is an editorial and communications consultant, and a fiction editor for Kitaab, a Singaporean literary journal. She has been an editor with Penguin Random House, Pan Macmillan, and Taylor & Francis Books in New Delhi, and has conducted editing workshops as part of the national research writing workshops organised by her university. Her articles, reviews and poetry have been published in Dilli: An Anthology of Women Poets of Delhi (2014), New Quest, Literary Paritantra, India International Centre Diary, Hindustan Times, The Times of India and The Statesman. Dana PERCEC is Reader in English literature at the West University of Timi‫܈‬oara, Romania. She has published several books and guides to Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age, has edited a theoretical series

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devoted to literary genres such as the historical novel, romance, and fantasy, and has written numerous articles on Shakespeare, English drama, and gender studies. She is collaborating with the general editor of a new version of Shakespeare’s Complete Works in Romanian, providing the prefaces for several plays. Daniela ROGOBETE is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the Department of British, American and German Studies, University of Craiova, Romania. She holds a PhD in Postcolonial Studies and this continues to be her major field of study, with a particular focus on Contemporary Indian Literature written in English. Her published work includes such titles as When Texts Come into Play–Intertexts and Intertextuality (2003), Metaphor—Between Language and Thought (2008), Deconstructing Silence—Ambiguity and Censored Metaphors in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction (2010), articles and studies on Indian English fiction, intertextuality, visual culture published in national and international journals, as well as literary translations. Jonathan P. A. SELL lectures in English at the University of Alcalá, Spain. He is author of Rhetoric and Wonder in English Renaissance Travel Writing, 1560-1613 (2006), Allusion, Identity and Community in Recent British Writing (2010) and Conocer a Shakespeare (2012), and editor of Metaphor and Diaspora in Recent Writing (2012). He is currently researching early modern ideas of the sublime and preparing a translation and edition of Florence Farmborough’s Life in National Spain. Ludmila VOLNÁ teaches courses on Indian writing in English at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Her research interests include the Indian novel in English, Indian culture and civilization, and also Czech culture. She has two (co-)edited volumes to her credit, Children of Midnight: Contemporary Indian Novel in English (2012) and Education et Sécularisme: Perspectives africaines et asiatiques (2013), as well as a number of papers published in anthologies and peer-reviewed journals, such as Archiv Orientální, Quarterly Journal of African and Asian Studies: Czech Academy of Sciences, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, or Editions A3.

INDEX accumulatio 14 See also accumulation 5, 7, 14, 125, 156, 165, 184 Ackroyd, Peter 82n10; Addison, Joseph 43 aesthetics 1, 16, 17, 95, 124, 136, 185 camp aesthetics 18 of consumerism 185-191 Alecsandri, Vasile 46-47 The History of a Ducat and a Para 46-47 Angelou, Maya 57 Anselmo, Attardi 61, 62 Appadurai, Arjun 11n1, 24, 36, 125126, 165, 190 The Social Life of Things 24, 165 Apuleius 42 archive 107-108, 110, 111, 114-117, 118, 119, 120, 121 mal d’archive 121 Aristotle 23 Austen, Jane 58 Awdry, Wilbert Rev. 186, 192, 199 Bacon, Francis 24 Bakhtin, Mikhail 42 Barthes, Roland 39, 54, 57-58, 79, 79n9, 80 Towards a Psychology of Food Consumption 57 The Death of the Author 79 Baudrillard, Jean 1, 2, 11n1, 19, 81, 82, 83, 193 La société de consommation 193 The System of Objects 2, 19 Bauman, Zygmunt 2, 182, 184, 185, 196 Liquid Modernity 2

belonging 6, 184 Benedict, Barbara 42, 71 Benjamin, Walter 20, 42, 95-96, 131, 133-134, 135 body 42, 55, 109n1, 145, 146, 175, 190, 190n1, 198 body of England 177 body-mind 58, 60 body-rituals 190 body techniques 190n1 Bodei, Remo 20, 21 Böhme, Hartmut 18 Bourdieu, Pierre 185 Borges, Jorge Luis 15, 20, 82n10, The Aleph 15 Bradbury, Malcom 5, 68, 70-71, 75, 77-79, 80- 84 To the Hermitage 5, 70, 82n10 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 166, 171, 171n7, 172, 172n8, 173-178 Lady Audley’s Secret 166, 171178 Breitbach, Julia 12, Breton, André 19 bricolage 147 Brosses, Charles de 17 Du culte des dieux fetishes 17 Brown, Bill 1, 11n1, 12, 34, 35, 36, 37, 43, 196n4 Thing Theory 1, 35 Brozel, Mark 63 Butler, Judith 146 Calvino, Italo 59, 89, 92, 93, 95, 99, 102 Carroll, Lewis 199 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 38 catalogue 13, 14-15, 17, 117, 130, 132, 136 Céline, Louis Ferdinand 199

208 Chaucer, Geoffrey 59 collection 17, 57, 78, 82, 83, 107, 111, 114, 115-116, 119-120, 121, 130, 133, 134-136, 165 collector 63, 64, 74, 78, 83, 107, 116, 131, 133-136 Collingwood, R. G. 73 colonisation 153, 154, 156, 182 Coca-colonisation 142, 149 postcolonial 6, 141, 142, 143, 145, 150 commodity 4, 6, 12, 15, 24, 93, 94, 101, 107, 134, 135, 143, 144, 150, 155, 159, 166, 173 commodity fetishism 135 global commodity 16 commodification 3, 4, 7, 23, 34, 55, 92, 94, 96, 98, 124, 126, 135, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147-150, 159, 182, 183, 184, 196, 198 commodity culture 24, 27, 69, 88, 92, 98 commodification of childhood 182 commodification of femininity 175 cultural commodification 4, 5, 6, 150 commodity value 5, 78 Condorcet, Nicolas de 80 collectible 75, 77, 85, 130 consumerism 4, 7, 23, 34, 94, 123, 145, 149, 159, 165, 182, 183, 184, 189-199 aesthetic of consumerism 185190 life-after-consumerism 7, 183 cultural consumerism 199 pedagogy of consumerism 191196 consumerist culture 3, 34 consumption 2, 3, 7, 16, 19, 43, 53, 55, 56, 57, 60, 64, 65, 94, 96, 97, 98, 126, 129, 165, 184, 192, 193, 196 collective consumption 196

Index ethos of consumption 53 Cook, Thomas 191 Coetzee, J. M. 82n10 Crick, Mark 59 Kafka’s Soup 59 D’Alembert, Jean 74, 76 Darwin, Charles 169 de Certeau, Michel 21, 97, 97n6, 129 De Lillo Don 18 De Luigi, Elisa 61, 62 Desai, Anita 153 Fasting, Feasting 153 Descartes, René 68, 72, 84n12 Derrida, Jaques 83, 115, 121 deterritorialisation 141, 147 Dickens, Charles 15, 18, 23, 92-93, 95-96 Bleak House 15 Diderot, Denis 5, 68, 70, 74, 75, 7678, 80, 81, 83 The Diderot Project 70, 75, 78, 81, 83, 84, 84n12 Doyle, Arthur Conan 23 Duchamp, Marcel 17, 18, 19, 24 Duras, Marguerite 21 Eco, Umberto 14-15, 17 Vertigine della lista 14 eidetic 186,187, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196 Eliot, T. S. 34 emotional glaciation (see glaciation of affect) Enlightenment 34, 68, 69, 70, 71-79, 81, 82, 83, 84 The “Enlightenment Project” 5, 68, 70, 72, 73n2, 81 enumeration 5, 14, 15, 83, 123 enumeratio. See enumeration ethnicity 6, 144, 145, 146 exchange value 1, 2, 93, 107, 144, 150, 166

The Silent Life of Things fantasy 5, 72, 101, 110-111, 114117, 119, 120, 121 fantasy of the archive 110, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121 femininity 6, 55, 118, 168, 169, 175 angel in the house 168, 176 manufactured femininity 168 fetish 4, 12, 13, 17-18, 24, 36, 135, 165 fetishisation of representation 187 methodological fetishism 36 cultural fetishism 142-143, 145, 146, 150 flâneur 131, 135-136 Foucault, Michel 11n1, 79, 83, 159 Fowles, John 5, 107, 112-117 The Collector 5, 107, 110, 111, 112-117, 118, 121 Francalanci, Ernesto L. 16 Estetica degli oggetti 16 Freedgood, Elaine 12n2, 23, 24 Freud, Sigmund 15, 17, 21, 90, 108109, 110, 198n5 Fromm, Eric 2, 196, 196n3 The Sane Society 2 Frow, John 12n2, 35, 36, 96, 97n5 Fusillo, Massimo 17-18, 20 Garrison, Laurie 171 Gildon, Charles 42, 43 glaciation of affect 182, 183, 185, 189, 195 globalisation 6, 55, 141, 145, 159 Gray, Alasdair 199 Green, Graham 59 Green, Robert 62 Hall, Stuart 97 Haneke, Michael 7, 182-183, 184185, 186, 187-188, 189-190, 191, 192-193, 194-196, 198, 199 The Seventh Continent 7, 182, 183, 184, 187-188, 189-190, 191-196, 198, 199 Benny’s Video 183

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Fragments of a Chronology of Chance 183 Hazar, Paul 72 La Crise de la conscience européenne 72 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 20, 23 Heller, Agnes 21 Heidegger, Martin 20, 21, 35, 37 historiographic metafiction 70 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 44 Hogg, James 199 Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 199 home 6, 16, 21, 23, 25, 40, 76, 78, 93, 100, 120, 125, 128, 129, 132, 134, 135, 141, 143, 154, 166, 176n9, 190, 192 homeland 142 homesickness 121 Homer 14, 59 Hume, David 73n3 Hunt, William Holman 175 Husserl, Edmund 20, 23 Hutcheon, Linda 82n11 hybridity 141, 145, 157, cultural hybridisation 6, 142 identity 1, 3, 5, 6, 21, 33, 34, 37, 44, 56, 96, 97n5, 99, 100, 124, 126, 129, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 150, 153, 154, 155, 165, 166, 172, 174, 178, 184, 185 cultural identity 33, 143, 144, 145, 154, 159 commodified identity 5, 88 fabricated identity 177 hybridised identity 142 immigrant identity 144 material identity 101 national identity 47, 147 racial identity 146 religious identity 142 Indianness 6, 146, 153, 156, 158 inventory. See also catalogue it-narrative 42, 45

210

Jameson, Fredric 82 n11, 141 Jencks, Charles 82n11 Johnson, Richard 43 Johnstone, Charles 43 Jonson, Ben 57 Joyce, James 15 Finnegan’s Wake 15 Jung, Karl 38 Kafka, Franz 21, 199 Kant, Emmanuel 36, 37 Keats, John 101-102 Krakauer, Siegfrid 36 Kristeva, Julia 83 Kruger, Barbara 182 Kureishi, Hanif 6, 141, 142, 143-146 Gabriel’s Gift 143-144 Something to Tell You 144 The Black Album 143, 145-146 The Buddha of Suburbia 143, 145-147 Lacan, Jacques 5, 108-110, 111, 113, 118 Lamb, Jonathan 41 Lecca, Constantin 44-45 The Coin 45-46 Lefebvre, Henri 21, 97, 97n6 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 54 Lichtenstein, Roy 182 list. See catalogue Lyotard, Jean-François 15n4, 83, 150 Luhrmann, Baz 63 Romeo+Juliet 63 Malafouris, Lambros 1 How Things Shape the Mind 1 Malia, Martin 75, 76, 76n5, 77, 77nn7.8 Man Ray 19, 24 Mann, Thomas 59 Marx, Karl 17, 24, 107, 144, 165 Das Kapital 165 Matter 2, 17, 18, 22, 24, 33

Index material culture 2, 3, 4, 7, 12, 21, 24, 25, 33, 34, 53, 55, 56, 165, 166, 176, 178 materiality 1, 2, 3, 4, 14, 18, 24n10, 25, 26, 124, 153, 156, 158, 160, 183, 186 commodified materiality 182, 196 spatial materiality 124 pantheistic materialism 22 magical materialism 5, 101-102 Maunder, Andrew 170, 170n5 Mauss, Marcel 54, 190n1 memento mori 93 metaphysics 21, 37, 188 metempsychosis 40 Miller, Andrew 82n10 Miller, Daniel 11n1, 26 Modernity 2, 5, 17, 23, 24, 26, 34, 35, 40, 41, 42, 43, 61, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 77, 81, 82, 133, 156, 191, 197 liquid modernity 2, 184 long modernity 34, 35, 40, 82 solid modernity 2 Mozaik 43 Mukherjee, Meenakshi 153, 156 multiculturalism 141, 145, 146, 150 multicultural uniformity 6 Narayan, R. K 6, 153-161 The Man-Eater of Malgudi 6, 154-161 Swami and Friends 154 objecthood 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 35, 182 objectification 6, 7, 39, 144, 150 objectification of culture 150 object tales see also it narrative objet-trouvè 19 O’Connor, Bridget 5, 88-102 Here Comes John 88 Tell Her You Love Her 88 Oliphant, Margaret 171 Ovid 41

The Silent Life of Things palimpsest 5, 68, 69, 71, 77, 82 Pamuk, Orhan 5, 13, 14, 107, 117, 118-121, 124, 126, 129, 133-136 The Black Book 5, 124, 125, 128, 134 The Innocence of Objects 13, 132 The Museum of Innocence 5, 13, 110, 111, 117-121, 124, 125, 128-136 Parlati, Marilena 23-24 partition 75, 155, 160 Patmore, Coventry 168 pediocularity 191 performance 17, 60, 61, 146 performativity 146 Picabia, Francis 19 picaro 41 Plato 34, 186 platonic forms 196 Ponge, Francis 133 postmodernity 15n4, 34, 35, 82 postmodernism 16, 21, 27, 69, 84, 85, 141, 149 postmortemism 82 Proust, Marcel 18, 58, 59 À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur 18 Remembrance of Things Past 59

scopophilia 187 Scott, Helenus 43 Self, Will 7, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186-187, 188-190 My Idea of Fun 7, 182, 184-187, 191-194, 199 Shakespeare, William 4, 53, 56, 57, 58, 60-62, 63-65 Macbeth 61, 63-64 The Merchant of Venice 64 The Taming of the Shrew 63 The Tempest 113n2 The Winter’s Tale 61 Twelfth Night 61 Shklovsky, Victor 35 Simmel, Georg 20, 126, 189 simulacra 7, 78, 81 Stoker, Bram 23 subjectivity 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 110, 111, 188, 189 Swift, Jonathan 199 talisman 1, 37, 45, 46 theory of everything 33 thingness 3, 4, 11n1, 35, 36, 37 thing theory 11, 12, 34, 35, 37, 97 Thompson, Edward 43 Thornton, Bonnell 43 Tilley, Christopher 165 Todorov, Tzvetan 39

Quincey, Thomas de 199 reification 6, 7, 25, 142-145, 146, 147, 150, 188 retroprojection 196n4 retroscendence 196 Rigotti, Francesca 21-22 Rilke, Rainer Maria 20 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 175 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 80 Rushdie, Salman 6, 141, 142, 147150, 153 The Satanic Verses 142, 147-150 Midnight’s Children 153 Ruskin, John 168, 178

211

Vablen, Thorstein 166 Van Ghent, Dorothy 93, 96 Voltaire 73n3, 75, 76, 77, 80 voyeurism 187 Walker, Aleander 167, 168n3 Warhol, Andy 182 Watson, Lyall 37-38 Wilde, Oscar 23 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 21 Wokler, Robert 71, 75n4, 76 Woolf, Virginia 21, 59 Žižek, Slavoj 110-111, 116