Object-Oriented Narratology

Objects, objects everywhere. Over the past two decades, many disciplines—led by philosophy, geology, and the history of science but duly picked up by literary studies—have turned their attention from subjects to objects. This move is overdetermined, to say the least. Critiques of the Cartesian subject—from feminism, gender, and sexuality studies, from postcolonial and decolonial studies, and most recently, from ecocriticism and the environmental humanities—have made Descartes’s cogito nothing less than the conceptual supervillain of modernity.Descartes’s sundering of the mind from the material world and privileging of the former over the latter have become an origin story for colonialism, exploitation, and environmental extraction. To address this nefarious version of the subject, philosophical developments in posthumanism, speculative realism, vitalist materialism, and—most relevant for the book under review—object-oriented ontology (OOO) have proposed a shift away from the subject toward nonhuman entities, namely animals, plant life, and human-made objects. In Object-Oriented Narratology, Ryan and Weisheng bring the concerns of object-centered philosophy to the study of narrative. As the authors acknowledge, there are narratological predecessors who explore the structural and thematic functions of nonhuman entities in narrative. Ryan and Weisheng cite Erin James, Marco Caracciolo, and David Herman as narratological forerunners in the study of nonhuman narratology, and Object-Oriented Narratology is less concerned with the ontology of objects themselves than with their narrative functions.Ryan and Weisheng begin the book with two methodological chapters, one exploring the mimetic function of objects as presented through linguistic signification, and the other delineating the more macrolevel functions (thematic, strategic, and structural) of objects in the larger designs of narrative. These chapters are followed by seven interpretive chapters that range widely in topic and source texts: the possibility of nonhuman narration is explored through the wilderness writer Rick Bass, questions of ordinariness and accumulation through Karl Ove Knausgaard and Nicholson Baker, and aesthetics of enchantment in classical Chinese literature, among other object-foregrounded narratives. This range is impressive, but the organization and logic of the book can feel arbitrary at times. After a detailed methodological setup, the book becomes conceptually more open-ended as it proceeds through its interpretive chapters. It is as if objects are so ubiquitous throughout narratives that their omnipresence overwhelms the authors’ conceptual framework.The book relies on some taxonomic touchstones to keep the reader grounded, particularly its adaptation of James Phelan’s tripartite model of character to a similar framework for narrative objects. In his 1989 book Reading People, Reading Plots, Phelan takes up the concept of character—to that point a neglected element of narratology—and explains three dimensions of character: the mimetic, which highlights a particular and plausible personhood; the thematic, which registers the character as representative of larger symbolic and thematic ideas; and the synthetic, which reveals characters as textual constructs, laying bare the linguistic foundations of narrative. Phelan’s schema inspires Ryan and Weisheng to adapt it to objects within narrative. Mimetic and thematic objects function analogously to their role in Phelan’s model, as an index of descriptive particularity in the former and symbolic significance in the latter. In place of the “synthetic” category, the authors find two other functions for objects: the strategic and the structural. The strategic function addresses the uses of objects within particular narrative actions, while the structural function points to objects as unifying devices, as in the case of an accordion that links disparate characters and histories in Annie Proulx’s 1996 novel Accordion Crimes. These are helpful descriptive categories for identifying the narrative function of objects. To my mind, however, the strategic and structural could be collapsed into one category, as both denote the elements of a narrative through which objects contribute to the sequencing and arrangement of narrative events (rather than simply projecting a Barthesian “reality effect”). In any case, the main contribution to be made by the book is one that deepens existing taxonomies of narrative by offering a more granular understanding of a category that exists in an ambiguous space between setting/storyworld and characters/agents within the narrative. The book demonstrates how objects shuttle in dynamic and significant ways between these domains.The title of the book perhaps oversells its scope. The nod to “OOO” is clear, but by replacing the last word in that phrase with “narratology,” the book prompts readers to expect a more fundamental reworking of narratological premises. After all, in philosophy, OOO aims at a foundational revision of subject–object relations, a central and recurring problem in philosophy that goes back to Descartes, if not earlier. Thus, the title of Ryan and Weisheng’s book suggests a similar reassessment of narratological first principles. Ryan and Weisheng are not advancing a new model of narratology, but rather, shining a light on an element of narrative that has previously been ignored, or at least given attention only as an ancillary topic. This approach prompts the authors to walk a fine line between centering objects and acknowledging their intimate and ubiquitous connection to human-centered narratives. Of their methodology, they write that, “rather than marginalizing humans, [the book] attempts to capture how objects shape human experience” (22). The book casts objects in an essential, but secondary role; to use an analogy from film, they are the mise-en-scène, the worlding, without which human stories could not unfold fully.The most fundamental difficulty in object-oriented narratology is that objects only become narratively significant when they reveal or deepen our sense of the human characters in a narrative. Certainly, there are objects that come to function as characters within specific narratives (Kafka’s 1919 short story “The Cares of a Family Man,” featuring a talking spool-like household object, is one celebrated example). In one chapter, the authors refer to eighteenth-century “it-narratives,” which personify an object and narrate social networks through its “voyages” as a historical genre based on character objects (the most vivid example discussed is Thomas Bridges’s The Adventures of a Bank-Note (1758–75), which tells the story of the eponymous bill circulating from the bank, to the owner, to the shopkeeper, and so on). These objects, of course, take up a narrative function and are, therefore, strongly anthropomorphized—if they are not human, they take up that role in narrative (a phenomenon discussed by Bernaerts, Caracciolo et al.). It is not the objectal status of the banknote that renders it a narrative; it is its subjectification through the narrative voice. Other objects, as Ryan and Weisheng show, are resonant largely in how they are tied to human characters, their actions, their relationships, and their interior lives. Ultimately, the book underscores what Monika Fludernik wrote about narrative in 1996: that, categorically, it has an “anthropomorphic bias” (9). We invest in narratives to the degree that we identify complex human (or heavily anthropomorphized) analogs to our own senses of identity, consciousness, and embodiment. If anything, Ryan and Weisheng point us toward examples of objects that gather into a kind of narrative force, imposing themselves on the human characters in a narrative—that is, when a particular narrative object or a collection of objects becomes an objectal dimension of narrative. This is a welcome complication of existing models of storyworld, which often connote a more environmental sensibility that can swallow up discrete things within a world.Although Object-Oriented Narratology casts its cultural and historical net fairly wide, the critical interest in objects has clearly increased in the past couple of decades or so, driven by the aforementioned developments in philosophy and ecocriticism. Yet, the invocation of these theoretical contexts feels less like a theoretical interrogation of the foundational role of objects in narrative than a listing of different approaches and objects without an underlying synthesis. The authors prompt the reader to ask the question, “why objects now?” but are reticent in offering answers. I am not calling for a granular historicism here, but the book might gain more coherence and insight by putting its concerns in a temporal frame. I submit that two related cultural-material “turns” have brought objects (and nonhuman agencies more broadly) to the front burner of philosophical thinking: accelerated capitalism and climate crisis. As commodification and dehumanization intensify, and as environments become ever more unpredictable and ungoverned by human designs, it seems like the subject has, on a material level, lost mastery over the world of things. Ryan and Weisheng address these circumstances indirectly through their citation of philosophers in the introductory chapter, but a stronger framing of objects within a geo-historical framework (as Erin James does in her Narrative in the Anthropocene) would give more coherence and force to the interpretations within.A more accurate (though perhaps less marketable) title for Ryan and Weisheng’s book might be Object-Oriented Narratological Interpretations. On these terms, the book models an attentiveness to the objectal agencies and dimensions of narrative in a valuable and incisive way even if it stops short of exploring the larger philosophical implications suggested by its title. The book does enrich existing conceptual frameworks—particularly in its adaptation of Phelan’s character types to objects—and, as such, will prove a useful contribution to contemporary currents of narratology, especially ecocritical and Marxist approaches. One might wish, given the opportunity for more sweeping philosophical claims, that the book could offer a fundamental methodological shift that moves beyond the descriptive and taxonomic conventions of narratology. But this limitation is ultimately more bound up within the anthropomorphic structure of narrative itself, and its magnetic pull toward human subjectivity, than any shortcomings by Ryan and Weisheng. To its credit, Object-Oriented Narratology advances the conversation between new materialist philosophies and the study of narrative in a language and framework that will be welcomed by many narratologists.