Object-Oriented Narratology

In Object-Oriented Narratology, Ryan and Weisheng rally together interlocking discourses on objects and things to explore their role in narratives across a range of texts. While the authors offer connections to foundational works in phenomenology and semiotics, they most directly contend with “new object philosophy,” a term they propose to encompass concepts shared between prominent ecological approaches, such as new materialism, actor-network theory, and as suggested by the title, object-oriented ontology.The material turns away from human subjects and toward objects, and their networks have entailed a fundamental revaluation of affective power, agency, and the scales on which certain nonhuman entities should be considered as whole, as cohesive, or in possession of an alien will of their own. For approaches that risk downplaying the significance of humans in the development of subject/object relations, the introduction of narratology by the authors provides a necessary complication by drawing attention to the constructedness of relations in texts across formats. Through it, the authors reveal striking range and historical specificity in beliefs about objects and their power to shape the contours of everyday human experience.The authors set aside notions of objects at their most extreme (like trading companies or the total volume of plastic in the environment), to instead foreground everyday things, like hats, handkerchiefs, accordions, curtains, and escalators, as they appear in narratives that emphasize their agency and social impact. Arrangements of these tangible objects, both intentional and incidental, document a long-standing literary awareness of phenomena related to varieties of thing-power; sometimes orchestrated by humans, but other times written about as part of emergent arrangements similar also to those described by Jane Bennett—who described how forces independent of observers can align to create emergent effects described to be much greater than the sum of their parts.In addition to a consideration of texts that stretch the limits of the typical paper substrate, the authors also address several instances wherein physical objects have been narrativized and re-presented to the public, such as in Clara Beaudoux’s Madeline Project (2015), a multimodal narrative told in 280-character tweets about a deceased woman’s former belongings, and in Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence (2008), a book and physical museum of antiques collected by the author and set to a tragic romance in a painfully nostalgic vision of Istanbul in the 1970s. The book’s global scope allows the authors to contend with objects of striking variety. An entire chapter devoted to objects in classical Chinese literature adds considerable depth to an analysis that already includes popular examples from English literature in America and Britain alongside accessible international translations from Europe, Anatolia, and beyond.Chapters 1 and 2 lay the foundations for a narratology of objects by establishing nonexclusive categories of their use in writing. Drawing from Phelan’s index of character functions, the authors describe objects first according to their mimetic qualities, and then their thematic, strategic, and finally structural dimensions in the proceeding chapter. Here, the authors explore the myriad ways objects come to populate storyworlds, motivate action, and with much less frequency, serve as the center of descriptive writing itself. While many objects in narratives appear to serve no purpose beyond sharpening the reader’s sense of presence and aiding in their construction of a satisfying mental image, those that stand apart from the background reveal farther-reaching applications, such as how the stuffed parrot in Flaubert’s A Simple Heart serves to reinforce the books’ central themes, while Othello’s much-theorized handkerchief offers an example of an object used strategically and thematically in the advancement of plot.The structural role of objects, introduced by the authors to Phelan’s original descriptive categories, attends to the book’s ecological aims by emphasizing things that connect narrative episodes rather than feature as part of the plot or at discreet moments. This category is perhaps best exemplified by the so-called “it narratives” of the eighteenth century, also known as object narratives or novels of circulation, which typically followed a singular object with a conscious awareness of its surroundings as it crossed paths with characters hailing from the various levels of society without agency or control over its movements and circulation. Highlighting this era, the authors analyze The Adventures of a Bank-Note by Thomas Bridges, wherein a paper bill exposes the complexity of London’s social strata by passing from person to person in exchange for a variety of goods and services. The authors note that the approach lapsed in popularity until the late twentieth century, when stories like Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes began again tracking objects as they encountered different peoples forming a tenuous web of connections between them.With theoretical underpinnings established, the authors dedicate subsequent chapters to case studies that directly relate to concepts deeply linked with the material turn. Chapter 3 examines the notion of a “flat ontology” through the works of Rick Bass, whose environmental narratives leveled the distinction between animals and humans by instilling both with equal significance in their occupation of a shared world. Deep ecology and new materialism both support an ontological perspective that places humans on the same plane as things without assumed superiority and with an appreciation for the unknowable complexity of subjectivity broadly. In Bass’s stories, humans are depicted with animalistic traits while animals are imbued with the capacity for human-like experience. As outlined by the authors, Bass’s perspective on ecology necessitated the development of a style described as “cautious anthropomorphism,” which activates human memories and experiences in the description of an animal’s point of view to make their lives more intelligible to the reader through the arousal of their sympathies.Chapter 4 reveals a surprising historical awareness of so-called “thing power” through an impressive re-examination of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Where most examinations of the short story typically attribute the manor’s gloomy objects and disconcerting arrangements to Poe’s preoccupation with the aesthetics of the Gothic Revival, Ryan and Weisheng’s analysis lends weight to these passages by emphasizing the agency of their contained objects and the accumulating effect they have on the novel’s characters—who experience the subtle decay of their sanity through their sustained exposure. The mysterious and foreboding power of objects in the story provides a strong conceptual link to the autonomous force of things in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, where the character’s surface-level understanding of these objects and their apparent effects neatly connects with what Graham Harman describes as the evident but impenetrably withdrawn nature of all nonhuman entities.In Chapter 5, the authors transition from plot-moving objects to narratives that feature mundane things experienced by characters with an overt subjectivity. Divided into two sections, the first considers My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, which plods through sensuous descriptions of encounters with mundane objects like credit card machines, blue jeans, and candy dispensers, with few fully emerging from the background in great detail. Sharing the name of the author, the narrator’s relationship with instruments of everyday performance offers a reflection of his mood and outlook while elevating the superfluous to narrative significance without the use of deceitful metaphors. The authors chart Knausgaard’s use of lists to describe objects in various states of disorder and how their accumulations impose themselves on the narrator and his living space, namely the many things needed to raise his three children. The second half of the chapter centers on American novelist Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (1988), which features drawn-out meditations on highly technological objects and reflections on their inner workings as they relate to stages in the narrator’s life. Marking their transition from childhood to adulthood and eventually daily work life, descriptions of an escalator serve to contain the multitudes of the narrator’s private imagination while linking together the novel’s distinct narrative episodes.Comparing two radically different character perspectives on objects, Chapter 6 examines those elevated to the level of the fetish in Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence and others rendered completely alien to human understanding in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée. In the first, the narrator, Kemal, falls madly in love with a beautiful shop attendant named Fusün, despite differences in their social standing and an active engagement to another woman. Early on, Kemal collects objects bearing her impressions, from clothes and accessories to dozens of half-smoked cigarettes, which he communes with regularly to release memories of their sordid romance. Following her tragic death, Kemal founded a museum to exhibit the accumulated effects—which exists in reality as one of the most popular tourist destinations in Istanbul. As recounted by the authors, Pamuk amassed a hoard of late twentieth-century mass-manufactured antiques over more than a decade, weaving them into a book to enhance its sense of realism but with the added effect of amplifying the semantic value of the physical objects themselves. The overt humanization of objects in the first half of the chapter is contrasted by the radically alien objects of Sartre’s La Nausée, which remain distant and surreal as fundamentally unknowable entities with a strange agency capable of both inspiring profound understanding in humans but also dizzying sickness and derealization.In Chapter 7, the authors contend with the proliferation of objects under capitalism by again showcasing two distinct character perspectives, starting with George Persec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965). The novel follows a young French couple after the Second World War as they accumulate objects not for their intrinsic qualities, but for their association with wealth and their symbolic connections to the so-called “good life.” Ryan and Weisheng connect the undifferentiated representation of both characters as a single social unit to the flattening characteristic of consumerism in the 50s and 60s. Also symptomatic, the couple, never satisfied with the objects they purchase, instead pursue the act of buying as an end in and of itself. The majority of the chapter is devoted to Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness, which examines the consequences of consumerism while advancing an ethic of Zen Buddhist minimalism. Set in the 2010s, chapters of the book alternate between those written by the protagonist, Benny, and those told by the book who is both an agent in the story and responsible for its physical progression. Shortly after the death of his father, Benny begins hearing objects speak with an awareness of their past, such as a window that laments its translucent character after its nonconcensual crystallization from grains of sand resulted in the death of an unwitting bird. At first regarded as a sign of mental illness, Benny learns to cope and even draws inspiration from the voices in objects and by the story’s conclusion wrestles control of his life from the book itself.Chapter 8 applies concepts from new object philosophy to an early accounting of objects in the Chinese literary genres of Bo Wu, Gan Wu, and Guan Wu. Translated to “an extensive array of things,” the authors contend that Bo Wu emerged alongside The Strange Tales as part of the first fully fictional narrative tradition to appear in China around 220 AD. These stories often took the form of precise evocations of objects and featured very subtle narrativization. According to the authors, knowledge of plants, animals, minerals, and other rarities communicated an author’s savvy intellect and credited their access to worldly knowledge. The technique bares the authors’ comparison to the suggestive use of lists by Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, and later Ian Bogost. Also with ancient origins, the poetic tradition of Gan Wu, translated literally as “putting emotions to things,” featured objects in evocative arrangements intended to communicate complex emotions argued by the authors to derive from the traditional Chinese perspective that humans and objects are linked together by an expansive and ever-present “emotional mesh.” The final narrative category, Guan Wu, refers to objects in their purest abstract forms. The authors argue that in line with the idealism of Confucian and Daoist philosophy, ancient Chinese poets sought to reveal universal truths in the natural and man-made world through ordered presentations of objects in literature and painting, as the authors point out the close relationship of the narrative style and the landscape painting tradition of shan shui.Chapter 9 concludes with a discussion of narratives that stretch beyond the page and into multiple modalities. In addition to addressing objects as physical supports for texts and inscriptions, the authors contend with a diversity of “storytelling agents,” first beginning with objects that appear in two-and-a-half dimensions, like book inserts including letters, postcards, and maps. Progressing into three dimensions with pop-up books and other interactives, the authors specifically examine a two-sided strip of text appearing in Zachary Thomas Dodson’s Bats of the Republic. The book instructs readers to create a Möbius strip by twisting the length of text and attaching the ends so that its stories blend together into a never-ending loop. The chapter ends by revisiting the physical Museum of Innocence and considering its exhibited objects as both related to the story and fundamentally independent representatives of a lost but cherished epoch in Turkish history.Moreover, the book establishes a foundation for an overdue narratology of objects, with potentially significant implications. Writing associated with the material turn has centered nonhuman agents and their networks in an effort to understand their existence and uncover their hidden pressures. While the authors grapple with several key aspects of objects mobilized in writing, they also reveal the unavoidable human element in attempts to capture the unknowable world of things. Ryan and Weisheng additionally offer direction for future studies that might draw out the political and ethical dimensions of their arguments into new contexts, with consideration for the ways narratives about objects have inflected our perception of their agency. Overall, the book should benefit object, thing, and material culture researchers, while certain museum professionals should find it insightful for engaging with a careful and varied approach to writing about objects.