What makes humans human? According to Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, it’s things. “Making things, and then coming to depend on things” is what “sets us apart from all other animals, and ultimately turns us into the humans we are today,” said MacGregor in his introduction to the 2010 BBC radio series A History of the World in 100 Objects.
MacGregor’s series won extravagant praise from critics and a large and devoted audience. Each 15-minute episode examined one object from the British Museum’s collections. The oldest was nearly 2 million years old; the newest, a solar-powered lamp and charger, was acquired by the museum especially for the series. At the end of each episode, MacGregor would link that day’s object to the object in the following episode, enabling him to move swiftly from 1st-century Ohio to 4th-century China to 8th-century Mexico.
Three years later, it no longer seems so unusual to tell stories through things. In 2012, the British Museum and Radio 4 teamed up again for Shakespeare’s Restless World, a project which examined Shakespeare’s era and work through 20 objects. But these radio shows are just part of a growing fashion for telling stories through objects. “Object narratives” such as Edmund de Waal’s The Hare With Amber Eyes and Paula Byrne’s recent biography The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things promise to replace the subjective histories we are used to with something more concrete, more trustworthy. Byrne describes Austen as “the most elusive of all our great writers with the exception of Shakespeare.” And the more shadowy or otherwise ungraspable the subject—Shakespeare, Austen, the whole daunting 2 million year history of humanity—the greater the appeal of a narrative which starts with the tangible.
At the beginning of Byrne’s book she notes, with the weary tone of someone who has done her research, the numerous Austen biographies that track the writer’s progress from “Steventon to Bath to Chawton to Winchester”—in other words, from birth to death. To do so, they use such “mundane materials” as letters, diaries and pocketbooks. Her own non-chronological biography, Byrne says, will be “different and more experimental.”
Each chapter of The Real Jane Austen begins with an object which Byrne uses to illuminate some aspect of Jane Austen’s life. A drawing of a carriage is the starting point for a chapter about Austen’s travels; a topaz cross Austen received from her brother leads to a discussion of the importance of religion in her life, and so on.
Byrne’s approach is experimental, certainly. It’s also canny. Sales of biographies have more than halved in the last few years. If you want to trot through a famous person’s life from birth to death, you can look them up on Wikipedia. The conventional biography is being replaced by what one recent academic conference called “the event, the collective, the life in parts.” This could be a “biography” of a year, say, (Charles Emmerson’s 1913 or Kevin Jackson’s 1922) or a biography of a group of friends or collaborators (Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns, Evelyn Juers’s House of Exile). In these new biographies, breadth gives way to depth, the grand narrative to the microhistory. Object narratives sit easily within this trend, as Byrne’s subtitle, “A Life in Small Things,” suggests.
Small things can tell big stories. This is one claim that object narratives make—and who could disagree? But object narratives make more problematic claims about the nature of their stories. Consider the title and subtitle of Byrne’s biography, which seem to be at war with one another. The subtitle marks it as a microhistory, rejecting grand narratives in favour of small things. But its title says something different. The Real Jane Austen: not just a new account of Austen’s life, but a definitive one. There’s a certainty in The Real Jane Austen (in its contents as well as its title) that most biographies of the past few decades, even the birth-to-death ones, go out of their way to reject. In Hermione Lee’s 1997 biography of Virginia Woolf, another much loved and mythologised female author, she writes on the first page that there is “no such thing as an objective biography” and that Woolf “lends herself to infinitely various interpretation.” The book’s preface is a dissection of the flaws of life-writing—Lee’s and Woolf’s misgivings about the form combined.
Object narratives promise to solve some of these problems, gaining a purchase on the slippery business of biography. One of the key sources for Austen biographers has traditionally been her letters. However, the majority of these have been lost or destroyed, and her relatives tailored their written recollections to produce an image congenial to Victorian sensibilities: an Austen sweet and pious, ever ready to put aside her work and tend to family or visitors. Byrne does not dispute the value of Austen’s letters to a biographer but she does suggest that it is easy to read the letters, and novels, wrongly. The written word can mislead or be misunderstood; objects, in their concreteness, have the status of fact. If we start with the physical “facts” of Austen’s objects, so Byrne’s logic goes, the rest of her will fall into place: her letters, her novels, her “true self.”
You can see this same confidence in the revelatory power of objects in the preface to perhaps the most successful object narrative of recent years, The Hare With Amber Eyes. The author, Edmund de Waal, uses a collection of 264 netsuke (tiny Japanese sculptures made from wood or ivory) to tell his family history. De Waal’s maternal ancestors are the spectacularly wealthy Jewish Ephrussi family, who lost almost everything to the Nazis. At the start of the book, he expresses doubts about writing their memoir. “I really don’t want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss,” he says. A netsuke, by contrast, is a “small, tough explosion of exactitude.” By focusing on the netsuke, which have been passed between members of his family since the 1870s, de Waal hopes to avoid what he sees as the trap of memoir: a melancholy that is nothing but “default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus.” Both he and Byrne believe that through objects we can overturn predetermined narratives, whether the “elegaic Mitteleuropa narrative of loss” or the image of Austen as a cloistered spinster, interested in nothing but village gossip.
*** In 2001, the journal Critical Inquiry published a special issue entitled “Things.” The issue is now regarded as a touchstone of a school of criticism known as “thing theory.” It brought together physicists and historians, philosophers and anthropologists, professors of English and professors of visual art. Thing theory is so diverse because it is a development of what archaeologists Dan Hicks and Mary C Beaudry identify as a “material turn” that has taken place across the humanities and social sciences in the past few decades. This shift is evident in material culture studies in anthropology and archaeology, new historicism in literary criticism and the rise of cultural history. All these modes of criticism proceed from the belief that material objects can reveal stories eclipsed by dominant narratives; their philosophy underpins popular object narratives such as The Real Jane Austen and A History of the World in 100 Objects.
But thing theory is not the same as material culture studies. Instead, by calling into question the ways in which we make meaning out of things, it highlights some of the weaknesses inherent in popular object narratives. In his introduction to the “Things” issue of Critical Inquiry, Bill Brown, an English professor at the University of Chicago acknowledges thing theory’s disruptive potential. “Why not let things alone?” he asks, playing devil’s advocate. Why not allow objects to offer us “some stable alternative to the instabilities and uncertainties, the ambiguities and anxieties, forever fetishised by theory”? Like de Waal, Brown pits the concreteness of things against “unnecessary abstraction.” Is there not “something perverse… about complicating things with theory?” he wonders.
If so, it’s a perversity that Brown both enjoys and finds necessary. The articles that he introduced demonstrate that there is no neutral approach to things. In his subsequent book A Sense of Things (2003), Brown writes about a number of novels, such as Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton and Frank Norris’s McTeague, which, he suggests, ‘”make ‘things’ not a solution to a problem, but a problem in their own right.” For thing theorists, things are never a solution; if they are not always a problem, they are always a question.
Yet Brown still believes that “history can unabashedly begin with things,” citing books about the history of “the pencil, the zipper, the toilet, the banana, the chair, the potato, the bowler hat.” Perhaps he would see object narratives of the type created by Byrne, de Waal and MacGregor as further evidence that history can begin with things. I am not so sure. There’s a difference between the history of a thing and using a thing to tell the history of something else—and it’s differences of this kind that thing theory exposes. When we use things to tell the history of something else, the interpretation of that something else—a writer, a family, humanity—comes first, and the things fall into place accordingly.
In this way, object narratives revel in a false aura of objectivity. As one would expect, the things that Byrne chooses for The Real Jane Austen reflect her image of the author: spirited, ambitious, politically engaged. Chapter 16 begins with Austen’s “laptop”: a wooden box that serves as a portable desk and can contain writing materials. Byrne emphasises its portability and its privacy (the box has a lock and key). Her Austen is used to “writing on the hoof” and able to keep her writing separate from the daily demands of a household. Byrne could equally well have chosen a different object, such as the patchwork quilt Austen made with her sister and mother, which speaks of the hours she spent away from her writing, engaged in the most orthodox of 19th-century female pursuits—but an Austen quietly quilting has no place in this biography.
Even the same objects can tell a different story in the hands of a different biographer. One of Byrne’s “small things” in The Real Jane Austen is the register of the parish where Austen’s father was clergyman. At the front of the register, in the young Austen’s hand, are joke entries for three marriages, each of “Jane Austen” to a different man. Byrne sees in this “facetious defacing” Austen’s playful, informal relationship with her father; she sees, too, the imagination of the young Jane, “already a fiction writer of sorts.” Claire Tomalin, in her 1997 biography of Austen, places a different emphasis on the register, suggesting it shows a young girl “dream[ing] of future husbands.” Both biographers identify in the register the writer’s wit and imagination, but Tomalin’s Austen is more romantic, conventional and melancholy than Byrne’s. I find Byrne’s interpretation more convincing here, and The Real Jane Austen often is convincing. Chapter by chapter, she dismantles the image of Austen as an insular maiden aunt oblivious to the social and political upheavals of her day. But the biography is not objective, and no amount of objects will make it so.
MacGregor is more comfortable than Byrne with the fallibility of things. He knows that A History of the World in 100 Objects can “only be a history of the world, not the history.” The objects he has chosen are 100 out of the British Museum’s 8 million. Yet even MacGregor’s embrace of plurality becomes the assertion of a grand narrative. MacGregor interviews curators, experts and public figures throughout the series, but for all its polyphony, A History of the World promotes a particular view of humanity, one based on our “common heritage,” our “shared story,” our “ongoing joint project.” It’s a resolutely optimistic narrative.
*** While non-fiction object narratives cling to the truth of things, fiction offers a space in which to test things’ limits. Leanne Shapton’s 2009 sort-of-novel Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry anatomises a fictional relationship through objects. In doing so, it involves its readers in a discussion about objects and object narratives, showing the form’s possibilities and hinting at some of its weaknesses without succumbing to them.
The possessions that Lenore and Harold accumulated and exchanged over the course of their relationship are being sold at auction in the wake of their break-up, and Shapton’s novel takes the form of an auction catalogue, complete with photos. Mix CDs and shoes jostle with novelty crockery and vintage bathing suits. The contents of a man and woman’s washbags are displayed side by side. A price accompanies each description of an object.
Unlike non-fiction object narratives, Important Artifacts places the burden of interpretation on the reader. The novel’s curator-narrator arranges Lenore and Harold’s objects, but she does not interpret objects in the way that Byrne, MacGregor or de Waal interprets them. She writes the catalogue descriptions and puts a price on each object. Harold and Lenore’s letters are included in the auction, as are newspaper clippings by Lenore, a food writer; the curator-narrator decides which parts of these letters and clippings to quote in her descriptions. But she does not draw conclusions about Lenore and Harold’s personalities, or their relationship. This is our job, and we learn how quickly objects fall silent—how much they cannot tell us, as well as how much they can. An atmosphere of loss pervades Important Artifacts, not only because the relationship that it documents has ended, but because the objects, untethered from the lives in which they once participated, become mysterious: they represent the past and yet there’s so much of the past we can’t see in them.
Like Harold and Lenore’s important artifacts, the objects in non-fiction object narratives tend to be no longer in use: displayed in a museum or hidden away in a collection, their stories finished rather than ongoing. For all MacGregor’s optimism, his 100 objects speak as loudly of loss as they do of progress. Even de Waal’s netsuke, which his children now use as playthings, carry a kind of absence. His journey around Europe in search of his family history throws up endless absences and mysteries, and the netsuke remind us, and him, how much of their previous lives is irrecoverable.
Object narratives have a specificity that proceeds from the tangible—the “exactitude” that de Waal finds in the tiny, tough netsuke. The Real Jane Austen makes Austen a physical being by giving her an existence among things as well as in texts. When Neil MacGregor holds a 2 million year old chopping tool, he feels himself “directly in touch with [the first humans]”; as he describes it in his palm we feel its phantom weight in ours. But, as Shapton’s novel reminds us, specificity is not the same as truth or completeness. The epigraph, a quotation from the poet Novalis, contains a warning applicable to all object narratives: “We seek the absolute everywhere, and find only things.”
