Professor Jonathan Lamb
Vanderbilt University
My project is a monograph entitled The Things Things Say. The idea for this came from two quarters. The first was my growing interest in 'it-narratives', first-person fictional accounts of the lives of things such as slippers, feathers, clocks, coaches, money and animals published during the eighteenth century. This seemed to me a unique genre of fiction, quite different from the novel as it is usually categorised (a full and probable account of what a human being might be likely to do in the course of his or her life). It-narratives seldom follow the pattern of a bildungsroman, they are basically improbable, and their relation to humans (including the reader) is largely hostile. Almost without exception autobiographical things charge humans with inhumanity. The second was a series of books written about things which seemed to supply a theoretical outline suitable to investigating this new genre. These were Arjun Appadurai's collection of important essays, The Social Life of Things, and Nicholas Thomas's remarkable book, Entangled Objects. There is also a superb essay by Christopher Pinney called 'Creole Europe: the Reflection of a Reflection', published in the Journal of New Zealand Literature, which explores Theodor Adorno's judgment concerning 'the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects'. These anthropological enquiries into the autonomy of mobile things have been followed by Bill Brown's collection of essays, Things, and his monograph A Sense of Things, which set talkative things firmly within modernist and postmodernist frameworks. Then there were two important collections by Bruno Latour, Iconoclash, and Making Things Public, together with Lorraine Daston's Things that Talk, uniting a more strictly Heiggerian model of the thing with the history of science. In the last few years there have been a number of important essays and books by scholars of the eighteenth century, such as Deidre Lynch, Lynn Festa, Barbara Benedict and Mark Blackwell. They have treated the prominence of things not so much as cultural phenomena but as occasions of emotion and consciousness operating outside the envelope of the subject.
The scope of reference is large, starting with Ovid and Apuleius and ending with J M Coetzee, but the key chapters will concentrate on those authors who used to stand at the centre of the Augustan canon: John Gay, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. I am approaching them through Hobbes and Locke, whose notions of property, though very different, lay an equal emphasis on the connection between owning a thing in the sense of possessing it and owning a thing in the sense of confessing, relating or accounting for it. Hobbes and Locke are likewise concerned to set the limit of the verisimilitude of owning things this side of the authorship of things themselves - things such as bridges, churches, little fingers, and parrots, which may be spoken for or even speak themselves but not with any authority. But as neither political philosopher operates with a sufficiently secure definition either of the person or of fiction to mark this limit decisively ('There are few things, that are incapable of being represent by Fiction' - Hobbes) they open up the possibility of persons behaving like things, and things like persons.
So I am going to look at property on the loose, starting with Jonathan Wild's innovations in the market for the return of stolen goods; then at still-life painting and its relation to techniques of description; and at personification as a device that seems at once to mock and to enable the fiction of articulate things. This will offer a basis from which to read The Beggar's Opera as a sort of advertisement for lost lovers, The Rape of the Lock as an exquisite picture of a thing, A Tale of a Tub as an Epicurean celebration of surface as essence and of matter as soul, and The What D'Ye Call It as one of the century's first experiments with the passions aroused by trifles. I shall show how the failure fully to own things such as books, lovers, locks of hair, and the paraphernalia of a modern person releases things not only from the restraints of possession but also from those of genre. Here are the outlines of a literature of things that is exorbitant to Catherine Gallagher's recent definition of the early novel as lying between two alternatives, realist fiction (probable but not true) or realist fiction, (not true but claiming authenticity). It-narratives are not authored by anthropomorphised utensils and animals; they represent the autonomy of experiences that are not entirely human. They belong to a genre perhaps of realist fiction, i.e., the incontrovertible fiction of personate things that is filled with facts that stare us in the face, like the caps, hat and shoes on the beach of Crusoe's island. Certinaly they owe much to the most ancient form of the it-narrative, the fables of Aesop and Phedrus, the origninal of all slave narratives and remarkable for their hospitality to the voices of animals and things.
I want to to test these conclusions in another zone of literary production - maritime journals before offering an account of two of the most intriguing it- narratives of the century, Charles Gildon's The Golden Spy and Charles Johnstone's Chrysal, or Adventures of a Guinea. I want to end the book with a chapter on slave narratives using as title and guide Frederick Douglass's watchword to his companions after their escape plans had been betrayed, when he demanded they eat the paper on which he had written their tickets of leave, telling them: 'Own Nothing'. What if slave narratives, and the it-narratives and fables they are manifestly derived from, were narrative variations performed in response to the imperative of owning nothing?
