Object-Oriented Narratology— Marie-Laure Ryan, Tang Weisheng — Frontiers of Narrative, 1, 2024 — University of Nebraska — 9781496238795 — c6c7603e1d289da8fa7641db6231425b — Anna’s Archive
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Highlights
Our analysis so far has hopefully disclosed Bass’s “cautious” strategy in his animal-man narratives: animals have consciousness, but they do not speak human languages, nor do they act on human rationality, while humans may be like animals, but they differ from wild beasts. To put this differently, humans and animals have much in common, but they also have their own subjectivity, and this makes them unique in their own ways. — location: 1603
They have been, so to speak, metamorphosed into animalmen, and like the plants and animals around them, they become part of nature. Neither the animals nor the humans attempt to give meaning to the other from their own perspective. They stare at each other for a while and then go their separate ways. — location: 1621
In “The Lives of Rocks,” as the title suggests, Bass is trying to show that everything in the world has its own form of life (it would take a whole essay to fully develop this point). As the dying Jil reflects, “of course rivers were alive. Of course mountains and stones were alive” (95). In the moment of her death, Jil tries to locate the meaning of life, and her strategy is to forget herself and to extend her life into that of other natural beings. When she thinks of the old deer as “graceful” and “elegant,” she is not awed by the animal per se, but by the life it embodies. — location: 1636
It is “invisible to the eye,” “generated when a certain individual, or a certain species, enters a certain landscape” (153), and it can be felt only when one is “enmeshed in it” and no longer “an alien observer” (154). By enacting this claim, Bass’s animal narratives can be described as “intersubjective fiction,” — location: 1644
Neither dead nor alive, the father shares the hybridity of the undead (or zombies), those terrifying creatures of popular culture.1 Hybridity also explains the narrator’s fear of the grandmother, who is both object and human (like the things in the house, she needs cleaning). If the becoming-animate of objects is scary, as Poe’s sentients things demonstrate, because it transgresses ontological boundaries, — location: 2087
By becoming pure object, the dead body represents the opposite of the “dead nonbeings” that scare the young Karl Ove. — location: 2115
The relative flatness of Knausgaard’s objects—they impress his narrator more through their proliferation than through their individual features— comes into sharp relief when we compare their role and mode of evocation in My Struggle with how objects are experienced and described by Howie, the narrator of The Mezzanine, — location: 2155
Refusing to subordinate the vehicle to the tenor, metaphor for Howie is not the embellishment of things that Knausgaard rejects but is language gone wild, asserting its autonomy, as this description of popcorn demonstrates: — location: 2206
One way to repurpose objects is to use them not for practical purposes but for ludic activities. — location: 2299
Through a change of scale, an object of limited size can hold the infinitely large world of the imagination. — location: 2341
The sentence reads: “Manifestly, no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today” (124). In spite of a style that Howie finds awkward and archaic, the sentence hits the nail by referring to Howie’s here and now situation: what he is doing when he reflects on the function of the grooves of the escalator, or on why his shoelaces broke two days apart from each other, or on the difference between paper straws and plastic ones for drinking milk from a carton is simply philosophy. For philosophy doesn’t have to be about the transcendental, the timeless, the absolute, and the abstract: The Mezzanine develops what Ross Chambers (1994, 790) calls a “philosophy of the contingent.” — location: 2390
Through this metonymic connection to a certain individual, ordinary objects that are part of a general category (such as all combs or all shoes) become unique and unreplaceable as x’s comb or x’s shoe. — location: 2439
The most common narrative strategy for humanizing objects rests on a metaphoric relation: some human properties are projected on material things, such as the ability to speak, think, or experience emotions. — location: 2429
The concept of the innocence of objects expresses their insistence on being themselves, their independence from human-made stories, and their resistance to serve as mere instruments to human goals.5 — location: 2566
According to Heidegger (as discussed in Harman 2018), the usefulness of object, which subordinates them to human will, makes them invisible to us, but once they are no longer reduced to an instrumental role, they become active and visible, which also means alien and fearsome. — location: 2603
The general (should one say abstract?) nature of the category “objects” liberates oon from any dominant theoretical influence. Some of our chapters privilege new materialism as source of inspiration, but other interpretive models can yield valuable insights, such as a phenomenological inquiry into the subjective experience of things, a Marxism-inspired critique of consumerism, a cognitive approach dealing with the memorial function of objects, a psychoanalytical approach concerned with the kind of erotic fetishism that we saw in the Pamuk novel, or an environmental approach concerned with the ecological impact of waste. Just as oon is not chained to a particular philosophy, it is not dependent on a particular methodology, beyond asking the fundamental questions: how are objects represented in narrative (the topic of chapter 1) and what role do they play in narrative meaning (chapter 2). — location: 3979
our case studies focus on the relation between humans and objects, that is, on the subjective experience of objects, leaving it to philosophy to probe their mode of existence or to describe “what it is like to be a thing” (Bogost’s [2012] expression), and leaving it to poetry to reveal “what makes the stone stony” (Shklovsky 1965, 12; italics original). — location: 3988