In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1).

There must be few people who have
no interest in objects: collectors of kitsch, connoisseurs of antiques,
curators, people decorating their home or office, fetishists, hoarders. Our
lives are full of objects, often of no material value. In my study I have a
beautifully rounded piece of concrete, smoothed to the shape of an egg by the
rough and tumble of sea currents. I have a piece of slag from a steel mill, my
grandmother’s plaster vase, and a plate bought in Prague, commemorating the
anniversary of the Czech Fire Service. Why do we surround ourselves with
things?

As described by Schwenger, objects are representations of
Things; entities that are forever ineffable. As a painting is not a landscape
but an evocation of it, the object is not the Thing; rather, it is a symbol.
Our separation from the Thing, which the object attempts to heal, is a cause of
melancholy. This is the focus of Scwhenger’s book, explored in a collection of
essays a number of which were originally published in various academic
periodicals. The author is a professor of English and has written on
masculinity in literature, nuclear holocaust, and the place of visual imagery
in literature. He brings a considerable scholarship to his latest work, drawing
on psychoanalysis, literature, art and philosophy to examine our relationship
with the objects that populate our world. Although ostensibly a book about art,
there is considerable interest for mental health practitioners. There is an
obvious overlap of interest with the melancholia described by Freud; Schwenger
also makes frequent reference to the work of Kristeva and Lacan. There is a
discussion of the nature of hallucinations which, perhaps inevitably,
undermines the accepted idea that hallucinations differ from everyday perceptions
because they have their genesis in internal states rather than the external
world. But more fundamentally The Tears of Things explores the human
condition, and so has much to offer those of us concerned with mental health
and its pathologies. For Schwenger, the melancholy that is at the heart of
human experience is something to be understood aesthetically, not "reified
and commodified by the depression industry" (p. 16).

In the introduction Schwenger sets
out his thesis, reflected in the title of the book and appropriated from
Virgil: "Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience"
(p. 1). There is a melancholy, Schwenger asserts, associated with physical
objects. This might seem a somewhat strange proposition; after all we accumulate
things to comfort ourselves, to connect us to people, to places, to ideas, to
our own history. This is precisely Schwenger’s point: all this reminding
ourselves is necessitated by the impossibility of unification; we are forever
separated from the things that surround us. Objects may become the "custodians
of our memories", but in doing so they do not reveal themselves, only our
investment in them. The act of perception always falls short of full
possession, giving rise to a melancholy "that is felt by the subject, and
is ultimately for the subject" (p. 2). But The Tears of Things is
not merely about the psychology of perception. While it is a truism to observe
that the phenomenal world is hidden by a veil of illusion, Schwenger explains
that he is concerned with representation in a broad sense, including systems of
art. He refers to "unfamiliar and underanalyzed work" such as the
paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, the bizarre Codex Seraphinianus of Luigi
Serfafani, Haim Steinbach’s displays of objects, and the grotesque photographs
of Joel-Peter Wilkin. Schwenger explains this eclectic approach as an exemplar
of its subject matter: a collection of ideas; incomplete, somewhat arbitrary,
and ultimately a source of melancholy.

The book is organized into three
sections; "Representation" (works of literature, painting and
sculpture); "Possession" (artistic representations of systems of
control, such as collections, museums, dictionaries); "Dispossession"
(the debris that remains in the wake of the inevitable failure of the two
former projects). The range of representations includes everything from words
to cadavers, and so is itself, an encyclopedic undertaking.

The first chapter is ominously
titled "Words and the Murder of the Thing", and in that chapter
Scwhenger outlines his theory of the fundamentally alienating role of language.
Citing Swift’s satire of the correspondence theory of language in Gulliver’s
Travels, Schwenger begins with the observation: "Words and things seem
fated to an irreconcilable difference." This is more than a matter of the
slippery nature of language, however; the difference Schwenger is talking about
cannot be resolved by a better definition or closer attention to the inherent
uncertainty of language. Schwenger’s argument is that the role of language is
to separate. The myth of Adam is explored, using Hegel’s Philosophy of
Spirit: "The act by which Adam established his lordship over the animals
is this, that he gave them a name…" This naming involves a certain kind
of death, captured in the words of literary theorist Maurice Blanchot: "My
speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world."
There is simply no escape from this death, although we are compelled to try;
the world of given objects prior to their subjugation by words is externalized
as desire. This is not a desire that can be fulfilled, it can only "move
endlessly along the signifying chain, never fulfilling itself, never filling a
fundamental emptiness" (p. 32).

The problem of speaking is
replicated in the problem of "seeing things", an ambiguous phrase
that suggests both an unproblematic perception of the external world, and a
disorder of perception that leads to illusion at best, hallucinations at worst.
In this chapter Schwenger explores painting through the work of Lacan. The
organ of sight is also that which produces tears, nicely captured by O’Keeffe’s
Red Cannas in which the scale of the painting attempts to correct the
inevitable shortfall of seeing. The analogy to language is obvious, and in the
end we don’t "see" O’Keeffe’s cannas, our gaze is substituted by the
gaze of the flower, the drop of dew at the centre is a tear not for something
lost, but for something never really possessed.

In the chapter on possessed objects
Schwenger explores Virginia Woolf’s beautifully contemplative story "Solid Objects".
In that story John, an up and coming politician becomes distracted by the
beauty of an accidentally discovered lump of glass. Such is John’s
preoccupation that he loses focus on his political career, apparently without
regret. His friend Charles rues John’s lost opportunity, but when he brings the
matter up in conversation, John’s indifferent response leaves Charles uneasy.
Charles’ gaze fixes on the piece glass, which John has displayed on his
mantelpiece. Charles supposes they were "talking about different things",
and indeed they are. Woolf’s story evokes an interest in philosophical issues
of the time, such as epistemological questions regarding perception and the
material world. Schwenger cites a sentence from the story that is particularly
revealing:

"Looked
at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any
object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its
actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which
haunts the brain when we least expect it."

These concerns are reflected in
another of Woolf’s stories "The
Mark on the Wall" (referred to briefly in a later chapter). The protagonist
of this story (surely it is Woolf) notices a mark on the wall above the
mantelpiece. Rather than resolve the issue empirically (she could walk across
and have a look) she uses the opportunity to reflect on the nature of knowledge
and the futility of our attempts to know things. There is also a reflection on
the transience of material things ("it’s a wonder I have any clothes on my
back"). In both stories a solid object has taken on a liminal quality,
dissolving the subject in the process. Objects that defy categorization most
obviously exert such a power, but Schwenger argues that all objects, even
words, have just that effect; they possess the subject who would subjugate them.
Schwenger shows how literature might address philosophical issues, although he
makes no assumption that Woolf’s philosophy is determined by a prior exposure
to the like of Russell and Whitehead, with whom she was acquainted. But as one
of Woolf’s characters in "The mark on the wall" observes, "art
should have ideas behind it".

There are chapters on sculpture, narrativity,
classification and collection, with many examples of art that disrupt both our
perceptions of objects systems of meaning. Who can look at Oppenheim’s Fur
cup and saucer without shivering? Edward Gorey’s The inanimate tragedy
is a cartoon "story" that plays with common things like buttons, pins
and a marble. It also teases us with alliterative ploys, and manipulation of
tense. The point seems to be about the arbitrariness of narrative convention,
something that would please postmodern novelists; there is a playfulness
amongst the serious commentary. Perhaps even more memorable is Serafani’s Codex.
Several illustrations are included, each depicting unworldly objects that in
some cases combine the animate and inanimate. More mystifying, though is the
accompanying "explanations". These consist of patterns of novel
characters arranged in what look like sentences, but are completely indecipherable.
Rather than unpacking the meaning of the illustrations, they obfuscate further,
and are of course part of a program of screening the object while appearing to
remove that screen.

The Tears of Things is not
an easy book to read, although that is no fault of Schwenger, whose careful
explorations take the reader to the edge of understanding, and demand a certain
reflectiveness, not to mention patience, as representation is shown not reveal,
but to invite imagination. In a relatively short book Schwenger covers many of
the forms of art through which we try to appreciate, if not know, the world
around us. The book contains some memorable quotations, many of which could
serve as aphorisms for the art world. Baudrillard comments that "The work
of art must annihilate itself as familiar object and become monstrously foreign",
and that "the object is that through which we mourn for ourselves". And
as if to show that the business of melancholy is not all serious, Schwenger
cites the example of Samuel Johnson kicking a rock, and declaring "I
refute Berkley thus." Schwenger is aware that his project is
something of a contradiction, and there is something reassuring in his frequent
reminders that there is no endpoint to this exploration. With Eliot, we "arrive
where we started, and know the place for the first time."

An interesting application of
Schwenger’s thesis would be to gardens. Domestic gardens, it seems to me, are
an attempt to repair a separation. Plants are often set in unnatural contexts
(witness the constant gardening necessary to maintain them) and have little
utilitarian value. The specimen tree on the front lawn, the bed of flowers
bordered by its neatly clipped buxus hedge, the hardy succulent that no amount
of neglect will kill connect us to the natural world at the same time as
reminding us that the price of our dominion is separation.

In the final chapter Schwenger
brings his project as close to a conclusion as such a project can come: "Melancholy,
for all its links to real and metaphysical death, is a desire, a yearning that
refuses to conclude, that is always impelled past conclusion." (p. 175).
If The Tears of Things does not set that yearning to rest, perhaps it
makes it more bearable, just as understanding one’s own limitations makes it
possible to more fully explore what those limitations allow.

 

©
2006 Tony O’Brien

 

Tony O’Brien RN, MPhil, Senior
Lecturer, Mental Health Nursing, University of Auckland

Categories: Philosophical