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Woolf Solid Objects

Solid Objects

• 1918 begins writing it
• published 1920 Athanaeum story
• 1944 reprinted posthumously in A Haunted House and Other Stories
• Figures in Bill Brown’s thing theory and in Doug Mao’s Solid Objects

Content

• Objects: “nothing was so solid, so living, so hirsute and virile as these two bodies for miles and miles of sea and sandhill.”
  • even as an outline they have “vitality”
  • yet the bodies “shake themselves free” of their argument and are ready for the next activity, something new (receptive)
  • once they stop arguing, they begin interacting with objects (slate stones, sand) and “his eyes lost their intensity” and became clear w/child-like transparency, with the wonder of a child (Baudelaire and child and wonder! but here we see objects involved)
    • the self as having an argument disappears, the self with an agenda – just as his hand disappears into the sand
      • it is the entire story enacted in miniature
    • next, he recovers imagination, thinking about everything the little pool of water he discovers could represent (“A secret channel to the sea”)
    • and then he finds a piece of…we find gradually that it’s some sea glass “impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler, or window-pane; it was nothing but glass; it was almost a precious stone”
      • Me: as it loses its specificity it begins to look like pure value, no use; or perhaps like money, like pure exchange value (the working upon something by a force itself material, the ocean, makes it like this, lose its identity, just like the sea made those two lose their identities)
    • this neutrality then leads to imagination again: “perhaps after all it was really a gem;something worn by a dark Princess….”
  • then he has it “blot” out his friend, another destruction of identity in favor of, “It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore”
    • compare with Clarissa who herself is seen to have this power! same power that this piece of glass has
• So John, young politician standing for Parliament, slips it into his pocked (Charles doesn’t see): as if “believing the heart of the stone leaps with joy when it sees itself chosen” and puts it on his mantelpiece
  • Wunderkammern?
  • as “paperweight” and somewhere to direct your vision “a natural stopping place for the young man’s eyes (it solves the ambiguity of vision)
• Object Changes Due to Stress of Consciousness, Just as It Had Changed Due to Ocean Currents
  • “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.”
    • and yet as we shall see it will change him and his consciousness:
• He begins a collection, looking for anything that looked like his piece of glass: in curiosity shops, the ground “especially in the neighborhood of waste land where the household refuse is thrown away” – which he conceives as useful for a young man in his position (“papers to keep in order”)
• One day finds a piece of china, starfish shaped “determined to possess it” but it keeps receding b/c of pressure of his stick … he goes back fashions his stick so he can catch it … succeeds but then he’s late
  • he cares about it b/c it’s accidentally shaped so (just like I learned in Belk!) “unlikely that there should be another such in existence” “freakish” “Seemed to be pirouetting through space” “vivid and alert” tho’ the glass is “mute and contemplative”
    • the objects are becoming more and more like people
    • makes him think metaphysically: how can world create two so radically diff things? or even be on one mantelpiece
• So now search intensifies, for broken china: immense variety, “cause for wonder and speculation in the differences of qualities and designs”
  • So instead of Hopkins being fascinated by the pied beauty of the works of God, we have this man being amazed by human creations and how they get altered by human or non-human force
  • searches to the dereliction of public duty. Not elected…but doesn’t feel devastated: he’d found a cool piece of iron that seemed “Alien to the earth” “Cold” “meteorite:” he’s fascinated you can keep them all on the “same ledge”
• “the determination to possess objects that even surpassed that even surpassed these tormented the young man” and suffers fatigue derision in his search
  • creates his own perfect tool for the getting of stuff, and his taste gets more particular
  • no one asks him to dinner or visits him
• And finally Charles asks him why he gave up his politics, and John’s answer says he doesn’t even realize politics really exists anymore, and Charles senses that the objects have something to do. but leaves. friendship over. never to come again.
  • obsession w/objects ruins interpersonal

Form/Style

• Written in impressionistic “real time:” how you discern the story. Instead of the narrator clearly delineating what is or is not the story.
• A very short story, only enough to set up one major scene where he gets the glass, then a few scenes where diff things make him progressively forget everything else, and then the final scene when we see the end: his being given up by his last friend.

Interpretation

• Remember Simmel and how pleasure in interacting with objects escapes the subject. I want to add that of course the constitution of the subject varies by history and by cultural context (so that here the men as subjects are defined by having an aggressive viewpoint)
• Objects subject to loss of identity and then subject to imaginative reconstruction
• Soon John b/c he’s possessed by the need to have possessions, is emptied out of all his other qualities: his ambition, his friendships, his interpersonal ability, his cleanliness even. Has nothing to talk about at dinners: he’s been emptied, neutralized, while the objects themselves are what have personality.
• It’s clearly an allegory of reification, where objects become subject-like and subjects become object-like