Narrative

Narrative 10.2 (2002) 140-155

Still Life:
A User's Manual

Peter Schwenger

"Still life," Norman Bryson has declared, "is the world minus its narratives or, better, the world minus its capacity for generating narrative interest" (60). Bryson links that narrative capacity to the human subject, which is evacuated by this genre devoted to objects: "Opposing the anthropomorphism of the 'higher' genres, it assaults the centrality, value and prestige of the human subject" (60). ¹ Of course, still life might equally well be seen as an assault on the object, on the vexed philosophical problem of the thing-in-itself—an assault that must always fail, filtered as it is by perception and representation. In either case, the end of still life is silence: the object is mute, and narrative, it seems, must shatter against it. This sense of the "stillness" of still life is involved with another sense of the word, a lack of motion that Bryson argues is fatal to narrative: "The law of narrative is one of change: characters move from episode to episode, from ignorance to knowledge, from high estate to low or from low to high. Its generative principle is one of discontinuity: where states are continuous, homeostatic, narrative is helpless. But still life pitches itself at a level of material existence where nothing exceptional occurs: there is wholesale eviction of the Event" (61).

These assumptions demand to be questioned, and with them the absolute severance of still life from narrative that they entail. It is far from self-evident, for one thing, that objects do not move through changes in time—we recall that Hans Christian Andersen's tin soldier, darning needle, and bottle neck take long, eventful journeys. And even if an object is viewed as motionless, there is a paradoxical connection to event in that very viewing. The minimalist sculptor Robert Morris asserts [End Page 140] the existence of a dynamic between the spectator and the art object confronted within the space of a room: that dynamic is a series of events experienced in the spectator, initiated by the object and the way it is positioned. In "Art and Objecthood," Michael Fried's essay on minimal sculpture, he criticizes its "theatricality," by which he means a disposition of the object designed to provoke (mental) events in temporal sequence. The stillness of an object, then, does not exclude the possibility of event.

In literary narrative we often find a translation of "Event" from its capitalized, presumably external, sense to a mental event with its origin in objects. Particularly in the modern period, the encounter with an object moved, in certain authors' works, from the margins to the center of their narratives. Virginia Woolf, for instance, welcomed the techniques of James and Proust because they offered new possibilities for writing about things: "The mind is freed from the perpetual demand of the novelist that we shall feel with his characters. By cutting off the responses which are called out in the actual life, the novelist frees us to take delight . . . in things in themselves. We can see the strangeness of them only when habit has ceased to immerse us in them. . . . Then we see the mind at work; we are amused by its power to make patterns" ("Phases of Fiction" 122). While the "things" referred to here are not confined to physical objects, the passage nevertheless depicts accurately Woolf's own narration of objects, of which her work affords many examples: the "Time Passes" section of To the Lighthouse ("I have to give an empty house . . . all eyeless & featureless with nothing to cling to" [Diary 3:76]); the baroque patterning of the mind in "The Mark on the Wall"; the uneasy relationship between human life and "the mystery of things" in The Waves (224; see McConnell, Webb);the obsession with bits of evocative debris in her curious short story "Solid Objects." ² Robert Kiely has even suggested that an aesthetic of the still life underlies the whole of Jacob's Room. And indeed the stillness of Jacob's empty room, described at the end in exactly the same...