The Problem with Things

Continental European writers spent much of the 20th century being terribly interested in things. (Georges Perec even had a book with precisely that title.) And not just in thinking about things. But in worrying about them. There seems to have been general agreement that there was a problem with things. A crisis in the thing kingdom. People had become alienated from the things around them. The thing-question was the great topic of the age. Whole literary movements were devoted to it. The nouveau roman was about nothing else. There are few if any, it would seem, who did not share in this general anxiety.

Should we be anxious too? It's hard to know. It would have to be clear what exactly the problem with things is before we can assess how dire it might be. I'm not sure exactly what people meant when they said they had become worryingly alienated from the things around them. 

Perhaps it was an overhang of Marxist theory - specifically the early Marx, the young Marx, with his notion that the objects of our built environment no longer reflected the investment of labour-value from our own hands. That is precisely the more wooly and metaphysical part of Marx, though, that I have the hardest time wrapping my head around these days (whereas his analysis of exploitation or primitive accumulation, say, still rings true in many ways). 

Or perhaps this thing-obsession had something to do with Existentialism—the separation from things, as I understand it at second-hand—being one of the sources of the eponymous "nausea" at the center of Sartre's famous conte philosophique. If so, then perhaps I just haven't read enough Existentialism to understand what the problem is. But certainly, in my life, while there are plenty of sources of angst and dissatisfaction, my relation to inanimate objects has not been a source of major concern. 

If we look at the writings of the great theorist and progenitor of the nouveau roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet, we discover that the thing-problem from his point of view was much closer to the latter possibility. It was fundamentally cosmological in nature. As he describes it in his theoretical work For a New Novel, the fundamental difficulty with things is that they used to serve our purposes, but now they no longer do so. In the old arguments-from-design, the universe as a whole was conceived as a built environment—designed for humanity's wellbeing. God made the animals to feed and clothe us, made wood and fire to warm us, and so on. 

Art before the mid-twentieth century, in Robbe-Grillet's telling, tended to replicate—however unconsciously—these cosmological assumptions. The novel's "setting," in the hands of the 19th century masters, was simply whatever collection of objects could be used to tell us something about the people involved, or about the story that was about to engulf them. Objects only merited a mention when they had something to do with character or plot, that is to say, and thus the world the novel created was charged with human emotion and human meaning, in even its inanimate details. (What John Ruskin in an earlier generation would have called the "pathetic fallacy.")

Under modern conditions, however, our world has suffered a Weberian disenchantment. The surrounding environment has become mute, cold, and indifferent to our existence. We have been reduced to simply one object among many, none of which is actually defined by its relationship to our needs. A world that was once charged through and through with human meaning, where everything was relevant precisely to the extent that it furthered human needs and human survival, has been replaced by a random and uncaring collection of atoms. 

This gives rise to a literature of despair—an Existentialist literature of the absurd—a series of works based on what Robbe-Grillet describes as a fundamentally "tragic" view of existence. Human beings are stranded amidst indifferent or hostile objects which have lost any meaning for us. We are lost in a world of things, and that defines our plight, at least for many 20th century writers. 

Next, however, comes the distinctive Robbe-Grillet twist—the one that yielded the birth of the new novel. For, he argues, this "tragic" Existentialist view, for all of its mechanistic understanding of the universe and ostensible materialism, is really the result of a theological overhang. The novel only retains this problem because it hasn't gone far enough yet toward genuine atheism, has not purged itself fully of its former metaphysical assumptions. 

The 20th century novel of angst (Nausea again comes to mind) took as its starting point the idea that humanity had become alienated from the world of objects. But the very fact that it regarded this as a bad thing revealed the extent to which it had retained its theistic assumptions. 

After all, if there is no theological meaning to the world, Robbe-Grillet reasoned, why should the fact that humanity is simply one object among many concern us? Why would it be a bad thing? Why should we expect human beings to be elevated above the inanimate? Does the very despair of the Existentialist writers not give away the fact that they actually still placed humanity at the center of the universe, in spite of their avowed atheism? If humanity is indeed not the center of the universe, after all, then we should not begrudge the objects around us their indifference to our fate. 

It's an interesting, if emotionally hollow, argumentative maneuver. Maybe, Robbe-Grillet suggests, we can defeat despair by doubling down on it, in a fashion somewhat akin to those adolescent arguments against nihilism we might once have deployed. "If nothing really matters," we once said to the nihilist, "then why does it matter that nothing really matters?" 

Whether we find any of this satisfying or persuasive is another story, but it does provide a logical scaffolding for the form the "new novel" was later to take. Robbe-Grillet's own novels applied, at least in some measure, his principle of object-equality. Things and environments are described regardless of their relation to the plot or protagonist. Information about objects is retailed to the reader regardless of whether it is "important," in the way we usually judge this criterion in a novel. The result is highly enervating, to say the least, and I confess I've never quite made it through a full Robbe-Grillet novel as a result. 

I did, however, read and finish Peter Handke's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which I found to be a more effective and satisfying use of the same techniques. 

Before I looked it up out of curiosity and realized that Handke was indeed an avowed disciple of the nouveau roman, I thought I detected shades of the French masters of the genre in his narration. As in a Robbe-Grillet novel, GAATPK contains a number of violent and gruesome incidents—a woman murdered without motive, a missing child's body found in a river. But it is narrated in such a way that the author in no way marks these ghastly items out. The narration fails to set these forth more vividly than the other occurrences or objects that surround them—applying the theoretical object-equality to which the new novel aspires. 

The effect is a kind of "flatness" (to borrow Clement Greenberg's term) such as one might find in an abstract painting. Handke's protagonist, Bloch, spends more time discussing tea kettles, the prices of wardrobes and their excessive number in a hotel room, and the foam in a beer stein than he does the horrific crime he commits, the women he attempts to seduce, or the corpse he uncovers. He, as much as the author, travels through the world applying object-equality to all that he encounters. The result, however, is not an escape from existential horror, such as Robbe-Grillet presents it, but an immersion in it. 

Bloch throughout the novel struggles with the perception that things are losing their significance, i.e. their relation to himself. He can no longer define them. He struggles to form sentences that would help him visualize them. Eventually, as his condition deteriorates further, he starts to string together words as individual units—"'wardrobe' 'then' 'a' 'wastebasket'" (p. 124, Roloff trans.)—and ultimately, when this too fails to cement the objects' meaning in his head, he resorts to thinking in tiny ideograms. 

The novel descends, for a sentence or two, to pictographic images—a tiny representation of bed, chair, window, etc. Bloch's brain is breaking down under the strain of living in accordance with Robbe-Grillet's principles, trying to allow each object to stand alone, rather than relating it to one's self and one's human needs. 

It is tempting, given the Austrian connection, to wonder if Wittgenstein was not on Handke's mind at this point. Because the Viennese philosopher certainly was concerned with exactly this sort of linguistic problem; and he presented a different way of resolving the "problem of things" than the one pursued by Robbe-Grillet. Moreover, Wittgenstein solves it without falling into either the "tragic" existentialist vision or the theological/metaphysical assumptions of yesteryear. 

I am certainly no expert on the late Wittgenstein (or early, for that matter), but as I understand it, his later works took aim precisely at the Bloch/Robbe-Grillet idea that objects could be isolated wholly from their relation to human purposes. 

Wittgenstein argued: according to a naïve conception of language—such as that found in the opening of Augustine's Confessions—words are assigned based on a one-to-one correlation with the objects they represent. Augustine imagined his infant self being shown around the room and learning the name for each independent thing, and thus acquiring language in this fashion. Bloch, in the final passages of Handke's novel, is reduced to much the same pre-lingual state. He is trying to string sentences together out of these same autonomous discrete elements and finding it impossible. 

Wittgenstein's point was that this is not actually how human languages are formed, nor how human beings develop the ability to speak. In reality, we only learn the meaning of words through relating them to ourselves. Words have a meaning to the extent that they have a use. The purpose of Wittgenstein's discussion of "language games"—as I understand it (based on Ray Monk's outstanding intellectual biography of the philosopher)—is to convey this truth. It is possible, he argues, to imagine languages that have no "names" for objects at all, but that nonetheless manage to convey meaning to other people. 

If language is defined by its use for human beings, therefore, then anything written in human language (which any novel or other work of literature invariably is) will find it impossible to ever truly achieve the kind of object-equality that Robbe-Grillet envisions. There will be no such thing as a novel comprised entirely of a list of objects, stripped of their relation to human beings, because in the very act of writing, in the act of speaking about these objects with human words, the author has already related those things to human purposes. She has already endowed them with a human meaning. 

This presents, then, an alternative route out of the problem of things that Robbe-Grillet describes. And it works—like most philosophical arguments, to the extent they work at all—by suggesting that the "problem" was never a real problem to start with. "Things," the objects around us in the universe, do have meaning, are charged with human meaning—but not because they were designed for us, not because God or anyone else put them there for our uses; rather because we understand them in the first place only through our human conceptual apparatus, we form ideas about them only through the language communities we have formed with other people, and inside which all words are defined by their human and social uses.

 Handke's novel, therefore—even as it bears the influence of the nouveau roman—presents a kind of warning against applying its tenets too literally. There is no escape into true object-equality, and such a move, if it could be made, would in fact be no escape at all. It would only be the total loss of human definition, of human community, the ultimate loneliness that can only come from completely losing the ability to communicate with others or participate in the language community. It is fitting, in this regard, that Bloch's cosmic loneliness in the novel, his total alienation and isolation, culminates in his losing the ability even to speak. 

In the theorist's defense, Robbe-Grillet would not, I gather, be entirely surprised by this outcome. He holds out the possibility, in his For a New Novel, that his very struggle to escape from tragedy by doubling down on it, his effort to escape from the problem of objects' indifference by becoming indifferent to that very indifference, "is precisely the tragic illusion par excellence." (Howard trans.) It is certainly this sense of tragedy that haunts Handke's novel. But as I have tried to argue above, it is a tragedy that either cannot possibly be escaped, or that never needed to be escaped at all. To the extent we use human language, we are already supplying the objects of our environment with meaning. And that is the meaning that may have to suffice, for it may be all that's there.