I’ve recently returned, as some of you know already, from the second of the Theories and Methods events. This one took us around a variety of London’s museums; we were set the challenge of choosing an object to speak about at the end.
I staggered my way through a few minutes on a young plesiosaurus which I found in the Grant museum at UCL (by the by, I strongly urge you to visit this place if you haven’t already) during a wine reception there. It seemed a shame, the staggering, because I really had a lot to say about this little creature, its life cut so tragically short somewhere between 199.6 and 175.6 million years ago.
To give you a sense of scale, this is an object about six foot in height, mounted as the end of a bookcase. You turn around, holding your glass of dry white with unbelievable panache, and there it is. Your Mary Anning moment.
There are numerous reasons that my encounter with this fossil stirred something in me. Its immediacy was the one I made the most reference to in my three minute spew – there’s no glass, and there’s no warning. There’s just this thing – a thing that was once alive, which once frolicked in a world we can but imagine, a token of an era that people devote their lives to guessing at. All these things are sufficiently brain-blowing when considered abstractly, but when you have the object right there, suddenly real, in front of you, it can be pretty powerful.
There’s another layer to this. The fossil is labelled ‘Owen’, presumably to identify it as part of the work of Richard Owen, an incredibly awesome man (he invented the word “dinosaur”) (not that plesiosaurus is a dinosaur, of course) (I want to be eight again). So the feeling of encountering something alien, mentioned above, comes up against almost celebrity-like recognition and familiarity (”he touched this..!”). This only increases the intensity of the experience.
It’s the kind of feeling a ‘text’ (if we’re using that word) supposedly never brings. The convenors of this course want us to use objects more in our research, since they can tell their own stories and bring new perspectives. I think that this is only very ambiguously true, and I would like to cite my experience with the plesiosaurus as an example of why.
Because powerful though it was, I’d been getting ready for that encounter since I first read about dinosaurs in my early childhood; and I’d been getting ready for Richard Owen since I first read about him, too. The object being unlabelled didn’t help it speak to me unfettered by the constraints of text – it simply allowed wiggle-room for my own mental text to assert itself. We are narrativeised, narrativising creatures, and if a narrative isn’t given to us, we furnish one ourselves – either from our memories or our imaginations.
Here’s another thing – I’m not a palaeontologist. I have no idea whether that was a real fossil or not. It does seem slightly crazy to put something so incredibly awesome where just anyone can touch it. But then, the Grant museum is completely brilliant, and I could easily believe it of them. As long as I could believe it, there’s no reason I wouldn’t until I had sure knowledge, because I’m the sort of person who wants to be taken to poetic places by encounters with ancient sea creatures. Would my experience have been any different if this was a model, a fake? Of course not. The point I’m trying to make is that without expert knowledge, trust in the establishment – the implicit text, if you like, behind any encounter with a museum artefact – is always going to inform your object-experience. It informs it to the extent that parameters such as authenticity become almost an irrelevance – surely, then, objects can’t intrinsically speak to you?
That said, I can’t entirely side with those who rejected the idea of objects outright. One can’t assume we live in a text-only world, and this is where I think book history makes an important point. Books (texts) are objects – even the ones on screens – and the form in which you encounter them can be every bit as prejudicial as with a relic in a museum. It can also be as moving – I once got to see the original Frankenstein notebooks, with Percy Shelley’s alterations and marginalia, and found it moving in exactly the same way I found the plesiosaur moving. The object-ness of Shelley’s book was informed by my prior knowledge of the impact of its contents – on me, on everyone – and of the lives of its creators. And just as books can be (and are) objects, even in examples far less extreme than this, objects are seldom totally devoid of text: whether it’s something as apparently innocuous as a catalogue number, or as comprehensive as a nearby placard with the artist’s entire life history on it.
The problem, for me, is that the object-text distinction simply doesn’t hold. It isn’t that I believe – as some did, on the course – that objects can never be useful, it’s just that I’m certain they won’t become more so if set up in opposition to the things we traditionally study. In other words, I think objects could definitely play a larger and useful role in some of the more text-oriented disciplines, but I don’t think that new ‘Theories and Methods’ would necessarily be required in order to accommodate that change. In the case of English, at any rate, I’m pretty sure you could get much further by coming to the museum-object in much the same way as the book-object.
And as with the book, there should always be a secret space for romance, when all the theory has died down. One of the other participants in LitSciMed chose Darwin’s cane for his talk. His two reasons for that choice, if my memory holds, were (1) its aesthetic properties relate to what we know of Darwin’s character in an interesting way, and (2) it gives us a physical reference point for the stories of Darwin loudly tapping it as he walked along. Both diverting points (and both contingent on outside text, you’ll notice), but I don’t believe for one second that these are the reasons the cane got chosen. This is justification after the fact. The cane got chosen because it was Darwin’s cane, and That Is Cool.
I study late-Victorian Science Fiction stories. I can make all kinds of arguments about why that’s a profitable use of my time. But in the end – in the beginning, too – there is no getting away from the fact that they’re pretty cool as well.
Will Tattersdill