The word ‘care’ often returns when you talk about materiality and literature. At what point did you start caring for the fictional materialities that occur in the works you’ve investigated?

Care is central to everything I do. Maybe it sounds a little bit touchy-feely, but I think that literature, literary criticism, the arts, etc. are practices of care, of slowing down, of being attuned to the word, the image, the object. It’s something that many people don’t make time for, and so it has a unique priority to me. The arts allow us and ask us to slow down and care.

But to answer the question more directly about when I became interested in literary objects. As a graduate student in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature it was hard for me to narrow down and focus, but I started to realize that so many of the novels I was reading, and the theoretical texts I was interested in, were filled with objects, and more specifically with disappearing objects. There were things that would appear in one chapter and disappear in the next, and their disappearance could be central to the plot – or not. So, I got very interested in why this seemed to be a trend or a leitmotif in the literature that I was reading. It came to me that way. It wasn’t a kind of theoretical interest that I then brought to the fiction. No, the fiction that I was interested in just happened to be really densely populated with this particular kind of object.

In The Death of Things. Ephemera and the American Novel, you shed light on what you call ephemera. What are they?

The word comes from a combination of a Latin and a Greek word: ‘epi’ and ‘hemra’. This translates into being around or existing for only one day or a short amount of time. The original term in English, ephemera, was used to refer to the mayfly, which has a lifespan of only one day. Later, it migrated to its present meaning and refers to paper objects that weren’t meant to last, such as a broadside, a ticket stub, a newspaper. The question that animated my book was: What does it mean to think of objects as not permanent, as things that have life cycles of their own?

In the book I’m expanding the conventional definition of ephemera to try to make sense of what authors such as Chester Himes or Ralph Ellison are doing when they think of, say, cityscapes as ephemeral or transient. Or what authors such as Marilynne Robinson are doing when they’re talking about women’s magazines or houses, or material patterns for dresses.

In your book, you’re discussing several postwar novels in which all kinds of ephemera help shape the narrative. Are their characters aware of the fact that the ephemeral objects they deal with are, in fact, dying?

In most cases – and I’m just thinking about the novels that I write about in the book – the characters are aware. They might not be aware in the way that you and I are, as we’re talking about it in a kind of theoretical, abstract sense, but they’re certainly aware that an object, a place, a setting, a scene that they expected to be permanent, is no longer there. This awareness can often be an important plot point. Exemplary is the introduction to Theodore Dreiser’s book Sister Carrie (1900), which opens with Carrie on a train looking at a scrap of paper. Also newspapers and pay bills are really central to the plot.

Even if the characters are not talking about the objects as ephemeral, I would say that they are made by the author to be aware of their impermanence in the course of the plot. It’s a fascinating question, as it highlights the contrast between how the world of the novel might be dealing with the ephemerality of an object and how we, as readers, engage with it from our own perspective.

In your publication you address the fact that, maybe, we aren’t that much fascinated by the vanished object, but rather by the vanishing itself. In this sense you wonder whether there could be something as ‘the art of losing’. Could you elaborate on that?

Well, I have to give credit to Elizabeth Bishop, who wrote a famous poem about the art of losing, “One Art” (1976). I think she’s thinking through that question in poetry. We’re faced with the loss of so many things, with both personal and collective losses. Think about climate change. But what does it mean to get good at losing? To think of it as an art that we might have to be good at in order to persist, really.

In literature, because the object itself isn’t there, we’re always dealing with just a representation of the object. It can only be described. Thus, readers come to the object in a space of distance or loss. The described literary object is always a proxy for the thing itself. So, I do think that literature is uniquely good at representing ‘vanishing’ and not just ‘the vanished object’. That is also true because we read in time. This generates a peculiar and productive intersection of life spans: that of the objects in the novel and that of the object of the novel.

When reading about an object, its relevance to the story goes beyond its material qualities. It is something that is to be experienced, sensed, in relation to the narrative. This means that a materially absent object, can still be present, as not having an object, or missing it, is also a way of sensing the object.

That’s right. Obviously, you need to understand the materiality to understand what’s being represented. The authors that I work on, whether it’s Philip Roth or Don DeLillo, are themselves good observers of the material. But for me the materiality is only important as a means to getting to that other thing, to understand the affect the material holds.

That’s why I enjoyed you mentioning Susan Stewart’s On Longing. Her theories have really supported me in understanding my artistic practice and my ways of dealing with objects. When trying to comprehend materiality in literature, I realized how you need a different set of senses. The object is constituted exclusively by language. And thus you need effort, imagination, empathy to come near the object. Do you believe that objects in their literary capacity are more powerful, significant or pungent?

First of all, I just love the use of the word pungent. If you find yourself in any setting where you have to explain something to people, you learn very quickly that they like examples. The more precise the example, the better your explanation usually is, and the better it lands. And it’s because people’s minds, I think, are wired to grasp more easily onto a material, vivid example then onto abstractions. Objects seem to do the same thing in literature; they are pungent vectors of meaning in a way that a dialogue or a description of a place may not be. When Marilynne Robinson writes about magazines, I think that we as readers, who have probably interacted with a paper magazine before, bring something of that sense memory to the reading. And so, when they are made to vanish in literature, we carry that sense memory. Even though this is all happening in the realm of symbolic language, and thus of ungraspable objects, our sense memory is helping us to process the object, as well as its disappearance.

In an interview with Calan Davies, you said that you consider the novel as some sort of container or storage medium.

Experts working on the play, the poem, or even the short story, sometimes point out that the novel, ironically, is the most monumental of forms that we might think of. Especially the so-called great male novelists had the ambition to write something that stands as a monument and lasts in time. In that sense it has a different archival status than those other forms. Or we seem to think it does.

For sure, I agree that the novel functions as an archive or a container for many different things. It remediates other forms of conversation or discourse. However, what I want to explore in my work is how the novel might be a container not just of the different objects that an author writes about, but of their loss. Novels so frequently move us because they contain the experience of grief or disappearance, of a kind of waning or thinning out of existence. Unlike a cabinet that contains files, or a museum that contains paintings, a novel has the unique capacity to contain emotions.

In a way, you could consider a book that narrates about jewelry as a jewelry inventory or casket, or maybe even a whole exhibition space with glittering things. Do you think that the author, intentionally or unintentionally, acts as a collector of objects or even as a curator?

Absolutely. I am a big enough fan and student of Walter Benjamin to believe that writing is a collecting of sorts. One great example is Observatory Mansions (2000), a novel by the British playwright Edward Carey. In this contemporary Gothic novel, the main character is a kind of demented collector. The novel itself is very aware of how it is curating the collection of its protagonists.

Some novels are very, very explicit about this. But of course, I believe in the power of subconscious mechanisms. Often novelists sit down and write stories that act as highly curated collections without intentionally doing that. Don DeLillo’s Underworld is a novel that I think is doing both at times. It’s a very explicit collection, but at other times it rather functions as a eulogistic collection of DeLillo’s own feelings about the twentieth century, and the promises it didn’t make good on. I think both can be true.

It reminds me of cabinets of curiosity or Wunderkammer, which have taken on literary forms.

Even if there’s not a clear sequence or link between the curiosities, we cannot help but narrativize. Why is the monkey’s paw next to the dried flower next to this piece of glassware? We’re always seeking narrative. It goes back to Susan Stewart again, who is so helpful in making us see the implicit and explicit narratives behind collections that might otherwise be invisible to us.

In your book Death of Things, you shed light on the fact that objects at some point cease to be and die. Now, is it, in your opinion, also interesting to think about whether literary objects could, in some way, resurrect?

Maybe objects die in literature. Maybe they never do. Maybe they’re always coming back. I think that’s certainly possible. I guess I have to write another book called The Resurrection of Things. But more seriously, my book is a little bit paradoxical or an odd fit within Material Culture Studies because I’m really reacting against the fascination with the object as agentic. The potential or meaning of objects interests me really only insofar as it tells us about ourselves. I think at the end of the day, we can’t escape ourselves and we have to figure out how we live in the world with meaning, principle, and value. And so I’m skeptical of the interest in objects as themselves. I’m more interested in what that interest tells us about how we live in the world and how we make meaning.

And thus the resurrected object is interesting because it raises the question: “Are we actually just trying to continue our hold on something? Is the resurrected object a kind of cipher for our own fears of mortality?” It’s much easier, maybe, to believe that we come back in different forms – and so do objects – than it is to think about a nothingness that follows once we are no more. And so, the resurrected object for me becomes a question about our own inability to actually just let things die. And let them disappear.

We repurpose objects; they reappear in different forms. And to go back to the very beginning of this conversation, it requires a kind of care on our part to figure out what the next chapter of a dead object might be. As opposed to an object that just magically comes back as something else, an artistic or literary resurrection always requires human intervention.

In my own artistic research, I’m exploring the literary jewelry piece. This object is readable, but not tangible, wearable or visible. The aim is to investigate in what ways it could be relevant to convert them into material pieces, in order to unveil their significance in unexpected ways. By means of transmedial transfers, I’m trying to disclose a certain kind of sensibility that is captured in the object.

When reading The Death of Things, I first held onto the idea that jewelry items are very different from ephemera, as the typical jewel is designed to be precious, valuable and aesthetically attractive. But then it occurred to me that jewelry often has ephemeral qualities too, as in many fictional narratives it is stolen, hidden, remelted or disassembled. So, do you think that the literary jewel is an object that might need its own kind of attention?

I do. I think that in a particular story or novel, a jewel might have some ephemeral properties, but indeed, in fact jewelry is not designed to be transient. It’s supposed to stick around. Even in a heist novel, where the jewelry gets stolen, it’s motivating the plot precisely because it’s supposed to be durable and enduring. I really like the idea of the jewel as having its own kind of animating force in literature.

Indeed, the jewel can initiate multiple dynamics. Not only in heist novels, I discovered. In romance novels for instance, a meaningful set of pearls can mediate gender relations. When the jewel functions as an heirloom, it mediates genealogical relations. Or in case of the infamous blood diamond, it is instigating colonial power mechanisms, and so on.

These ‘glittering things’ perform pungent work in fiction, work that other kinds of objects can’t do. That’s why, I feel, the literary jewel needs care. You certainly were the one that showed me how to do that.