Smashing ourselves to smithereens: Object collection, death, and creative writing as salvation

Abstract

David Malouf (1985) describes the objects children first encounter as symbols of the unknown – we are ‘set loose in a world of things’, and our only tool to exert power over these objects is the body, as we ‘try to swallow them, then to smash them to smithereens… If they refuse to yield their history to us they may at least, in time, become agents in ours’ (p. 9); especially once we are able to wield linguistic instruments. But objects go beyond becoming mere ‘agents’ in the narratives of our lives. As rendered things – selected, curated, labelled and preserved in our minds and the pages of books, these objects undergo a horror just as brutal as Malouf’s metaphors of consumption and demolition. Objects become us, just as we become objects. This holds true in both life and death – perhaps even more apparently in death, when our objects must be subjectively ‘inventorized’ (Baudrillard), collected or discarded by those who grieve. Can writing salvage the past? Or does the very act of writing things ensnare us in a melancholy gaze? This fictocritical work explores these questions through theoretical and performative discourses, ultimately asking: Through writing, are we smashing ourselves to smithereens?