Search

This essay examines the various modes of interaction between things and human subjects successively in Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, and Joyce. In Dickens, space is saturated with traces and the frontiers between human bodies and inanimate things are constantly blurred. The Victorian detective novel finds its source in the infinite possibilities of traces in inhabited space. In Hardy, traces can either point to an absence due to erosion by time or to a supplement of inscription similar to geological strata. In Joyce, the very writing technique is mimetically contaminated by the mechanical interlocking (embrayage) of self and space. The object presupposes a linguistic predetermination, whereas the thing resists any pre-established adequation with the available repertory of words and subverts the Joycean principle that the real exists only because there are words to define it.