Of Motion and Emotion: The Mechanics of Endurance in Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears

Guided by Jacques Derrida’s observations about the aporetic logic of the archive, this reading of Peter Carey’s novel The Chemistry of Tears (2012) relies on contemporary philosophical discourse about the human-thing interface to examine the correlations between practices of mourning, memory, and museology as unfolded in the narrative. The central image of an automaton operates as an extended metaphor both for the metafictional feat of the novel, and imagination in its broadest sense, wherein we are reminded of the ethical obligations that things, especially technology, call for. Above all, Carey reveals the porosity of the boundaries between organic and inorganic substance, tethering matter to metaphysics, desire to detritus, and the present to the past.