The Implacability of #Things | The Public Domain Review
►http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/10/03/the-implacability-of-things
There are genres of fiction where we allow things to be sinister or significant in an unsettling way – Gothic romance and the detective story, for example – but the it-narrative is generally expected to be comic and anthropocentric. Yet for a number of reasons this is seldom how it deserves to be read. Whether it is owing to its origin and terminus in the narratives of slaves, or to its coincidence with the financial revolution and the growing unaccountability of mass human behaviour, or to the growing appetite for print ephemera, or to the end of feudal tenures and the resulting anomalies of personal portable property, or to the irreversible metamorphoses precipitated by the holocaust, ordinary things situated in banal circumstances develop a salience that has nothing to do with symbolism or hidden meaning.
