Object Oriented Ontology & James Joyce's "The Dead" by Geniva

Section I : Using Object Oriented Ontology to examine James Joyce's "The Dead"
                       Ways to study literature have been transforming for years, but where is this critiquing headed? A new development in how to look at a text is Object Oriented Ontology. This is the study of objects or things in a work. The point of this essay will be to determine what—if anything—can be gleaned from utilizing this strategy of reading. The canonical text I will use is “The Dead” by James Joyce. This text is considered ‘great literature’ and has been analyzed and examined in countless ways. It is a story that recounts a Christmastime party, hosted by the main character’s (Gabriel) Aunts, which him and his wife, Gretta, attend. There are many noticeable class divisions, political rifts between Ireland and Britain, and emotional disconnects throughout the story. In this essay I will attempt to implement Object Oriented Ontology to see its possible insights and benefits. The object I shall follow in “The Dead” will be the piano, something that is simultaneously highlighted and forgotten as a constant in the text.

In order to look at a text through the lens of Object Oriented Ontology, one must firstly know what to look for. This concept focuses on ‘objects’ or ‘things’ in a text. While there is some debate over what counts, most would agree that this includes props—inanimate and alive—as well as fictional characters. Additionally, it is important to note that these things are not meant to be reduced into smaller parts, because this would insinuate that there is some sort of hierarchy of things. For example, a guitar would not be broken down into a chain, from wood to a tree and so on, and one would not consider each thing as a separate object. According to OOO, all objects are on the same plane—things are just as important as people.  OOO also requires its users to grasp the concept that things do not require human interaction or human perception to make something real. For example, to use the cliché—if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears or sees it, did it fall? According to OOO, yes the tree did fall, “For even if an object were absent from us, it would still be present to itself” (Harman 196). Things and objects exist even if we do not see them and things can do things without us. However, whether or not the tree falling makes a sound is another debate—hearing the tree fall requires human perception as proof. Another useful example to understand this concept is that: “The rock does not exist because it can be used, but can be used because it exists. […] This is not because the rock is just a form in our minds, but because it is a real form outside our minds” (Harman 199). Additionally, one must know that objects do not always have an awareness of how they appear and do not have full control over their appearance. An instance of this would be the gap in correlation of when someone asks you if you are upset, when in reality your face just betrays how you’re feeling when it is relaxed.

Heidegger, a prominent voice echoed in this developing literary theory, claims that, “most of our contact with entities does not occur in the manner of having them present before the mind. […] When using a hammer, for instance, I am focused on the building project currently underway, and I am probably taking the hammer for granted. Unless the hammer is too heavy or too slippery, or unless it breaks, I tend not to notice it at all” (Harman 186). This is helpful to keep in mind about the objects that you examine when using this method of reading a literary text. There are many reoccurring objects present in texts that may seem entirely irrelevant or insignificant simply because we tend to overlook them. It is a fact, however, that some details are not worth unpacking. One must analyze the text through reconnecting with both the obvious and the overlooked to find what elicits meaning. Lastly, when we look at a text using OOO, we are not interested in finding the author’s intention or any ‘correct’ meaning or theme. What matters is how the text itself constructs or produces a reading that allows for the illumination of intriguing ideas or parallels (Bryant). This is not to say that the text does the work for us, but instead that the text presents us with this multiplicity.

So, now that you have an idea of what Object Oriented Ontology entails, let’s see if we can discover what is preformed in “The Dead” through the piano. How does the assessment of the piano matter in the text? Firstly, when the piano is present in the text it is either being played (in the scene or in the background) or not being played. When the piano is being played, it seems to ‘color’ the scenery or atmosphere surrounding it. The piano transforms the characters or the moments, weighing them with meaning and complexity. A moment in the story that clearly illustrates this happening is when Gabriel mentions he hears the piano playing, but it is a tad bit of an eerie moment because they do not know who is playing it, as if it’s playing itself. Directly after this Gabriel goes on to recount a story about Johnny the horse and the old gentleman (Joyce 46). The piano sets the scene for the story, and allows him to speak about the dead—a common thread in the story. The force playing the piano during this section is unknown, and remains a mystery. This gives the piano power to act. There becomes a moment when the piano is not just a piano. The music playing gives the scene a haunting feeling at first, much like when there was confusion about who was playing the piano, and resolves on a happy and joking note just as whoever playing the piano is assumed and therefore there is no longer a need to be concerned with it. The piano serves to highlight the dead, whether it be songs that are outdated, people, or forgotten and changed memories.

The piano appears in the story as a venue to talk about other things—topics and objects—in the story. Another example of this is when the piano is being talked about and, because of the agency of its location, a painting of Romeo and Juliet and a painting by one of Gabriel’s Aunts of two murdered princes in the Tower is mentioned. This expands the text to talk about family and then comes back to the music from the piano, resolving Gabriel’s discontent so that the “resentment died down in his heart” (Joyce 30).

The piano playing also shows that it is capable of moving characters in the text. Gabriel dances with Miss Ivors at the completion of one song (Joyce 30), and they have a very heated, but on the surface playful, conversation about politics (Joyce 32). After this, the music continues to play as Gretta walks over through the guests waltzing, seemingly only so that Gabriel may complain to her about his interaction with Miss Ivors (Joyce 33). The piano serves as a method to move characters and heighten the urgency of their emotions.

 When the piano is playing, people notice it for what it does, not what it is. There are many instances when someone is playing the piano or singing along with it and the person singing or their voice is what is being acknowledged for how it is functioning. Gabriel is very critical of the piece’s melody that is being played and focuses solely what the piano produces when Mary Jane plays (Joyce 29). Another time the piano is overlooked is when Aunt Julia is singing a song and the story states: “To follow the voice, without looking at the singer’s face, was to feel and share the excitement of swift and secure flight” (Joyce 35). There is constantly much emphasis on the elements surrounding and complimenting the piano.

There are some sections that allow the piano to have human agency based off of word choice. Right before Gabriel’s speech, there is a comment that: “The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing-room door” (Joyce 42). In this passage, the piano is playing the song and the people have faded away, beyond what they are doing as a result of the piano working. In this instance, the piano is meant to reflect how Gabriel is feeling. This moment is just before Gabriel gives his speech, one of the only things—beyond carving a goose—that he does successfully. That is why things are running smoothly in the background and the focus then becomes about his thoughts. This also happens early on in the story when the piano is playing a waltz, but what is noted is Gabriel consciously announcing to himself a class difference from the other guests, him thinking about this disconnect only after hearing the shuffling of the dancers’ feet. The waltz becomes a thing of its own through language, Gabriel saying that he was waiting “until the waltz shall finish” (Joyce 24). An additional example is when the text suggests that, “the piano had twice begun” (Joyce 28). Phrases like this are strung throughout, both pseudo-personifying and giving the piano a transcending quality. When the piano is not playing, generally the focus is on the pianist or singer being mentioned and not the piano as the active agent. Two examples of this are when the text states that after, “a final flourish of the pianist told that the waltz had ended” (Joyce 26) or when Miss Daly played a song and the text states, “the waltz she had played” right after the music stops (Joyce 28). It is almost as though persons using or accompanying the piano become an extension of the piano. The object conglomerates with the identity and assumes a new role as the focus, which guides the formation of events occurring.

            Lastly, one of the most insightful moments when the piano is playing in the text is in relation to Gabriel and Gretta’s relationship. This first appears in the story when Gretta comes up to Gabriel through the guests waltzing and he asks her, “Were you dancing?” and she responds with, “Didn’t you see me?” (Joyce 33). Already the audience gets a sense of their disconnect and Gabriel’s unawareness of his wife. This deepens as the story continues to a moment when she is on the stairs and is entranced by a song. When Gabriel first sees her, he does not even recognize her. He only starts to recognize her from her clothing. This is not just because of the darkness of the staircase, but also, most importantly, because of the fact that Gretta is experiencing deep emotion. He cannot connect with her personally when she is remembering such overwhelming grief. Because of the song the piano plays, Gretta is transformed. Gabriel is present, “But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on the piano and a few notes of a man’s voice singing” (Joyce 48). This is significant because here the piano reverts back to an object that is being used, and as such, it allows Gabriel to transcend into his thoughts more fully. He tries to analyze his wife as a symbol because he cannot understand her expression of emotion. Gabriel stays removed and remains not only critical of Gretta, but chooses to remain detached by not climbing the stairs to meet her or hear the song himself. This reflects how he lacks spontaneity, unlike Gretta, and how he fears risking sharing her grief—shown more explicitly later at the hotel.

            Gabriel is overly self-conscious and thinks through everything he does, avoiding raw emotion and choosing instead to inspect everything. He seems to miss the point, that Gretta is mentally far away and removed. She becomes an object to Gabriel that must be explained and examined, much like the song. This scene becomes a juxtaposition of two objects, Gretta and the song (piano), in which Gabriel can understand neither and where both are very emotional. Gabriel lacks a natural ease in life, whereas the piano is naturally easing in and out of the whole story. The piano threatens Gabriel because it is deeply emotional. It exposes him in many scenes, showing his true character. The piano is essential to this scene, as well as others, in terms of forming and or sharing the moment. Gabriel fails to realize when objects are withdrawn. He fails to grasp that the moment is not about him, but instead in relation to him. Near the conclusion of the story when Gabriel thinks on Gretta’s emotional connection to the song—the boy who died, Michael Furey—he realizes quite consciously, “that such a feeling must be love” (Joyce 59). Everything he does seems calculated and oddly deliberate. The piano acts as a facilitator for the characters’ emotional awakenings—Gabriel’s, Gretta’s, and even Miss Ivors being livid during her politically biased rave. The piano also shows that Gabriel and Gretta’s emotional relationship is dead.

            When the piano is not being played, it has just as much impact on the characters surrounding it. People in the story notice the object less when it is not being played, but instead it transforms to serve other functions within the story. The piano is first mentioned when it is to let the audience know that it was used to give piano lessons from someone, “too feeble to go about much” (Joyce 22). From then on, if the piano is mentioned on its own, it is referred to as “square” as its only identifier. The guests talk about the piano frequently, commenting while it is playing and not playing.

               When the piano is not being played, it acts as an addition of something else—but never a necessary one. An example of this is when the piano is used as a table for pudding and bottles. “On the closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms, […] with green sashes” (Joyce 38). The way the bottles are described lends itself to militant language, the piano serving as a docking area for the reserves of food. The piano is not talked about or noticed here until it has a purpose—something to use it for, even though it is being used nonconventionally, and even then it is overlooked. Moving the food that would not fit on the table onto the piano serves to highlight the outcasted items, making them more announced, noticed, and prominent than they would probably otherwise be. By putting things where they don’t belong, they become less about habit and more about dislocation. Objects develop a different meaning and are transformed by the piano. It gives things importance and injects awareness of otherwise muted qualities or instances or memories. It is as if the piano is offering a service aesthetically and emotionally to other objects (including characters) and readers.

            Language that is musical or reminiscent of the piano is littered throughout the story as well, reinforcing the piano’s importance in “The Dead.” Words and phrases that demonstrate this are lines like Freddy “beat time” (Joyce 45) or a memory being “like distant music” (Joyce 52) or when Gabriel reflects, “how poor a part he, her husband, had played in [Gretta’s] life” (Joyce 58). The other objects in the story begin to adopt the qualities of the piano. Additionally, the characters are constantly thinking about the music the piano played, even when it is not playing and especially when it is absent from the scene. Instances of this in the text are when Gabriel recalls how Gretta had leaned on him earlier when they were dancing (Joyce 53), Gretta not being able to stop thinking about the song she heard at the party—and as a product of that, the memories and people she had attached to it (Joyce 55), and Gabriel thinks about dancing and the music from the party (Joyce 58).

The piano interacts, both directly and indirectly, with the objects around it to create its impact. The piano is a seemingly integral part of moving this story along, because it is an object that can easily be traced throughout the entirety of the story in a meaningful way. Objects around the piano develop and transform to garner different meaning through the piano’s emotional contact. As “The Dead” progresses this impact changes. The piano remains important but it seems to morph from a physical object to a haunting memory or nagging thought that plagues the characters. We learn to do or see things differently from how the piano is used in this text.

Section II : Evaluating Object Oriented Ontology as a literary approach

So how effective is Object Oriented Ontology as an approach to evaluate literature? It is still a new literary lens that is being explored and the parameters of it are still quite malleable. This literary theory obviously expands upon and is a result of other, already established literary theories. That being stated, this literary theory came into existence because it filled a gap that was missing in analyzing literature. “What object-oriented philosophy hopes to offer is not a method, but a countermethod. Instead of dissolving a text upward into its readings or downward into its cultural elements, we should focus specifically on how it resists such dissolution” (Harman 200). OOO is like New Criticism or Deconstruction in that using it is to base your analysis solely off of the isolated text and what it provides. Furthermore, OOO asserts similarly that, “A poem can not be paraphrased” (Harman 188) without translating it into something it is no longer. However, OOO seems to veer from the New Historicism approach in supposing that you cannot use relationalism when looking at a text. This is because OOO is not human culture centered, seeing as the philosophy is that all objects or things are on the same plane, unlike New Historicism. The OOO argument about why this sort of relationalism is flawed, is that then everything would turn out to be interrelated and nothing would be stable or hold any importance. If everything is in flux and everything influences everything else—then how can we recognize or distinguish a Shakespeare play, for example? This approach is entirely against interrelational theories because then that means that everything is in constant circulation.

Object Oriented Ontology, as aforementioned, is a literary studies theory that is still in its infancy. Because of this, often persons who attempt to develop the theory draw on other works to provide examples in hopes that this method of reading a text will codify. The attempt to find historical links and reach back to others (philosophers, writers, literary critics, literature, etc.) will perhaps allow OOO to become a more permanent fixture in literary studies. It has proved itself to me as a useful lens to study literature. I feel that the main reason this approach was beneficial when examining “The Dead,” or any text, is because it forces you to look at something other than the plot, but that is still located within it somehow. The content that was derived from looking exclusively at the piano were ideas that I am not sure I would have arrived at as seamlessly otherwise. The main points of the story flow together through using this approach. It reminded me much of the concept of the Complex Word that we had studied as a class earlier in the year. A Complex Word is determining a word that works best to represent a text. The Complex Word needs to have thorough evidence, be encompassing of a text as well as present in the text, and have a multitude of meaning represented in the text itself. Much like the object or thing chosen for OOO. Another strength of using OOO is that one is able to consider elements of the text that would more than likely go unnoticed otherwise, but that still hold key information or insight to the text. Additionally, the concept that all the objects reside on the same plane was integral for the impact of this approach. It no longer is this messy, complicated interwoven mass of a plot—the story is reduced to its parts, as anti-OOO as that may seem, and because of that it becomes so much clearer as to how things are relating in the story (inanimate and not).

OOO seems to fall short when looking at insignificant details and objects in texts. It can be hard to determine which objects will work best until there is reflection and research into the text. For example, I originally wanted to examine the use of money as an object in “The Dead” but I quickly realized that there were not enough substantial points to glean from delving into that occurrence in the text. I was not able to look at anything outside of the text because of my using OOO. I would say that a weakness of OOO is that isolation, although it is not a strong detriment. There were some objects that could be chosen, like the statues for example, that would have had more of a presence outside of the text and perhaps would be snuffed in some ways because one would not be able to expand deeply into the historical associations that are not given footnotes. Because of the intensity of magnification on objects, there is much lost from the story itself. It is certainly a way to understand elements of a text, but not to acknowledge a text in its entirety.

When compared to the other approaches I have learned in my Literary Studies course, I would say that this method of looking at a text was helpful and provided meaningful insight and/or discussion. I think that it facilitated a thought-process that was intriguing and inventive. It purposely forces you to consider the overlooked. This, to me, is invaluable. If I were using a text that had less objects or less importance invested in its objects, this approach could be useless. However, I would argue that most, if not all, texts hold objects that could be used effectively in conjunction with OOO—especially considering that fictional characters count as objects. The point of OOO is that, “Rather than closing the book, we should instead explore what can be built based on the book. […] rather than sensing the text, we instead allow the work of art to transform how we sense” (Bryant). It is enlightening to be asked to complete such an undertaking. Objects are just as intentional as any other element in literature, and it is nice that they are being held with the same weight of producing meaning.

Works Cited

Bryant, Levi R. “Speculative Realist Literary Criticism.” Web log post. Larval Subjects.

Wordpress, 23 Dec. 2011. Web.

Harman, Graham. “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary

Criticism.” New Literary History (2013): 186+. Project MUSE. Web.

<https://moodle.depauw.edu/file.php/2052/The_Well-Wrought_Broken_Hammer-_Object-Oriented_Literary_Criticism_by_Harman.pdf>.

Joyce, James. "The Dead." Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Daniel R.

Schwarz. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1994. 21-59. Print.