t okay to say it functions as an object?) and Captain Ahab’s wooden leg in Moby Dick (1851). Even in very interior and psychologically-driven novels, like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), objects (and characters’ interpretations of them) feature very prominently.
By the time we get to Faulkner, the 18th and early 19th century subjectivity of the opinionated (and often 1st person narrator) begins to be fused with the objective mid-18th through late 20th century objective third person. Faulkner, Virgina Woolf and James Joyce and other adventurers into streams of consciousness and human interiority combine an emphasis on the external world with and its tenuous relationship to the internal world of the human mind.
I haven’t read as much post-modern fiction, but I would guess the relationship between character and object has already begun to change very significantly.
All of this is not to say that objects should “mean” something in a story– but rather that looking at the way an author presents objects tells us a lot about the his epistemology– what human beings can know about reality.
Obviously my above argument is fraught with holes and exceptions, but I think the general idea holds.
Speaking of ideas with a lot of holes and exceptions, this is a very interesting take on the popular Myers-Briggs Personality Test–a test which, by the way, has always fascinated me.
All tests of the Myers-Briggs ilk are tautologies. They are tautological because their results cannot exceed my input. If out of 100 questions, I 100 times affirm that I am likely to grow angry over criticism and confrontation, all my 100-question test-result really says is that “I am likely to grow angry over criticism and confrontation.” Sure, a test may express its tautological conclusions in words that sound like it has digested our answers and excreted some new diamond — as when we tell a test in 100 different ways that we are most likely to look outwardly than inwardly, and it tells us we are an “extrovert” — but closer inspection reveals that this new “identity” is no more than a simplified expression of what we usually do — an “extrovert” is defined as a person more likely to look outwardly than inwardly. The problem with test-takers is that we conflate words which summarize and offer back to us our habits with words that serve as identities given to us by the test. (BadCatholic, “Magic and Myers-Briggs”)
It is true that we should not so easily conflate “habit” with “identity” (although immediately Flannery O’Connor’s Habit of Being comes to mind).
But on the other hand: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
UPDATE: Or, as Molly pointed out to me, not actually Aristotle, but Will Durant’s characterization in The Story of Philosophy.
On the one year (!) anniversary of Pope Benedict’s official retirement, via Catholic News Agency:
Back to objects.
An excerpt from my essay:
For Felicite, however, this [relationship between a human being and an object] is more complex, and for Flaubert (or at least for his narrator) objects seem to gather more levels of meaning than they do for Austen. The portrait of Darcy in Pride and Prejudice is simply a description of him—its meaning lies in its accurate rendering and its ability to convey something of his inner character to Elizabeth. But the picture of the Holy Spirit and the stuffed parrot have a more complex relationship to one another and to Felicite—because that very relationship exists only in her perception: “In her mind, the one became associated with the other, the parrot becoming sanctified by connection with the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit in turn acquiring added life and meaning” (SH 35). The picture of the Holy Spirit is not a portrait of the parrot—yet the two objects acquire a kind of correspondence in Felicity’s “mind,” in her imaginative awareness. In Flaubert’s story the object’s significance is also much more subjectively determined; Darcy’s portrait would represent Darcy to almost everyone in Austen’s world (albeit to a lesser degree than to Elizabet