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1 Joyce’s Debris David Spurr You friable shore with trails of debris, You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot, What is yours is mine my father. Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” If a history is ever written on the status of the object in the modern novel, perhaps it will have room for Harriet Smith’s court plaster. In Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), the dizzy Harriet is so taken with the fatuous Mr. Elton that she has preserved, in a box labeled Most precious treasures, two objects that once had the distinction of being held in his hands: a discarded bit of court plaster and the end of an old pencil (304–5). The latter is more valuable because it has been the actual property of Mr. Elton: “This was really his,” she declares reverently. However, in Austen’s novel these objects figure purely as relics of a girlish infatuation, and as such they are entirely subordinated to the logic of character delineation and of narrative, which in this case takes the form of an ironic hagiography. Austen’s novels are models of economy in this regard, that every object has its proper use. There are no extra things lying around. As the nineteenth century progresses, however, the novel begins to accumulate more and more things. The first chapter of Balzac’s Le cousin Pons (1847) is titled “Un glorieux débris de l’Empire,” which refers not just to the novel’s title character but also, by metonymic extension, to his immense collection of bric-a-brac: a miscellaneous and helter-skelter assemblage of curiosities, of obscure pictures and engravings, snuffboxes, picture frames, and so forth. This being a novel by Balzac, the collection of debris from the brocantes of Paris is discovered to be of fabulous value, and so becomes the object of deadly intrigue among Pons’s neighbors and relations. In terms of the novel’s function as historical interpretation, Balzac solves the problem posed by the debris of 16 David Spurr France’s empire by recirculating it in the form of capital and commodity in the bourgeois world of the July monarchy. The spirit of sheer accumulation represented in Pons’s collection is shared by the less glorious debris of Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53). One of the symbolic loci of this novel is Krook’s shop, a dusty repository of rags and bottles, bones, old iron, wastepaper, and old clothes (61–62)—tottering piles of cast-off stuff from the Victorian economy of bourgeois consumption and institutional corruption. As the shop is putatively a commercial concern in secondhand goods, the things in it are theoretically for sale. But, in fact, it represents the dark underside of the Court of Chancery, the debris left over from interminable , ruinous struggles over the rights of inherited property. Trash is again brought to the foreground in Dickens’s last novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), where a dustman’s rubbish heaps, as tall as hills in the urban landscape of London, represent a potentially vast fortune to be made from what they might contain. Rubbish here, however, is simply another form of capital, and therefore becomes the object of a Balzacian struggle for inheritance . In Theodor Adorno’s analysis, Dickens’s object world, even in the form of debris, represents the bourgeois sphere of power and property, one that his characters must master if they are not to be sacrificed to it (Notes 2: 177). If, in contrast to the novels of Austen, those of Balzac and Dickens have among their functions that of registering the proliferation of objects in a newly industrial and urbanized world, they (just) succeed in doing so by containing this proliferation within narrative structures of individual triumph over or sacrifice to that world. Joyce is unlike his novelist predecessors in that he abandons the master narratives to which character relations and the world of objects are conventionally subordinated. This relinquishment of a totalizing narrative structure appears to have been necessary to Joyce’s larger purpose of formulating an artistic vision congruous with the fragmented character of modernity. In the process, the object world of Joyce’s work tends to take on a life of its own, while at the same time spilling over into an abundance of debris that seems made to defy any conventional attempt at authorial control. The problem for Joyce is somehow to comprehend this increasingly fragmented world of objects in...

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