The Art of Losing

Wasserman's elegantly written book engages a central question: What do we make of the preoccupation with ephemera—things on the cusp of disappearance—in postwar American fiction, and what can that fiction tell us—indeed, teach us—about how we might live in our "dematerialized" digital era and ever more precarious world? Though The Death of Things is a contribution to recent work broadly characterized as new materialist, she critiques much of this scholarship for an "overcorrection against universalizing discourses of the subject" (13): decentering the human in favor of the material world, such approaches do not sufficiently illuminate ways that our encounters with things, including vanishing things, create new versions of subjectivity. To attend more robustly to our entanglements with things, Wasserman turns to the insights of psychoanalysis, especially Freud's little-known essay "On Transience," which illuminates the "imbrication of subject and object" and offers psychic lessons in how to continue loving (in) the world while recognizing its inevitable impermanence (22). Drawing inspiration from Freud's essay, Wasserman proposes that ephemera, fragile and vanishing objects that solicit our care, "encourage a nondominative orientation to the object world," teaching us that "all objects and subjects are, in crucial ways, and for all time, transient" (37).She grounds this argument in nuanced assessments of an array of postwar American novels that show how ephemera can inspire generative responses to transience that are both melancholic and transformative, revealing how "attachments to disappearing objects reveal new conceptions of time and social affiliation" (9). Literature, she argues, not only archives ephemera but is a space in which our complex relations to things is revealingly described; at the same time—especially in an era when emerging communications technologies led Marshall McLuhan and others to herald the death of print and later the death of the novel—postwar authors' engagement with ephemera allowed self-reflexive commentary on the status of literature itself. Printed objects (stamps, comic books, magazines) figure centrally in Wasserman's story, in part because of traditional designations of paper objects as ephemera, and in part because they serve as vehicles through which novelists reflect on the ephemeral nature of their own fictional medium—concerns made more urgent in a digital age.Wasserman specifies her argument about how "nonhuman objects can engender more humane subjects" (214) across six richly detailed chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the world's fair, a cultural form that, in constructing the world as ephemeral exhibition whose transience "reflected the nature of the commodities they showcased" (42), offered influential "object lessons" in the material conditions of modernity. Wasserman examines two novels that depict the 1939 New York World's Fair, E. L. Doctorow's World's Fair (1989) and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), tracing how characters' fairgoing experiences forced an encounter with transience. Both novels show how world's fairs promote nationalist spectacles of an idealized futurity while showcasing their fragility, revealing "vanishing materials of historical futures" (43) that were distressingly evident on the brink of global war. She then explores how this "nostalgia" for "the passing" is facilitated by an app that makes artifacts from the 1939 World's Fair digitally available. Wasserman argues that novels' homeopathic ability to acclimate us to vanishing futures is especially meaningful in the current moment: helping us recognize the centrality of transience to "our objects, . . . our futures, and our selves," such novels invite us to look back on the "world of tomorrow" so that we can live in the world of today (69).Chapter 2 turns to the speculative genre known as "counterfactual" or "alternative history" novels about the Second World War. Wasserman explores the complex effects produced in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2005), which fill their counterfactual worlds with representations of factual objects. Dick presents an alternative outcome of the war set in 1963, in which a victorious Germany and Japan have divided up the US. Japanese colonizers in the Pacific States exhibit a passion for prewar American artifacts—especially ephemeral paper goods like comic books and collectible cards. Roth's text is a fictionalized memoir in which Charles Lindbergh, aviation hero and Nazi sympathizer, is elected president in 1940, leading to the persecution of American Jews; the "real" objects that here punctuate the novel's realism are stamps—young protagonist Philip is a stamp collector, and the stamps are described in meticulous detail. Presenting critiques of American exceptionalism "by collapsing the distance between American and Americana and then exposing Americana—stamps, comic books, memorabilia of various kinds—as serial, counterfeit, and ephemeral" (74), both texts offer "chilling portraits of America as ephemeral" (77). Wasserman further argues that the counterfactual genre "affords the chance to meditate on what it means to be a Jew in America," especially revealing "what of America is uniquely visible to its Jews" (94–95). She notes that this knowledge of the way history "always contains its own counterfactuals" (109) is especially relevant now, when the enduring reality of fascism in America has been undeniably exposed.Chapter 3 addresses African American postwar fiction across genres (from modernist psychological realism to sensational crime fiction) that uses ephemeral objects to illuminate the "strange palimpsests" (122) produced by urban change and to mark the uncanny persistence of racism in urban infrastructure amidst postwar projects of gentrification and urban renewal. Examining novels set in Harlem by Chester Himes and Ralph Ellison, Wasserman examines how both writers figure signs, storefronts, blueprints, and other insubstantial and transient objects as proxies for an American urban environment undergoing partial yet constant modernization; at the same time, they embed in their texts clearly racialized, lasting objects such as Himes's cotton bale, a relic of slavery's "ghost infrastructures," and Ellison's Black Sambo doll, a "stubbornly durable" artifact of blackface, signaling the afterlife of slavery in the present cityscape and the way that the present is only a "partial transformation" of the past (132). Mapping a Harlem "de-realized through transience" (122), the novels shed light on infrastructural racism, exposing lasting, racist social forms embedded in the built environment, while revealing ways urban transience holds the vitality of "black memory, black community, and black life within its infrastructural folds" (138).Chapter 4 examines the material presence of "everyday life" in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, often deemed a literary postmodernist par excellence. Contesting his widespread characterization as an endlessly lucid, cynical writer, Wasserman presents a Pynchon "deeply concerned with ephemera" in ways that approach "a realist response to the conditions of postwar America" (142, 146). But Wasserman's Pynchon is acutely concerned with how transient objects serve as a "means for understanding jeopardized subjects who must navigate the ruins and remnants of postwar America" (143). In V. (1963) Pynchon tethers protagonist Stencil and other characters to an array of objects, partly to reveal the entanglements of female bodies and inanimate objects, thus illuminating species of human suffering "wrought by the unchecked fetishism" of consumer capitalism (171). In The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), objects like the rogue hairspray can that menaces Oedipa at the novel's start seem to symbolize consumer culture out of control; but Pynchon more broadly reveals how technological objects, especially communications technologies including the postal system, radio and television, serve as "connective tissue" linking broader collectivities. Exploiting the "dual logic of ephemera" through which disappearance constitutes "more than just loss," these novels reveal how "by feeling the material textures of the world . . . we might find ourselves more connected to fellow travelers" (171). Since transience raises the specter of mortality, ephemera acutely "illuminate the vulnerable subject" of postwar America, facilitating a "feeling for the compromised but remaining humanity" overlooked when we attend only to the mesmerizing parade of objects that define postmodernity and full-blown consumer capitalism (173).This forceful turn toward subjectivity persists in chapter 5, on Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980), a novel famously preoccupied with transience. Wasserman provocatively asserts that ephemeral objects—starting with the stamps that the narrator's mother, Helen, collects—serve as vehicles through which Housekeeping's "women seek to renegotiate and escape the object relations to which they are traditionally assigned" (176). The analysis presents a rereading of Sylvie's housekeeping, attuned not to her rebellious carelessness but rather her careful curation of debris—especially fading ephemera such as leaves and paper—and "the evanescent and dissolving material culture in which she dwells" (181). Robinson's merger of nature and printed word gestures toward a history through which women's writing has long been viewed as ephemeral, while explicitly evoking Dickinson—not Emerson or Thoreau, often considered guiding spirits of the novel—as another woman writer dedicated to "preserving the process of loss" (183). The novel ultimately depicts larger objects—houses, towns—as not much more durable than paper or magazine scraps, a reality Robinson names with the phrase "delicate infrastructure" (193). Ephemeral things are paired with "a disappearing subject that is less a pure negation than a leaning into . . . the historical world as it really is, thronged by absences" (193). Housekeeping thus summons a generative model of subjectivity, finding in transience not only escape from oppressive norms, but "mutability and possibility" (195).The final chapter considers a writer widely recognized for his expansive attention to postwar consumerism and its object world: Don DeLillo. Wasserman focuses on Underworld (2000), a novel that gathers an encyclopedic array of objects, highlighting a scene where a conservative nun is transformed by a vision of a murdered girl whose face appears on a billboard in the South Bronx—a fictional vision that bears uncanny resemblance to a concrete image of the Virgin Mary that reportedly appeared in a Chicago underpass in 2005. Wasserman traces how DeLillo attends to the "power of transient objects," invoking religious aspects of transience that offer "not a flight from reality" but "a more intense immersion in it" (203, 202). In capturing the power of agentic objects, DeLillo anticipates a key strand of new materialism before the new materialist (211). That agency is staged especially in the final scene, where Sister Esmerelda is transformed by the ephemeral image on the billboard and "returned to the material world," awakened to the poverty and material suffering in her community (214). Wasserman then turns to the salvific efficacy of ephemera in reports of the apparition of the Virgin Mary in Chicago's Fullerton underpass, which similarly mobilized a vernacular community while pointing toward often unseen dimensions of urban life. A brief coda turns to dilemmas surrounding the death of the book in the digital age, when "so many actual things are migrating into the digital ether" (230). Through a reading of a video game adaptation of The Great Gatsby, Wasserman argues that the digital affords not an escape from the condition of transience as investigated by postwar novelists but a reprisal of its core dynamics.Wasserman is a stylish writer, and her textual readings are skillful and imaginative. But the study raises several questions. For one thing, it seems to overcorrect for what it identifies as new materialism's overcorrection; it was Bill Brown himself, in his field-defining essay, "Thing Theory" (2001), who first asserted the ethical salience of things—that accepting the otherness of things is the necessary condition for accepting otherness as such—and the power of things to solicit forms of subjectivity has been repeatedly broached in his work. (Wasserman is more persuasive in her observation that such work tends to focus on the animacy and vitality of things at the expense of their disappearance and "death" 8.) Similarly, Wasserman's argument about how we are moved to care through ephemera in many ways echoes Bruno Latour's concept of "risky attachments." But the main questions the study raises for me involve how it handles the broad historical frame for ephemeralization that defines the period in question.The postwar period was a particular moment in the history of the death of things, when Western subjects were emphatically habituated to ephemeralization and loss. Capitalism's engine of creative destruction established the culture of obsolescence that preoccupied postwar writers; Wasserman's story of dying things is located in what Susan Strasser, in Waste and Want, describes as a broad shift from durable to disposable goods, from an ethic of stewardship and thrift to the normalization of the ephemeral in capitalist modernity. Wasserman is well aware of that history; in the introduction to Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age, Wasserman and coeditor Babette B. Tischleder survey ways that the desire for the "new" had to be cultivated and disposability converted into a healthy practice. And in the introduction to The Death of Things, Wasserman notes that, due to planned obsolescence, "the history of postwar America is undeniably a history of more things that die more often" (26), referencing marketing strategies that made "ephemerality a dominant paradigm of the late-twentieth-century object world" (27). But in turning strongly away from production to consumption—from the moment of "birth" in the life history of objects to their consumption, reception and death—The Death of Things largely sidelines that history. This elision occurs especially through centering the Freud essay as the theoretical touchstone in the study. For one thing, Freud's essay was published in 1915, a decade before planned obsolescence (or in General Motors executive Alfred P. Sloan Jr.'s words, "dynamic obsolescence") was devised as corporate strategy and policy in the mid-1920s; in what way can it model responses to manufactured transience? Further, for Freud, the beloved, transient things are natural landscapes and objects, objects of beauty, cultural ideals threatened by war. This begs the question: Are all ephemera equally valuable and worth caring for? If planned obsolescence is the logic of twentieth-century consumer capitalism, is this love in the face of loss and care for (about) dying things a sustainable or an ethically meaningful stance, particularly if such ephemera not only represent mortality, but hasten it? (Here one must note the general sidelining of class in the study; in learning of dying things, I found myself recalling nineteenth-century images of consumer goods that yoke them strongly to the precarious bodies of the seamstresses or slaves who produce them.) And as many who work on waste, toxicity, and so forth point out, the problem with the system that produces dying things is not (only) that (some) things have grown ephemeral, but that many other things—often hidden by-products of this system—are not ephemeral enough. Imagining ways novels might be seen to chart ethical responses to the different temporalities embedded in this postwar system of objects seems deeply vexed. Given consumer capitalism's systemic harms, ranging from abuses of labor to abuses of the planet, is ethics—with its standard focus on individual response and action—a sufficient frame for grasping the efficacy of the ephemeral? Writing about surrealism, Walter Benjamin theorized how, in supplying a "profane illumination" that reminds capitalist modernity of its own forfeited dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the outmoded traps "revolutionary energies" of the past (Foster 195). Is prompting an identification based on shared fragility—that is, moving us to recognize our shared transience—the primary pedagogic value of ephemera and the reason why we (should) care about dying things?These questions lead to others, including questions about scale. Wasserman's study stretches the concept of ephemera quite wide, the things included within it ranging from paper objects such as comics and stamps to aging houses to dying urban infrastructure. How do responses to—attachments to and/or "investments" in—dying things vary across the range of examples she unpacks? Presumably, given that we "invest" (psychically, materially) so differently in such things, how does their ephemeralization differently matter? Especially since infrastructure is often discounted and invisible to us—often existing as commons that, especially under neoliberalism, we (tragically) do not recognize as already "ours"—such differences of scale are arguably also differences of kind and seem worth parsing. Finally, in theorizing the generativity of characters' and readers' responses to ephemera, differences of race, gender, class, sexuality could be centered more forcefully. For example: most of the book's writers (and protagonists) are white men, who may experience greater anxiety about the object world's ephemeralization—and benefit more from the lessons afforded by ephemera in identifying with that object world and recognizing one's own vulnerability and transience—than many other subjects.The Death of Things may not provide answers to all these questions; but I hope my account of the wide-ranging questions the book inspired signals the value, generativity, and richness of Wasserman's provocative, ambitious study.