Voyager: The Secret Life of Things

Virginia Woolf has a short story titled "Solid Objects."  It would be worth noting whether this story was originally published alongside "The Mark on the Wall" (which centers obsessively on the identity of a black mark on a wall, which reveals itself to be a snail by the end), because "Solid Objects" begins with this passage:

The only thing that moved upon the vast semicircle of the beach was one
small black spot. As it came nearer to the ribs and spine of the
stranded pilchard boat, it became apparent from a certain tenuity in its
blackness that this spot possessed four legs; and moment by moment it
became more unmistakable that it was composed of the persons of two
young men.

From this moment of objectifying the human person on the beach, Woolf moves on to the strange tale of a man who becomes obsessed with the collection and arrangement of things--the first of which is a piece of smooth green glass:

Whether this thought or not was in John's mind, the lump of glass had
its place upon the mantelpiece, where it stood heavy upon a little pile
of bills and letters and served not only as an excellent paper-weight,
but also as a natural stopping place for the young man's eyes when they
wandered from his book. Looked at again and again half consciously by a
mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly
with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes
itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain
when we least expect it. So John found himself attracted to the windows
of curiosity shops when he was out walking, merely because he saw
something which reminded him of the lump of glass. Anything, so long as
it was an object of some kind, more or less round, perhaps with a dying
flame deep sunk in its mass, anything--china, glass, amber, rock,
marble--even the smooth oval egg of a prehistoric bird would do. He took,
also, to keeping his eyes upon the ground, especially in the
neighbourhood of waste land where the household refuse is thrown away.
Such objects often occurred there--thrown away, of no use to anybody,
shapeless, discarded. In a few months he had collected four or five
specimens that took their place upon the mantelpiece. They were useful,
too, for a man who is standing for Parliament upon the brink of a
brilliant career has any number of papers to keep in order--addresses to
constituents, declarations of policy, appeals for subscriptions,
invitations to dinner, and so on.

His obsession consumes him, to the exclusion of all else, but at the same time remains bound with his old ambitions, which included a career in Parliament.

Although they share only a preoccupation with objects, this is the story that comes to mind when I read in Voyager of Bree's "knack of objects," which she has in common with Frank:

     Some people have a way of arranging everything about them, so the objects take on not only their own meaning, and a relation to the other things displayed with them, but something more besides— an indefinable aura that belongs as much to their invisible owner as to the objects themselves. I am here because Brianna placed me here, the things in the room seemed to say. I am here because she is who she is.
     It was odd that she should have that, really, I thought. Frank had had it; when I had gone to empty his university office after his death, I had thought it like the fossilized cast of some extinct animal; books and papers and bits of rubbish holding exactly the shape and texture and vanished weight of the mind that had inhabited the space.
     For some of Brianna’s objects, the relation to her was obvious— pictures of me, of Frank, of Bozo, of friends. The scraps of fabric were ones she had made, her chosen patterns, the colors she liked— a brilliant turquoise, deep indigo, magenta, and clear yellow. But other things— why should the scatter of dried freshwater snail shells on the bureau say to me “Brianna”? Why that one lump of rounded pumice, taken from the beach at Truro, indistinguishable from a hundred thousand others— except for the fact that she had taken it? 

There are other moments in the Outlander when objects become significant.  I have not recorded them all, but one moment is in the beginning of Dragonfly in Amber, when the objects in the late Rev. Wakefield's house take on symbolic significance in reference to Claire's story; another moment is when Claire dreams of Frank giving a lecture on things, which I blogged about more recently.  I find it fascinating the variety of ways in which we think and talk about things, and I even designed a course for an interview in New Zealand titled, "Writing the Lives of Things," in which students would theorize "things" throughout the semester--how we control things, how they control us, how they are useful to us, how they are manufactured, etc.

The idea, in this passage, that the arrangement of the objects--or their very identity--takes on special significance because of the act of having been chosen, brings me from Woolf's "Solid Objects," which is a descent into thing-based madness reminiscent of the contemporary phenomenon of "Hoarding," epitomized by the TLC reality show, to Wallace Stevens' consideration of how the placement of a thing orders the universe around it by the very agency and artificiality of its placement in "The Anecdote of the Jar":

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Frank and Bree take pleasure in the arrangement and collection of objects.  In so doing, they make an external representation of some aspect of their own minds, as in "Solid Objects," but they also imprint the objects, and transform the things themselves, which in turn, reorder the space around them, as in "Anecdote of the Jar" (although the surroundings are not "natural," as in Stevens' poem).

By contrast, Claire does not have a way with things, and things--including the comforts of modern life--have no hold on Claire.  As she describes this non-relationship with things, she relates it to Jamie:

     I didn’t have a way with objects. I had no impulse either to acquire or to decorate— Frank had often complained of the Spartan furnishings at home, until Brianna grew old enough to take a hand. Whether it was the fault of my nomadic upbringing, or only the way I was, I lived mostly inside my skin, with no impulse to alter my surroundings to reflect me.
     Jamie was the same. He had had the few small objects, always carried in his sporran for utility or as talismans, and beyond that, had neither owned nor cared for things.  (263-264)

I actually think that this is a similarity that is overstated.  Is it an oversight of the author's, I wonder, or the author's skilled manipulation of a character that results in this equating of Claire's and Jamie's relationship to things?  Because if it is the author, it is a flaw--Jamie prizes things, from the carved snake made for him by his older brother Willie, or the rosary he gives to his own son, or a piece of plaid.  Jamie believes strongly in symbolic objects, and his faith is an object-based faith.  Claire, who does not have faith, and who does not have roots, also has very little relationship with objects--aside from her wedding rings, which are not mentioned here.  If the author meant for this to be a mistaken observation on Claire's part, what does that mean?  To my mind, not much.  I really find this more of a flaw in the narrative (however slight) than in the character's understanding.

Rather than drawing attention to Jamie's and Claire's lack of attention to things, this reader finds that it draws attention to Jamie's use of things.  Claire attributes their indifference to objects to their dislocations--Claire was nomadic and Jamie was forced to live on the run at a young age, and so, the character posits that "perhaps it was natural to him also, this isolation from the world of things, this sense of self-sufficiency— one of the things that had made us seek completion in each other" (264).  And yet, there is a sense of home that accompanies Jamie with his things, inadequate as it is.  So when Claire observes that it was "Odd all the same, that Brianna should have so much resembled both her fathers, in their very different ways" (264), I have a nagging feeling that Brianna's "way with things" might also be attributed to Jamie.  Why the oversight, I wonder?

However, there is another possibility.  In her relationship to things, is there a hint of materialism? Roger and Bree will, in later volumes, bond over things in various ways--at times to recapture what they have lost from the 20th Century.  Claire can discard the material comforts of the 20th Century that she lacks while in the 18th Century.  Brianna can do it, too, but that attachment--an attachment often framed by way of things--remains.  So in her connection to things, Brianna is more firmly linked to the 20th Century.  And it is not terribly surprising that she and Frank, for all of their penchant for historical research, should have that in common.  That she and Roger should also have it in common points to something about their generation, perhaps (though Roger is older).  The 60s generation is something I plan to come back to in future posts on later books in the series.

Gabaldon, Diana (2004-10-26). Voyager (Outlander). Random House, Inc. Kindle Edition.