Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the Question of Modern Literature

Jörg Kreienbrock

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780823245307
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Deutsche Literaturkritik

Why do humans get angry with objects? Why is it that a malfunctioning computer, a broken tool, or a fallen glass causes an outbreak of fury? How is it possible to speak of an inanimate object's recalcitrance, obstinacy, or even malice? When things assume a will of their own and seem to act out against human desires and wishes rather than disappear into automatic, unconscious functionality, the breakdown is experienced not as something neutral but affectively—as rage or as outbursts of laughter. Such emotions are always psychosocial: public, rhetorically performed, and therefore irreducible to a "private" feeling.By investigating the minutest details of life among dysfunctional household items through the discourses of philosophy and science, as well as in literary works by Laurence Sterne, Jean Paul, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, and Heimito von Doderer, Kreienbrock reconsiders the modern bourgeois poetics that render things the way we know and suffer them.

Chapter One

“When Things Move upon Bad Hinges”

Sterne and Stoicism

“Unhappy Tristram! child of wrath! child of decrepitude! interruption! mistake! and discontent!”

—Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

“When Things Move Upon Bad Hinges”

Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767, describes the life of its protagonist as constantly threatened by accidents. “I have been the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune,” Tristram exclaims; “and though I will not wrong her by saying, She has ever made me feel the weight of any great or signal evil; — yet with all the good temper in the world, I affirm it of her, That in every stage of my life, and at every turn and corner where she could get fairly at me, the ungracious Duchess has pelted me with a set of as pitiful misadventures and cross accidents as ever small Hero sustained.”¹ Falling and cutting, pelting and piercing objects perpetually disturb the everyday life in Shandy Hall. It unfolds in “one of the vilest worlds that ever was made” (10). This chapter attempts to analyze some of these disturbances to the bourgeois household as they relate to questions of the relationship between necessity and contingency, regularity and irregularity, wholeness and interruption, body and soul. What exactly is it that makes life for Tristram, Walter, Uncle Toby, and the other members of the Shandy household so vexing, and what strategies do they develop to cope with these vexations, irritations, and aggravations? The epistemological question “What is an object?” in Tristram Shandy cannot be separated from the anthropological investigation of how, as a human being, one can live in an environment populated with recalcitrant, accident-prone objects.

The rise of consumer society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries goes hand in hand with a considerable increase in the number of household items and other objects of everyday life.² The more tools, instruments, and gadgets populate the household, the more likely it is that the life of its human inhabitants will suffer from the breakdown and malfunction of these different pieces of equipment. The disruptions and catastrophes of the world (the earthquake of Lisbon 1755 took place only four years before the publication of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy), and with them their disorienting, anxiety-inducing effects, reappear within the limited space of the household en miniature. The most famous example of this miniaturization and domestication is Uncle Toby’s reenactment of the battles of the war between England and France in his backyard. Since skeptical Enlightenment philosophy radically questioned the security of all forms of religious and dogmatic worldviews, earthly disturbances could no longer be integrated into an overarching salvation plan. As part of the “secularization of accidents,” the small world of Shandy Hall becomes the site for Sterne to present, perform, and stage the emotional effects of the contingency of the individual’s Lebenswelt.³

One piece of equipment in Shandy Hall that constantly fails is the parlor door. Tristram uses this piece of furniture to teach a moral lesson and to exemplify Walter Shandy’s philosophical principles and his rhetorical eloquence. “In mentioning the affair of door-hinges,” he aims to show how Walter’s “rhetoric and conduct were at perpetual handy-cuffs” (183). Life in Shandy Hall consists of a constant struggle between abstract principles and the concrete realities of everyday life. In response to the dysfunctional door hanging on bad hinges, the philosopher Walter experiences anxiety, pain, and melancholia. “His philosophy or his principles fall a victim” to the parlor door hinges (183). From this collision of philosophical principle and recalcitrant world Tristram learns to question whether systematically organized knowledge can produce pragmatic prescriptions for living well. Man’s soul is “inconsistent,” torn between reason and the unavoidable accidents of the quotidian:

Inconsistent soul that man is!—languishing under wounds, which he has the power to heal!—his whole life a contradiction to his knowledge!—his reason, that precious gift of God to him—(instead of pouring in oyl) serving but to sharpen his sensibilities,—to multiply his pains and render him more melancholy and uneasy under them!—poor unhappy creature, that he should do so!—are not the necessary causes of misery in this life enow, but he must add voluntary ones to his stock of sorrow; struggle against evils which cannot be avoided, and submit to others, which a tenth part of the trouble they create him, would remove from his heart for ever? (183)

Instead of eloquently reasoning on the nature of doors and hinges as practiced by Walter—“There was not a subject in the world upon which my father was so eloquent, as upon that of door-hinges” (182)—Tristram recommends “three drops of oyl with a feather, and a smart stroke of a hammer” (183). Despite all his eloquence and sharpened sensibility of reason, Walter is unable to cope with the mostly unnecessary annoyances of everyday life. In his resistance to repair the door hinges, he shows his whole life to stand in contradiction to his knowledge. Scholarly erudition does not lead to happiness but instead can multiply the stock of sorrows. Walter recognizes the faulty door, and “every day for at least ten years together did my father resolve to have it mended” (182). Yet his eloquent reasoning undermines proper action. His theoretical acumen does not solve any problems but diverts and consequently complicates matters, never arriving at a pragmatic solution or bringing a project to an end. Like his Tristrapedia, an encyclopedic attempt to provide a scholarly and theoretical foundation for the education of young Tristram, his plan to mend the door is never fully realized. Against this form of abstract reasoning that leads only to anguish and pain, Tristram suggests differentiating between those causes of anger that cannot be avoided and those that can be avoided. He does not simply apply the Stoic doctrine of ataraxia⁴—a passive, detached endurance—but calls for the active elimination of those sources of sorrow that lie within the subject’s abilities. Tristram understands living the good life to consist in not struggling “against evils that cannot be avoided” and in removing the voluntary ones: “By all that is good and virtuous! if there are three drops of oyl to be got, and a hammer to be found within ten miles of Shandy-Hall,—the parlour-door hinge shall be mended this reign” (183). He promises to mend the door and hence heal the wounds and unhappiness caused by it. It would take only “three drops of oyl,” a small amount of lubrication, to reduce friction among the hinge’s parts and thereby to restore order and make things work properly again. The door, as the element that connects inside and outside, the realm of the Shandy family and that of the servants, of private and public, would function without creaks.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the increasing complexity of machines and their interaction with human users required equipment that could reduce friction and wear so as to make things work smoothly. Hence the rise of tribology as a science of friction. Tribology, as defined by Bharat Bhushan, is “the interdisciplinary science and technology of interacting surfaces in relative motion and associated subjects and practices.”⁵ “The most effective means of controlling friction and wear is by proper lubrication, which provides smooth running and satisfactory life for machine elements.”⁶ What oil is to the hinges, rhetorical affect control is to the social relations between the different members of the Shandy household. While lubrication eases the movement of tools, instruments, and mechanical gadgets in relation to each other, technologies of the self in the sense of Michel Foucault allow human beings to exist in an environment made up of inanimate objects as well as other human beings. The interaction of subjects and objects is threatened by the resistance of matter, appearing as friction and wear, possibly making things stick, breaking down movement and communication.

In Shandy Hall “things move upon bad hinges” (184), and the sound of the squeaking hinge that no one ever repairs wakes Walter just in time to discover that Trim has used Walter’s jackboots to create two mortar pieces for Uncle Toby’s fortification models. Furthermore, Walter’s sleep—under constant threat of being disturbed—does not put his imagination to rest; he is permanently prevented from entering a state of peacefulness and tranquillity. Even during his sleep, imagination incessantly attacks and occupies Walter’s body and mind: “He never folded his arms to take his nap after dinner, but the thoughts of being unavoidably awakened by the first person who should open the door, was always uppermost in his imagination, and so incessantly step’d in betwixt him and the first balmy presage of his repose, as to rob him, as he often declared, of the whole sweets of it” (184). In the form of the creaking door hinges the possibility of a contingent disturbance and interference appears. Consequently, Walter has to be on constant guard against the intrusive forces that might enter through the creaky door. Because Walter has not mended the hinges, as proposed by Tristram, he constantly anticipates the creaking door and thus remains restless and frustrated, always inventing new and different forms of protection and fortification against the “infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life” (3). The door, instead of protecting Walter’s sleep, stirs his imagination.

In volume 4, chapter 7, however, Walter envisions “hidden resources” that allow human beings to cope with the irritating accidents of life: he remarks to Toby that “when one runs over the catalogue of all the cross reckonings and sorrowful items with which the heart of man is overcharged, ’tis wonderful by what hidden resources the mind is enabled to stand it out, and bear itself up, as it does against the impositions laid upon nature” (25). Walter, very much in the tradition of the Enlightenment, believes in the human being’s ability to withstand and finally overcome nature’s impositions by the exercise of reason. He rejects Toby’s invocation of the power of religion in these matters, since this would equal “cutting the knot…instead of untying it” (250). The alternative of untying the knot involves slowly and analytically retracing the threads that lead to the causes of misery, thereby solving the “riddles” and “mysteries” of life. The act of untying reverses the temporal sequence of the original drawing up of the knot. The knot, as a result, must be connected to a cause, and the connection between cause and effect can be established only by analyzing the intricate makeup of that knot. In discussing the knots that make Dr. Slop’s bag of instruments unusable, Tristram also notes the necessity of slowly and patiently untying them: “In the case of these knots then, and of the several obstructions, which, may it please your reverences, such knots cast in our way in getting through life—every hasty man can whip out his penknife and cut through them.—’Tis wrong. Believe me, Sirs, the most virtuous way, and which both reason and conscious dictate—is to take our teeth or our fingers to them” (151). Reason and virtue demand the slow undoing of the obstacles and disturbances of everyday life. Like knots, they need to be dissolved by a method of analytical disentanglement. Analysis attempts to separate and define the cause for every effect, priority and posteriority, by reducing chaotic contingencies to distinct and unequivocal determinations. It turns “accident into design.”⁷ Every knot, or obstacle, can be traced back to its moment of creation. And it is this knowledge of cause and effect, excluding any accidental occurrences, that allows human beings to overcome all obstacles and disturbances.

But while Tristram grounds his morals in virtue, reason, and practical knowledge, Walter, after rejecting Toby’s belief in the redemptive powers of religion, surprisingly depicts the “hidden resources of the mind” as a “secret spring” (251). He represents the faculty of the human mind that can cope with the many causes of trouble as a purely mechanical device. It merely absorbs the shocks, thereby “counterbalancing” evil forces: “But the spring I am speaking of, is that great and elastic power within us of counterbalancing evil, which like a secret spring in a well-ordered machine, though it can’t prevent the shock—at least it imposes upon our sense of it” (251). Man equals an elastic machine, absorbing the shocks of the real. What is lacking in this concept of the shock-absorbing secret spring within us is the possibility of differentiating between necessary and unnecessary evils or the rational analysis of its causes as proposed by Tristram. In Walter’s vision of the human mind as a secret spring, there is no reason and no element of rational choice. Each shock—from the smallest irritation to the greatest catastrophe—is dealt with in the same mechanical way. In effect, Walter is not untying the knots but, much like Toby with his faith in God, cutting them by not paying attention to the heterogeneity of the “catalogue of all the cross reckonings and sorrowful items with which the heart of man is overcharged” (250). In passive reception and springlike absorption, Walter fails, at least in Tristram’s view, to actively change the conditions of his existence. He endures—depending on the elasticity of his mind—more or less dispassionately, but none of his calculations provide protection from the shocks of an antagonistic environment. Instead, his success in existing happily lies in a mechanized application of learned and merely recited knowledge. Walter does not perceive the uniqueness of any given disturbance; rather, he immediately relates and explains its occurrence by quoting a philosophical or scientific authority. He thereby effectively erases its singularity and avoids reckoning with contingency.⁸ Even the greatest accidents and disasters can easily be integrated into Walter’s stable system of knowledge.

The metaphor of the spring and the machine reappear in the description of the Shandy family as a whole: “Though in one sense, our family was certainly a simple machine, as it consisted of a few wheels; yet there was thus much to be said for it, that these wheels were strange principles and impulses,—that though it was a simple machine, it had all the honour and advantages of a complex one,—and a number of as odd movements within it, as ever were beheld in the inside of a Dutch silk-mill” (323). It is exactly the door with bad hinges that turns the seemingly simple machine of Tristram’s family into a complex one. The springs of “strange principles and impulses,” situated in this passage between parlor and kitchen, do not work properly. Bad hinges leave the door “somewhat a-jar” (323), neither fully open nor closed, and thereby allowing for sudden disruptions and misunderstandings. The door, “intersecting access and closure,” contradicts the French proverb that a door is either open or closed.⁹ When the door is ajar, it is open but not open enough to let a person through, and not closed enough to block out unwanted entry or exit, leaving only voices and sounds to pass through. The governing of the house rests on a fault, the slight opening of a passage, which creates “a number of…odd movements within,” leaving it entirely ambiguous who the real head of the household is. The door can control neither the passage of bodies nor that of sounds, complicating the distinction between inside and outside, the real and the imaginary: “In its nature, the door belongs to the symbolic order, and it opens up either on to the real, or the imaginary, we don’t know quite which.”¹⁰

In the crooked architecture of Shandy Hall, the door moving upon bad hinges functions as a passage between parlor and kitchen, the realm of the head of the household and the realm of the servants. The dysfunctional door creaks and never fully closes: “’Twas the rule to leave the door, not absolutely shut, but somewhat a-jar—as it stands just now,—which, under covert of the bad hinge, (and that possibly might be one of the many reasons why it was never mended) it was not difficult to manage; by which means, in all these cases, a passage was generally left, not indeed as wide as the Dardanells, but wide enough, for all that, to carry on as much of this windward trade, as was sufficient to save my father the trouble of governing his house” (323). The bad hinges (mis)manage the opening of a passage through which the kitchen can partake in the governing decisions of the parlor room. “Any thing worth knowing or listening to” (i.e., every thought of Walter under discussion) is being noticed and commented upon in the realm of the kitchen, where his wife and the servants rule: “Whatever motion, debate, harangue, dialogue, project, or dissertation, was going forwards in the parlour, there was generally another at the same time, and upon the same subject, running along parallel along with it in the kitchen” (323). The most prominent and sorrowful of these discussions deals with the death of Tristram’s brother Bobby. After delivering the fatal letter imparting Bobby’s death to his master, Obadiah walks through the passage of the parlor door into the kitchen and distributes the sad news among the gathered servants. Obadiah’s delivery is only one of several intrusions through the slightly opened door that permanently interrupt Walter’s efforts to calculate a journey’s expenses, provoking a “m...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: How (Not) to Do Things with Doors
• 1. “When Things Move upon Bad Hinges”: Sterne and Stoicism
• 2. Annoying Bagatelles: Jean Paul and the Comedy of the Quotidian
• 3. Malicious Objects: Friedrich Theodor Vischer and the (Non)Functionality of Things
• 4. Igniting Anger: Heimito von Doderer and the Psychopathology of Everyday Rage
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography