The House

Abstract

Memory is labile, as we all know. We want our own stories to have shape, to take on the elegance of a beginning and ending. Hence autobiography tends toward teleology or fiction or both. But what if I try to pin down memory with objects? Is the new enthusiasm for things and thing theory — in art history, cultural studies, sociology, and literary criticism — any help? Despite Bruno Latour’s or Arjun Appadurai’s arguments for the “life” of things, objects seem to us in fact to sit there, lumpish, inarticulate, enduring. Even if polished or repainted, abused or restored, it is their stuff that migrates through time; something that was there is here — still here. Can things then pin down stories, keep them honest, embody, solidify, crystallize the past exactly because they are both past and present? I want to tell a story about my mother that is inevitably also a story about myself. It is to me a painful story. Will it be a better story, less histrionic and selfinvolved, more about her and less about my telling of her, if I anchor it with things? I shall try. I start with a photograph. It stood on the bureau in my mother’s bedroom among a few jars of face and hand cream, her comb and brush, a pin cushion into which needles, pins, and a few of her favorite brooches (including a silver moonscape given her by my sister) were stuck, and a slightly lopsided wooden jewelry box I had made for her at summer camp. It was a picture of the house where she grew up. There were no other photographs. The house was three stories high with a mansard roof, and, although the photo was black and white, I knew the house was yellow and the mansard roof