On the stuffness of things

At the moment my mental life seems to be dominated by stuff--things, objects, all that ordinary everyday stuff that gathers dust around the edges of life. Just last week the prof admitted that the photography class I'm taking is "stuff-intensive," and this morning my American Novel class considered the impact of all that stuff that crowds Mrs. Peniston's parlor in The House of Mirth. So it's only natural that I should read a book on the meaning of stuff: The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity by Richard Todd. This elegantly written and highly accessible collection of essays delves deeply into the human tendency to fetishize our stuff, to endow certain objects with special meaning.

Todd considers the stuffness of art, asserting that a work of art is a physical object that at once draws us away from the material world and directs our attention back toward it. Art is different from mundane stuff because its value is not determined simply by its materials but is instead constructed within a community that fetishizes objects because of their origins, their rarity, or their ability to transcend stuff. "Art is to objects as sainthood is to people," he explains. "Most people can't be saints, and most objects can't be art, but in each case the extent to which they are marked by an impulse toward grace is a measure of their worth."

Even ordinary objects, though, can gain an aura after they have outlived their usefulness. Todd examines the power of nostalgia to endow antique tools and tractors with new value when these objects no longer serve their original purpose. Nostalgia even influences the relative value of places as urbanites seduced by nostalgic narratives of simple country life move to the countryside only to transform the agrarian spaces that seemed so appealing. "All places are stories, stories we tell to ourselves," he says, adding that no matter how apparently pure and untouched a place may appear to be, "all inhabited places... are in fact polluted with meaning."

If natural places are polluted with meaning, what of artificial places? Todd describes trips to Las Vegas and Walt Disney World, reveling in the self-conscious artificiality of the first but finding Disney's dream world oppressive and claustrophobic. Walt Disney, asserts Todd, "is what we had instead of Hitler. He gave us a fascism of smarm. If real fascism ever comes to this country, can one doubt what it will look like? It will not be goose-stepping legions and blaring music. It will be cute, like a Disney movie. There will be country music and laconic heroes and lovable dogs."

The idea that our stuff says a lot about us is so obvious as to be a cliche, but Todd makes the topic fresh and treats it in unexpected ways. This is a very stuff-intensive book, but like the works of art, places, and objects Todd writes about, the book directs our attention to the tyranny of stuff while also endowing it with an aura of grace.