1 Introduction

In the medieval Upper Town of Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, a museum displays objects such as an old hairdryer, a packet of gastritis tablets, a black dildo, and “a drawing of us made by a stranger.” It is the “Museum of Broken Relationships,” and it was founded in 2006 by two local artists, Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić. Since then, the museum has become a global brand, with a branch in LA (which suspended operations in 2017) and a number of temporary exhibitions organized around the world. The concept is simple: the objects in the collection point to the end of a relationship (usually, but not always, a romantic one); they are accompanied by a short caption with the story of the breakup and the object’s role in it. Here is, for instance, the text accompanying an espresso machine from Paris, dated “too long, last 20 years of the past century”:

For a long time he loved the coffee I made for him using the espresso machine he gave me. For a long time he loved me. And then, one day, he no longer loved the coffee I made for him using the espresso machine he gave me. And then, one day, he no longer loved me and left. And so I took the espresso machine he gave me that made the coffee he loved and I put it in the basement so I don’t have to look at it anymore … But every time I come down to the basement, there it is.1

This simple story is based on the triangulation of the narrator, the “he,” and the coffee machine on display. Initially, the narrator and the coffee machine (or rather the coffee it produces) are on the receiving end of “his” love. We can speculate that the narrator is also in love with the other character, but we don’t know for sure. Love doesn’t come from within (the narrator’s feelings) but from someone else, and it is mediated by the exchange of a material thing. As Marcel Mauss argued in his seminal essay on The Gift, “the unreciprocated gift still [i.e., in modern times] makes the person who has accepted it inferior” (2002, 83). Here, the narrator’s inferiority is tied to a basic parallelism: both the narrator and the machine are reduced to an object of desire. The events that follow – the lover loses interest in both the coffee and the narrator – only reinforce that parallelism. When the relationship ends (again, as a result of “his” initiative), the coffee machine is left behind, a painful reminder of the breakup staring at the narrator whenever they (the gender is unspecified) visit the basement. The main theme of the collection is that objects survive human relationships; they even survive human beings when their intersubjective ties are broken by death. But objects also serve as a problematic model for human relationships, when love becomes a unidirectional projection of desire, something to be exchanged like a physical thing and eventually abandoned – “dumped,” one could say, with a recognizably material metaphor.

The material presence of the things on display at this Museum of Broken Relationships becomes the site of nostalgic attachment and various other forms of affective investment, which are here externalized, staged for a self-consciously global audience (the Museum’s website contains an interactive map with the object’s provenance; all of the Earth’s inhabited continents are represented). Through their wit and brevity, the narratives that accompany these objects shape the audience’s emotional meaning-making: they guide their interpretation by invoking a wide gamut of symbolic values (from sexual attraction to care, from old grudges to bittersweet memories of one’s first love).

This book is also about contemporary narrative as a practice involved in the negotiation of the meaning of material things. My focus is on imaginative, fictional narrative as can be found in literary novels, short stories, films, and video games. This marks a first departure from the (presumably) factual narratives that accompany the collection of the Museum of Broken Relationships, although the difference between factual and fictional stories is never clear-cut: as the field of narrative theory (also known as “narratology”) is increasingly recognizing, fictionality is a strategy at work in narratives that can be otherwise construed as factual; and, conversely, quintessentially fictional stories are always embedded in and entangled with the world of everyday interaction.2 More importantly for my purposes, the narratives I will foreground in the book negotiate the materiality of things in profoundly different ways from the vast majority of stories told at the Museum of Broken Relationships. Instead of mapping objects onto human intersubjectivity and thus using the material as symbolic commentary on (and counterpoint to) the fragility of relationships, the stories I engage with gesture beyond the domain of human interaction: they highlight the way in which materiality eludes human apprehension and resists the kind of symbolic projections that are on display at the Museum. The narrative negotiation of materiality thus hints at the limit of human cognition and affect; it challenges an anthropocentric way of apprehending the world.

Things, from that anthropocentric perspective, are merely helpful gear or “Zeug,” in the German of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time: “A useful thing is essentially ‘something in order to …’ The different kinds of ‘in order to’ such as serviceability, helpfulness, usability, handiness, constitute a totality of useful things” (1996, 64). While the usefulness of Heidegger’s notorious hammer is straightforward (it is a tool for building), it may seem strange to apply the label of “useful thing” to the coffee machine abandoned in the basement. Its use is, evidently, not a practical one; yet, by becoming the focus of the narrator’s nostalgia, the coffee machine can be said to fulfill an important psychological role. It is a tool for the symbolic and affective evaluation of the world, which is also a form of building for animals like us. What Graham Harman (2002, 19) refers to as the “equipmental” perspective on things in his reading of Heidegger’s philosophy isn’t limited to practical function, but extends to the domain of symbolic interaction. In fact, as we will see, the symbolic value of things tends to be at the center of narrative negotiations of materiality. Insofar as the values involved are human values, an equipmental understanding of material objects is fundamentally anthropocentric. This book is concerned with how narrative, and contemporary narrative more specifically, can disrupt – however partially and temporarily – this straightforward reading of things as implicated in anthropocentric dichotomies between subject and object, animate and inanimate, sentient and unfeeling. These dichotomies are quintessentially Western and involved in the very grammar of Western languages, as argued by linguist Andrew Goatly (1996) in a seminal essay. This doesn’t mean that all Western thinkers buy into dualism or anthropocentrism, of course. But it does mean that philosophers – and everyone socialized into a Western mindset – have to make a conscious effort to distance themselves from the default view of things as inert and equipmental.

Non-Western philosophy, including Indigenous thinking, can play a major part in this project of unsettling a dualistic reading of materiality. Indeed, the Western understanding of things as passive and inert is diametrically opposed to how Indigenous cultures have tended to conceive of materiality. As Kim TallBear explains, “indigenous peoples have never forgotten that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives” (2015, 234). Even philosophers working within a Western context are beginning to consider the materiality of things as something that transcends human agency; they ask whether materiality can be accessed without human cognition leaving its trace on the things themselves.3 Quentin Meillassoux (2008) uses the phrases “the absolute” and the “great outdoors” to refer to this materiality unsullied by the human mind. Can philosophical speculation ever reach this great outdoors? That is a hotly debated problem in philosophy, but – as far as this book’s focus goes – narrative faces an even more arduous task than philosophy when it attempts to do away with human cognition. As a practice grounded in everyday experience, storytelling is deeply bound up with the human form: whenever we narrate something, we can’t help but imagine a human interlocutor, existing within human-scale time and space, experiencing events that make sense to us, human animals. This may come as a disappointment to those of my readers who hope that narrative may be able to afford direct insight into things in themselves, whatever that means. In the words of narrative theorist Monika Fludernik, narrative has an “anthropomorphic bias” (1996, 13): even when it reaches toward nonhuman materiality, it tends to transform the material into something recognizable, humanly useful or relevant. We cannot narrate the “life” of the coffee machine lying around in the basement without symbolic meanings sneaking in along multiple routes – perhaps less blatantly than in the stories told at the Museum of Broken Relationships, but no less significantly.

What narrative can do is stop readers in their tracks, disrupting or temporarily delaying the projection of anthropocentric value, so...