The Death of Things, Part 1

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of reading Sarah Wasserman’s book, The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel. (Minnesota 2020). The book’s chapter of Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes originally drew me to this book, but as I started reading it, I realized that the entire work had something to contribute to the my incipient thinking about a project that takes works of fiction seriously as a way to think about archaeology. 

Wasserman’s book considered the place of ephemeral objects in the post-war novel. She suggested that objects that both refused to remain intact and visible, but also refused to disappear entirely from view played a key role in post-war American fiction. Far from being background or merely agents of a kind of emerging realism in American fiction, ephemeral objects embodied the anxieties of post-war consumerism and anticipated the 21st century interest in materialism, things, and various “flat ontologies.” As an archaeologist, many of the novelists considered in Wasserman’s book either explicitly invoke archaeologists (as in the case of DeLillo’s work or alluded to in Philip K. Dick’s fiction) or allude to archaeological understanding of things that exist below the surface of the everyday or just out of focus (as is so typical of Thomas Pynchon’s fiction or Michael Jameson’s critique). Instead of fixating on ephemerality per se, Wasserman focuses on how these post-war authors understand the insistent appearance of objects throughout their work in ways that reveal Wasserman’s deeply archaeological sensitivity as well. In other words, she presents in her work a book that is a useful companion for archaeologists of the 20th and 21st century who see in contemporary fiction new ways to understand our changing material world.

My plan was to write a single post about three things that stood out to me as potentially useful for an archaeologist, but as I started to do this, I found myself distracted by tangents and before I knew it, I had written almost 2000 words. This seems better suited for two blog posts than one.   

First, the second chapter deals with “Counterhistory, Counterfacts, and Counterobjects” in the work of Philip K. Dick and Philip Roth. I’m more familiar with the former than the latter and will note that quite a few commentators have observed that Dick’s interest in objects makes him a useful lens to consider the ragged edge of reality where most archaeologists tend to operate. In novels like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Man in the High Castle, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (to identify three of his better known novels), objects play a key role in negotiating the tension between the real and imaginary, fake, or counterfactual. Wasserman’s reading of Roth and Dick demonstrates how physical objects often represent problematic foundations for our faith in authoritative historical narratives. By interweaving known historical artifacts with forgeries, fabrications, and fictional objects, authors of the post-war novel reveal the fragility of our concept of historical reality and the potential unreliability of the idea that the past culminates in the present in an unproblematic way.

This offers a useful point for interrogating the potential of pseudoarchaeology to inform how we think about and produce more authoritative (and conventional) archaeological narratives about the past. It is useful to distinguish pseudoarchaeology from alternative archaeologies grounded in indigenous knowledge, polyvocal readings of archaeological sites and ideas, or interpretative disputes mediated through differing methodological commitments. In contrast, pseudoarchaeology often consists of deliberate provocations of conventional archaeological knowledge making. It relies on spurious evidence (sometimes bolstered by forgeries), problematic versions of traditional archaeological methods, and flawed or even simply misleading forms of argumentation that mimic conventional archaeology, but in sometimes subtle (and sometimes pronounced) ways undermine the authority of the disciplinary narrative.

In other words, pseudoarchaeology, much like Dick’s counterfactual novel, The Man in the High Castle, which he apparently sets in a world where Japan and Nazi Germany have won World War II, relies on seeding arguments with forgeries, fakes, and artifacts of dubious provenance. Wasserman demonstrates how Dick opposes the utility of deliberately forged artifacts in his narrative against the dubious capacity of authentic objects to produce a compelling (or even “real”? “genuine”?) present. In other words, Dick emphasizes the disjunction between the present and material evidence from the past upon which it should rely, by dint of its authenticity alone.

A maximalist view of pseudoarchaeology, which recognizes in this work a countermethod to conventional archaeological knowledge making, could — much like Dick’s counterfactual counterhistory — shake our commitment to modern reality as the product of singular modern past. Or at very least complicate our modern (or even contemporary commitments) to producing the kind of scientific and authentic past necessary to support the existing regime. This isn’t to somehow sanction the use of pseudoarchaeology to support racist, nationalist, or colonialist situations in the present by producing pasts that undermine claims of colonized or otherwise excluded groups to cultural, political, or even economic autonomy. Racist pseudoarchaeology is bad.

At the same time, pseudoarchaeology does push us to realize ‘the fragility of historical narratives” (to use Wasserman’s phrase) which should, perhaps, nudge us to reflect on how our own (political, methodological, “scientific,” and even forensic) commitments to authentic and authoritative knowledge rely on incredibly tenuous (and political!) relationships between the past and contemporary conditions. Pseudoarchaeology represents a threat as much for what it argues (especially as far as it seeks to advance racist, colonialist, and nationalist agendas) as for what it relies upon to advance those arguments. The work of Thomas Pynchon (especially in the Crying of Lot 49), Philip K. Dick, and Philip Roth all show how fragile our understanding of the contemporary situation can be in part because our claim to control or understand the past is painfully delicate. This is a powerful lesson for archaeologists and historians to recognize. Moreover, recognizing this fragility should encourage us to read pseudoarchaeology and fiction with a renewed sense of critical attention. Instead of marginalizing it as counterhistorical, reactionary, subversive, or merely fiction, we might find new ways to fortify our own “high castles” or at very least a new modesty as we realize that our past is no more authentic than our commitments to the contemporary order.

More tomorrow!