Object Ontologies, Relationality, and Collaborative Aesthetics: Purloined Things in Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere
Jessi Rae Morton · The Comparatist/Comparatist · 2023
Object Ontologies, Relationality, and Collaborative AestheticsPurloined Things in Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere Jessi Rae Morton Art, claims critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud, is "an activity consisting in producing relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions and objects" (107). As he further explains, "[i]f a work of art is successful, it will invariably set its sights beyond its mere presence in space: it will be open to dialogue, discussion" (41). Such exchanges with artists and the objects they put forth for consideration invite viewers, Bourriaud argues, to participate in collaborative meaning-making projects and by the same token to co-create potential futures. For, as Jane Bennett makes clear in her turn, "[w]hile the smallest or simplest body or bit may indeed express a vital impetus, conatus or clinamen, an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces" (21). While Bennett's assertions may not hold true for all objects we encounter, these observations are particularly useful for understanding not only visual art, Bourriaud's focus, but also literature, that is, poems or novels concerned with visual art. When viewers, readers, or listeners enter into collaboration with artworks, they engage in the crucial function of art, namely, in speculating and imagining a future beyond current limits. Depicting such collaborative processes is a growing segment of twenty-first-century U. S. fiction, a remarkable and innovative corpus that comprises critically acclaimed works such as Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility (2022) as well as no less popular, if less mainstream, novels like Kristen Arnett's Mostly Dead Things (2019), Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch (2022), Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2022), and Celeste Ng's novel Little Fires Everywhere (2017), my subject in what follows. As I suggest in this essay, Ng's characters and the book as a whole, in fact, participate in collaborative meaning-making endeavors and, what is more, ask us, readers, to do the same. Incongruous as it may seem, my analysis leans, albeit cautiously, on relational aesthetics as well as object-oriented philosophies to show, first, that object and human actants, including the physical things Mia, Ng's protagonist, [End Page 329] appropriates and characters such as the members of the Richardson family, complete Mia's artwork through a participatory aesthetic of reactivation and, second, that art practices reach a new level of effectiveness when ontologically diverse, human and nonhuman creative agents join forces. Moreover, when read with a certain version of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)—a critical version, I hasten to add, one fostered in conversation with OOO's critics—Little Fires Everywhere provides, I maintain, a solution to what I consider the anthropocentric blind spot of relational aesthetics. Specifically, the novel shows that a truly relational, ontologically "democratic" aesthetics works when the category of aesthetic agents is expanded to feature nonhumans also. While Ng's novel is an excellent example for use in connection with these concepts, the approach I present here has much broader potential applications. As Bourriaud contends, "[e]ach particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations" (22). An artwork, he goes on to specify, is "an ensemble of units to be re-activated by the beholder-manipulator," and so, in viewing the artworks, the Richardsons become co-creators alongside Mia, her camera, the objects and experiences she has incorporated into the work, and a variety of other actants, known and unknown (20). The meanings produced through this collaboration are not restricted by Mia's intentions and may run counter to her design, and readers, similarly, may produce meanings for the novel that do not align with Ng's plans. But, regardless of the author or authors' original aims, such collaborative experiences of art are our most promising path forward, toward a flatter, more object-oriented approach to the world we share with a wide variety of beings and material assemblages. When it was published in 2017, Celeste Ng's second novel...