'A Solid Metaphoric Extension of His Self': Thing Theory and Collecting in A. S. Byatt's Fiction (Critical Essay‪)‬

In his 2001 article "Thing Theory," Bill Brown suggests that 'the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.' (1) By this, Brown means that when the word 'thing' is used, it describes the relation of an experiencing subject to another subject, rather than describing the object it ostensibly appears to refer to: 'temporalized as the before and after of the object, thingness amounts to a latency (the not yet formed or the not yet formable) and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects).' (2) Following Brown's definition of the thing naming a particular subject-object relation, the object in literature describes less an imagined referent than a particular subject-object relation, concerned with the subject's identity. A collection, especially for certain characters in Byatt's fiction, is interwoven with the collector's sense of identity. Whilst a collection is a group of objects assembled because of certain similarities in those objects (such as a museum's collection of objects relating to, for example, Elizabeth I's reign), for Byatt's fiction, these collections also express something about the collector. The collection, then, becomes a metaphoric extension of the subject (to use Possession's Mortimer Cropper's words on R. H. Ash's ash-plant). (3)