Still Life: A User's Manual

Abstract

"Still life," Norman Bryson has declared, "is the world minus its narratives or, better, the world minus its capacity for generating narrative interest" (60). Bryson links that narrative capacity to the human subject, which is evacuated by this genre devoted to objects: "Opposing the anthropomorphism of the 'higher' genres, it assaults the centrality, value and prestige of the human subject" (60). 1 Of course, still life might equally well be seen as an assault on the object, on the vexed philosophical problem of the thing-in-itself—an assault that must always fail, filtered as it is by perception and representation. In either case, the end of still life is silence: the object is mute, and narrative, it seems, must shatter against it. This sense of the "stillness" of still life is involved with another sense of the word, a lack of motion that Bryson argues is fatal to narrative: "The law of narrative is one of change: characters move from episode to episode, from ignorance to knowledge, from high estate to low or from low to high. Its generative principle is one of discontinuity: where states are continuous, homeostatic, narrative is helpless. But still life pitches itself at a level of material existence where nothing exceptional occurs: there is wholesale eviction of the Event" (61).

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