In Just Looking, Updike wrote a whole book of art criticsm doing this with single pieces of art, I'm told. Just sat down, stared and stared some more, and wrote. Melville spent an excruciating amount of pages examining whaling objects in Moby Dick--forges, try-works, the dart, the crotch, and the Heidelburgh Tun. Philosophers have found a renewed interest in Melville because of this attention to inanimate objects, I'm told. Russell Hoban wrote a crazy little metaphysical novel called Kleinzeit in which he transformed inanimate objects--The Hospital, The Underground, and Glockenspeil--into actual, major characters. And of course, there's Cogsworth and Lumiere from Disney's Beauty and the Beast.
Disney excluded, these artists try and examine the profound effects that seemingly dead objects can have on our lives. A friend of mine thought Hoban's Kleinzeit was, in part, an examination of those type of events in which one stubs one's toe on a piece of furniture and proceeds to cuss out the thing as if it were a living enemy. What can a single, "dead" object hold?
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