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Guided by J acques Derrida’s observations about the aporetic logic of the archive, this reading of Pe ter Carey’s novel The Chemistry of Tears (2012) relies on contemporary philosophical discourse about the human-thing interface to examine the correlations between pra ctices of mourning, memory, and museology as unfolded in the narrative. The central image of an automaton operates as an extended metaphor both for the metafi ctional feat of the novel, and imagination in its broadest sense, wherein we are reminded of the ethical obligations that things, especially technology, call for. Above all, Carey reveals the porosity of the boundaries between organic and inorganic substance, tethering matter to metaphysics, desire to detritus, and the present to the past. “Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where alētheia, truth, happens.” (Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”) 1. Nostalgia and Neo-Victorianism Contemporary literature in English nurtures a fascination, both aesthetic and intellectual, with the weight of the cultural legacy of the nineteenth century. The rise of neo-Victorian fi ction in particular, as manifested in Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003), Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2012), Graham Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2015), and Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (2016), to name but a few, speaks of the seductive charisma of the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and its pull towards an increasing need to recalibrate and readjust our moral 102 Rūta Šlapkauskaitė contract with the past, on the other. For Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham, editors of Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Possessing the Past, the ubiquitous traces of nineteenth-century culture across the English-speaking world have a haunting quality that highlights the epistemic power of cultural accretions: The spectral presence of the Victorian past is all around us: it exists in the municipal buildings of our major cities; it is visible in our education system; it informs the legacy of immigration; it underpins cultural tourism; it is ever-present in popular culture in fashion, fi lm and television adaptations, and is evident in the ‘Classics’ section of every bookshop in the country where major novels by Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy are always to be found. (xi) While bringing forth the sedimental nature of cultural phenomena, these barnacles of time also get hold of the public sentiment and imagination regarding the diff erent modalities of nineteenth-century life, aligning the call for remembering and understanding with the sense of longing and oblivion in an aesthetic guise of what Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia calls “armchair nostalgia” (15). Neo-Victorian novels themselves, as Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss point out, often are marketed as “pleasurable commodity objects inviting consumption” and promising “titillating entertainment” (4) that bring out the “internal confl ict between critical thinking and emotional bonding” (Boym xvi). As a structuring principle of historiographic (meta)fi ctions, nostalgia moves in step with the epistemological desire to restore and reform the intellectual, emotional, material, and moral bonds between the present and the past. Conceptually, however, the restorative gesture fi nds itself at odds with the imperative of critical refl ection. It is worth recalling Boym’s distinction at greater length: Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Refl ective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming – wistfully, ironically, desperately. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Refl ective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth while refl ective nostalgia calls it into doubt. (xviii) In this respect, the clashes and crossovers between restorative and refl ective nostalgia in neo-Victorian literature highlight the extent to which our relations to the past are fraught equally with aff ection and alienation. On the one hand, the Victorian world in contemporary fi ction exerts its power of immersion, elevating to signifi cance the novel’s aff ective economy with its emphasis on loss and longing; on the other, it directs a political eye toward the modern condition as a moral agent of nineteenth-century legacy, exposing thereby the mutual imbrications Th e Mechanics of Endurance in Peter Carey’s Th e Chemistry of Tears 103 of emotional absorption and intellectual alertness. This view echoes in BoehmSchnitker and Gruss’s observation that “Neo-Victorianism provides the pleasures of immersion and enhance these by keeping us in the know of the how and why these pleasures are produced” (16). 2. Things vs. Objects: Ontology, Morality, and Social Mobility The dialectical character of the nostalgic sensibility reverberates in modern-day textual revalorisations of nineteenth-century culture by way of examining its association with the advancement of rational thought, technology, and social emancipation, on the one hand, and the rise of industrial capitalism, imperialist expansion, and the consumerist ethos, on the other. Although the material turn across diff erent disciplines, which began as a critical reaction to the linguistic turn in the 1980s, initially addressed the material histories of eighteenth-century British colonialism, more recently, to quote Frank Trentmann, “research has moved at once forward in time, highlighting the cult of home possessions in Victorian Britain, and outward, recognizing imperial and global points of exchange and transculturation” (285). It seems reasonable to note, therefore, that more often than not the immersive power of narratives attuned to the nineteenth-century aesthetic conventions derives from encounters with material culture, which prime contemporary readers for the processes of collection and recollection that shed light on the moral transactions between our material, social, and textual practices. As Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss reiterate, “Neo-Victorian texts frequently tap into all schemas of materiality, at once metafi ctionally highlighting their own status as artefacts, playing at the aff ective relations to things for characters and readers alike, and refl ecting on texts as products and their implications within a late-capitalist marketplace” (10). To put it otherwise, aesthetic encounters with materiality in neo-Victorian literature simultaneously help recreate, albeit in narrative terms only, and re-examine the material contingencies of nineteenth-century social life as well as yield critical insight about the social formations that historically have contributed to the marketability of neo-Victorianism itself in the global capitalist economy of art. The material side of cultural memory, of course, is not limited to the neoVictorian aesthetic agenda. In the domain of theoretical reasoning more broadly, the revival of intellectual interest in the signifi cance of material accounts has had major implications for the discourse on human subjectivity and agency. The intellectual impact of Arjun Appadur ai’s The Social Life of Things deserves special attention here. His edited volume of essays has called for a revised attitude to things as active participants in social transactions, whose mobility in the network of social relations uncovers the ethical premises of human regimes of value, desire, and institutionalised power. For Appadurai, “even though from a theoretical point 104 Rūta Šlapkauskaitė of view human actors encode things with signifi cance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context” (5; original emphasis). In other words, social history and anthropology take the view that material objects, by way of circulating in culturally defi ned settings and socially regulated exchanges, fulfi l themselves as social actors that unveil the ways in which humans give value to things and things give value to social relations. In the context of studies of nineteenth-century culture, Janell Watson’s Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust proceeds along similar lines in that, by examining the meaning and signifi cance of the bibelot in nineteenth-century French culture, it makes visible the social institutions and practices that tied “valuable art objects [to] industrial reproductions, and worthless junk” (6) and shows how material agency correlated with social values such as daring, decadence, and domesticity. As a result, her analysis of nineteenth-century commodity culture compellingly brings to light the durability of social relations as measured against the moral transactions of material forms of knowledge. While nineteenth-century material accounts show no lack of testimony to how the new practices of commerce and commodifi cation were co-dependent on the social construction of value, to the extent of inaugurating a culture of consumption and consumerism, Bill Brown’s reading of nineteenth-century American literature in A Sense of Things considers the conceptual limitations of Appadurai’s approach and draws our attention to an “indeterminate ontology” (2003, 13) where things are not exhausted by the logic of capitalism, but have an interiority that challenges the autonomy of human subjectivity. In his reasoning, the material parameters of the object world are constitutive of human subjectivity as a materially embodied self in that things participate in our intellectual processes and emotional experiences, alerting us to how our desires for and needs of objects take possession of us so that we lose our agency and become object-like. Brown’s notion of mat

Of Motion and Emotion: The Mechanics of Endurance in Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears