NB: THE FOLLOWING has been hand-corrected from RTF format and may contain some
errors; it is provided for the first perusal of the editors only.  I will convert
the original file properly later.
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Object Relations
<P>
The archetypal dull object is a small pebble. It has properties, true: it is
portable, inedible, visible, can be thrown, is without odour, colour or taste,
lacks consciousness, is not flammable, has no interior, is opaque, can be put in
pockets. But these are exactly the characteristics which we discard from our
impressions as being unremarkable.  They take a good deal more simulation for
interactive fiction than one might expect, and indeed if a pebble failed of any
of them, it would become interesting for that reason, but this a long-solved
problem. The corresponding problem of simulating people, using any machinery
other than people (i.e., actors), is woefully different, and at times appears
hopeless. Numerous designers of interactive fiction eschew characters altogether,
or have them sleeping, in ghostly form, busy potting daisies or in some other way
evading their reasonable obligations to observe and react. This is a shame. The
present chapter is, however, not a contribution to that debate. Instead of
lamenting that interactive fiction is hobbled by a lack of characters, one might
count one's blessings by observing the richly nuanced possibilities of objects as
used in conventional fiction. Objects are by no means too crude to carry a
narrative of human situations. The difference between object-rich interactive
fiction and people-rich uninteractive fiction is not a dichotomy on the scale of,
say, conversing with a small pebble versus conversing with Socrates. Leaving
aside the physical behaviour of objects, since those are easily understood (a
chair supports the character sitting on it, but this is not very remarkable from
a literary point of view), we consider three largely distinct ways in which
fictional objects function in story-telling: first evocatively, in representing
character and feeling; second as objects of desire, arousing those feelings in
reader and characters alike; and thirdly as a kind of carrier, a physical signal
which intercedes between characters negotiating their feelings. 
 <p>
 
Evocative Objects
 <p>
 
Few would deny that other people are the sweetness of life. The evocative use in
narrative of objects rather than characters at first seems a saccharine, a sugar
substitute. Literary criticism has a variety of terms for the way particular
objects come to represent, or stand in place of, an inchoate mass of feelings and
social structures: for instance, metonymy ("The bench rebuked Mr Dershovitz" =
the Judge sitting at the bench did) and its close cousin, synecdoche ("She loved
that driving seat" = she enjoyed using the whole car). Sometimes these devices
are elegant plays on association, fraying away into hackneyed figures of speech;
sometimes they are a verbal shorthand for rafts of understanding whose
elaboration would be unnecessary, tiresome and perhaps also difficult. ("Downing
Street today denied any rift between the Health Secretary and the Chancellor.")
What makes metonymy more than a linguistic convenience, where figurative objects
substitute for verbal explication, is that real objects also play a role in real
social patterns. Jewellery serves us in many ways, but a diamond engagement ring
is almost wholly metonymic. If I were to burn the degree certificate which hangs
on my dentist's wall (purely hypothetically speaking), he would neither forget
his trade nor lose his right to practice it, yet the actual certificate means
something to him. The Royal Navy, though sympathetic, will not replace my
grandfather's recently stolen war medals, because the doctrine is that there can
only be one metal cross. A spare would be a fake. Essentially these are tokens to
make tangible something which seems terribly large to our lives (a
marriage-to-be, a seven-years'-apprenticeship, a dreadful time on the Murmansk
convoys), yet which has no substance. Much of the sense of unfairness in grieving
comes from the appalling way that a sudden absence seems to affect nothing else:
not the trees in the garden, not the books on their shelves, not the crockery to
be washed up. We know that the world has been transformed, and yet the world does
not. 
 <p>
 
The title of this chapter is also the title of three from Julian Barnes's novel 
"Metroland" (1980), the sentimental education of an English schoolboy. Each of
three phases is concluded by "Object Relations", a long room description
itemising his habitual things. At the end of adolescence: 
 <p>
 
A crocheted mat; two hairbrushes so stuffed with hair that I have abandoned them
and taken to a comb; clean socks and white shirt for the morning; a blue plastic
knight, made up from a model kit given me by Nigel one Christmas, and left
half-painted... My watch, which I despise because it doesn't have a second hand.
A Fablon-covered book. 
<P>
The scheme is explained in one of Barnes's trademark deft repetitions: "Objects
redolent of all I felt and hoped for; yet objects which I myself had only
half-willed, only half-planned. Some I chose, some were chosen for me, others I
consented to. Is that so strange? What else are you at that age but a creature
part willing, part consenting, part being chosen?" But the narrator is
increasingly conscious of these chosen things, which continue to lay him open.
Five years later here is what he leaves behind at the end of a summer in Paris
supposedly spent researching theatrical history: 
<P>
On the desk, a line-up of bottles of spirits, one for each calvados I'd consumed.
Beside it, a wastepaper basket which I had, with deliberate negligence, failed to
empty; though I hadn't actually planted evidence, I was certainly conscious of
what was in it. A copy of "Hara-Kiri" ("journal b '90te et m '8echant") and one
of "Les Nouvelles Litteraires"; a theatre programme which happened to be a
duplicate; various rough drafts of stories and poems; a few drawings (the best
rejects); a couple of letters from my parents; some tangerine peel; and a note
from Annick, left one morning when she had gone off early.  
<P>
<P>
Nine years later still, his objects have shrugged off their accusing looks, their
peacock-display, and are trusted guides: 
 <p>
Objects contain absent people. A poster, flat and pinned, of the chateau of
Combourg (where Chateaubriand grew up) narrates a holiday four years ago. A
phalanx of a dozen glasses on a shelf implies ten friends. A feeding-bottle,
stored high on a dresser, predicts a second baby. On the floor next to the
dresser is a plastic travel-bag with a bright sticker we bought to amuse Amy:
"Lions of Longleat", it says, with a picture of a lion in the middle. 
<P>
These room descriptions are subtler than they look, that is, are not simply
opportunities for Barnes's writerly pleasure in capturing domestic items by a
fresh phrase. The travel-bag with its sticker, for instance, is what has become
of the narrator's old suitcase, with his imagined baggage labels from foreign
parts: already it is now his daughter who will travel, no longer himself. Objects
"contain absent people", they narrate, they imply, they predict. 
 
So suggestive are juxtapositions of items, like still lives, that even when not
openly chosen or random they may still be thought to contain, narrate, imply and
predict, as in dictionaries for the interpretation of dreams. The surrealist
movement certainly thought so. Rene Char's prose poem 
"Artine" (1930, trans. William Rees): ""In the bed prepared for me... there was
no prison door, there was the taste of bitterness, a glazier's diamond, a hair, a
day, a broken chair, a silkworm, the stolen object, an overcoat chain, a tame
green fly, a branch of coral, a cobbler's nail, an omnibus wheel"" (the list is
italicised in Char's original). Of course this was nothing new in art. The
theological symbolism of objects in the Old Masters is a field of study in
itself. A few years back, I asked an expert why the artist had placed an
octagonal glass of violets on the floor in a painting of the circumcision of
Christ. "Well," she said, "some people think it signifies the virginity of Mary,
but I think he was just showing off. Most of the painters in Venice at the time
couldn't really do transparent glass." Objects should indeed give us pleasure,
besides any meaning they stand for. Sometimes that pleasure becomes urgent. 
 <p>
 
Objects of Desire 
 <p>
 
Objects can be more than substitutes for absent friends: they can be friends in
their own right. It is satisfying to lay a two-foot-high brick wall, or to rake
over ashes in the morning. We do not like to part with trusted bicycles, with
whom we have shared many miles, until they begin to betray us by constant and
wilful breakdown. A screwdriver set changes from a nagging reproach to an obscure
source of congratulation when it is used for about the fourth or fifth different
household job. "Hooray!" as Helen Fielding's heroine Bridget Jones might write in
her diary: "Am successful intellectual/handywoman hybrid." Beyond our own nests,
and the intimacy that attaches to anything in them, we find intriguing whatever
has had a history of human contact, because it is old, or hand-made. If we viewed
frankly bad furniture and cookware in functional terms, there would be no
antiques dealers. A coin minted in 1921 has a story the more interesting because
it cannot be known. Better yet is the tale of something which struggles to come
down to us, the lost treasure: 
 <p>
 
 Until!  -- finally, and at long last  -- mangled and tattered like a dog that
has fought its way home, there falls across the threshold of the Italian
Renaissance the sole surviving witness [...] the Verona Codex of Catullus; which
was almost immediately lost again, but not before it was copied with one last
opportunity for error. And there you have the foundation for the poems of
Catullus, as they went to the printer for the first time, in Venice 400 years
ago. 
<P>
So goes an outburst in a 19th-century scene from Tom Stoppard's play, 
"The Invention of Love" (1997). Legend has it that the Verona codex, the last
copy anywhere of Catullus, was found bunging up a wine-butt in the cellars of a
monastery. There are reasons to doubt this, but the legend is itself revealing,
as was the recent keenness of newspapers to celebrate the "discovery" of a "lost"
children's story by Sylvia Plath which, it transpired, had not only been
published before and by Plath herself, but had even been erroneously
"rediscovered" before. That we love such tales enough to over-egg them is the
more curious since they are not, in fact, especially rare. Menander, once thought
a second Homer, much imitated, copied by innumerable scribes, quoted elliptically
even in the New Testament (I Cor. 15:33), was wiped out altogether by the
Christian dark age (not counting some aphorisms and somewhat free Latin
translations). His fragmentary survival today hangs chiefly on two pieces of
rubbish: a wrapper lining a jar buried in a Cairo lawyer's house, excavated in
1905; and the papier m '89ch '8e used by municipal workers in 3rd-century BC
Alexandria to remummify a number of dilapidated bodies, unseen by human eye until
it was unpeeled at the Sorbonne between 1906 and 1965. It is all the tale of
Perdita, the daughter washed ashore as a baby after a shipwreck, to be raised by
shepherds, with nothing but a keepsake in her tiny hand. 
 <p>
 
Such exquisite objects of desire are central to genre fiction. In the "literary
entertainment", for want of a less patronising term, the treasure may indeed be a
manuscript: in Eco's "The Name of the Rose", a lost book by Aristotle; in A. S.
Byatt's "Possession", a secret exchange of love letters between Victorian poets;
in Henry James's "The Aspern Papers", the Aspern papers. Or we may find ourselves
in the cold war, with the microfilm of "atomic secrets" hidden in a Russian doll;
or in the English 1930s thriller, where the Foreign Secretary will visit our hero
in his flat at St James's after midnight, to confide that it is no exaggeration
to say that the fate of nations depends on this innocent document. In one long
paper chase we pursue letters patent of a claim to the Ruritanian throne; a
private annexe to a treaty; a nameless protocol; a formula predicting the stock
market, called only The Product; a millionaire recluse's lost final will. The
matter is an urgent one. Paper, that may crackle with life, may also crackle in
the flames. 
 <p>
 
The token changes hands, perhaps frequently, or is at least pregnant with the
risk of loss, while the present holder is in no doubt that, merely by virtue of
holding it, he is the central figure in the narrative of the world. A comedy
inversion (and a defining quality of farces) is to find the object not vital to
hang on to, but vital to get rid of. In the Fawlty Towers episode "The Kipper and
the Corpse" (1979), both objects recur no matter what Basil Fawlty tries, the
fugue-like reappearance of the kipper  -- which one might think easier to dispose
of than the dead hotel guest  -- being a masterstroke. The kipper, long past its
best, is cooked for the breakfast in bed of a guest who has, however, died in the
night. Fawlty, the hotelier, wrongly assumes that the kipper was responsible for
the guest's demise, and panics. The doctor is coming. Fawlty has only seconds to
hide the evidence. He tries to open a window, but it's jammed. He stuffs the
kipper under his cardigan, but the head begins to protrude just as... and so on.
Later, the kipper is thrown into the kitchen doorway, out of shot, to get rid of
it once and for all; where, however, somebody carrying the corpse trips over it.
This Marx-Brothers-like business is funny partly because the kipper is
incongruous, but mostly because Fawlty is berserkly determined that it must not
be seen, a distraction from the actual problem that the corpse must not be seen.
Also, of course, because it ought to be easy to get rid of but will not go away.
As curious as it seems, Fawlty's kipper is in some structural sense the
equivalent of Wagner's ring. One cannot quite imagine Fawlty's operatic death,
bellowing a final warning to "Beware the Kipper!" as the curtain falls, and yet
it is still his nemesis. 
 <p>
 
So narrow a focus, and such certainty of purpose (as compared with the aimless
ambiguities of real life) are characteristic of genre fiction, as also, by its
present means of construction at least, characteristic of interactive fiction.
There is no crime against mimesis in designing an interactive fiction whose quest
is essentially for an object rather than, say, a shift in human relationships,
for traditional fiction is replete with such tales. Mimesis is threatened only
when the object sought fails to convince the reader that it is precious. It must
move us as the plight of a sympathetic character would move us: it must be a
character in all but physical form. 
 
 
<P>
Interceding Objects 
 
 <p>
Having considered objects as evocation and as desire, scenery and treasure, we
turn to objects as tools: not as physical tools, like crowbars or biplanes, but
as the means by which fictional characters adjust and express their feelings
about each other. 
 
 <p>
In the stagey third act of Alfred Hitchcock's movie "North By Northwest" (1959),
Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is hiding on the upstairs landing of James
Mason's criminal hideout. Frantic to attract Eva Marie Saint's attention, he dare
not risk being heard or seen by any of her confederates. Eva is a double agent
who has infiltrated the gang but, unknown to her, she has been found out. So
Grant must somehow warn her that the gang plan to kill her. His solution is to
throw a matchbook, bearing the monogram R.O.T., onto the carpet below, at Eva's
feet. It concentrates our anxiety because it is so tiny on that wide screen,
because he has only one try, because Mason has guns, Martin Landau and a sinister
housekeeper while Grant is armed only with a small square of cardboard. Who will
see it first? Even if Eva does, will her reaction betray her? 
 <p>
 
Grant's solution is one for which the audience has been prepared. We saw the
matchbook earlier, in what was itself a deftly metonymic device. Roger has R.O.T.
matchbooks printed: what shall we infer of Roger? That he is successful, not a
young man, smokes too much, advertises, is wry about his own shortcomings ("rot")
but stubborn too, doesn't spend too much time at home (being doubtless divorced
by two or three exasperated wives already), and is suave as all heck regardless.
Roger is, in short, played by Cary Grant. The matchbook serves still a third
function in a movie "about" transposed identities: of the many markers of
identity in the movie, from red railroad-company caps to dry-cleaning tickets and
hotel reservations, this label alone, small and foolish, tells the truth. Barring
some peripheral characters early on, only Grant is *not* a secret agent. 
 <p>
 
The message carries; Mason and entourage leave for a getaway plane; Grant rushes
downstairs, meaning to follow them out and somehow rescue Eva. Unexpectedly a
second familiar object detains him: Eva's revolver. In its earlier scene, Eva had
proved her villainous credentials by shooting Grant dead, a phoney incident
staged for Mason's benefit. Now Grant, thinking the downstairs lounge is clear,
finds the housekeeper pointing that same revolver dead at him. Cut to outside
where, a little while on, we are startled to see that Grant has now escaped. How
did he do it? In a classic aside, which except for one frantic exchange early on
is his only dialogue in the whole 14-minute sequence, Grant tells Eva: "The
housekeeper had me pinned down for five minutes before I realised it was that
same silly gun of yours." Like Grant, we the audience were clearly shown, and
then reminded, and still forgot, that the revolver was a fake. 
 <p>
 
What was Ernest Lehman, the screenwriter, up to? His difficulty was to resolve
the movie's mysteries without allowing it to end, Hitchcock being set on an
all-action finale at Mount Rushmore. Grant, Eva and Mason must somehow all meet,
clarify their true motives and identities once and for all, yet resolve nothing.
Lehman accomplished this with devices not unlike those which sterner critics of
interactive fiction would disapprove. Lehman keeps Grant one location behind
Mason  -- climbing the house wall when Eva is upstairs; upstairs when the gang
are downstairs; downstairs when they are out on the driveway; out on the driveway
when they are at the plane waiting to take off. Lehman ensures that Grant cannot
provoke a confrontation by having him outnumbered and unarmed. He slows Grant
down with a two-stage puzzle based on objects, each used once already.
Interaction is diverted from people to things, from speech to gesture. 
 <p>
 
Thomas Hardy likewise avoided a happy ending to Tess by having a letter, pushed
shyly under a door, disappear beneath a carpet, never to be read; he disposed of
Michael Henchard's last act of love, a gift of a canary, by having its cage
draped closed so that it starved before anyone found it; he demolished a solid
farmer's composure by sending him a flirtatious but unmeant Valentine from
Bathsheba Everdene. All these objects are carriers, just as the matchbook was
Cary Grant's honest endeavour and the phoney revolver Eva's inner self: a good
girl, only pretending to be a murderess. As with most good romances, it is hard
to pin down exactly where in "North By Northwest" the lovers settle on each
other, but if one had to pick a single scene this might be it. 
 
 
<P>
The Inventory of an Adventure 
<P>
Sherlock Holmes comprehends people, when he does, through objects, the tools and
clues which follow him as a comet is made visible by its tail. As the "Adventure
of the Blue Carbuncle" (1892) opens, Watson, who "knows my methods", reconstructs
the recent past with one glance at the objects surrounding Holmes's sofa:
newspapers "evidently newly studied", lens and forceps so posed that they
"suggested" a forensic examination. A mislaid hat, owner unknown, is then
examined for some 1019 words, one-seventh of the whole, while Holmes performs his
standard trick. Watson: "But his wife  -- you said that she had ceased to love
him." Holmes: "This hat has not been brushed for weeks." 
 <p>
  
This "Adventure", slight but charming, has a festive motif, over a dozen
characters, picturesque locations; yet its objects have the greater tenacity, as
we see through the eyes of its first reader. Sidney Paget, illustrator for 
"The Strand" magazine, and unsung creator of much of the Holmes iconography,
depicted above all faces and postures: a criminal stoop, a saturnine smile. His
interiors are vague pools of light with chairs only as needed, and he dispenses
altogether with the Yuletide scene in the consulting rooms, the roaring fire, the
windows "thick with the ice crystals". The inventory for the story (from which
the reader who knows Holmes's methods may like to deduce the plot) is, in order
of appearance: 
 
<P>
a sofa; Holmes's purple dressing-gown; pipe-rack; crumpled morning papers; a
hard-felt hat with "H.B." inside; lens; forceps; *a white goose with a barred
tail; *a card reading "For Mrs. Henry Baker"; a brilliantly scintillating blue
stone, rather smaller than a bean in size, found in the goose's crop; *a small
morocco casket; Holmes's strong-box; a Scotch bonnet; another goose, identical to
the first; two glasses of beer; a small thin volume and a great greasy-backed
one; a hanging lamp; a sovereign (coin); a four-wheeler cab; basket chair;
Holmes's slippers; medicinal brandy; *a villain's pipe; *twenty-five further
geese; a bell for summoning Mrs Hudson, Holmes's cook. 
<P>
Those items marked with an asterisk appear only in dialogue reporting past events
at which Holmes was not present, and are as such unavailable to Paget (notably 26
of the 27 geese). This leaves 21 possibles, of which Paget's six illustrations
include exactly two-thirds, omitting only newspapers, strong-box, bonnet, coin,
beer, cab and bell. The coin and bell are too small, the strong-box, bonnet, beer
and cab would all require a seventh illustration showing a fleeting moment in the
tale, so that only the newspapers are voluntarily omitted: and that because,
presumably, the opening scene is already so cluttered. 
 <p>
 
We might, to be sure, inventory the same story in a number of other ways. As
class stratification  -- our middle-class professional men jostle with a
Countess, a jailbird gone straight, an intellectual on his uppers, a barrow boy,
four servants at varying degrees of respectability; as chronology  -- events are
arrayed along five segments of time between 22 and 27 December; as economic
survey  -- transactions range from a few pence, via one sovereign, to  L1000; as
a geography of barriers in Victorian London. In "Eccentric Spaces", his classic
study of landscape in the imagination, Robert Harbison remarks of the great
detective that "In the distressingly simplest terms, this is the crux of social
life: getting into other people's homes, to which he has found an odd but
gratifying solution". 
 <p>
 
And yet these readings seem peripheral, like the shadowy walls which Paget
declined to draw, compared to the objects. Objects serving a metonymic function
are the best clues to the habits of the people inhabiting this story, especially
in clothing, from the purple dressing gown to the hat. At the centre in every way
is an object of desire: the eponymous Blue Carbuncle, sportive (carbuncles are
ordinarily red), exotic (from "the banks of the Amoy River in southern China"),
precious (valued by Holmes at  L20,000), sinister ("Of course it is a nucleus and
focus of crime. Every good stone is"), exclusive (the Countess of Morcar reserves
it to herself), sensational (advertisements of a reward for its return have
filled newspapers for a week), hidden (it is always inside something else, never
displayed). This being a comic tale, the stone needs no tracking down and is
always being inadvertently given away. Holmes finds it in his supper goose, a
parody of the customary coin placed in the Christmas pudding for the children to
find. He will return it to the Countess as soon as he has deduced how it reached
him, by running back through previous owners. As for objects interceding between
characters, the goose not once but twice appears as a peace offering between
couples: Mr and Mrs Henry Baker, whose estrangement is such that she no longer
dusts his hat; and at last Holmes and Watson, at a delicate moment since Watson's
recent marriage has obliged them to divide their households. No longer sharing
lodgings, they can at least share beers and a late supper: and there is never any
doubt that the bird, all the while being plucked and roasted below stairs, will
in the final paragraph "fulfil the ultimate destiny of a goose". 
 
 
<P>
Graham Nelson <br>
St Anne's College  <br>
University of Oxford <br>