Since there were a few members of our seminar unable to make it to class this morning, I wanted to give a summary of a key part of our discussion. I hope this will be useful for the rest of us, as well, and please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below!

We discussed a section from de Waal’s Prologue in which he describes a story he remembers his grandmother, Elisabeth, once told him about Charles Ephrussi, the art collector who first collected the netsuke. He imagines one version of the story he could write, one with “stitched-together wistful anecdotes” and “some clippings from Google on ballrooms in the Belle Époque” (15). But that narrative, he says, “would come out as nostalgic. And thin.” de Waal tells us, “I am not interested in thin” (15).

So we considered what it meant for a narrative to be “thin” or “thick.” Here are some summarizing points of that discussion:

Thin Narratives:

-Are nostalgic and melancholic–based on hindsight and the writer’s feelings about the past.

-Are therefore self-centered (literally)–mainly about the writer.

-Are clichéd, and tend to tell stories that are the same as other people’s stories (see de Waal on p. 151 discussing a moment where his narrative almost “thins” out).

Thick Narratives:

-Are full of “exactitude” (de Waal 16) and based on careful details.

-Reconstruct the places, things, and experience of a time: “I want to be able to reach to the handle of the door and turn it and feel it open. I want to walk into each room where this object has lived, to feel the volume of the space, to know what pictures were on the walls, how the light fell from the windows” (de Waal 16).

-Create an experience constructed out of multidisciplinary knowledge of the past. For instance, de Waal draws upon:

• Architecture
• Urban history and planning
• Psychology and sociology
• Art and Art History
• Literature
• Photography
• Fashion
• Intellectual History

-Are based on discovery and trying to find something new about the subject or history (rather than re-telling familiar stories)

-Are Connected to other stories and histories–move beyond the “self”

-Develop/Have an Arc

In summary, The Hare with Amber Eyes offers us a model for telling historical narratives both with and through objects. The text invites us to touch the netsuke and experience their history by placing them in a rich (“thick”) cultural history.

My inpiration for this course came from reading Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, a book that we will be studying in this class. The text is remarkable because it tells the story of a family not by psychoanalyzing personalities but through looking at objects–a collection of Japanese Netsuke (small handcrafted figurines) to be precise. We get an amazing view of who this person is and where he comes from because of the stories that these objects contain.

It is my hope that we can find out more about ourselves, our community, and our scholarship by looking to the stories held by the objects around us. We will be using our “reading” of things (some simple and everyday, some more elaborate) as an avenue to personal stories, collective histories, and new approaches to our scholarly work. I am very excited to see where these searches will take us over the course of the term!