One of the main tenets of material ecocriticism is the “narrativity” of matter, namely, the ways meanings, stories, signs, and discourses are embedded in material forms, intra-acting with the lives and landscapes of humans and nonhumans. In my presentation I analyze the material-discursive entanglements of Naples, the “porous city” (as Walter Benjamin defined it), by discussing a significant example of “storied matter”: the plaster casts created by archaeologists in excavating Pompeii’s ruins. There is a paradoxical aspect in these bodies: creating hollows in the solidified lava, their absence was instrumental to make visible the emerging interplay of nature (the volcanic eruption) and culture (Pompeii’s social dynamics and the loss of memory about Vesuvius being a volcano). As a result, the collision of nature’s agency with the material and cultural dimension of Pompeii’s life created in the landscape a new naturalcultural, or diffractive, narrative. In this porous dimension in which bodies are absorbed by the world, and the world—in the form of lava or other matter—is absorbed by bodies, landscape became the material and cognitive context of memory. Although absent and silent, these bodies are thus powerfully eloquent, transforming a history of death into a lively narrative of naturalcultural emergences. In my presentation I propose how such an interpretation can respond to this narrative of worlds in “differential becoming,” also considering the way the diffractive dynamics of nature and memory are embodied in what Pompeii’s reality appears to be today.
The Living Diffractions of Matter and Text: Material Narratives, Ecocritical Interpretation, and Natural-Cultural Memory
IOVINO, Serenella
2013-01-01
Abstract
One of the main tenets of material ecocriticism is the “narrativity” of matter, namely, the ways meanings, stories, signs, and discourses are embedded in material forms, intra-acting with the lives and landscapes of humans and nonhumans. In my presentation I analyze the material-discursive entanglements of Naples, the “porous city” (as Walter Benjamin defined it), by discussing a significant example of “storied matter”: the plaster casts created by archaeologists in excavating Pompeii’s ruins. There is a paradoxical aspect in these bodies: creating hollows in the solidified lava, their absence was instrumental to make visible the emerging interplay of nature (the volcanic eruption) and culture (Pompeii’s social dynamics and the loss of memory about Vesuvius being a volcano). As a result, the collision of nature’s agency with the material and cultural dimension of Pompeii’s life created in the landscape a new naturalcultural, or diffractive, narrative. In this porous dimension in which bodies are absorbed by the world, and the world—in the form of lava or other matter—is absorbed by bodies, landscape became the material and cognitive context of memory. Although absent and silent, these bodies are thus powerfully eloquent, transforming a history of death into a lively narrative of naturalcultural emergences. In my presentation I propose how such an interpretation can respond to this narrative of worlds in “differential becoming,” also considering the way the diffractive dynamics of nature and memory are embodied in what Pompeii’s reality appears to be today.
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