Chapter 6 Towards sustainable practices in the ‘post-museum’: object lessons from contemporary literature

Emma Bond

In August 2023, the British Museum became embroiled in scandal when it emerged that over one and a half thousand items from its collections, including gold, jewellery and semi-precious stones dating back to the fifteenth century B.C., had been stolen by an employee and re-sold on eBay. What is perhaps more scandalous than a curator siphoning off ancient objects for personal gain is that the theft also exposed systemic weaknesses in the British Museum’s catalogues and record-keeping practices. The website that the museum launched the following month with the aim of finding the missing objects listed items ‘similar to’ those missing, rather than the exact objects themselves.¹ This is because the majority of the missing artifacts had never been registered. At the time of writing, around half of the British Museum’s collections, in fact, remained uncatalogued – approximately four million objects. This is less surprising than it might seem, since inadequate resourcing, combined with a sheer excess of things, means that cataloguing has become a near-impossible task for many of today’s world museums to keep up with. If we add to this the fact that most museums in the Global North only have capacity to display a maximum of around five per cent of their collections,² leaving the rest in storage – which is expensive, environmentally unsustainable and exclusive in terms of access – we can see precisely why the contemporary museum sector is facing what has been termed a ‘crisis of accumulation’.³

This chapter draws on material first published in my recent monograph Curating Worlds: Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature, which proposes that a number of museum techniques (such as collecting, curating, display, storage, preservation and deaccession) can be seen as narrative strategies that offer up new ways of reading, interpreting and understanding literary texts.⁴ The final chapter of the book, on object deaccession, takes its cue from the ‘crisis’ of accumulation described above to explore how museums might envisage post-object futures, and how contemporary novels might offer a framework for reading modes of degrowth through their own moves towards post-representation.⁵ It is this link between literature and museums that I want to explore further in the present chapter, in order to foreground the value of literary research for other fields and disciplines. In Curating Worlds, I identify parallels between museum debates on deaccession and a waning of the solidity of material referents in an emerging genre of novels that Timothy Bewes has recently termed ‘post-fictional’. These are novels that stretch and exceed genre boundaries, ‘formally ambiguous modes of writing with ontological implications that extend beyond the practice of literature’,⁶ which therefore, I argue, offer themselves as potential models for imagining new modes of (narrative) representation within museum futures.

In what follows here, I will focus my analysis on the rupture between form and content that museum paradigms of loss, disposal and deaccession imply, in order to identify what sorts of analogous modes of reading beyond the object we might be able to use when approaching contemporary novels. In terms of literature, these new, liminal forms of representation are emerging to occupy a ‘fringe’ position in terms of genre and, in particular, are muddling modes of fiction and non-fiction. These are literary forms ‘that cross the borders between styles, genres and media, between real-life events and imagined ones’.⁷ Using a term coined by the Italian author collective Wu Ming, Kate Willman refers to such texts as ‘unidentified narrative objects’ (UNOs). My chapter will identify instances in post-fictional UNOs where the ties between an object and its representation become loosened in such a way as to activate our understanding of the narrative potential of spaces such as museums and other heritage sites that exist, in Bewes’s words cited above, ‘beyond the practice of literature’.⁸

This is an especially timely intervention since deaccession is a growing contemporary concern for museums, and one that holds high emotional, even existential, stakes. In recent years, top US institutions, such as the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, have come under fire for selling high-value artworks in order to raise funds for the care of collections and for diversity initiatives. As Christopher Bedford, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, explained at the time, ‘my greatest act of creativity is now an economic one’.⁹ Deaccession thus threatens the foundations of our current understanding of the museum as an institution and as a concept but, in selected cases, it could potentially open up new avenues and new directions for museum futures. Indeed, in the current crisis of heritage sites holding on to ‘too much stuff’, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s declaration that the ‘great collecting phase of museums is over’ has ushered in the idea of the ‘post-museum’, which forecasts a focus on object re-use and adaptation rather than on the further accumulation of things.¹⁰ This post-museum is envisaged less as a sited building and more as a scripted process that can be experienced ‘within a variety of architectural forms’.¹¹ In the analysis that follows, I will suggest that one of these forms that the post-museum might take could be the post-fictional novel, inspired by Wolfgang Ernst, casting the design of the earliest object collections as a ‘space of contemplation’ or ‘a cognitive field of ideas’: not so much a place, then, as a text or a semiotic-led space.¹² This chapter will make the case for the value of literary research by exploring whether contemporary works of post-fiction can hint at what might happen if the absolute primacy of the object collection in the museum begins to wane.

This sense of a growing flux and uncertainty in visions of museum object futures has been a long time in the making. Dayna L. Caldwell offers a bleak picture of museums in the grip of an obsessive-compulsive crisis, with their backrooms and basements now resembling ‘the slowly expanding burden within a hoarder’s domain’.¹³ But how did they arrive here? The crisis of object accumulation is perhaps best explained by the heritage explosion of the twentieth century, which saw the global number of museums increase exponentially, coupled with an ‘ethics of memory’ which arose in response to the traumas of a century characterised by loss. This combination of factors gave rise to something of a ‘Noah complex’, where museums felt compelled to first collect and then retain unsustainable numbers of objects in order to preserve memories of the past.¹⁴ Only over the past twenty years have the first steps towards implementing a solid framework for getting rid of objects occurred, spurred by the publication of the National Museum Director’s Conference reports entitled ‘Too Much Stuff’ in 2003, and the issue of a revised Museums Association ‘Disposal Toolkit’ in 2014. Yet curators must still confront anxieties around which objects to collect in order to preserve a representative sample of the present for the future, since we never know for sure what is going to be valuable, and to whom, beyond our own lifespans. Do we thus need to whittle down some existing collections of past material to make more space for the present in the future? On the one hand, museums poised towards disposal risk damaging public trust in their stewardship, thereby putting the notion of museums as institutions bound to survive time into doubt. For if its foundational collections can be dismantled, the museum is no longer a fixed entity for perpetuity. On the other hand, museums have a responsibility to future generations not to become unmanageable. But what happens to the spaces left behind by objects that are delisted, deaccessioned and ultimately disposed of: victims of processes of decluttering in public museums and private homes alike? And what sort of narratives emerge in the gaps, the blank spaces and the empty display cases they leave behind?

As far back as 1968, the Smithsonian-based historian Wilcomb Washburn posed the provocative question that if the primary purpose of the museum is to store and transfer knowledge and information, ‘need one save objects at all?’.¹⁵ In an era of three-dimensional digitisation and reproduction such as the present one, representations of what and how museum objects can mean has necessarily been diversified. The focus on the (digitised) preservation of information rather than objects themselves has brought about the risk of things being transformed into images and the museum itself becoming a data bank, ‘taking apart’, as Ernst warns, ‘the hermeneutic distinction between memory and waste’.¹⁶ Concerns about object overflow have affected the contemporary novel in much the same way as they have today’s museums. Many novels of the twentieth century have been categorised as having functioned like a ‘storage medium’ for the flotsam and jetsam of history.¹⁷ So if the task of the postmodern museum was, in the eyes of some theorists, ‘to teach the user how to cope with information’,¹⁸ can more contemporary, twenty-first century, post-fictional novels show them how to do so, precisely by moving beyond object reliance? As we shift away from relying on museums and novels to provide figural representations of reality, new locations for meaning-making are emerging within the residual or blank spaces freed up after objects become frail or fail in other ways to deliver what is desired of them. In the analysis that follows, I will probe these ideas in readings of contemporary novels that interrogate objects in fruitless quests to answer unresolved questions, and in so doing privilege instances of failure, forgetting and loss over memory, conservation and further accumulation.

The ability to forget is becoming increasingly rare, both on a personal and institutional level, in today’s digitised world where everything can be archived for future reference. This is because fetishising what remains of history has led to memory becoming akin to a ‘new religion of the past’, as Maria Stepanova remarks in her astounding, genre-bending book In Memory of Memory: ‘(i)n comparison with a future we don’t want to inhabit, what has already happened feels domesticated – practically bearable’.¹⁹ Personal pasts become a safe harbour, a foreign country that can be colonised, modified and then mobilised for present and future needs. Published by Fitzcarraldo in 2021 in a translation by Sasha Dugdale, Stepanova’s volume has the white cover reserved for non-fiction works, rather than the distinctive blue shade of the imprint’s fiction range, yet inside, it is characterised – somewhat confusingly – as ‘Essay/Fiction’. It also bears the tantalising subtitle of A Romance. In Memory of Memory thus destabilising our readerly expectations from the off: the slash separating but also conjoining genres; the ‘romance’ label providing a bewildering angle. This hybrid labelling anticipates the author’s interventionist approach to personal essay-writing that sees her constantly cast doubt on the material she lays before us until we, as readers, are ultimately left grasping at nothing more than her words. Stepanova’s broad mission in In Memory of Memory is to oppose any comfortable retreat into the past by consistently showing how her attempts to revive and narrativise her own family history lead to nothing meaningful at all. Much of this work of letting go takes place within the relationship the narrator tries to form with objects. By gathering up her recently deceased Aunt Galya’s belongings into detailed descriptions but simultaneously pointing to their lack of transferable meaning, Stepanova uses In Memory of Memory to show how post-fictional texts can serve as a particular kind of archive, both for things and for their disappearance, thus calling the reader’s attention to the generative capacities of loss. Letting go of material remnants thus becomes a creative response to a contemporary necessity, allowing us to shed comforting, but maybe unrealistic, fantasies, whether these are of ‘permanence, of national coherence, of a universal subject, (or) of a particular future’.²⁰

Museums might well heed Sarah Wasserman’s words quoted here. In the same way as the realist novel or the archive, the modern museum once represented an ‘organizational principle for the content of cultural identity and scientific knowledge’,²¹ one built on practices of collecting, ordering, categorising, displaying and preserving past things. It has thus assumed the function of externalising memory: we can relegate our memorial function to museums because the physical content of memory is (supposedly) stored there in perpetuity. Traditional museums, memorials and even novels are all, in Pierre Nora’s felicitous term, lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory, that in effect replace active processes of memorialisation.²² However, faced with the ‘profusion struggle’ of overflowing reserves and storerooms, heritage institutions are now recognising the need to consciously define the life cycle of objects as bookended by moments of birth and death, foreclosing the possibility of endlessly preserving memory for future generations.²³ Calls for degrowth in heritage collections thus align museum priorities with economic and social agendas that attend more closely to utility and to the potential future benefits of actions and acquisitions rather than seeing a priori value in the act of accumulation itself. With the advent of the post-fictional novel and the post-museum, the old regime of using traditional museal and literary forms as storage emporia for representative memorialisations of the past is now changing. This ‘implosion of the mnemonic museum frame has consequences for the form of representation of the past’,²⁴ and making difficult decisions about deaccession and disposal can allow us to open up space for more sustainable modes of remembering through forgetting and letting go of material props and anchors in heritage and narrative settings alike.

Even given this, the reader, and indeed the museum visitor, still has a crucial (albeit malleable) role in the interpretation of objects and texts, respectively. Stepanova would say this is because pasts are ‘submissive’: ‘they reject no interpretation, endure any amount of humiliation’.²⁵ We can (re-)fashion them however we like. On finding a mystery man’s name written on a piece of paper inside a lace purse belonging to her grandmother, the narrator pesters her mother for ideas of who it might be. ‘I wanted to know what to make of it. “Make of it what you will,” said my mother, and ended the conversation.’²⁶ What are the implications of this refusal of the potential to find meaning in our relationships with objects? Can achieving liberation from such a search allow us to be more creative, and more generative, in our interpretation of things? If in the Western tradition to date, material objects were assumed to act as analogues of human memory, then, as Adrian Forty shows, they also used to ‘stand in for memories and thus preserve them’.²⁷ Yet now this is no longer the case, since in standing in for memories, objects have succeeded in substituting them, thereby weakening our ties with the past. The more time Stepanova’s narrator spends in her family’s archive of objects and photographs, the less she finds she knows or remembers. ‘The history of a family which I had at the outset learnt at the speed of a straight line was now fragmenting in my head into tesserae, into notes indicating textual omissions, into hypotheses there was no one left to prove.’²⁸ Fact has turned into fiction, and all that remains to her are ‘unverifiable stories, fables, fairy tale elements, embryos of a novel’.²⁹

If our reliance on material objects to help us remember the past starts to wane, so the emphasis on recognising the value of letting go of some of its associated objects might well increase. As Wasserman says: ‘(d)oing away with fantasies of durability means rejecting damaging nostalgia and accepting constant change; it also means recognizing that even temporary formations can carry within them the possibility of real action’.³⁰ Discarding materials and information allows for greater latitude in opening up gaps where creativity might spark new ideas, new connections and new content. Yet in In Memory of Memory, the silence of family memories stored in cupboards, albums and cemeteries mimics the futility of the narrative drive to complete histories, and speaks instead of the impossibility of saving anything at all. The forgotten art of decomposition means that too much past lingers in the here and now, and the stories we tell about that past are themselves beyond repair. When confronted with her failure to make the mute objects in her family archives communicate, Stepanova’s narrator concludes that in the end, nothing revealed itself to her, and ‘the less I can say about them, the closer they come’.³¹ We have seen how in In Memory of Memory, a ‘register of narrative certainty gives way to one of crisis and disorientation in which authenticity not only of the account but also of the experience falls into doubt’.³² We now inhabit a world where preservation at all costs is a concern of the past, and where objects have lost their primacy in our efforts to connect with and memorialise collective and personal pasts. Even narrative efforts at connection are, indeed, also in decline, and evidence the fact that ‘deflections, refusals, even failures and incapacities are as important to the story of the novel as insights, revelations, intuitions, and enigmas – or more so’.³³

In this new era of Hooper-Greenhill’s post-museum, we can thus see how the erosion of object primacy may, in some select instances, be reconfigured as a positive outcome, since objects can tie memory down, fixing it into an unnatural stasis that limits its natural capacity for movement. As Michel de Certeau says, ‘memory is a sort of anti-museum: it is not localizable’.³⁴ Perhaps it is in the post-fictional spaces between objects, spaces in which we can move, walk and think beyond the fixity of representation, that we can relocate new museological priorities and practices to come: practices that privilege various modes of reuse, and potentially also of global redistribution. For in an era where the idea of ‘forever pollution’ currently haunts our futures, the crisis of accumulation that affects both the public and the private spheres in the Global North is exacerbated by ever-more-sophisticated modes of technological hoarding. Perhaps acknowledging a broader range of creative methods for representing and imagining the past, as are envisaged in the post-museum and in post-fictional narratives, might also offer something of a response to urgent issues of sustainability in our planet’s fight for climate survival.

Post-apocalyptic imaginings seem less distant and more imaginable in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, and narratives such as Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven provide a glimpse of what our relationships to things might look like in the wake of a disaster to come. When a group of stranded air travellers sets up camp in the fictional Severn City Airport after a flu pandemic eliminates 99% of the Earth’s human population, a lawyer named Clark takes over the Skymiles Lounge with an object collection that becomes known as the Museum of Civilization. News of the airport museum spreads far and wide, with visitors coming to the airport to view, and sometimes add to, the collection on display. But although the objects have a consolatory power for Clark, their curator, the ‘civilization’ they represent is shown to be extinct, replaced by new scales of humanity and inhumanity as those left in the world jostle for survival. Its futility is made clear in the following exchange, where the characters of August and Kirsten are asked to explain what the Museum of Civilization is to a passer-by.

‘I heard it’s supposed to be a place where artifacts from the old world are preserved,’ August said. The man laughed […]. ‘Here’s the thing, kids, the entire world is a place where artifacts from the old world are preserved. When was the last time you saw a new car?’³⁵

It is, rightly, the conservation of the planet itself that must concern us now, not the shoring up of individual components of its material contents. Given this, can museums design and envisage new future-oriented practice that will see us all transition beyond object dependence? And can literature help to show how they can do so? Contemporary works of literature gesture towards the possible contours of a post-museal future where the potential of objects is imagined as lying beyond their figural properties. The landscape of ontological doubt sketched by texts such as In Memory of Memory and Station Eleven further calls into question both the value of the physical space of the museum and the representational powers held within the material contours of the museum object. Recent calls for deaccessioned museum objects and objects marked for disposal to be transformed into art or even into working objects make us further query what the value of static, ‘forever’ collections is now. This value, I would argue, is contingent on factors of external necessity which are constantly changing. Outside the Severn City airport in Station Eleven, and, thus, far from the Museum of Civilization’s collection of obsolete objects, lies the graveyard where those who have died there since the outbreak of the flu pandemic are laid to rest. Between two obsolete runways, a series of aeroplane tray tables have been repurposed as grave markers, ‘driven into the ground, details of the deceased carved into the tray’s hard plastic’.³⁶ In both literary and museum settings, we should be looking for such examples of future-oriented practice in the adaptive reuse of objects that works to find meaning in loss.

The residues of material and memorial loss exist in multiple forms: in texts, in objects, in modes of intangible heritage and, most of all, in stories. Kevin Walsh is right when he makes the point that a new museology must involve people ‘in the production of their own pasts’.³⁷ This is an active process, distinct from any traditional passive experience of didactic learning in the museum. Reading post-fictional literature offers us the tools to produce our own pasts in this way because, as Judith Schalansky writes in An Inventory of Losses, another work of contemporary post-fiction, when all else is lost, or threatened with destruction, ‘(w)riting survives. By writing, as by reading, one can pick one’s own ancestors and establish a second, intellectual hereditary line to rival conventional biological heritage’.³⁸ Museums can use literary imaginings to find solutions to the challenges to come as we contemplate post-object futures and move beyond current preservation paradigms. Likewise, care can be reimagined within processes of letting go, of forgetting and of leaving spaces uncurated in order to spark creative twists and trails of fantasy and look toward new post-object futures in twenty-first-century museums and literature alike.

But we can also locate examples of how to figure museal and material degrowth into readings of contemporary novels that allow us to identify more radical shifts in narrative trends. In order to do so, we need to turn back to Bewes’s idea that the post-fictional signals some sort of dissolution of the novel’s claim to representativeness. Bewes claims that a shift has taken place in the register of contemporary narrative: from certainty to crisis and disorientation, so that ultimately, ‘the authenticity not only of the account, but also of the experience falls into doubt’.³⁹ Alongside this, the formal principles and qualities of the work have become fragile, allowing writing itself to become a ‘prominent and intrusive element in the consciousness of fictional protagonists’ in a cycle of awareness that ‘renders indeterminate the distinction between reality and fiction’.⁴⁰ Finally, Bewes notes that the post-fictional novel ‘unthinks or deauthorizes the very claims made by the work’,⁴¹ making ‘deflections, refusals, failures and incapacities as important to the story of the novel’s thought as insights, revelations, intuitions and enigmas – or more so’.⁴² These reflections chime with the recent trend toward radical autofiction in contemporary narrative, and reveal how autofictional methods might help us configure practices aimed at post-representativeness in other settings as well, such as museums and heritage sites. In contemporary Italian author Walter Siti’s pamphlet Il realismo è impossibile [Realism is Impossible], the autofictional voice is described as one that ‘esige partecipazione e consenso. Esibizionismo ricattatorio che funziona come “intimazione di realtà”; l’autore di autofiction, mentre dice al lettore “credimi”, gli comunica con altrettanta sfacciataggine “sto mentendo’ [requires participation and consensus. An exhibitionist blackmail that functions like a ‘summons to reality’; the writer of autofiction, at the same time as saying to the reader ‘believe me’, breezily admits to him, ‘I’m lying’].⁴³

Siti is perhaps the most famous of a growing number of contemporary Italian novelists who instrumentalise the instability of the autofiction genre in order to dismantle the distinction in the reader’s mind between reality and fiction.⁴⁴ As Raffaele Donnarumma has said: ‘In Italy, Siti represents, in the most eloquent and considered way, how the hypermodern subject constructs and reflects on itself. He believes that a story cannot exist outside the despotism of the subject.’⁴⁵ What is more, Siti’s autofiction is emptied of the usual kinds of material indicators that one would expect to find in a novel that was making serious attempts to reproduce a world. By this, I don’t just mean a literal sense of object decluttering, degrowth or deaccession, although these features are also present in Siti’s work, especially in his 2014 novel Exit Strategy. The title evokes a clear drive towards narrative modes of deferral, evasion and refusal, while the cover art features Pere Borrell del Caso’s 1874 painting Huyendo de la critica [Escaping Criticism], which depicts a figure literally climbing out of a frame of representation. The novel begins as the protagonist, also named Walter, is emptying out his old flat in Rome, helped by some friends of his ex-partner Marcello: ‘Vedo il mio appartamento sparire pian piano inghiottito dalla finestra e ricomparire in cortile sotto forma di scatoloni […]. Nessun rimpianto è più possibile, né tornare indietro’ [I watch my apartment disappear slowly, swallowed up by the window, and then reappear in the courtyard below in the form of boxes. No regrets are possible anymore, nor is turning back in time].⁴⁶ What is more, the death of Walter’s sexual desire for Marcello, a desire that underpinned Siti’s preceding trilogy Il dio impossibile,⁴⁷ is signified in the disposal of one particular object: Marcello’s boxer shorts, that Walter notices ‘avevano l’elastico allentato e lui li maneggiava dubbioso: “Quasi quasi li butto …”’ [had lost their elastic and he fingered them uncertainly: ‘Maybe I should throw them away’].⁴⁸ Later, ‘buttando le bucce di pera nel secchio della spazzatura vedo i boxer bianchi e verdi, lì appallottolati come una bestia morta’ [while throwing some pear skins in the rubbish bin I see the white and green boxer shorts there, rolled up into a ball like a dead animal].⁴⁹

Discarding his investment in this relationship along with their own material referent opens up a space of ontological doubt that throws Siti’s novel itself into a genre spin. The narrator states, a few pages after this episode, that the work will not be autofictional and warns the reader, ‘non date retta alla dicitura “romanzo” sulla copertina’ [pay no attention to the word ‘novel’ on the cover].⁵⁰ He says, instead, that this will be ‘un diario banale, pane al pane e vino al vino’ [an ordinary diary, where a spade is called a spade].⁵¹ And yet, once again, the narrator is unreliable. He cannot seem to fix an endpoint to the diary, adding first a ‘post scriptum’, then an ‘addendum in extremis’ and a final ‘nota’, in which he again addresses the reader, saying in a voice that removes agency from the narrator and reassigns it to the text itself: ‘domando scusa, sembra che questo libro non voglia finire’ [apologies, it seems this book doesn’t want to finish].⁵² Finally, in the last note, he negates all the previous statements he has made on the genre of the work:

Nonostante la forma diaristica, questo non è un diario: non il mio, almeno. Io non voglio più parlare di me, ma il personaggio a cui ho prestato il mio nome ha esigenze di coerenza e di radicalità a cui fortunatamente nella vita non devo sottostare; quando esisto in carne e ossa, mi riservo di mutare in modo nebuloso e reversibile. Il mio io da esportazione […] sosteneva di essersi convertito e così gli ho affidato il compito di scrivere un diario di cui porta intera la responsabilità. Romanzo in forma di diario, dunque, […] che mostra il protagonista definitivamente invecchiato; arricchito ma anche stremato da esperienze fatte in altri libri.⁵³

[Despite the diary form, this isn’t a diary: or at least, it’s not my diary. I don’t want to talk about myself anymore, but the character to whom I’ve lent my name needs a coherence and radicality that luckily I don’t have to obey in real life; when I exist in flesh and blood, I reserve the right to change in murky and reversible ways. My externalised self claimed to have been converted and so I entrusted him with the task of writing a diary which he took total responsibility for. A novel in the form of a diary, therefore, […] that shows the protagonist irrevocably aged; enriched but also worn out by his experiences in previous books.]

I’m interested in the way that Siti’s statements cited here chime with Bewes’s notion of post-fiction, and particularly in how the self-positioning of the writer within a text weakens its own programme; thereby definitively blurring the distinction between reality and fiction. This is mirrored in Siti’s wider personal and political writing project, that seeks to indicate (and indict) a weakening of society’s own relationship with reality through our increased dependence on the artificiality we experience through engaging with reality television, mass tourism and social media. Crucially, this break with reality also plays out in terms of (narrative) form. As Walter walks through the city’s historic cemetery at the end of Exit Strategy, he notices that the old kiosk outside it has been burned down in a fire, creating a landscape in a state of permanent destruction and re-elaboration: ‘la plastica annerita ingombra il marciapiede; le lamiere della metro in costruzione sono ostaggio di writers di opposte bande, i disegni sovrapponendosi si annullano. Nessuna forma è più possibile’ [blackened plastic blocks the pavement, the metal sheets of the metro under construction are hostage to battles between rival graffiti bands, drawings accumulate to cancel each other out. No form is possible anymore].⁵⁴ The reader, and indeed the writer, are both lost in a landscape of overabundant signs that have lost any solidity of meaning.

What are the implications of us losing faith in the certainty of finding meaning in our relationships with external objects; objects which we have, to date, used to stand in for reality itself? And can halting or rediverting our search for meaning in objects offer up a liberation from now-obsolete attempts to reproduce images of a fixed material reality? As I hope to have shown in this chapter, reducing our reliance on over-accumulated materials and information to represent the past can allow for greater formal latitude, perhaps even leading us towards new ways of re-imagining the future of the novel as a genre, and of the museum as a concept and as an institution. The spaces of doubt that lie in the post-fictional grooves between material objects, which include doubts about form, programme and mission, are where I believe some of the most intriguing links between museums and contemporary narrative now lie, since the ‘insistent quality’ of post-fictional works of literature is ‘not only refusing to connect the work and the world, but thinking, inhabiting, even forging the space of their disorientation’.⁵⁵ As I hope to have shown, the value of literature, and thus also of literary research, lies precisely in its ability to help us navigate new ways of reading the world in all of its rich disjointedness and abundance.