The Box: Experiments and Inspirations

Mandy-Suzanne Wong

The Box: Experiments and Inspirations

A novel about a box? It’s an experiment. Much about it is uncertain; including, as in all experiments, the outcomes and results. Those are for readers to determine, and I expect they’ll do so with greater dubiousness than conclusiveness. The nature of the experiment was to learn whether I could make a novel of which the spark and the kerosene, the ignition and the engine, was a small thing of the sort known as inanimate. 

Not another talking teapot, magical hammer, or psychotic computer but a thing seemingly inert and voiceless with the potential to be utterly unremarkable. Permit a narrator, one of several from The Box, to describe the box that sparks the story.

[T]he little white box fit in the palm of my hand with perhaps a whisper of a rattle when it moved, was of a size that could’ve accommodated cigarettes or playing cards, a wallet or slim wad of cash, yet was absolutely self-contained lacking the door or flap of the cigarette or playing-card carton, but then again it was the opposite of self-contained being all-over seams, by which I mean it was constructed of paper strips entangled as if haphazardly [. . .] a curiosity of kinetic rectangular perfection, a hypnotizing snarl of gaps with all the vulnerability of paper in the snow . . .

The box of The Box is the protagonist of the novel. The plot constitutes the movements of this small, inanimate thing in interaction with other beings. 

Some of these others are Homo sapiens. The box catalyzes within and between these volatile animals: obsessions, romances, artistic ambitions, breakups, rumors, thefts, sales, murders, misunderstandings, and shattering self-reevaluations, terrible existential doubts,. Sneaking up on the characters is the horrifying suspicions that humans are not the only ones with the ability to make things happen. What we call living things are not the only things with agency. is nonexclusive to humanity and that agency in general may be unsynonymous with what we call animacy therefore what if nobody resembling or intelligible to ourselves was ever in control or ever will be?!, and so on. 

In The Box, humans’ shenanigans may seem more like consequences or side effects of nonhumans’ being what they are and moving as they do. The box of The Box is the driving force of its own story. My challenge was to create a story whose driving forces were inanimate nonhumans, with the things that humans do seeming more like consequences or side effects of nonhuman things’ being what they are and moving as they do. 

I set myself this challenge under the influence of philosophical writings by Jane Bennett and Graham Harman. Each in their outlandish way imagines what it is to be a thing. For Harman, things are secretive: “the human perception of a house or a tree is forever haunted by some hidden surplus in the things that never becomes present,” he writes in Tool Being. What it is to be a house exceeds understanding in part because humans are not houses. Which is not to say that humans are good at understanding humans or that houses are good at understanding houses. Each of us contains a “hidden surplus” which others never experience; our very bodies consist of facets of which we ourselves are unconscious.

Even so, things such as arteries and kidneys, as well as things beyond ourselves—things like packages, doors, hotels, pigeons, snowflakes, infrastructures—both enable other things’ going about our business and limit what we’re able to accomplish. A limestone wall enables our protection from the elements but forbids us from walking through it, forcing us to seek permission from a door. As Jane Bennett says in Vibrant Matter, featured recently in the New Yorker, things are not passive qualities of our world but agents making the world the unstable assemblage that it is. A plastic bag, brightly colored, catches our attention, entices us to buy it and consume the sweets within. Before long, that plastic bag shall be banished to the garbage; but even then it will continue to exert power over global ecosystems and vulnerable individuals such as seabirds and turtles. Even the bottles, bags, and boxes which, having used them up, consumed their contents, we banish to oceanic garbage vortices continue even then to exert power over others, not least by “generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds of methane.” Inanimate existence, Bennett writes, “include[s] the ability to make things happen, to produce effects”; and this is what she calls “Thing-Power: the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.” 

The Box is a novel of thingly secrecy and thing-power. It’s an experiment in subordinating components of the novel form, especially character and plot, to thing-power. It’s the discovery that, as Bennett says, “human power is itself a kind of thing-power.” 

But wait. Humans are things? Humans are no better than boxes? Humans are as vulnerable as little white paper boxes in snowbound streets? 

We humans prefer not to think of ourselves as things because our cultural norms and ideologies have stripped things and objects of all dignity, forgetting the power they wield over us. Things from microscopic nurdles to plastic bottles to shipping containers to dead dinosaurs pulverized into fossil fuels—we humans have underestimated things to our peril. The most trivial things shall certainly outlive us. And, unless smothered in denial, our own thingliness is obvious. We humans are entities physically manifest. That’s what it means to be a thing. We’re entities which are engaged by other entities. That’s what it means to be an object. Things and objects lose their dignity only when treated without dignity. Who is it that’s producing, selling, and discarding things upon things, mountains of things unstoppably and with impunity, without a thought for what things really are and how their being as they are affects others?

To displace the human from the center of a novel, which by definition is a humanistic art form, is politically subversive. De-anthropocentrism in any context is subversive. Today it’s also urgently necessary. With a nonhuman, anthropogenic thing as its protagonist, The Box cannot help but draw attention to such matters as toxic consumerism, climate collapse, and Earth’s betrayal by our species. 

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Mandy-Suzanne Wong is the author of The Box, a novel (Graywolf Press and House of Anansi); Drafts of a Suicide Note (Regal House), a Foreword INDIES literary-fiction finalist and PEN Open Book Award nominee; Listen, We All Bleed (New Rivers), a PEN/Galbraith-nominated essay collection and ALSE Book Award finalist; and Awabi, a duet of short stories, winner of the Digging Press Chapbook Series Award. She lives in Bermuda, where she was born.

Find out more about Mandy on her website https://www.mandysuzannewong.com/

THE BOX

A stylistically dazzling novel about things, people, and the forces and seams between them.

In a dark and crooked lane in an unnamed city where it never ceases to snow, a small white box falls from a coat pocket. It is made of paper strips woven tightly together; there is no apparent way to open it without destroying it. What compels a passing witness to this event, a self-described anthrophobe not inclined to engage with other people, to pick up the box and chase after the stranger who dropped it? The Box follows a rectangular cuboid as it changes hands in a collapsing metropolis, causing confluences, conflicts, rifts, and disasters. Different narrators, each with a distinctive voice, give accounts of decisive moments in the box’s life. From the anthrophobe to a newly hired curator of a renowned art collection to a couple who own an antiquarian bookshop to a hotel bartender hiding from a terrible past, the storytellers repeat rumors and rely on faulty memories, grasping at a thing that continually escapes them. Haunting their secondhand recollections is one mysterious woman who, convinced of the box’s good or evil powers, pursues it with deadly desperation.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing