Souvenir Book Review: One of my favorite books ever
This little book is a part of Bloomsbury Object Lessons series in which each book studies an object. You wouldn’t expect such a short book or seemingly innocent object to have such deep narratives and abstractions around it. Yet this book does so. In particular, I find the final 3 chapters to be the most poignant. They also help establish the meaning of objects well beyond surface materializism. From opening my mind to new perspectives of meaning and sparking new questions of human suffering, objectification, human erasure, and narrative building, I’ve placed this book as one of my most formative when it comes to objects and meaning.
Here are a number of passages from 3 select chapters:
Chapter 6: Souvenirs and Human Suffering
Chapter 7: Souvenirs and (the complicated notion of) Authenticity
Chapter 8: Souvenirs, Memory, and The Shortness of Human Life
Chapter 6: Souvenirs and Human Suffering
Souvenir postcards had, in fact, been printed to commemorate lynchings since the turn of the century. "This is a token of a grate day we had in Dallas," one Texan wrote on a postcard depicting the 1910 murder of a domestic laborer named Allen Brooks (67).
Though scholars and historians have written countless books and research papers in an attempt to make sense of the lynching epidemic that seized early twentieth century America, few of these studies analyze the gruesome souvenir rituals that accompanied the killings. One notable exception is "The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching," a 2005 paper by cultural historian Harvey Young, who asserts that lynching mementos were inseparable from the mob-terror theatrics that defined the act. "The body part recalls and remembers the performance of which it is a part," he writes. "it not only gestures toward the belief that motivated its theft, but also renders visible the body from which it was taken." Young goes on to point out that while mob killings were by definition a public spectacle, they were ultimately enforced by the participants' after-the-fact public silence (which frustrated federal investigators, and yielded few convictions). Lynching souvenirs were not just a way to dehumanize the victim and certify the savage emotional energy of the event; they were a physical token of the unspoken assumptions that underpinned white supremacy (67-68)
In her essay collection *On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection,*literary critic Susan Stewart characterizes the mementos of death as "anti-souvenirs": "They mark the horrible transformation of meaning into materiality more than they mark, as other souvenirs do, the transformation of materiality into meaning. If the function of the souvenir proper is to create a continuous and personal narrative of the past, the function of such souvenir of death is to disrupt and disclaim that continuity. Souvenirs of the mortal body are not so much a nostalgic celebration of the past as they are an erasure of the significance of history (69).
Chapter 7: Souvenirs and (The Complicated Notion of) Authenticity
Indeed, the process of collecting personal souvenirs invariably serves what sociologist Ning Wang calls "existential authenticity" - a sense that the object reflects a more genuine sense of selfhood in the person who acquired it. "Tourists are not merely searching for authenticity of the Other," Wang notes. "They also search for the authenticity of and between, themselves...In such a liminal experience people feel they themselves are much more authentic and more freely self-expressed than in everyday life, not because they find the toured objects are authentic but simply because they are engaging in non-ordinary activities, free from the constraints of the daily (94).
Existential authenticity is underscored by the fact that, as travelers, we are by definition itinerant outsiders —strangers in strange lands—who don't possess the experience or knowledge to objectively evaluate the things we see along the way. When we collect souvenirs, we do so not to evaluate the world, but to narrate the self (94).
Chapter 8: Souvenirs, Memory, and the Shortness of Life
Most of these objects are unremarkable in and of themselves (and, in the case of pebbles and hotel soaps, they were even less remarkable in their original contexts); what gives them significance is the fact that they've ended up here together, in what amounts to a kind of collage-autobiography. Everyone who collects souvenirs ends up creating these object-narratives, which resonate with private meanings no written autobiography could ever achieve. When astronaut Neil Armstrong died in 2012, for instance, his estate executors discovered that he'd saved a few workaday items—an emergency wrench, a waist tether, a mirror—as souvenirs from his 1969 moon landing. For all that was written about the Apollo 11 mission, these simple objects suggest a story that only Armstrong could appreciate at an intuitive-emotional level (104).
As sophisticated as Armstrong's moon mission was, his desire to keep these items as souvenirs was rooted in a universal impulse to go back to childhood. Nobody sits down and tells us to collect objects when we're young; it's just something we do, as a way of familiarizing ourselves with the world, its possibilities, and our place in it. And while adults typically see souvenirs as a way of preserving lived experience, children seek and keep objects for more fundamental reasons. "The behavior of children as young as toddlers shows that possessions are not just utilitarian devices," notes scholar Stacey Menzel Baker. "In general, possessions provide the child with an emerging sense of control and self-effectance over his or her environment." As children grow older, the keepsakes they collect don't just give them a feeling of stability; they help create and interpret a sense of self. Even as adults, the private mythologies we attach to souvenirs are a way of mythologizing our own lives. Like Proustian madelines, these objects invoke a personalized sense of the past self—a universe of "lost time"—that can be felt in the present moment (104-105).
Souvenirs and similar mementos thus find their power in the way the object itself, like a broken-off chunk of bygone time, can trigger subjective reveries of distance places, people, and events. In this way souvenirs are like a similar visual keepsake, the photography. Unlike the memories called forth by photos, however, souvenir memories are more associational, less visually specific, more unique to the object's owner, and more likely to transform over time. Often this means that the importance of a given souvenir will wax and wane—telling slightly difference stories, in slightly different voices—in tandem with the self—perception and worldview of its owner (105).
Looking at those items, I was struck by how much of what we collect in life ultimately becomes depleted of meaning: without any sense for the memories or desires that led Lynda to to save these keepsakes, they felt like a sorrowful menagerie of lost objects. I ended up taking a small alabaster elephant, which I now keep perched on a coffee table in my living room (108