The sign reads “pond” and prompts a one-page rant from the narrator on the idiocy of such cautionary acts. In the story “The Big Day,” the woman’s neighbor, preparing for a community event, places a sign next to the nearby pond. Pond is a collection of stories from the perspective of an unnamed English woman living for some time on the west coast of Ireland. In the passages below, Bennett dramatizes the materialization of language and the limits on meaning-making. In Pond, Bennett lingers over the rich intricacies of the material world and of prose, allowing us to encounter the opacity of both. This is the conundrum articulated by Bill Brown in the opening to his 2001 Critical Inquiry piece and invoked by the deliberately dissonant phrase “thing theory.” While acknowledging the gap between word and thing, thing theory identifies moments of contact, when the properties of one rub off on the other. If things, distinct from objects, can only become known to us through a disruptive encounter, then surely language is superfluous to that encounter. In her 2016 book Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett poses the incompatibility between words and things as a comic problem-and then offers a formal response to that problem.
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