Presence as Thing-Speech: Quitting Correlationism and Listening to Objects in Michael Farris Smith’s Blackwood

ABSTRACT: This essay examines characters’ detachment from reality in Michael Farris Smith’s Blackwood as a revision of the Southern Gothic grotesque, revealing what Object-oriented ontology refers to as correlationism: the assumed supremacy of the perceiving subject and corresponding blindness to the ontological reality of objects. Such detachment manifests in the novel not only through the accumulation of ghost stories and other superstitions in the local idiom, but also in the systematic failure of communication: circular monologues and dialogues, endless trivial questions, elusive answers, and characters’ repeated demands for linguistic, discursive exchange with the novel’s hyperpresent, post-instrumental objects. These hyperpresent objects resonate with recurring Southern Gothic forms and “insist” upon themselves in a non-linguistic idiom through their presence and energy, resisting deconstructive approaches that would reduce them to signifiers; meanwhile, the novel’s characters remain unable to apprehend this thing-speech because of their entrenched correlationism. Blackwood therefore incorporates familiar Southern Gothic forms to reflect facets of correlationism, explores the limitations and failures of this perspective, and meditates on the potentials of thing-speech to foster new, ontologically inclusive dispositions toward reality.