The Collected

Hari Kunzru’s 'The Collected' in The Phantom Museum:
‘Hari Kunzru’s series of evocations, ‘The Collected’, explores the space between the things’ existence as museum objects – only the most recent phase of their rich and varied careers – and their former lives: their spirits.' (Hildi Hawkins and Danielle Olsen 2003: xi). The idea that they are somehow alive because of this sense of history – alive because of the idea that they have spirits or souls – becoming human-like?

This chapter tells stories of:
A shrunken human head: ‘I was once Juan Ignacio Perez-Santos, out of Havana (Kunzra 2003: 55), who travelled through the jungle in search of gold. ‘The hot green pulse of the forest thickened the air, which became heady and stifling, hard to take down your lungs. We travelled for weeks, pushing ourselves up the silent brown river…’ (Kunzra 2003: 56). The story is told partly from Juan’s perspective, then interspersed with grisly factual information about how to shrink a human head: ‘First you have to sever the head. Then you cut a slit at the back…just simmer. The thing will disintegrate if the liquid gets too hot.’ (Kunzra 2003: 56). ‘There in a few words, is the story of Juan the idiot who believed the stories he was told in bars. Juan who paddled up the river and got his throat cut.’ (Kunzra 2003: 57)

Hari Kunzru weaves a fairytale-like narrative, interweaving factual information with the voice of the object now in the collection. Taking you away from its current context in a museum, to imagine and visualise the story (or possible story) behind the object, now sitting on a shelf with a label, gathering dust…

… and the story of a locket containing an illustration made from human hair… ‘My lover…wanted his memento to be finer to confirm that his love and thus his loss were greater than the other man’s’ (Kunzra 2003: 60). A memento speaking its story of how it came to being… ‘Now when I think of love, I think of hands. I think of jewellers delicate hands, taking strands of my hair and teasing them into the shape of trees… even now that I am here, the property of the collector, I am marked by the touch of those hands.’ (Kunzra 2003: 60)
…ghostly traces and memories of a life… now a memento of the passing of time…

Hari Kunzru writes as though the objects in the collection are talking:
‘It is dark in here…
In the rooms filled with rows of numbered metal racks…
But I am here.
There are others too.’ (Kunzra 2003: 47)

‘Even in nothingness one has to have something to think about. I like to contemplate certain ironic aspects of my situation. The one I like best is that the collector is here too, caught in his own afterlife. Skin follicles. Saliva. A single moustache hair that fell when he was examining a new curio. Enough to trap him here, one of us, crouching in the darkness.’ (Kunzra 2003: 73)
The collector becomes the collected. Writing about the thoughts or dreams or yearnings of the collected objects…


References:
Kunzru, H. 2003. 'The Collected'. In: Hawkins, H. and Olsen, D. [eds]. The Phantom Museum, and Henry Wellcome’s Collection of Medical Curiosities. Profile Books.