Edmund de Waal’s History of Touch: The Hare with Amber Eyes. A Hidden Inheritance

Abstract

The British ceramist artist Edmund de Waal’s book The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010)—a sort of netsuke saga—is, upon his confession, a way of building a history of restitution: of a family, collection, an epoch. By paying tribute to the power of place and objects (from houses, monuments, paintings to netsuke), this artist of touch has managed to restore the most intimate feeling of possession and dispossession to a family whose history spans over a century. In my argument I bring evidence meant to show, on the
one hand, how objects can map the soul by falling away into the territory of personal storytelling; and, on the other hand, how the handing on of objects is all about story-telling, wherein historical fact as memory, imagination, personal feeling and memory intertwine to the point of effacing boundaries
like in an Impressionistic painting, which manages to achieve harmony even by way of discords. The book can then read as a manifesto for art and history together as it can represent the author-artist’s joint effort to recompose that moment of apprehension and response, a possible dialogue between the
creator/artist and the spectator/collector, between the past life of the object and its new life.