Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form After the Constitution 0199346534, 9780199346530

Table of contents :
Cover
Episodic Poetics
Copyright
Contents
Episodic Poetics
Introduction
The Episode between Part and Whole
Telemachus’s Doubt: Toward a Theory of Episodic Poetics
The Whole against the Parts: Narrative Theory
From Event to Episode: Historical Poetics
The Hillock and the Mountain
Chapters
1 The Poetics of Constitutional Consolidation
Complexity and Consolidation: Out of Many, One
Common and Finer: The Legacy of 1787–88
The Chain of Reading: Commerce, Episodic Poetics, Politics
Hierarchy and Literary Form 1: Commerce and Contagion
Hierarchy and Literary Form 2: Governing the Splintered Society
Hierarchy and Literary Form 3: Faction as Form
Mercantile Time and the Periodical Plot
Debt and the Rhythm of Exchange
Unreadability and Nationalism’s Chain of Reading
2 The Life in Episodes
Structure and Dispersion
Erratum and Episode: Duration and Narrative Binding
Character and Competition, Success and Failure
Society, Mischief, and the Episode
Experience, Selection, and Narrative Unity
3 The Fiction of Hesitation
Reading the Episode in the Novel
Adventure and Didacticism
Incipits and the Incitement to Reading: From Clarissa to Constantia
Against the Episode: Morality and Form in the Literary Market
Nothing Happens
Endless Prolixity
Episode versus Futurity
Episode and Ideology
4 Miscellany and the Structure of Style
Commodity Writing
Whim-Whams on the Market
Criticism and the Work of the Writer
Salmagundi: An Arthrology of the Episodic Miscellany
The Rejection of Reference
Volubility and Formal Compromise
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Contents and Collation of Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Episodic Poetics

Episodic Poetics Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution Matthew Garrett

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3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland  Cape Town  Dar es Salaam  Hong Kong  Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Matthew Garrett 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Garrett, Matthew. Episodic Poetics : Politics and Literary Form After the Constitution / Matthew Garrett. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–934653–0 (acid-free paper)  1.  American literature—1783–1850— History and criticism.  2.  Literature and society—United States—History—18th century.  3.  Narration (Rhetoric)  4.  Literary form.  5.  Plots (Drama, novel, etc.)  I.  Title. PS208.G39 2014 810.9'002—dc22 2013035344

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Nachdem ich etwas erfahren hatte, kam es mir erst vor, als ob ich gar nichts wisse, und ich hatte recht: denn es fehlte mir der Zusammenhang, und darauf kommt doch eigentlich alles an. [Once I had discovered something, it occurred to me that I didn’t really know anything, and I was right: for what I lacked was a sense of the whole, and that, after all, is what everything depends on.] —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

{ Contents } Introduction: Reading the Episode in the Early Republic The Episode between Part and Whole  3 Telemachus’s Doubt: Toward a Theory of Episodic Poetics  4 The Whole against the Parts: Narrative Theory  10 From Event to Episode: Historical Poetics  13 The Hillock and the Mountain  15 Chapters  21

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1. The Poetics of Constitutional Consolidation

24

2. The Life in Episodes

60

3. The Fiction of Hesitation

86

4. Miscellany and the Structure of Style

116

Complexity and Consolidation: Out of Many, One  26 Common and Finer: The Legacy of 1787–88  27 The Chain of Reading: Commerce, Episodic Poetics, Politics  31 Hierarchy and Literary Form 1: Commerce and Contagion  35 Hierarchy and Literary Form 2: Governing the Splintered Society  39 Hierarchy and Literary Form 3: Faction as Form  44 Mercantile Time and the Periodical Plot  49 Debt and the Rhythm of Exchange  53 Unreadability and Nationalism’s Chain of Reading  57 Structure and Dispersion  61 Erratum and Episode: Duration and Narrative Binding  64 Character and Competition, Success and Failure  71 Society, Mischief, and the Episode  77 Experience, Selection, and Narrative Unity  83 Reading the Episode in the Novel  88 Adventure and Didacticism  91 Incipits and the Incitement to Reading: From Clarissa to Constantia  97 Against the Episode: Morality and Form in the Literary Market  100 Nothing Happens  103 Endless Prolixity  107 Episode versus Futurity  111 Episode and Ideology  114 Commodity Writing  117 Whim-Whams on the Market  122

viii  Contents Criticism and the Work of the Writer  125 Salmagundi: An Arthrology of the Episodic Miscellany  128 The Rejection of Reference  134 Volubility and Formal Compromise  138

Conclusion

145

Acknowledgments Appendix: Contents and Collation of Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others Notes Works Cited Index

149 151 157 207 227

Episodic Poetics

Introduction Reading the Episode in the Early Republic

It may be observed, that public commotions in human affairs, like the shocks of nature, convulse the whole system, and level the lofty mountains, which have arisen for ages above the clouds, beneath the vallies; while the hillock, unnoticed before, is raised to a pitch of elevation, that renders it a land-mark for the eye of the weary seaman to rest upon. —Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution

A crooked road, a road in which the foot feels acutely the stones beneath it, a road that turns back on itself—this is the road of art.  —Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose

Episodes are nothing new to literary criticism. Homeric epic is famously episodic, and the literary analysis of episodic form goes back at least to Aristotle’s Poetics. Episode itself comes from the ancient Greek for “coming in besides” (ἐπεισόδιον, epeisodion, the neuter form of ἐπεισόδιος, epeisodios) and was first used to designate the dialogue in tragedy that took place between two choral songs, or an act. For Aristotle’s normative theory, overly “episodic” plots violate the strict formal economy of tragedy, “stretch[ing] the plot beyond its capacity.” The philosopher’s distaste eases a bit when he discusses the Iliad, in which supplemental episodes enrich the plot, “diversifying the poem.” In epic, the episode plays a quasi-cathartic role; it is the form through which multiple events may be represented as occurring simultaneously: as the unit of the subplot (or parallel plot), the episode can provide a diverting release (or suspension) of tension. Aristotle tells us that “[e]‌pic has here an advantage, and one that conduces to grandeur of effect, to diverting the mind of the hearer, and relieving the story with varying episodes. For sameness of incident soon produces satiety, and makes tragedies fail on the stage.”1 At the moment of its emergence into Aristotelian literary criticism, the episode already marks the formal divide between key categories: between order and variety, between

2  Episodic Poetics

consolidation and complexity, between shape and distention, between one story and the many stories it may contain. So although, as this book will argue, the issues they raise still cut to the heart of persistent literary-formal effects, episodes themselves are decidedly ancient stuff. Novelty, then, will play only a minor role in my story. For the interesting point about literary forms is not always, or even often, their newness as such but, rather, the ways in which they may become more or less compelling to readers and writers at determinate historical moments. To put it another way, the specifically historical interest of literary forms—which is to say, of the connection between history and form—lies in their emergence as imaginary solutions to historically new problems.2 Cultural forms are not tied aprioristically to sociohistorical epochs, simply emerging and dying out with successively dominant tendencies; they may be, on the contrary, reactivated (as Étienne Balibar once put it) even after they would seem to have been superseded by more developed forms.3 In terms of the prominence of the episode within narrative, there are many available periodizations within Western literature. From Homeric epic we might look to medieval romance and then to the picaresque; the eighteenth-century British tradition of episodic narrative returns with a specific and powerful political charge in Brecht’s epic theater, while its skeleton is exhumed for quite different purposes (or purposelessness) in postmodern refusals of plot. So any study of the episode must have two components, formal and historical: in the case of my book, “episodic poetics” and “the early American republic.” This book argues for the central role of an episodic literature within public writing in the two decades following the composition of the Constitution in Philadelphia. As Bertolt Brecht quipped, “To understand literature, one must consider it in its development (by which I  don’t mean self-development).”4 Following Brecht, Episodic Poetics does not hesitate to examine whatever that writing might touch—from, say, the expropriation of debtor farmers to the tonal structure of rhetorical irony. Its guiding warrant is that “formal patterns are what literature uses in order to master historical reality, and to reshape its materials in the chosen ideological key: if form is disregarded, not only do we lose the complexity (and therefore the interest) of the whole process—we miss its strictly political significance too.”5 This is therefore an implacably literary history in the sense that it is concerned with what happens to the forms of writing when literature itself becomes the site of a social contradiction that depends upon a specifically literary form of functionality:  what happens, that is, to literature as it is shaped by the pressures and contingencies of the social life of writing—by events, yes, but more substantially (for reasons that will become clear shortly) by the rather muddier historical things we casually call conditions. “Form” here indexes the historical meeting of experience and its arrest: the apparent openness of experience and the apparent closure of its congealed actualization in printed matter—or, in the broadest terms, its

Introduction  3

materialization within representation. A concentration on literary forms therefore need not seal itself into transhistorical oblivion. Instead, as this book aims to show, a focus on forms will necessarily attend to the social practice that shapes them—that calls them into usefulness and discards them when their term is up.6

The Episode between Part and Whole What is an episode? An episode is, first, an integral but also extractable unit of any narrative. This twofold character is nicely captured in the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry on episode:  “An incidental narrative or digression in a poem, story, etc., separable from the main subject, yet arising naturally from it.” These two aspects of the episode are essential to narrativity. Provisionally self-enclosed portability is what enables any particular episode to mean, even as the episode connects with and opens onto other episodes that constitute the syntax of the narrative. Episodes are parts of narrative wholes, and we need not cling to Romanticist organicism to recognize the inescapable significance of part–whole relationships to the study of literary forms. The episode nevertheless troubles a fine distinction between part and whole because it raises questions of prioritization. Indeed, such questions already produce static in the otherwise staid transmissions from Aristotle I quoted above. What might it mean for a structural unit of narrative to be sometimes an aberration, sometimes a source of diversionary pleasure? How should one draw a line between the episode in its integral moment and its appearance as excess awaiting extraction? Wayne Booth considered the question to be a matter of “cutting”:  “In appraising episodic materials [. . .], we can distinguish four levels of resistance to cutting:  those incidents that are essential if the experience is to be what it is; those that are perhaps replaceable but at least useful—something like them is required; those that while not especially useful are at least appropriate; and those that, because they are neither essential nor useful nor appropriate, not only can be dropped without a trace, but should be, because they are in fact harmful to the whole.”7 Booth’s primer on textual mutilation is intended for practical use, but for a criticism interested in the episode as such, it is more illuminating as a symptomatic illustration of the problem with episodes: namely, that they insist upon the question of the part’s relationship to the whole and in so doing they unsettle any easy assumption about interpretive prioritization. Is the episode “essential” or “harmful” to the text as a whole? Is it useful? Useful for what, essential to whom, harmful to what? The questions occurred to Booth, of course. But in an Aristotelian search for formal clarity and a well-shaped plot, criticism’s various guides to literary surgery overlook the foundational point: that the episode is always, every single time it appears

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within literary history, a part that exists as such only in relation to a real or implied whole. It is a relational, dialectical form—and therefore hard to see, harder still to talk about as a form or narrative unit. That is the task of this book: to claim the episode as a significant literary form and to produce a microstructural or subgeneric literary history told through it. Microstructural, subgeneric:  Episodic Poetics proceeds from the tradition of the great genre histories, adjusting the focus to the level of the literary device or unit. One virtue of this way of proceeding is that it enables us to see literary genres as linked together in a complex of cultural production:  sometimes, it seems, it is the literary unit, rather than the genre, that provides the most compelling fantasy representation of real social conditions. Dialectical criticism always depends upon the coordinating of intrinsic formal analysis and extrinsic social conditions; the crux of every argument will always be the tender place where history and form meet. By following the episode across four genres (political essay, autobiographical memoir, novel, and miscellany), this book tries to reduce the ever-requisite speculative gestures of literary history. Rather than giving account of one genre, this book gives an account of four—in the service of literary analysis tout court and also in an effort to cover the full range of prose production in the early decades of the United States. Concentration on a smaller part may illuminate a larger whole, hopefully shedding some light on the history of these specific early U.S. literary genres, too.

Telemachus’s Doubt: Toward a Theory of Episodic Poetics My descriptions of the episode so far have pointed to a peculiarity: the episode is what we might call a structurational (rather than a structural) element of narrative, in the precise sense that it takes shape only through readerly actualization. That is, it is in the reader’s organization of parts into relationship with a whole that some moment of narrative becomes properly episodic. As readers, we can “get lost” in a single episode—linger over it, reread it, even decide that it can be rewritten as synecdochical representative of the larger narrative in which we stumble upon it. But we can also find our way back to the overall narrative line, however wavering or tenuous it may be. The episode is defined by this doubleness, by the fact of its being simultaneously both “open” and “closed.” The variable relationship between the open and closed aspects of the episode is both a fundamental characteristic of narrative and a (historically and culturally) specific source of readerly pleasure. For the dynamics of episodic structuration, even in the most perfectly plotted narratives, both keep us reading and allow us to stop—and thereby license us to commit our attention unevenly to the narrative. In elaborating on the specific difference of the episode as a form, and in order to locate the literature of the early republic

Introduction  5

within a properly world-historical perspective, we must consider briefly the way literary-critical interest in plot has built upon episodic form even as it has displaced attention from the conceptualization of the episode itself. At the outset of his major work on the subject, Peter Brooks provides a sweeping introduction to plot. “Our lives,” he writes, “are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semi-conscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue.” Developing this initial statement toward a definition, Brooks continues:  “Plot is that principle of interconnectedness and intention which we cannot do without in moving through the discrete elements—incidents, episodes, actions—of a narrative.”8 Were we reading for it, we might notice the repetition within three pages—episodes and episodic—of an essential but perennially underdefined term within narrative theory. Plot, for Brooks, is implicitly defined against the episode; from the inchoate narrative episodes of our lives, in dreams, fantasies, and waking consciousness, we produce plot—the form whose Kantian necessity is conveyed in the most common figure for it, the line: “the organizing line and intention of narrative.”9 Brooks’s approach to the study of plot, emphasizing as it does narrative structuration and plot as desire—as the libidinal apparatus par excellence through which we make meaning of experience—does not ignore the episode willfully. Quite the contrary, plot and episode are bound tightly together at the definitional beginning of his account. But as so often in literary criticism, it seems that plot and episode can never be in the same place at the same time, as though to attend to both together would somehow amount to a scandalous (or perhaps merely too mundane) revelation of their mutual conceptual constitution. My study takes a different approach, with the aim of producing a literary criticism attuned to episodic organization across narratives and literary genres. My emphasis in reading is not simply on overall narrative plot but, rather, on the configuration of its components. This study thus tries to conceptualize plotting through variations in the episodic poetics that sometimes produce and often trouble tidy narrative lines; it analyzes the significance, historical and formal, of those texts in which episodicity refuses plotted structure or in which plot itself only takes shape through an ostentatious yet unsteady integration of the unwieldy parts.10 Such a criticism may help us to produce a literary-historical account of narrative forms that approaches plot through the episode itself: an account that takes plot to be a historically determined problem rather than an ever-ready solution. How does this take shape in literary narrative? Consider, for example, the way the Odyssey invites us to understand episodic form as multiplicity contained within an overarching literary structure. The Odyssey is the essential starting place for a theory of episodic poetics: critical opinion about the poem is split as profoundly as the narrative lines that are finally woven together in

6  Episodic Poetics

the epic. The poem’s various stories take shape within a single, simple, slowly unfolding plot. At the banquet of the suitors in book 1, the disguised Athena responds to Telemachus’s belief that his father has died trying to return to Ithaca using language that opens into a capsule summary of the poem’s episodic form: They told me he was here in this country, your father, I mean. But no. The gods are impeding his passage. For no death on the land has befallen the great Odysseus, but somewhere, alive on the wide sea, he is held captive, on a sea-washed island, and savage men have him in their keeping, rough men, who somehow keep him back, though he is unwilling.11 The father lives, at sea, but the state of his household in Ithaca—the compromised position of Penelope, the rage of Telemachus against the suitors—bespeaks how dramatically the gods’ impediments, made real by rough men, fracture life on land. So dramatically, in fact, that only fifteen lines later Telemachus utters doubts about his parentage in terms that detonate the charge of a universal axiom from the seemingly incombustible stuff of deepest intimacy: “My mother says indeed I am his. I for my part/do not know. Nobody really knows his own father” (i.215–216). In this pair of lines, the assertion of individual specificity, “I for my part,” might be said to revolve through two phases of Telemachus’s identity, and these two phases open up the relationship between episodic diversion and structured plotting. The first expresses his particularity, the condition of his doubt about Odysseus’s role; the second, brought out in Lattimore’s translation through the emphatic “for my part,” reveals Telemachus’s individual doubt to be determined rather than contingent.12 Odysseus’s long and disjointed absence is merely the occasion for an uncertainty whose cause is, in the world of the epic, the general one of being a son. This relationship between structural shape and episodic distention is articulated in the wavering line of Odysseus’s journey back to Ithaca, which is a kind of narrative figuration of Telemachus’s doubt. The Odyssean episode, and with it an entire tradition of narrative episodics, comes to be defined as the very form of narrative hesitation:  each story proffers localized richness and variety, holding out the promise of endless journeys yet to be taken and disparate ends to be met.13 Georg Lukács captures this promise of narrative plenitude in his commentary on Homeric epic: The way Homer’s epics begin in the middle and do not finish at the end is a reflexion of the truly epic mentality’s total indifference to any form of architectural construction, and the introduction of extraneous themes [. . .] can never disturb this balance, for everything in the epic has a life of its own and derives its completeness from its own inner significance. The extraneous

Introduction  7

can calmly hold out its hand to the central; mere contact between concrete things creates concrete relationships, and the extraneous, because of its perspectival distance and its not yet realised richness, does not endanger the unity of the whole and yet has obvious organic existence.14

Lukács’s description dramatizes epic unity through the implied contrast with novelistic fragmentation:  Once we have left an integrated civilization, the extraneous no longer calmly holds out its hand to the central; the hold becomes a wishful reach. “Architectural construction” is possible and necessary only in the circumstances of novelistic fragmentation. The pleasure here, for Lukács, is the melancholy one of gazing back upon a lost “unity of the whole.” That whole is double: the social totality itself and its seamless integration with the literary text. The lack of distance between referent and representation provides an index of social happiness. The “extraneous” does not threaten aesthetic unity, because its “richness” remains “unrealized.” The dialectical relationship between unity and multiplicity—between the determining force of plot and the potential autonomy of the extraneous—appears to Lukács only in retrospect, belatedly; for him, it is not an intrinsic characteristic of epic form, because the very gap between the central and the extraneous does not appear until form as such is no longer a historical possibility.15 The Odyssey gives us three versions of the relationship between the central and the extraneous. The primary plot is Odysseus’s voyage home, in relation to which two subordinate stories take shape: the plot of Telemachus’s doubt and Penelope’s struggle against the suitors. Each of these is a version of narrative deferral or of inappropriate speed: events in Odysseus’s story unfold both too quickly (too many events, too many adventures) and too slowly (since each new adventure further delays the return home).16 Telemachus’s doubt would seem to press the pace forward, demanding answers to questions and, indeed, insisting upon a new adventure aimed at ending Odysseus’s adventures (gathering the information that will finally put the tale of the father’s wandering to an end). But, of course, it does not, and the measure of its own dilatory force may be its amenability to extraction, as in Fénelon’s important retelling in Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse (1699). Each of these plots is also a critical reflection on narrative itself, none more spectacularly so than Penelope’s, emblematized in her account of weaving her wiles: but always I waste away at the inward heart, longing for Odysseus. These men try to hasten the marriage. I weave my own wiles. First the divinity put the idea of the web in my mind, to set up a great loom in my palace, and set to weaving a web of threads, long and fine. Then I said to them: “Young men, my suitors now that the great Odysseus has perished,

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wait, though you are eager to marry me, until I finish this web, so that my weaving will not be useless and wasted. This is a shroud for the hero Laertes, for when the destructive doom of death which lays men low shall take him, lest any Achaian woman in this neighborhood hold it against me that a man of many conquests lies with no sheet to wind him.” So I spoke, and the proud heart in them was persuaded. Thereafter in the daytime I would weave at my great loom, but in the night I would have torches set by, and undo it. So for three years I was secret in my designs, convincing the Achaians, but when the fourth year came with the seasons returning, and the months faded, and many days had been brought to completion, then at last through my maidservants, those careless hussies, they learned, and came upon me and caught me, and gave me a scolding. So, against my will and by force, I had to finish it. Now I cannot escape from this marriage; I can no longer think of another plan; my parents are urgent with me to marry; my son is vexed as they eat away our livelihood; he sees it all; he is a grown man now, most able to care for the house, and it is to him Zeus grants this honor. (xix.137–161) Penelope’s weaving materializes what will become the Scheherazadean tradition within episodic poetics; as in the 1,001 Nights, in the Odyssey we see a version of narration as delay, as interruption. Yet, unlike Scheherazade’s narrative weaving, Penelope’s work operates according to a double temporality. On the one hand, there is the intrinsic time of the weaving: Penelope here establishes her own time; she will consider an offer of marriage when Laertes’s shroud is complete. This, we might say, is Penelope’s ever-receding, Scheherazadean moment. But, on the other hand, this intrinsic, Penelopean time is pressured by three decidedly masculine forces: the demands of the suitors (and the related arguments of Telemachus and the parents), the implied time of Odysseus’s return, and—most definitively—the time of Laertes’s remaining life.17 Whereas Scheherazade masters the temporality of the 1,001 Nights, literally seducing the narrative onto an alternative path, Penelope’s wiles are finally overtaken by the weaving of the master plot.18 This interplay between unity (the masculine force of forward-falling plot) and multiplicity (Penelopean weaving) becomes the watchword of Western literature in Theodor Adorno’s account of aesthetic unity: “Unity is motivated not least of all by the fact that according to their own propensity the individual elements seek to escape it. [. . .] If the unity of artwork is also inescapably the violence done to multiplicity—symptomatic of which is the use in aesthetic criticism of expressions such as ‘mastery over the material’—multiplicity must, like the ephemeral and alluring images of nature in antiquity’s myths, fear unity.” And so, writes Adorno, Penelope’s tale

Introduction  9

is a “self-unconscious allegory of art”: “What cunning Penelope [die Listige] inflicts on her artifacts, she actually inflicts on herself. Ever since Homer’s verses this episode is not the addition or rudiment for which it is easily mistaken, but a constitutive category of art:  Through this story, art takes into itself the impossibility of the identity of the one and the many as an element [Moment] of its unity.”19 Following Adorno, then, we have opposing poles of unity and multiplicity, with the episode as dialectical mediator. So many critical readings of literature emerge through analyses of episodes whose textual fullness seems to overwhelm (or, what is the obverse of the same, to stand for) claims for aesthetic coherence. Telemachus’s doubt—that second great alternative plot within the Odyssey—is the emblem for this type of literary-critical interpretation, which traces the circuitous routes of the open text. But such a field of narrative plenitude can only appear as plenitude when contained between the endpoints of the implied and long-deferred alternative: the straight line home. Perhaps, as Telemachus complains, one never really knows one’s own father, but like Telemachus, the father occupies a structural position even in his absence. We see this clearly in the poem, where it is Odysseus’s role in the plot, rather than the character himself, that sustains narrative structure. Odysseus embodies variety; he is “Odysseus of the many designs” and “the man of many ways,” the one on whose very self is impressed the many-ness of the world: “Many were those whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of,/many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea” (i.83, 1, 3–4). Much of the Odyssey’s power derives from the combination of Odysseus’s tendency toward dispersion and the plot’s stark directionality—so much power, in fact, that Odysseus’s deviations may appear as the only way home. Early in the epic, when Zeus says that through their “own recklessness” mortals bring evil upon themselves, we are tempted to read this as an indication that Odysseus’s intrinsic character is to blame for his tribulations; as with Telemachus’s “my part,” the accident of Poseidon’s anger and the resulting narrative mischief seem (under the pressure of Homeric epithet: all of those many’s crowd the lines) to shift registers from accident to necessity (i.34).20 But a temptation to read this way is all we feel. Within the episodic narrative, contingency and structure become two sides of the same coin; we cannot tell them apart in the Odyssey, and even the gods prove unreliable guides.21 How else, finally, are we to read Zeus’s statement but as a shirking away from responsibility for the overall structure of the epic? Recklessness and doubt are the twin concepts at the center of Odyssean episodic narrative. The impossible dichotomies of the poem recur in many of our most significant critical reactions to the Odyssey. In Athena’s description, the extremes of land and sea correspond not merely to home and adventure but specifically to death on land and captivity at sea. To live at all is to live “on the wide sea,” trying to get home, in forced compromise: the freedom of adventure is always

10  Episodic Poetics

captivity somewhere, in a place that is not home. In the light of the final homecoming, already certain at the beginning of the poem, Odysseus’s multiplicity appears as far more than the accumulation of episodes, but the episodes nevertheless remain. And as a result, powerful critical responses to the epic tend to be built upon the choice between totality and episodic dispersion. On the side of the episode we find Bertolt Brecht, who, recalling Alfred Döblin, defined epic as the text to which “one could take a pair of scissors and cut it into individual pieces, which remain fully capable of life.” On the other side, the totalizing wish fulfillment of the return to Ithaca seizes attention: “Homeland,” in the acid, doubting phrase of Horkheimer and Adorno, “is a state of having escaped.”22 The divergence of tone and purpose between these readings—for Brecht, the hopeful promise of a pedagogical theater based on epic form; for Horkheimer and Adorno, a terrible present with origins in an equally terrible deep past—speaks to the flexible relationship between critical perspective and moral extrapolation and hints at the wide gulf between formal and thematic emphases in the interpretation of episodic narratives. Brecht’s turn to pedagogical theater is based upon a formal appreciation for the discrete and enlivened components of epic; Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading depends upon an intense concentration on the thematic implications of selected episodes from the Odyssey. But even this distinction resolves back into a formal one. Brecht finds value in an equal weighting of episodes; the failure of dramatic resolution should spur the viewer of a Brechtian play to engage with the world. For Horkheimer and Adorno, not just the Odyssey’s purported resolution (the homecoming) but also futurity itself are made impossible by the continued impact of the poem’s episodes—whose capacity of remaining “fully capable of life” appears, in their reading, to be more terrifying than promising. Thus the distance between Brechtian engagement and the Frankfurt School’s “sociological vision of the total system” is articulated here through opposed readings of, and responses to, episodic form.23 But to choose between them is to forget the Odyssey’s lesson: that the whole is always the organization of its parts and that the episode’s distinctive force springs from its mutable but incontrovertible relation to the whole.

The Whole against the Parts: Narrative Theory If allegorical readings of the Odyssey’s episodic poetics are symptomatically split, so too are formalist accounts of the episode. Narrative theory has been most powerful in its description and analysis of plot, but in racing toward the straight line of structure, it has rather roughly handled the episode, as in Brooks’s otherwise subtle readings:  narrative theorists have understood the episode only as a structural element (so that all narratives are constituted out of episodes) or as the unit of narrative digression (so that, following Aristotle,

Introduction  11

all narratives are disfigured by episodes). I want to slow down over narrative theory’s most successful descriptions of the episode for a moment in order to pinpoint the specific difference of my study’s dialectical approach. Tzvetan Todorov’s classic account of narrative grammar reduces the episode to mere event:  there are two types of episodes in narrative, “those which describe a state (of equilibrium or of disequilibrium) and those which describe the passage from one state to the other.” The first, which are “relatively static” and which may be iterative (that is, occurring more than once), function in the narrative grammar as adjectives. The second, which are dynamic and which (“in principle”) occur only once, function as verbs.24 Todorov participates in a long tradition of what we might call overnomination within narrative theory, whereby the same concept is christened and rechristened by each of its students. Thus we find iterations of Todorov’s grammatical account in Boris Tomashevky’s free and bound motifs, Roland Barthes’s concepts of catalytic and cardinal functions (or catalyzers and nuclei), and Seymour Chatman’s satellites and kernels.25 Peter Haidu, in his work on the medieval romance, elaborates on the term enough to edge toward a suppler engagement with episodic forms: “The episode can be formally defined as a syntactical unit of narrative structure, modular in form and serial in content, that (qua episode) is subsidiary to a principle of textual coherence located not in the referential function of a category like ‘character,’ but on the semantic level (insofar as the text is coherent).” Yet here one feels the Aristotelian pull of the well-formed plot, in Haidu’s gesture toward textual coherence.26 Indeed, most critical accounts of episodic narrative turn on the point that episodes are discrete units of narrative that do not accumulate toward a definite, necessary end:  they are, for narrative theory, simply nonplots. And so, when episodes follow one another, they do not do so based on logical causality; when an episode occurs within a narrative, it is separate from (and does not affect) the causal flow of the narrative in which it appears. E. M. Forster’s classic (if somewhat gross) distinction between story and plot is essentially one between episodic and nonepisodic narrative. Story is episodic, “a narrative of events arranged in time and space.” Plot, on the other hand, is a narrative of events with “the emphasis falling on causality.” All plots have stories; all stories do not have plots. Literary criticism has rather blindly relied on this hierarchy of narrative forms, in which nonepisodic narratives are superior to episodic ones and in which nonepisodic aspects of narrative (Forster’s plot) are superior to the episodic (Forster’s story).27 All narratives may have episodes, but they are not therefore “episodic.” Forster distinguishes between two kinds of story elements: those that remain in the form of discrete events (one thing after another) and those that are integrated from start to finish—A leads to B leads to C. Or in narratives that elaborate on a simple chain of cause and effect, A, B, and C occur such that C is the ultimate result of A and B. The episode is therefore tacitly assumed to be the zero degree of narration: the simplest stories, the

12  Episodic Poetics

most primitive, are episodic. Even Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Macherey retain the Aristotelian view of episodes as nonplots. Lévi-Strauss, who found in otherwise unmotivated story units a transformation sequence, and Macherey, whose incisive critique of structuralism helped to usher Lévi-Strauss off the intellectual stage, both slight the episode as such. Nevertheless, Macherey negatively recasts the structuralist project in terms that almost open onto a positive claim about the episode itself. Structuralism, he writes, insists upon “a totality: a certain relation links the parts and thus makes them into a whole. [. . .] The diversity of elements is relative, a prior material, necessary to the realisation of order but with no existence independent of it.”28 Developing the Odyssean lesson about the openness of the literary text, Episodic Poetics jettisons the demand for the realization of order and asks instead after the various logics of the organization of episodes within narrative. What organizes the parts into a whole? Here we enter, in one last reminder of this study’s forebears in classical narrative theory, the province of the Russian Formalists’ distinction between sjužet and fabula, wherein the former is the configuration (the ordering and organization) of the latter, whose natural order, so to speak, is only implied. As Brooks has noted, narrative “always makes the implicit claim to be in a state of repetition, as a going over again of ground already covered.” Sjužet restates fabula; discourse rehearses story. Brooks’s argument is that the ending structures the narrative; the middle of a narrative (defined only as the text in between the beginning and the end) is “the place of transformation: where the problems posed to and by initiatory desire are worked out and worked through.”29 So plot, which is directed both toward and by the end (plot is teleological), configures narrative meaning— without plot, narrative cannot mean. (This is, in effect, Lévi-Strauss’s view of myth: its secret meaning is revealed when we recognize plot—logical progression—where we formerly saw only one episode after another.) Brooks points to the influence of causal direction (whether true or based on the logical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, which Barthes found so essential to narrativity) on the interpretation of narrative: we read in relation to the end of the story. But more than this, if a narrative is plot-directed, the discourse will organize our attention to aspects of the story; it will encourage the reader to ascribe varying levels of significance to different details or story units. Hayden White’s effort toward a definition of narrative complements Brooks’s analysis:  “[A]‌ narrative is any literary form in which the voice of the narrator rises against a background of ignorance, incomprehension, or forgetfulness to direct our attention, purposefully, to a segment of experience organized in a particular way.”30 White’s definition is compelling in its combination of ethical and formal imperatives; and, indeed, in the case of historiography (which is White’s central concern), the voice of the narrator would seem to be indispensable. But as I have described it, the centrifugal energy of the episode reopens the question of narrative configuration, for episodes invite readers to disengage their

Introduction  13

attention from narrative line even as they enable plotting itself. The vigor of narrative discourse is indispensable to the formation of plot; but, as this book will attest, the “purposeful” voice of order and the “background” of episodic diffusion are fundamentally co-implicated in the organization of narrative attention.

From Event to Episode: Historical Poetics In clarifying terms, and in linking my formal account of the episode to its historical situation in the early republic, we could do worse than to dwell for a moment on the distinction between the episode and the related concept of “event.” Right from the start we can hear the specific difference of “episode”: it is, definitively, the part–whole relationship. An “event” does not necessarily take place as a part of a real or implied whole, just as the term scene does not point necessarily to further scenes that might be comprised by a plot. Events and scenes may be episodes, but they need not be. Episode is a relational term: it indicates a relationship between a narrative unit (a scene, an event) and a necessarily larger narrative that comprehends that unit. The distinction is significant. An event, as in Todorov’s narrative grammar, is a change of state.31 Understood as such, the event is not explicitly dynamized within a plot, even if we may agree that every event, every scene, may be seen within a determinate number of plots, delimiting the possible narrative pasts and futures that may imaginatively interlink with it.32 If an event is to be understood as part of a plot, part of a story, however, it must be animated within that story—even if, as in the case of historical events, one wishes to argue that the event is always part of a (sometimes hidden, sometimes evident) story. The difficulty of animating the event as episode is precisely the problem presented by the traditional historiography of events (l’histoire événementielle). For once the event is reconceived as episode, the historian faces the questions of complexity and consolidation: historical understanding becomes radically dependent on a prior (and hitherto absent) theory of episodic poetics. Fernand Braudel expresses just this dilemma in his comments on the intractability of the event as a historiographical category: Take the word event: for myself I would limit it, and imprison it within the short time span. [. . .] An event can if necessary take on a whole range of meanings and associations. It can occasionally bear witness to very profound movements, and by making play, factitiously or not, with those “causes” and “effects” so dear to the ears of the historians of yore, it can appropriate a time far greater than its own time span. Infinitely extensible, it becomes wedded, either freely or not, to a whole chain of events, of underlying realities which are then, it seems, impossible to separate. It was by adding things together

14  Episodic Poetics

like this that Benedetto Croce could claim that within any event all history, all of man is embodied, to be rediscovered at will. Though this, of course, is on condition of adding to that fragment whatever it did not at first sight appear to contain, which in turn entails knowing what is appropriate—or not appropriate—to add. [. . .] Now, it is worth noting that side by side with great and, so to speak, historic events, the chronicle or the daily paper offers us all the mediocre accidents of ordinary life: a fire, a railway crash, the price of wheat, a crime, a theatrical production, a flood.33

Imprisoned within the short time span but also infinitely extensible: in the first case, the event as event, starkly delimited and indeed distorted by its compressed scale (“great event” or “theatrical production,” it is in every case a fragment); in the second, the event as episode, emplotted within a collection of “things” added together, shaped according to some narrative architecture that may even—following Croce’s Hegelian claim—enable us to see all of history within it, at will. This last phrase is crucial because it expresses the central gesture that converts the event into an episode: namely, a recognition (or invention) of the narrative whole (real or implied) within which the episode finds its place.34 Braudel’s blurring of the line between episode and event is representative of modern usage. Like episode, event oscillates between two limit points; the OED’s entry swings with aristocratic nonchalance from “anything that happens” to an “occurrence of some importance.” Alain Badiou has even developed his influential concept as a dialectical fusion of the event as both anything and the thing. Badiou gives an account of the event that strains against the gravitational force of the episode. Deciding that an event belongs to a situation is, for Badiou, “a wager: one can only hope that his wager never becomes legitimate, inasmuch as any legitimacy refers back to the structure of the situation. No doubt, the consequences of the decision will become known, but it will not be possible to return back prior to the event in order to tie those consequences to some founded origin.”35 In Badiou’s event, chance and necessity are joined—joined by, as Terry Eagleton puts it, “the decisive act of a subject” who is “brought into existence by his or her persistent, laborious, sometimes heroic fidelity” to the event itself.36 Badiou’s philosophical system, in its commitment to incident against any normalization or institutionalization of the ruptural moment, exemplifies the effort to grasp contingency and necessity together through uncompromising particularity. That is, we may understand Badiou’s project as the refusal to produce an episode from an event. When we consider the question in these terms, the significance of Badiou’s emphasis on contingency becomes clear:  evading all system-building, Badiou equally evades emplotments that rely on episodes from the historical past to narrativize or make sense of events in the future. Such a style of reticence connects, surprisingly, with that “randomization of history” that shaped so much historical and theoretical work in the

Introduction  15

late twentieth century. The central difficulty in the period’s historiographical mode was the disconnection between history and causality, on the one hand, and history and narrative, on the other.37 Such a double disengagement has a formal dimension: one might say that, dispensing with narrative, historiography committed itself to contingency without fully grasping the interrelation of contingency and determinism (multiplicity and unity, part and whole) that a theory of episodic poetics helps us to see. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, two of the great bearers of that randomization, help to locate its historical emergence—as a special problem of narrative sense-making—with the French Revolution:  “Is it not the essence of the Revolution to have given the word ‘event’ its modern meaning, to have been prodigious to the point of excess in creating events, and to have profoundly altered the way in which they were perceived and interpreted? Some were events in the purest sense of the word, recognized as they happened for their disruptive power. [. . .] Others were repetitious, almost rituals. [. . .] Still others were crucial constellations of events.”38 Badiou’s event bears the first of the modern meanings referenced by Furet and Ozouf; and the French Revolution is itself a central example for him: as an event—designated and produced as such by a subject—the French Revolution exceeds its situation even as it emerges from it and appears as its quintessence, as the “inherent inconsistency and/or [. . .] excess” of the situation.39 Badiou’s event is always a “truth event,” revealing the fundamental condition of the situation as it is to be made by the subject; but such a style of “reading for the event” may both randomize history and induce an overvaluation of the event as exception, outlier, or interruption.40 The event, in other words, is structurally evacuated of historical meaning. Meaning itself may be a more or less desirable object of historical poetics. But it is clear that, unlike events, episodes are, by their nature, alive within historical narrative—precisely because of the real or imagined plot of which they are a component-yet-multiplicitous part.

The Hillock and the Mountain During those public commotions of which Mercy Otis Warren writes in the first epigraph to this introduction, the minor hillock appears amid the rubble of the mountains:  the lowly form may assume the symbolic position previously reserved for the lofty. The episode is that minor form: As we have seen, it is a relational, dialectical form, and it becomes important as a form when that peculiarity is imaginatively useful. I stated at the outset of this introduction that this book would examine what happens to writing when it becomes the site of social contradiction—when the literary itself was called upon to serve a distinct social function after the preparation of the new Constitution for ratification by the states. What happens is that the episode is put freshly to work.

16  Episodic Poetics

Turning briefly to the widest possible view, and the one prepared by my examination of the historiographical event in Braudel and Badiou, the problem before us may be expressed as revolution, that “linguistic product of our modernity” that seemed, at the turn of the nineteenth century, to install itself with atmospheric totality.41 The American War of Independence may not have been one of those revolutions “properly so called—that is, those which go beyond a mere change in political forms and those who govern, transforming institutions and transferring property from one class to another,” but it was a political revolution that opened ideological opportunities and created ideological problems of its own.42 On this matter, Allan Kulikoff ’s summary comment remains a helpful orientation point: “Where does the Revolution fit within [the] long, complex struggles over capitalism and bourgeois individualism? It was an essential first step, a sweeping away of remaining constraints on capitalist development, a crucial victory of the ideology of systematic individualism over the idea of collective rights. More than any other event it created the American bourgeoisie, helping to transform merchant capitalists into capitalists. That such radical change was not fully achieved by the Revolution is hardly surprising. The Revolution, then, was a bourgeois beginning.”43 The pages that follow depart from Kulikoff in jettisoning the concept of the “first step.” For it is already clear from his phrasing (“an essential first step” but also “a sweeping away of remaining constraints” and “a crucial victory of [. . .] ideology,” yet a moment of creation, too) that a simple model of evenemental rupture or emergence is insufficient to the task of interpreting the relationship between the American Revolution and the consolidation of bourgeois social power.44 Kulikoff knows this very well, but I emphasize the point in order to deliver us from the deceptively concrete appearance of class consolidation to the rather more fluid realm of ideological struggle—which is to say, from social practices as such to the relationship between social practices and social representations: more specifically, from historiography to literary criticism. In addressing the question of revolution in what follows, I  focus not on the conflictual moment of 1775–83 but, instead, rather tightly on the period between the constitutional consolidation and the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century. This is, from one point of view, a book about the situation of the early republic, a situation in which, I will argue, public writing shaped and responded to the structuring dilemmas within the postindependence framework of national formation, each of which was itself conceptualized as a problem of the integration of parts into whole: representational government, in the ratification debate; the status of social interdependence in a newly robust market society; and the comprehensibility of historical transformations in what seemed to be a new era of major historical events.45 Representational government is the most direct form of the abstract problem of the part and the whole within politics as such during this period. During the ratification period, the Constitution’s invocation of the people made the appeal to the

Introduction  17

masses a permanent component of U.S. political discourse. But the speciousness of the claim that the Constitution represented the interests of the mass of citizens, coupled with manifest inequity within the system of representation itself, made the abstract relation between the mass of popular parts and the purported whole into a palpable conflict. Conflict of a related kind was coming to define the field of social relations. The market, which depended upon an extreme degree of economic and social competition and which was accompanied by evident exacerbation of inequality, brought forth another version of parts versus wholes. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the fundamental notion that an individual is part of a society entailed a set of assumptions about social obligations that were deeply compromised by the new competitive energy, in which individual successes were quite clearly—relationally—built upon social disparity. Notions of individual ambition and self-improvement were expressed most influentially by Franklin’s Autobiography and the culture of competition that was legitimated by reference to his life’s example. The pressure of these political and social developments combined with the American and French revolutions to spur uncertainty about the nature of history itself. A  new problem crystallized:  How was one to understand the relationship between historical events and social dynamics in history? While such a question is familiar to students of the great historians and philosophers of the age, it is no less essential to those contemporary writers and thinkers who are less explicitly engaged with historiography as such. Each of these is a problem of the part and the whole: regional and social unit versus nation, in ratification; individual autonomy and civic awareness in a freshly energetic market society; and historical events versus historical transformations at the turn of the nineteenth century. These problems are inflected, unevenly, into the literary culture, which responds to, recasts, or rehearses them through a range of episodic texts. In each of these categories—political, social, and historiographical— large-scale sociohistorical transformation is registered in the literature as a process constituted by contentions and struggles between social actors. But if, to return to Kulikoff, “revolution” is the sign under which my story will unfold, why begin with the 1787–88 moment of retrenchment and piecemeal restoration, which has long been understood as an effort to contain and dampen the social forces heralded by the spirit of ’76, a move to qualify that moment’s “emancipatory promise of universal equality”?46 Here my book’s dialectic motors into motion. For there is, above all, a literary-historical reason for my periodization, one that overdetermines or frames the complex of sociopolitical issues. Within the literature of ratification, produced in the debate over the Constitution, an original strategy takes shape as The Federalist attempts to control and order the meaning not only of the Constitution but also of the history and imperial destiny of the United States. Once “the people” appears as a keyword of national politics, the stage is set for a new literary effect within

18  Episodic Poetics

political writing, the origins of which I discuss in chapter 1. One might proffer the reminder that 1787–88 was a political rather than a literary event, but my contention will be twofold: the political event gives rise to a literature that shapes and helps to define (for contemporaries and for us) the meaning of that politics.47 Furthermore, the strictly literary possibilities that are opened by the constitutional moment become paradigmatic for the period as a whole. We will see them unfold unevenly across this book’s four chapters. For while this is an account of a singular early national moment, it seeks to analyze that moment as a series of relatively autonomous inflections of social practice into writing and of writing into social practice. In some cases, this is a matter of the way writing gives form to social practice; just as often, however, I emphasize the fractures in form, the splittings and recombinations instigated by the new partition of word and referent in the Constitution, the novel form of disingenuous writing that appeared with the new republic. The episode gives literary shape to this dialectic of unification and division. To grasp this last point, I must turn to a second reason for beginning with ratification, which is a properly political-historical one. With the writing of the Constitution, the United States effected the first expressly political event of what Karl Polanyi called nineteenth-century civilization—that period of modern history dominated by the ideology of the market. The historical novelty of the Constitution lay in large part in the central political contradiction of the moment, which exacerbated a deep existing preoccupation with the distinction between masses and elites: a people discursively appealed to as sovereign and whole inhabited a nation that structurally neutralized their political agency through its formative document. Quite simply, the Constitution reoriented the English codification of property protections. While the English tradition shielded property from above, against seizure by the Crown, the Constitution sheltered it from below, from the mass of citizens who were thereby reduced to a rhetorical invocation in the service of their own dematerialization: A hundred years later [i.e., after the chartering of the Bank of England, in 1694] not commercial but industrial property was to be protected, and not against the Crown but against the people. Only by misconception could seventeenth-century meanings be applied to nineteenth-century situations. The separation of powers, which Montesquieu (1748) had meanwhile invented, was now used to separate the people from power over their own economic life. The American Constitution, shaped in a farmer-craftsman’s environment by a leadership forewarned by the English industrial scene, isolated the economic sphere entirely from the jurisdiction of the Constitution, put private property thereby under the highest conceivable protection, and created the only legally grounded market society in the world.48

A  legally grounded market society could only be instituted within what Christopher Looby has called the peculiar “hallucination” of the Constitution,

Introduction  19

the “expressive silence of the document’s lack of explicit reference to sovereignty” that directs attention to “the creative utterance proceeding from the natural voices of embodied persons.”49 The utility of these structuring displacements for the foundation of that market society—from speech to writing, from voice to silence, and from protection to usurpation—is legible in the literature. Writing becomes the crucial site of the displacement, the location of usurpation, even as (and, as I will suggest, oftentimes because) it retains the marks of that distortive work. The great concept of the “public” itself was a product of the distortion: the very notion of “a coherent, connected, self-intelligible, and autonomous public sphere” was “a necessary phantom of the ratification process.”50 That such a fiction was a fiction is no more surprising today than it was in 1787, and it will not be the task of this book to rehearse once more that story of the theft of power by the propertied. My context is smaller: Once again, what happens to writing under these conditions? Literature must, under these conditions, learn to lie. Lie is a strong word, and it will be clear that I refer to writing permeated by suppressio veri rather than suggestio falsi. The truth it must suppress is the truth of the ruling class.51 On the matter of truth and concealment, Roland Barthes’s description of bourgeois ex-nomination (of the bourgeoisie as “the social class that does not want to be named”) retains its persistent analytical accuracy and its energetic combination of vulgarity and perspicuity: “[I]‌n a bourgeois culture [. . .], ideologically, all that is not bourgeois is obliged to borrow from the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois ideology can therefore spread over everything and in so doing lose its name without risk: no one here will throw this name of bourgeois back at it. It can without resistance subsume bourgeois theatre, art and humanity under their eternal analogues; in a word, it can ex-nominate itself without restraint when there is only one single human nature left: the defection from the name ‘bourgeois’ is here complete.”52 To follow Barthes’s argument on the necessary anonymity of the ruling class is not to say, of course, that bourgeois culture is not internally riven by conflict and split by contradiction, not least in the mercantile, smallholder, and early industrial “reorganization of property and privilege” of the early republic.53 Quite the contrary:  it is precisely in these conditions that the episode appears with renewed vitality within public writing. Literature performs that ostentatious yet unsteady integration of the social parts into a national whole in and through episodic forms. Literature bears what I take to be the signature of bourgeois culture: its ambition toward pervasiveness and its refusal to be identified as the hero of its own history. Through “the press, the news, and literature,” writes Barthes, the bourgeoisie “is constantly absorbing into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to it except in imagination, that is, at the cost of an immobilization and an impoverishment of consciousness.”54 Since Barthes’s claim about ex-nomination will orient much of the argument of Episodic Poetics, I want to dwell for a moment on its details and their specific

20  Episodic Poetics

application to this book. Bourgeois culture is a privileged site of speciously naturalized signification because ex-nomination is a typically fundamental trait of capitalist ruling classes: the defection from the name requires a defection from the trace of history itself. Barthes uses the term form to describe the bearer of naturalized, dehistoricized myth; form is the carrier of what Barthes calls myth’s “concept,” its ideological charge. “Form” here is “empty” and “parasitical” on the real histories (and real fields of signification) that are warped into the service of the myth: the “history which drains out of the form will be wholly absorbed by the concept.”55 While the finer points of this argument are known to readers of Barthes, his peculiar use of the term form in these pages speaks quite directly to the matter of episodic poetics. For the episodic poetics this book explores is a spectacular case of Barthesian ex-nomination: Process (episodic structuration) is, again and again, converted into form; structuration becomes structure. As a relational, dialectical unit, however, the episode can also reveal this process of formalization. The very qualities that make the episode so appealing as a ruling-class literary device in the early republic could also undermine the totalizing projects it would be made to serve. That is one consequence of the dialectic Adorno captures so well, in his comments on the contradictory unity of the one and the many: the episode (with Penelope’s weaving synecdochically standing for the form as such) is not an “addition or rudiment” but, rather, “a constitutive category.”56 The simplest version of Barthes’s point about form is correct as far as it goes—which, in the case of my book, is more or less to the end of chapter 2, on Franklin and life writing. Both Franklin and The Federalist aspire toward totality; they aim to comprise a multitude of social elements within their episodic forms. This is the source of their extraordinary persuasive force: these texts are, as we shall see, properly hegemonic articulations of social power, in which comprising multiplicity and heterogeneity within form is always to compromise with them. But chapters 3 and 4 present a rather different version of the problem. In the early U.S. novels I discuss in chapter 3, episodicity is the overproduction of noncumulative narrative, lacking the crucial order of prioritization. Plot is a true difficulty for these novels. In Salmagundi, the centerpiece of chapter 4, the attraction of the many is precisely, regrettably, the pleasure of a too-much that never achieves substance. Politics, for Paulding and the Irving brothers, is merely language; and language, too, is merely language: the gesture of speech, the sign of writing. That the parts come near to overtaking the whole in the second half of Episodic Poetics is hardly an indication of radical critique within the texts. Rather the contrary. Broadly speaking, this book describes two historical phases or moments of literary ex-nomination. The first is strong, class-consolidating work: the constitutional moment, the modeling of a dominant subject through the emplotted life. The second shows the materials that emerge out of the first phase determined by the new, unsteady situation of the literary market. That

Introduction  21

barely existing market for literature was an inhospitable environment for baldly Federalist or consolidationist literature—which, after all, is no surprise:  the reading public for literary writing, such as it was, was not especially Federalist in its politics. Nevertheless, a more structural condition becomes evident in the literature of chapters 3 and 4: a hesitant, even static political imagination, happiest when nothing happens at all. Thus, what Barthes describes as a silent and insidious universalization of forms is the smaller context of this book. That context directs me to examine what happens when literature performs the assertion of a specious owning-class universality for a whole section of humanity—of citizenry—that is without status or substantial property. What achievements are not only enabled but even necessitated by those conditions of writing? There are countless ways of counting them; mine begin and end with matters of narrative plotting. For it is the episode, in its flexibility and diaphanous quality—part gesturing toward whole, whole gesturing back—that does the literary work of this emergent bourgeois culture. The episode is, as a critical narrative poetics would put it, the ideologeme of the early republic.57 My claim is that episodic form is reactivated in the early republic: sometimes as imaginary resolution of these social contradictions, sometimes as the marker of an ideological bind registered in but unresolved by the text. “Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help,” wrote Hegel in 1822, echoing Warren’s commentary on public commotions.58 True enough, perhaps, but tumultuous times are also the setting in which we see the conceptual conflict between great social struggles and general principles. “The truth,” as Alexander Hamilton wrote, registering the divide, “is that the general GENIUS of a government is all that can be substantially relied upon for permanent effects.”59 Episodic poetics provided a representational way of governing for men like Hamilton, even as it disclosed—in its insistence on the shared integrity of the whole and the parts—the poverty of their early national plots.

Chapters Chapter 1 initiates my method of reading through a close analysis of the ratification debate of 1787–88. I show how The Federalist established a poetics of the episode, turning the serial format of the newspaper essay into a full-blown strategy of political consolidation. The chapter argues that we cannot understand the literature of ratification without considering the way an episodic style of political argumentation developed out of the seriality of periodical prose. Literary form and publication format were co-implicated in creating an enduring framework for conceptualizing the United States by dissolving the parts into the whole, and the chapter shows how The Federalist papers invented a way of addressing a public that depended upon the erasure of that

22  Episodic Poetics

public as a heterogeneous political body—an erasure that was mirrored in the essays’ transcendence of their origins when published as a two-volume book in 1788. The Federalist papers created a mode of insisting on the generalizable nation against a crowd of localisms and produced a style of reading to secure its political victory. Chapter 2 attends to the period’s autobiographical writing, in which the great questions of the age are writ small, in the details of a life. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography orients the chapter’s argument that episodic life narrative was an especially effective means of sketching the “self ” against the vagaries of a changing society. The chapter reads the text of the Autobiography (beginning with its manuscript instantiation) to trace the unfolding of the episodes comprised by the narrative and coordinates Franklin’s episodic poetics with contemporary developments in family life, politics, and historiography. Franklin’s work—read alongside and against the memoirs of the failed inventor John Fitch—achieved unprecedented popularity through the nineteenth century largely because of the effectiveness of its formal compromise: episodic structure expresses the fundamentally antagonistic competition between “self ” and “society” as the central figure’s ability to thrive at the center of social diversity and textual variety. Chapter 3 attends to the wide field of novelistic production in the period to analyze two aspects of literary structure: plotting and narrative discourse. The episode is a problem of plotting within the field of literary production; and this problem with plotting is paradoxically also a formal solution to the problem of emplotment within the early national political imagination—that is, of the narrativization of competing claims about what will constitute a desirable social and political future. Coupling a synoptic account of didactic and adventure fiction with close attention to Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (1799), the chapter shows how episodic narrative in the novel functions as a form of hesitation, in terms of both narrative structure and sociopolitical meaning: a curious type of hesitation before the possibilities of structured plotting, yes, but also a hesitation before the political questions these texts raise on the level of thematics and implied reference. In the episodic poetics of early American fiction, the lack of integration of the parts into the whole reveals a formal hesitation before the historical challenges of the early republic. My concluding chapter turns, finally, to the literary marketplace itself to anatomize the episodic form of commodity literature as it emerges fleetingly in 1807–8. The chapter situates Salmagundi within the market, arguing that Salmagundi designates an important moment in U.S.  print culture. Literary scholars have paid little attention to the text, which has seemed to defy intelligibility within established accounts of literary history. By locating the text within the culture of the episode, chapter 4 argues that Salmagundi makes minor literature into a major response to the nascent U.S. literary marketplace—and

Introduction  23

marks the collapse of the episode as a narrative device into the commodity form itself via the abstraction of literary style. For literary historians, these chapters gesture toward a freshening of our procedures, even as they draw eagerly on literary-critical tradition. By orienting analysis toward a unit smaller than the genre, Episodic Poetics seeks to comprehend the work of four genres of writing: by going smaller, the book aims to go bigger. And again, following Brecht’s injunction, the book ranges methodologically, from formal analysis to material-text history, from close reading to social and political history. A narratological account of episodic structure will lead into a reflection on the part/whole conjunction in contemporary political thought, and an apparent excursus on the money form in mercantile societies will speak back to the fundamentals of reading periodical prose in the eighteenth century. My Odyssean style of proceeding is cut to fit my episodic material. And perhaps, in tracing the form of the episode as it moves across these several genres, this book may suggest a new way of conceiving of literatures (national or otherwise) previously seen as insignificant or simply absent from the literary-critical map. For if episodic poetics can find an afterlife in the early U.S. republic, where literature would seem to have been nothing but the stones underfoot, where else might Shklovsky’s crooked road of art lead?

{1}

The Poetics of Constitutional Consolidation Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uninformed mass of the people. —James Madison, Federalist 62

Who so likely to make suitable provisions for the public defense as that body [. . .  that] as the representative of the WHOLE, will feel itself most deeply interested in the preservation of every part? —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 23

Students of the early United States are well acquainted with the fact that the most enduring postrevolutionary argument for national consolidation took shape over the course of eighty-five newspaper pieces published in New York City between October 27, 1787, and August 15, 1788. The first thirty-six papers were printed in a bound volume on March 22, 1788; the remainder (including eight not yet published in the newspapers) appeared in a second volume on May 28. Alexander Hamilton, author of two-thirds of the essays, directed both the newspaper and the book publication, and as the swift transition from ephemera to tomes makes clear, he aspired to secure the durability of his line of reasoning. Eighteenth-century gentlemen’s libraries often included collections of pamphlets whose transitory origins in the give and take of public polemic were erased through the concretization of stitching and leather binding, which installed them on the bookshelf as permanent anthologies.1 Rather than risk the public’s judgment, Hamilton recast his own work in this form. “The subject speaks its own importance,” he wrote in Federalist 1, and the fit vehicle for such vital speech—despite its claim of breathy presence—could be none other than the book.2 Serial essays and books: the movement from one to the other had been a part of American publishing since 1724, when Samuel Keimer reprinted Trenchard and Gordon’s The Independent Whig, with the first twenty numbers as stand-alone pamphlets (sold each week for a penny apiece) to be bound later as parts of the whole.3 But with The Federalist, for the first time, a change in printed format served a rhetorical end. As a result, rhetorical

The Poetics of Constitutional Consolidation  25

strategy and material constraint became two aspects of the same formal configuration, based on the representational flexibility of the episode—the dispersion of units of argument across the eighty-five papers in an intricate play of connection and disconnection, interaction and independence, intention and accident. A shift in format, then, was dictated by—even as it appeared to determine—a formal quality of the text. And that formal quality was put in the service of political rhetoric. The following pages organize this triple step into an argument about the causes for and consequences of the distinctively literary effects of The Federalist. My case rests on a dialectical account of the relationships among these elements (form, rhetorical strategy, and format) and the situation of writing in 1787–88. I  begin and end with the material text of The Federalist, but the core of the chapter analyzes its literary form and moves between that form and the social field in which the form is forged and into which it irrupts. The first section describes the basic part–whole problem of The Federalist, leading into a discussion of the way social hierarchy became part of the material book itself in 1788. The third section extends this discussion, moving from the material text to the conceptual ground from which the consolidationist argument attempted to naturalize hierarchy—namely, the mercantile language and logic of commerce. The central three sections of the chapter, entitled “Hierarchy and Literary Form,” are the torso of the argument, chiseled with close analysis of the dialectic of complexity and consolidation as it is elaborated across the series of essays. These sections show how The Federalist’s case for the Constitution relies upon a literary enactment of its federalist principles: first dispersing elements of the social formation into a complex array and then consolidating them within an overarching framework; the social problem is, as these sections show, a formal problem of writing, of episodic poetics. Following this close analysis of the text, the chapter extends the yield of my reading back into matters of publication, circulation, and material texts, to show how fully the conditions of argument in 1787–88 were imbued by the form and logic of the episode. The return to extrinsic issues of reading and circulation is not an exit from the close reading at the chapter’s center. On the contrary, my final argument is that The Federalist—in 1788 and today—aims to deflect intensive, critical reading; its resistance to close analysis is, as I will discuss, emblematized in 1788 by the inclusion of blank leaves in the fine-paper copies of volume 1. It is my claim that only reading—close, careful, intensive reading, equally alive to the episodic structuration of the text and to the social world it seeks to displace by representing—can combat The Federalist’s (and, indeed, the eighteenth-century Constitution’s) disfiguring of politics. This chapter’s task, then, is to establish what the situation of writing was in the ratification moment, to elaborate the key concepts of Episodic Poetics through their use, and to start to develop a method of reading that will be put to work in the chapters that follow.

26  Episodic Poetics

Complexity and Consolidation: Out of Many, One Recall that the episode is, formally, always on the threshold between the categories of consolidation and complexity: it joins the parts into a whole even as it insists upon (forces the reader’s recognition of) the division between part and whole. And of course here I mean above all the relationship between narrative part and narrative whole. The Federalist is not a narrative stricto sensu, but it produces a narrative effect: the consolidation of the parts into the whole takes a narrative shape, even though the text obviously tells no explicit story. Moreover, the dialectical character of the episode is important to The Federalist’s place in the ratification debate because Hamilton, Madison, and Jay strive to comprehend—to seize, to contain, to fully explain, to account for all aspects of—the assemblage of units that was late eighteenth-century American society not only in the overt arguments of their text but also in the literary form they use to make those arguments. Consolidation is enacted through the prior effect of dispersion:  consolidation is only meaningful, only persuasive, when it unites elements whose complexity would otherwise threaten to overwhelm or subvert the centralizers themselves.4 Let us start with the claim to account for everything. It appears at the very opening of the series, in Federalist 1: “In the progress of this discussion I shall endeavour to give a satisfactory answer to all the objections which shall have made their appearance, that may seem to have any claim to your attention.” Such is the “enlarged view” that Hamilton promises in that number, the “very comprehensive, as well as very serious, view” that “the people of America” should take of the matter (1.90, 2.90). Hamilton’s description of Publius’s vast powers of comprehension in fact reiterates what he has described already as the Constitution’s:  “The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world” (1.87). Publius’s papers will exemplify the comprehensive view. Hamilton here uses comprehensive in the eighteenth-century sense that indicates “comprising” or “including much”: as the OED tells us, citing The Independent Whig, what is comprehensive is “inclusive of ” or “embracing.” As Federalist 1 uses it, empire, too, is a gesture of comprehension of the parts by the whole: an empire in 1787 is both a sovereign state and the dominion or absolute command exercised over that state. The doubleness compressed into empire is then explicitly marked by the distance between the “UNION” and its “parts”: The parts compose the union, but the union comprehends—holds dominion over—the parts. The opening pages of The Federalist are stocked, like so many literary beginnings, with the material that will be explored or written through in the succeeding pages: semantic density here is an index of the weight of the political question and of a conceptual knot that can only be worked on (not worked out) in eighty-five

The Poetics of Constitutional Consolidation  27

numbers. The union of parts into a whole will in fact be the vertical organization of parts under a sovereign power: that is what is indicated by the conflation of Americans, Publius, and the Constitution. The language that initiates The Federalist is already operating according to the logic of episodic poetics. What is compacted in Federalist 1 unravels into explicit conflict later. So, for example, in Federalist 44, Madison caps his rebuttal to Anti-Federalist objections to the Constitution as the supreme law of the land with a full-dress version the nightmare. Were the states to hold supreme sovereignty, “the world would have seen, for the first time, a system of government founded on an inversion of the fundamental principles of all government; it would have seen the authority of the whole society everywhere subordinate to the authority of the parts; it would have seen a monster, in which the head was under the direction of the members” (44.291). Madison here produces an inversion of Thomas Hobbes’s “Artificiall Man,” giving an upside-down ekphrasis of the frontispiece to Leviathan, in which the sovereign’s head and arms comprehend the subjects that constitute its body.5 Again and again, The Federalist recasts the specific arguments for and against the Constitution in terms of an abstract relationship between parts and whole. Again and again, it asserts the necessity of comprehension.6 In these terms, the part–whole relationship is not a narrative problem— architectonic, physiological, systemic, yes, but not narrative. Yet The Federalist produces a narrative solution to the problem—again, working on what cannot be properly worked out—in the unfolding of the eighty-five essays and their consolidation into book format. The part–whole problem of U.S. politics, as we have seen it thematized in Federalists 1 and 44, is recast as a part–whole problem of episodic narrative. The doubleness of the episode, its integral but extractable quality, is essential to the political theorization of The Federalist: the episode dialectically enables the argument for ratification to imply both provisionality and permanence, a sense of the constitutional project both as an ongoing experiment and as the final installment in a series of historical lessons. In this way, episodic poetics works to cut across one line of argument, for durability, even as it reinforces or homologically reiterates the processes of unification and consolidation that are so crucial to ratification politics. This dialectic of complexity (the threatening vitality of the parts) and consolidation (the comprehension of the whole) is given narrative shape in The Federalist’s movement from the many to the one.

Common and Finer: The Legacy of 1787–88 Episodic poetics, in fact, has ensured The Federalist’s place in U.S.  historiography and national mythology alike. The energy of The Federalist derives from its dual nature; it can be—and is—read both as a singular contribution to

28  Episodic Poetics

U.S. constitutional interpretation and as a collection of discrete essays written to the 1787–88 moment. That this text is now regularly known by the historically unfounded title The Federalist Papers is some indication of how collectedness has governed its peculiar location in the U.S.  canon.7 The Federalist has “held the place of a compact, articulate American political theory,” even despite the fact that it is best understood as a “serial-in-progress.”8 Historians habitually contrast the outsized afterlife of The Federalist with its more modest efficacy in the ratification debate, yet the questions that frame these accounts regularly give away the game: “[W]‌hat was there about the previous uses to which The Federalist had been put that delayed full appreciation of its merits until well after the centennial of the Constitution?”9 Here, finally, is the (otherwise very good) introduction to the Penguin edition, expressing a similar fascination with the discrepancy between the moment of publication and the historical legacy: “Few readers of the New York Independent Journal on October 27, 1787, could have realized that the essay appearing on page two of their newspaper that day, ‘The Federalist No. 1,’ would inaugurate a series of eighty-five papers, which thirteen months later Thomas Jefferson would call ‘the best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written.’ ”10 Strictly speaking, none of the Journal’s readers could know this. But what is immediately striking is the purported palpability of history in this passage. The fleeting moment of October 27, 1787, is offered—like any particular moment—as a deliciously unlikely site for History to happen. The account proffers the spectacle of contingency itself, as a piecemeal text is collected for the appreciation of posterity. But a determinant necessity quickly elbows its way into the scene:  the Jefferson quote (an obligatory invocation in too many scholarly discussions of The Federalist) is in fact not so much a mark of History’s judgment as a promotional blurb (however sincere) from a friend of an author (James Madison). And there lies the buried truth: what few readers could know is just how energetically “The Federalist No. 1” would be enfolded into elite national politics from the beginning, how it would serve to remake national politics as elite politics. The distinction, it turns out, is not between the particular date and History but between the anonymous “readers” and Jefferson. The compulsive scholarly return to Jefferson’s pronouncement is built into The Federalist from the start, originating in the text’s fraught claim to establish a ground from which to justify the institutionalization of social distinction. Contingency and the myth of the common reader (emblematized here by the original newspaper readers) are enveloped into determinism and the normative authority of the elite reader (signified by the implied whole of the complete, bound text). Episodic flexibility allows both aspects to stand. The question of the complete comprehension of the parts is for The Federalist not merely one of the relation between local and national; the part–whole question is—as Madison’s implied invocation of Hobbes indicates—a matter of social inequality.

The Poetics of Constitutional Consolidation  29

The energizing tension between the singular and the collected extends to The Federalist’s ambition to enumerate and to comprehend every aspect of the ratification debate, a strategy that Dana Nelson has called “rational distance.”11 The text was distributed widely; as Jay Grossman suggests, The Federalist’s “imperial publishing strategies [. . .] align with the imperial vision for a consolidated nation that the Papers [. . .] endorse as the primary justification for ratification.”12 Or as Michael Warner has it, Publius “blanketed the public space in a way that was warmly resented by his opponents.”13 This strategy of covering an extensive spatial range doubles The Federalist’s conflation of Constitution–Publius–American; Grossman’s imagery of conquest is in this regard apt. But it is important to remember, too, that the illusion of complete comprehension was a widely shared tactic and that consolidation was enacted through the prior effect of textual and readerly dispersion. A familiar (though false) story told of George Washington standing for two hours at a time before the Constitutional Convention, defending every part of the Constitution.14 That tall tale articulated, in a remarkable early consubstantiation of Washington as the embodiment of the nation, the circumstances of a public discourse in which commentary and polemic gushed from a variety of Federalist and Anti-Federalist sources. (It may remind us, too, in its collapsing of the myriad people into the figure of Washington, of the invocation of Jefferson as privileged reader of The Federalist.) For the Philadelphia convention’s decision to submit the Constitution to state conventions for ratification brought a wide and varied number of people into the debate, and these commentators left no article unglossed.15 And as the Washington story and The Federalist itself both indicate, it was not only the Anti-Federalists who refashioned constitutional clauses; the ratification debate was an exercise in obsessive, and collective, annotation. Moreover, the emphasis on enumerating aspects of the Constitution, of apprehending it as a set of discrete elements, thematizes the conditions of a debate that enfolded so many different voices, articulated along and across social divides. Analysis—decomposition of the object for study and critique—was the first step toward synthesis. So many voices articulated across social divides—and then muzzled: episodic form and serial format are essential to The Federalist’s claim to comprehension of this field of conflict.16 To grasp the interdependence of format and form, we need to push harder on the accepted story of The Federalist’s movement from essays to book. We need to analyze, in other words, the way the text’s dialectic of complexity and consolidation relates, in the first instance, to its material appearance. As a newspaper serialization, it followed in the tradition of The Spectator, The Independent Whig, and Cato’s Letters. As pieces assembled into a book, The Federalist partook of a publishing convention contemporaneous with serialization: number books. These were sold weekly or monthly in parts, or what bibliographers call fascicles, two or three sheets

30  Episodic Poetics

stitched between paper wrappers. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, English booksellers expanded their trade by issuing books in fascicles, which took off in the early 1730s.17 By selling in installments, booksellers expanded their market: a volume or set of volumes that would be beyond the reach of the common reader when sold as a bound unit would be a reasonable (if still aspirational) purchase when amortized over several months. The result was an extraordinary acceleration and intensification of the commodification of books. By the 1770s, as James Raven has shown, a “cavalcade of part-number books” had been launched in England, increasing circulation of large and multivolume formats manyfold.18 The scale of American bookselling did not match the market across the Atlantic, but printers nevertheless recognized the promise of issuing books in parts—particularly those with either the ambition or the need to take a chance with limited capital.19 So, for example, Nathaniel Coverly and Robert Hodge, two embattled printers, collaborated to issue a peculiar history of the American Revolution (largely redacted from the London Annual Register) as a number book, printing two of three volumes together before their partnership dissolved.20 Such an undertaking was far beyond the usual scale of their jobs; more successful printers used the number book to issue gargantuan projects, of which Thomas Dobson’s edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, issued by subscription in quarto parts from 1790 to 1798, is only the most famous.21 Once bound, these books were indistinguishable from copies purchased complete (even if a patient bibliographer may find stab-stitching holes in the gutters of the volumes). Although no real measurement exists, it is worth speculating (with the historian of serialization R. M. Wiles) that the aspirational fascicle-buyer of limited means would be inclined to continue purchasing sheets in order to complete the set; a book was valuable—whether for reading or, more likely, for display of ownership—only in its completeness.22 Completeness appears to have been the ambition for American parts issues. Number books like the Coverly and Hodge history and the Dobson encyclopedia lent themselves to indexical reference reading rather than sustained attention, and they were self-evidently books for display. This surface prestige of the complete book appears in Hamilton’s account, in a letter to Madison, of sending fifty-two copies of volume 1 of The Federalist to Governor Randolph of Virginia, in two formats: “40 of the common copies and twelve of the finer ones.”23 The difference between the common and finer copies has gone virtually unnoticed in the scholarship on ratification, but it is an important one. Most immediately, at the level of the production and sale of the volumes themselves, it marks a great divide between book buyers. The printers commissioned to produce the book, James and Archibald M’Lean, had been issuing the essays three times each week in the Independent Journal. Hamilton and the Federalist group that ordered the publication of the book indicated a single duodecimo volume of 200–250 pages. In their call for

The Poetics of Constitutional Consolidation  31

subscribers, in January 1788, the M’Leans offered the book at five shillings (if 200 pages) or six shillings (if 250). But they also noted that “[a]‌few Copies will be printed on superfine Royal Writing Paper, Price Ten Shillings”—or almost two dollars, double the price of the common copies. At eighty-five essays and nearly six hundred pages, the final two-volume book was a project of another scale altogether, and the chasm between the common and finer copies only widened.24 Hamilton sent The Federalist to Virginia to be used as a “debater’s handbook” for the “rhetorical battle” about to begin at the Virginia ratifying convention.25 In April, George Nicholas had written to Madison to request help on just that front. Since the “greater part of the members of the convention will go to the meeting without information on the subject,” Nicholas wrote, “it will be very important to give this as early as may be. [. . .] Publius of the foederalist if it is published in a pamphlet, would do it far better than any other work.”26 The best information for those without information would be, of course, comprehensive information: a handbook. But the handbook itself had already divided the field of readers (and of people) into the common and the finer: the distinction between common and finer bindings was as indispensable as that between common and finer persons. Publication as a book established The Federalist as a physically unified text. Presentation of that text in the form of gifts to convention attendees who were differentiated according to their relative importance (twelve of the finer, forty of the common) reflected the papers’ political problematic—a problematic structurally tied to their formal consolidation— on the level of the book’s distribution. When understood in relation to the dynamics of complexity and consolidation, this publication plan communicates, even through the very mereness of the detail in Hamilton’s letter, how fully ratification politics was saturated in the instantiation and reinforcement of social division. For a late eighteenth-century social imagination exceptionally fascinated by the classical age, one that routinely troped its social structure in terms of a plebeian/patrician polarization, the distance between common and finer was ample indeed.27

The Chain of Reading: Commerce, Episodic Poetics, Politics So far we have seen that the material text unites the political dialectic of complexity and consolidation with the social division between common and finer persons. In both cases, the parts are the problem; they must be contained, comprehended, subordinated, bound. Federalist 1’s language of comprehension sets the rhetorical tone for the essays:  every objection will be neutralized. The division between common and finer persons—between an unruly mass of people and a well-governed elite—is imaginatively healed in homologous fashion: the finer neutralizes the common. But from what ground is the

32  Episodic Poetics

neutral itself produced? For The Federalist, as for the Constitution, the ground is commerce. Mercantile societies—and the United States in 1787–88 was one, albeit in a transformative situation—are marked by their distinctive intellectual, cultural, and broadly ideological emphasis on the moment of economic circulation. Trading classes produce a mercantile epistemology: not merely, or even primarily, the body of thought and policy known as Mercantilism but also a more local and socially oriented way of conceiving of the world. Mercantilism itself has been called the economic thought of the “second phase of primitive accumulation,” of the consolidation of capitalist economic power after a first phase of property acquisition through dispossession and enclosure.28 It is certainly the moment of money as such: in Marx’s general formula for capital, the full circuit of circulation appears as M–C–M', where money is used to purchase commodities that are then sold for a profit. In the M and M' moments, the aim is the circulation of money as capital, the “determining purpose” is exchange value, and, as a result, the movement of capital appears to be endless.29 The foundation of the economy in production is obscured; but because trade dominates economic relations, this is in part a true or accurate obfuscation. Economic historians of the early United States disagree about the nature of the early national economy (and they rarely refer to the general formula for capital), but calling its culture “mercantile” points us to the power of that true obfuscation—and, crucially, to the force with which a commercial epistemology, “capable of converting anything it touches into a monetary equivalent,” neutralizes conflict and complexity within the imagined framework of trade.30 Quantification becomes a primary strategy of neutralization: The order of value does not admit of qualitative difference; all differences are reducible to quantitative differences, and substantial conflicts are reconceived as a matter of balancing accounts. If there is a pure model for this imaginary solution to the problem of the absorption of multiplicity, it is the commercial handbook itself, the guide to the lex mercatoria, or merchant law. Among the most widely used commercial handbooks in the early United States, Wyndham Beawes’s Lex Mercatoria Rediviva:  or, The Merchant’s Directory, provided a guide for, as its subtitle announces, “all Men in Business, whether as Traders, Remitters, Owners, Freighters, Captains, Insurers, Brokers, Factors, Supercargoes, Agents.”31 Hamilton studied the book, and Madison recommended it in his list of books to be acquired by Congress, in 1783, under the heading of “Law of Nature and Nations,” alongside Grotius, Hutchinson, and Pufendorf.32 Lex Mercatoria’s tables of weights and measures, and its “Modern Universal Table, of the Real and Imaginary Monies of the World,” established a kind of complete key of equivalency, a picture of the world in which the “currency of money is the constant and monotonous repetition of the same process.”33 The book is a dictionary of commercial law (prescriptive rather than descriptive), yet, as Beawes expresses it in his preface to the reader, the book’s

The Poetics of Constitutional Consolidation  33

form is continuous, proto-narrative, in its presentation of the merchant’s knowledge: “The Form I have put my book in, I believed would best suit my Intentions of having every Particular readily turned to, as Occasion should require, which the large Contents at the Beginning, and extensive Index at the End, will immediately lead my Reader to. And as every Subject is placed by itself, the Chain of Reading is not broke through, as it is in the Dictionarial and some other Methods; therefore I hope this, which I have elected, will be approved.”34 A standard dictionary makes the most of the book as a technology of discontinuous reading, organizing information so that the reader may absorb the sought-after fact with a minimum of actual reading. One locates an alphabetically situated term and swiftly consumes its meanings. If, rather than absorbing information in this way, one becomes instead absorbed in information, skating across the surface of the dictionary and taking pleasure in its version of variety (in which the content is always new because fresh material is always presented in the same form), one uses the dictionary as sheer text; the pleasure is written upon the page by the reader, the perfect negative of the dictionary writer—who, as Johnson noted in his 1755 preface to the Dictionary, writes (willfully or not) not to imprint himself upon the page but, rather, to efface the very evidence of his endeavor: “Among those unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered not as the pupil but the slave of science, the pioneer of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths through which learning and genius press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress. Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.”35 Unlike even the most practical encyclopedia, in which alphabetization and cross-referencing offer a gateway into the totality from any particular point of entry, the dictionary simply discourages its own reading. It is a world designed for consumption one bite at a time. But Beawes stresses both the utility of his text (its table of contents and index) and the continuity that makes it readable; practically speaking, the book is organized thematically, not alphabetically. If he plays the role of Johnsonian “Dictionarial” drudge, he does so by de-ironizing Johnson’s heroization of the humble collector. His text may be rediviva, secondhand, “extracted from the works of the most celebrated British and foreign commercial writers,” but Beawes presents himself as the master compiler and true author of a series of unbroken units of reading. “And though a Collection is not esteemed to carry with it a Proof of Genius and Understanding like a genuine Composition,” he writes, “yet the Labour must be allowed greater, as ’tis certainly more easy for a Person to pen his own Thoughts than dexterously to select and range those of others; more especially if he has them to seek, compare, and correct, from a large Variety of Authors in different Languages. This has been my Task. And

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I wish my Performance may be looked on like the Bee’s Industry; as Honey will not lose its Taste, or Virtue, by reflecting that that Insect was only a Collector, not Author, of its Sweetness.”36 Compilation and organization, the ordering of found materials into a new and continuous whole, yield the sweetest result. Beawes writes, in the opening lines of his preface, that the book is “the Product of a leisure Season.”37 It also, in its effort to facilitate sustained study, encourages leisure—or, at least, the slowing of activity that continuous reading entails. Yet, as the book makes clear, the continuity that Beawes takes such care to preserve—the unbroken chain of reading within each chapter—is constituted in relation to the chapter divisions that structure the “chain” itself. Complete comprehension is a function of the persistent diversity of objects. Malachy Postlethwayt, that other great guide to commerce for eighteenthand nineteenth-century traders (far more durable than Beawes for the later period) and the authority Hamilton appears to have relied on more than any other, expresses the point with a merchant’s lucidity: “In order to make a right judgment of any branch of trade, when considered in a national light, it is frequently necessary to survey it’s [sic] connection with various others; and, if a gentleman is not duly informed of those connections, he cannot be able to make suitable inquiries of traders.”38 Following Postlethwayt’s argument (if not his dictionarial method), Lex Mercatoria proffers a full representation of the world, a representation that is possible because commerce and trade are, from its proto-Smithian perspective, humankind’s defining activities; they are, as Beawes repeats, in a term whose force is doubled by its resonance with Adam Smith’s rising contemporary logic, “universal.”39 They are universal, that is, in a complex world system of trading networks and dispersed peoples: a universe in units, to be understood (to the extent that understanding is useful for commerce, or profitable) piecemeal. The Lex Mercatoria imparts a world-historical dynamic that tends toward the money relation’s constant repetition of the same process, emblematized by the table of exchange. The chapters in Beawes’s unbroken chain of reading, his syntax of world trade, may be redescribed in terms of Georg Lukács’s account of the social collisions that produce plot in the novel. In a complex social field, as against the singular and definitive collision of classical tragedy, any given collision may be merely “a link within a system of many links. The particular circumstances, the specific clashes which produce the collision will be shown, but precisely as particular circumstances alongside others, and they certainly will not have to unfold in perfect purity.”40 Lukács’s point about the novel is that modern civilization offers a surplus of social material, far in excess of the simple confrontation that structures the plot of classical tragedy; and, as such, his argument reveals as much about the social material as it does about the novel’s work on it. From the tangled web of action emerges the wavering line of plot in modern times. In the Lex Mercatoria we see this social field represented, as it were, prior to novelistic narrativization.41 Here, things are even

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less pure: Heterogeneity is everywhere, and the many-linked system of transactions is itself evidently already a formal reduction of vast social content. That reduction is a representation, and a powerfully effective one, within the merchant’s law—and within The Federalist. That carving of a complex world into slices that inventory multiplicity (of coins, of peoples), even as they eliminate that multiplicity through the general equivalence of all things under the sign of value, establishes the pure form of the voice of reason, of mathematical neutrality, as we find it in The Federalist. The value form of commerce is The Federalist’s, and the Constitution’s, representational ground for the resolution of the part–whole problem of politics and society.

Hierarchy and Literary Form 1: Commerce and Contagion “What greater affinity or relation of interest can be conceived between the carpenter and blacksmith, and the linen manufacturer or stocking-weaver, than between the merchant and either of them?” Hamilton’s question, in Federalist 36, comes quick on the heels of his rough-and-ready reformulation of republican principle: “There are strong minds in every walk of life that will rise superior to the disadvantages of situation and will command the tribute due to their merit, not only from the classes to which they particularly belong, but from the society in general” (36.236). Merchants are the heroes of this renovated tale of state formation: they are the ones who emblematize “society in general” by mediating the disparate interests of manufacturers and mechanics. The mercantile position encompasses all others because, through the accurate misprision we have examined in the Lex Mercatoria, it appears to order and determine the complete circuit of production, circulation, and consumption. Hamilton celebrates the centrality of commerce early on, echoing Postlethwayt and Beawes in a standard (if nevertheless notably assertive) paeon to trade: The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of their political cares. By multiplying the means of gratification, by promoting the introduction and circulation of the precious metals, those darling objects of human avarice and enterprise, it serves to vivify and invigorate all the channels of industry to make them flow with greater activity and copiousness. [. . .] The often-agitated question between agriculture and commerce has from indubitable experience received a decision which has silenced the rivalship that once subsisted between them, and has proved, to the entire satisfaction of their friends, that their interests are intimately blended and interwoven. (12.134)

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Interests blended and interwoven:  Hamilton’s is a familiar picture of social cohesion through commercial exchange, a version of the harmonious cacophony of Bernard Mandeville’s grumbling hive (here given as the coalition of landed and merchant property). Commerce creates profit, which whets the appetite for gain even as it gratifies it; and gain is universalized within social life. Through writing, as we have already heard Barthes argue, the bourgeoisie is constantly absorbing into its ideology a whole social world that cannot live up to it, “except in imagination,” at the great cost of an “immobilization and impoverishment of consciousness.”42 Such is Hamilton’s ambition in these lines. But the case for a neutral commercial position is difficult to make, harder than it might at first appear. If the Lex Mercatoria points us toward the pure form of The Federalist’s voice of reason, which speaks with a commercial cadence, the essays themselves depend upon a mediating term: The Federalist arrives at this commercial framework via the logic of contagion, which not only provides a structuring metaphor with which to trope the dangerous tendencies of “the people” but also describes the episodic structure of The Federalist itself. We have seen that the distinction between common and finer persons framed the ratification debate; that distinction is inscribed in the very form of The Federalist. The following three sections of this chapter will examine the relationship between contagion and episodic poetics across the essays. On the one hand, these sections follow Albert Furtwangler’s suggestion that the series itself invites literary-critical scrutiny.43 On the other hand, I am interested less in providing an overall picture of the eighty-five pieces than I am in analyzing contagion as the consummate case of an enchained episodic structure across a sequence of essays within The Federalist as a whole: the essential place where structure and structuration, form and theme, intersect with and elaborate on one another. In a word, these sections pursue the fundamental plot of The Federalist: the consolidation of the many into the one.44 We might even call it a meta- or deep-structural plot.45 The metaphorics of contagion, vital to Federalist argumentation, is worth pursuing in its own right, and it is my starting place; but my object here is to trace the ways the metaphorical expression is shaped through recurrent, episodic movement across the several essays. A  thematic reading, which would entail aligning each of these moments (paradigmatically) into a single proposition (such as, “Insurrection is like a disease that infects the body politic”) and which would then effectively analyze that compressed reformulation (converting it into a descriptive argument, such as, “The Federalist distrusts democracy”), misses the dynamics of the language as it works both in its discrete context and in the larger workings-out of The Federalist as a whole and thus risks short-cutting the process of reading in an effort to deliver an argumentational payoff.46 Such a thematic reading would tell us mostly what we already know, following, in Roland Barthes’s phrase, “the inevitability of a dice throw” to “arrest and fix

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the skid of names.”47 In short, it would fail to engage with questions of structure and discursive form as they shape the politics of reading in the ratification debate. This style of missed connection is all too typical of analyses of “political” literature, which, as a result, rarely attain both abstract conceptual portability and trenchant analysis of the microstructures of discourse as they emerge in the process of political persuasion. For my analysis, the question of form opens onto a set of questions about how the text makes political claims, about the ground upon which the thematic distinction (Federalist versus others) is able to mean in the first place.48 Little of the ratification debate is devoted to explicitly naming sections of society as expendable, extractable, or dangerous; such direct articulation of social difference would contradict the rhetoric of unity, of “the people,” on which the Constitution itself is based. Yet a substantial part of The Federalist is committed to pathologizing Anti-Constitutionalists as unruly and untrustworthy elements of the nation. Most famously, Hamilton in Federalist 1 asserts the distinction between the rational argumentation of Publius and “the conduct of the opposite parties.” The ratification debate, Hamilton cautions, could threaten the very possibility of governance on all levels, from the self to the state:  “A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose” (1.88). After calling up this threat of uncivilized speech, The Federalist proffers a well-governed—that is, in the eighteenth-century’s negative definition of government, suitably controlled—rhetoric, growing from a well-governed character.49 As Hamilton says in an appropriate paradox, The Federalist exhibits an “enlightened zeal” (1.88).50 We may note, however, that the rhetorical excess invoked by Federalist 1 is articulated with an at least equally threatening numerical excess. A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose. In The Federalist’s opening salvo, bad speaking generates bad people (“converts”), and lots of them, in a proto-Malthusian fantasy of total social disorder: “To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and by the bitterness of their invectives” (1.88; emphasis added). Born of loudness and bitterness, these imagined infidels, apostates against both intellection and fellow feeling and gorging themselves on every impassioned polemic against consolidation, can lead the nation nowhere but—as “History will teach us”—to the doorstep of despotism itself (1.89). The association between rhetorical and numerical excess is persistent. In defining Publius’s enlightened zeal against passionate but unenlightened zeal, Hamilton puts to use terms that recall mid-eighteenth-century debates over religious affections in the Great Awakening and that presage the language of disease that became a staple of Anti-Jacobin writing in the 1790s: “[During the course of public debate,] [i]‌t will be forgotten [. . .] that jealousy is the usual concomitant of violent love, and that the noble enthusiasm

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of liberty is too apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust” (1.89).51 Enthusiasm infects the people, who press with diseased insistence against the stable boundaries of the American “empire”—a term, as we have seen, denoting the unification of multiple territories and peoples under a single sovereign (again, a negatively understood “government”) (1.87).52 Federalist 1’s tendency is toward anxiety about too much. Too much passion instigates too many people to believe that too many sovereign states can thrive as the all-too-plural United States of America. The plural itself is made into the enemy, and the enemy is literally everywhere—all over the page—in The Federalist. We see this most clearly in the repetition of the words State and States, which together account for almost 1 percent of the text (far more than any other term).53 On the level of lexical selection, the name “United States” efficiently enacts The Federalist’s goal of political compression. Its pulse-like appearance is a frequent reminder of the dispersed political form against which the text is articulated; the past-tense United, when installed as the modifier of States, is a radically condensed wish fulfillment. There is something more than the routine in The Federalist’s use of the phrase “United States,” despite its apparent necessity. Indeed, its significance to the ratification debate lies in its unsteady movement between common and proper noun: only united states can cohere into the United States. The ease with which the United States advertises itself as e pluribus unum veils not only the early anxieties about what such a manyness might mean but also the articulation of and the conflict between those meanings at the core of the nationalist canon, in The Federalist. The plural from which the one should emerge too often approximates the foreign, the supplement, the unwelcome interest that threatens to derail political debate altogether: “The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests, innovates upon too many local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions, and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth” (1.87). Collectivity so often seems to be the affliction, and it is worth registering just how easily The Federalist’s tropes of unyielding multiplicity migrate into a new context at the turn of the century. Writing around 1800 (in a text published in 1805), Mercy Otis Warren, herself a Republican and supporter of the French Revolution (and early opponent of the U.S. Constitution), expressed revulsion at events in France: “These sudden eruptions of the passions of the multitude, spread, like the lava of a volcano, throughout all France, nor could men of correct judgment, who aimed only at the reform of abuses, and a renovation in all the departments, check the fury of the torrent.”54 The crucial link between too many people—segmented into their regional departments, their passions flowing like lava across the land—and the disintegration of reasoned politics powerfully conveys the threat. (It is one we shall see again in chapter 2, in Benjamin Franklin’s account of the Wilkes Affair.) Warren’s language remarkably echoes Hamilton’s across the decade, despite their divergent politics.55

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Hierarchy and Literary Form 2: Governing the Splintered Society Just as the insidious eloquence of passion seems to generate the people by infecting them, so The Federalist disperses its own expressiveness to cure the disease and to stamp out the human “conflagration” (a key word in this cocktail of metaphors) it has ignited. Dispersion is the crucial first moment in a rhetorical effect that conscripts the total text—from the syntax of political persuasion to its manifestation on the printed page—in the service of consolidating a unified government. We see this double movement in the play of pseudonyms that in part structured the print debate over the Constitution: the multiplication of pen names scattered orphan arguments across the field of public discourse.56 On the one hand, the lack of reference to actual persons amounted to a diffusion of disembodied voices. The Federalist participated in this diffusion through the wide distribution of Publius’s text. On the other hand, the insistence of Federalist numbers, the repetition of the Publius name, worked centripetally to consolidate a Federalist position. If, as Saul Cornell has argued, print debate helped to focus a rather haphazard Anti-Federalist politics by forcing numerous partisans to articulate the Anti-Constitutional position, it also enabled a prolific group of writers—Hamilton, Jay, and Madison—to turn anonymity into the very foundation of a dependable, characteristic political personality.57 In a field of production that proffers too many names, Publius and The Federalist appear as assembling terms, like the repetition of “United States” within the text, wishfully organizing the discourse by joining its sundry essays together across the time and space of publication. I want to turn now to the formal configuration of the metaphorical field of contagion I sketched above. We see that “the people”—or, rather, certain people—are prone to infection. Warren’s lava of passion “spreads” like the “spirit of distrust” that infects Hamilton’s populace. The rhetoric of disease and contagion is The Federalist’s main thematic vehicle for expressing the encounter between popular, centrifugal energies and consolidated national government. Relevant terms—including contagion, disease, infection, malady, and, in several uses, spirit—are not the most numerous in the text, but they are deployed at cruxes in the argument for ratification, and they strike at the heart of the social clashes that underlie the debate over the political future. The language of disease connects the famous passage from Federalist 1 discussed above to more than a dozen others scattered across the numbers of The Federalist, all of which are centrally concerned with the problem of mass insurrection.58 Each of these moments posits, in a variation that rewards detailed inquiry, a fundamental difference between those who accept and those who reject what Hamilton in Federalist 28 calls the “general government,” a dissimilarity that is based on the irrationality of the insurgents and which is articulated against an authorial pose of mathematical neutrality. These moments take shape through the process of their episodic unfolding and recursive reference to one another.

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Reading them in terms of episodic poetics is to consider them relationally, “in their expansions,” as Barthes puts it: contingently, and so against the grain of Hamilton’s schematics. Yet Hamilton’s scheme is itself structured contingently across the numbers of the series, and it depends upon a crucial contrapuntal relationship (as we will see) with the diffuse model offered by Madison. So my reading draws out the bases for Federalist schematics, rather than accepting it (as in “the inevitability of a dice throw”) as already understood. “An insurrection, whatever may be its immediate cause, eventually endangers all government. Regard to the public peace, if not to the rights of the Union, would engage the citizens to whom the contagion had not communicated itself to oppose the insurgents; and if the general government should be found in practice conducive to the prosperity and felicity of the people, it were irrational to believe that they would be disinclined to its support” (28.204–205). So writes Hamilton in a key moment of his long defense of energetic government—specifically, of the central government’s power to tax and to raise military forces (the standing army that was anathema to republican theory). The rhetorical legerdemain—converting the specific into the general—is impressive, for the passage refers most directly to Shays’s Rebellion, the uprising of debtor farmers in western Massachusetts in 1786–87, which created an atmosphere of crisis that “strengthened the resolve of the nationalists and shocked some reluctant localists into an acceptance of a stronger national government, thereby uniting divergent political elements of commercial society in the country at large.”59 The shock wave ripples through The Federalist. In the next sentences, Hamilton makes plain that the rebellion provides the context for his discussion: “If, on the contrary, the insurrection should pervade a whole State, or a principal part of it, the employment of a different kind of force might become unavoidable. It appears that Massachusetts found it necessary to raise troops for suppressing the disorders within that State” (28.205). Hamilton fashions a vital distinction between two types of insurrection: that in which “insurgents” may be detached from “the people” and that in which “pervasive” revolt calls for “a different kind of force.” In its highly schematic presentation of social clashes, Federalist 28 is representative of Hamilton’s writing in The Federalist as a whole. The political philosophy penned by Hamilton-as-Publius divides the social field generally into two categories: the people and the peripheral others who—under the distorting influence of some mental infection or other—become inassimilable to the body politic. Madison’s essays, on the other hand, generally multiply social divisions. The factions of Federalist 10 emblematize the political vision of the Madisonian Publius: organized into cohesion not, as in Hamilton’s essays, by the centralizing, sovereign force of commerce but, rather, by the exquisite balance of a complex system of antagonisms—what Hannah Pitkin called “an act of faith.”60 We will return to this immensely effective divergence between the two writers in due course, but first we must consider a question: How do the people migrate along this continuum in The Federalist, from rational to

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irrational actors, the latter suffering collectively from “contagion”—perhaps, that is, suffering from collectivity itself? What is occurring in the above passage from Federalist 28 is the extraction of one segment of society from the legitimate body politic. On the one hand, it is easy enough to perceive the political-theoretical axiom that rebellion against the state forfeits claims to citizenship: this is the traditional definition of treason.61 But, on the other hand, Hamilton’s dilemma runs through the whole text: How can Publius—articulated along the fracture between Hamilton and Madison—sustain “the people” as an enduring concept even as he engages with questions of social conflict? The problem presents the other side of what has been long recognized as a definitive feature of emancipatory rhetoric since the English Revolution:  its uses reach beyond the intentions that underlie the instance of its enunciation. Or to put it another way, by examining The Federalist’s navigation through the problem of “the people,” we can see how, in the process of (re)shaping an existing language of social emancipation, a group of writers produces the language of social closure. Tentative, tactically deployed assertions of equality and social justice have often invited revolutionary interpretations that outstrip the bounded ambitions of their authors by pursuing the logic of the language’s claims. In this case, we shall see how that radicalism precedes the effort to foreclose it, as Hamilton and Madison work to neutralize several political foes at once—foes who by and large saw themselves as activated by the spirit of 1776 (as Hamilton and Madison decidedly did not).62 Federalist 28’s polar distinction between the insurgent and the good citizen reduces the model Hamilton has already set up in Federalist 16. The Hamiltonian schema of insurrection—which denotes the limit case of political fragmentation—brings us to the fundamental questions that we shall see developing episodically in the interplay between Hamilton’s and Madison’s arguments about the social organization of the polis. Federalist 16 is the first of Hamilton’s explicit insurgency-as-disease numbers (after the conceptual setup we have already seen in Federalist 1). In defending the extension of the national government’s jurisdiction to individuals (beyond states), Hamilton argues that the applicability of national authority onto citizens themselves prevents the possibility of cabals within state legislatures, for it will ensure that “DIRECT and ACTIVE RESISTANCE” cannot be mistaken for “mere NONCOMPLIANCE” (16.154). He then examines the possibility of substantial factional resistance and the small but devastating risk of complete revolution: If opposition to the national government should arise from the disorderly conduct of refractory or seditious individuals, it could be overcome by the same means which are daily employed against the same evil under the State governments. [. . .] As to those partial commotions and insurrections which sometimes disquiet society from the intrigues of an inconsiderable faction,

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or from sudden or occasional ill humors that do not infect the great body of the community, the general government could command more extensive resources for the suppression of disturbances of that kind than would be in the power of any single member. And as to those mortal feuds which in certain conjunctures spread a conflagration through a whole nation, or through a very large proportion of it, proceeding either from weighty causes of discontent given by the government or from the contagion of some violent popular paroxysm, they do not fall within any ordinary rules of calculation. When they happen, they commonly amount to revolutions and dismemberments of empire. No form of government can always either avoid or control them. It is vain to hope to guard against events too mighty for human foresight or precaution, and it would be idle to object to a government because it could not perform impossibilities. (16.155)

Hamilton offers a tripartite schema of insurrection in terms of the instigators: (1) “refractory or seditious individuals,” (2) “the intrigues of an inconsiderable faction,” and (3) “mortal feuds” that stand beyond “any ordinary rules of calculation.” The last of these rightfully draws our attention, for it speaks of the perhaps justified dismantling of the state four years after the victory of the thirteen colonies in the War of Independence. And indeed, Hamilton points out that such complete conflagrations “commonly amount to revolutions and dismemberments of empire,” recalling the Lockean justification for revolution against the state. This particular state formation is, as we have already seen in Federalist 1, one whose downfall consists of the dismemberment of a multipart body. Yet Hamilton notes that “mortal feuds” proceed “either from weighty causes of discontent given by the government or from the contagion of some violent popular paroxysm.” The binary of Federalist 28 is already available here; crudely put, there are good citizens and bad traitors. Yet the range between these poles raises The Federalist’s fundamental questions regarding individuals and society. How does The Federalist maneuver along the continuum from justified “discontent” with government to violent “contagion”? How do we move from refractory individuals to factions and from factions to mortal feuds beyond calculation? Federalist 31, from the series on taxation that runs from number 30 to number 36 (which is itself part of the longer series on taxation and national defense, numbers 21 to 36), picks up the line of discourse from 16 and 28. In Federalist 31, we find the first wholly abstract consideration of the questions of complexity and consolidation. The opening paragraphs back into the political questions through an excursus on the nature of scientific truth. This shift into abstraction—which requires quoting at substantial length—communicates the concrete concerns of the series: In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend. These contain

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an internal evidence which, antecedent to all reflection or combination, commands the assent of the mind. Where it produces not this effect, it must proceed either from some disorder in the organs of perception, or from the influence of some strong interest, or passion, or prejudice. Of this nature are the maxims in geometry that the whole is greater than its parts; that things equal to the same are equal to one another; that two straight lines cannot enclose a space; and that all right angles are equal to each other. Of the same nature are these other maxims in ethics and politics, that there cannot be an effect without a cause; that the means ought to be proportioned to the end; that every power ought to be commensurate with its object; that there ought to be no limitation of a power destined to effect a purpose which is itself incapable of limitation. And there are other truths in the two latter sciences which, if they cannot pretend to rank in the class of axioms, are yet such direct inferences from them, and so obvious in themselves, and so agreeable to the natural and unsophisticated dictates of common sense that they challenge the assent of a sound and unbiased mind with a degree of force and conviction almost equally irresistible. The objects of geometrical inquiry are so entirely abstracted from those pursuits which stir up and put in motion the unruly passions of the human heart that mankind, without difficulty, adopt not only the more simple theorems of the science, but even those abstruse paradoxes which, however they may appear susceptible of demonstration, are at variance with the natural conceptions which the mind, without the aid of philosophy, would be led to entertain upon the subject. The INFINITE DIVISIBILITY of matter, or, in other words, the INFINITE divisibility of a FINITE thing, extending even to the minutest atom, is a point agreed among geometricians, though not less incomprehensible to common sense than any of those mysteries in religion against which the batteries of infidelity have been so industriously leveled. But in the sciences of morals and politics, men are found far less tractable. To a certain degree it is right and useful that this should be the case. Caution and investigation are a necessary armor against error and imposition. But this untractableness may be carried too far, and may degenerate into obstinacy, perverseness, or disingenuity. Though it cannot be pretended that the principles of moral and political knowledge have, in general, the same degree of certainty with those of mathematics, yet they have much better claims in this respect than to judge from the conduct of men in particular situations we should be disposed to allow them. The obscurity is much oftener in the passions and prejudices of the reasoner than in the subject. (31.216–217)

First principles, defensible through their own internal logic, govern the world in matters of politics and society as much as in geometry and physical matter; obscurity darkens the obstinate, perverse, passionate, or prejudicial

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mind—it does not shadow the world. On the one hand, Hamilton’s appeal to rationality is part and parcel with the forward march of reason and science, with faith in nothing but the power and absolute worth of reasoned and laws-based inquiry. On the other hand, both the choice of language and the progression of the passage suggest that more is at work here than principled Wissenschaft. I will return to Hamilton’s portrayal of subjective distortion, which clearly recalls the discussion of insurrection and contagion above, but first it is useful to focus on the relation between the science this passage chooses to include and the specific political aims of The Federalist. Two choices, in particular, claim our attention: the example of the geometrical maxims that the whole is greater than the parts and of “the INFINITE DIVISIBILITY of matter, or, in other words, the INFINITE divisibility of a FINITE thing.” In a text that not only aims to convince its readers to endorse the consolidation of thirteen semiautonomous states under a single national government but also itself mirrors such consolidation in its own form, these axioms take on a certain weight. We have already seen Hamilton’s tendency to split the social field into two categories of persons. His discussion in Federalist 31 works similarly to present the mathematical mind against the spirit distorted by passion. And although Hamilton claims that politics does not exactly share the privilege of perfect clarity with mathematics, he conspicuously chooses “geometrical maxims” that pertain quite directly to the ratification debate— a debate that we might say resounded with the echo of Benjamin Franklin’s protorevolutionary motto from the Seven Years’ War, “Join or Die.”63 Franklin’s famous image of the severed snake was a reminder that the whole is greater than the parts; but it also depicted that other maxim, of the infinite divisibility of a finite thing—that is, the persistence of the parts in any case. Hamilton’s mathematical pose is motored by the ethical imperative that structures The Federalist: join or die. Yet, as the image of a collection of fragments indicates, the maxim of the infinite divisibility of a finite thing underscores the radical contingency of the processes of joining and splitting.

Hierarchy and Literary Form 3: Faction as Form Joining and splitting:  these processes as expressed abstractly by Hamilton in Federalist 31 are scattered across the essays. Hamilton’s style of dichotomization—reason versus passion; illness versus health; for or against the Constitution; join or die; or, in the terms of Federalist 31, for or against the possibility of political first principles—is complicated by The Federalist’s tendency toward the language and form of radical fragmentation: the infinite divisibility of matter, the collection of parts comprised by the whole, the ongoing appearance of numbered essays. The two modes (dichotomization and multiplication) are closely related in The Federalist, and they bring us to the relation

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(or separation) between Hamilton’s and Madison’s approaches to the episodic poetics of “the people” (or, in its abstract form, of the whole and the parts). Both writers mobilize the contrast between disciplined science and unruly affect (and, in this regard, neither was especially innovative). But their conceptualizations of politics and society diverge even as they interlock in their overarching expression and apprehension of the question of collection and fragmentation. As Hamilton tends toward binaries, Madison’s Federalist contributions generally fragment the social field into his well-known “factions,” and so obfuscate social struggle by claiming that it is always everywhere, diffuse and universal in countless forms, and thus politically unproblematic as long as it is dense enough that, by extending the “sphere” of the republic, “you take in a greater variety of parties and interests” (10.127). But as iterations of the problematic of complexity and consolidation, the opposing tendencies toward binarism and plurality in The Federalist are not irresolvable antinomies so much as dialectical (and contingently structured) processes. In Federalist 42, Madison returns to that standard in the Publius repertoire, the villainization of those who disagree: “But the mild voice of reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest, is but too often drowned, before public bodies as well as individuals, by the clamors of an impatient avidity for immediate and immoderate gain” (42.276). In an extension of classical republican theory, the stubborn individual corrupts “an enlarged and permanent interest,” the stable structure that ensures the common weal. Madison’s rhetorical move here is virtually pre-scripted by a political-philosophical tradition. But the next development in the essay resonates with the reflex toward abstraction we have already seen in Hamilton, as Madison offers the following comment on the regulation of trade with Indians, who are “not members of any of the States”: “This is not the only case in which the Articles of Confederation have considerably endeavored to accomplish impossibilities; to reconcile a partial sovereignty in the Union, with complete sovereignty in the States; to subvert a mathematical axiom by taking away a part and letting the whole remain” (42.277). As in Federalist 31, Madison here telescopes from the minutest question of inclusion and exclusion—who is deemed a citizen of a state (“[w]‌hat description of Indians are to be deemed members of a State”) and how that categorization affects the relation between state and nation—to the most abstract language of mathematics (the integrity of a “whole” composed of “parts”).64 I take this rush to abstraction, it should by now be clear, to be both a cornerstone of The Federalist’s formal achievement and the most unmediated aspect of its connection to the mercantile situation from which it emerges: in short, abstraction is where politics collapses into economics. An enlarged and permanent interest is an integral whole, all too easily “subverted” by the willed autonomy of the parts. How is the “mathematical axiom” to remain intact? Federalist 42 compresses a relation developed by Madison across numbers 10 and 14, where the problems of irrationality and inassimilable parts confront

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one another in two papers written in sequence by Madison and interrupted in publication by three of Hamilton’s works. Federalist 10 provides Madison’s formulation of the solution to the problem of social disintegration: The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it, in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district than an entire State. (10.128)

Here Federalist 10 bases itself on a theory of politics that Madison argues the Constitution will manifest in reality:  Expand an infinitely splintered social field, and no particular faction can overtake the whole; any “particular” member may be “tainted,” but the whole body will remain healthy—albeit, one assumes, with an unhealthy limb. In any case, the general “conflagration,” the consumption of the whole in the fire of popular revolution (or, in Federalist 10’s model, of a chaos of warring interest classes), will have been prevented. And yet, it would seem that—shifting metaphors—the factional splinters themselves would be motes to trouble The Federalist’s clear political vision. Tracking the transformation of the Publius pose between Federalist 10 and Federalist 14 helps us understand how this is so—not only how social fragmentation forms the center of The Federalist but how that dispersion into parts structures the authorial voice itself, that mathematical neutral we saw emerging from the language of trade. Several times in The Federalist, the reasonable discourse of Publius is interrupted by direct address or by moments of characterization (in which an argument is presented through the language or perspective of an imagined viewer or interlocutor). But notwithstanding the repetition of this strategy, Madison’s oratorical appeal to the reader in Federalist 14 is remarkable (as historians and critics have noted) for its unusually aggressive sermonizing. After reiterating his sharp distinction between a democracy and a republic, Madison makes a plea for the common sensibility and shared interests of Americans, offering this extended admonition against Anti-Federalism: Hearken not to the unnatural voice which tells you that the people of America, knit together as they are by so many cords of affection, can no longer live together as members of the same family; can no longer be fellow-citizens of one great, respectable, and flourishing empire. [. . .] No, my countrymen, shut your ears against this unhallowed language. Shut your

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hearts against the poison which it conveys; the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defense of their sacred rights, consecrate their Union and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies. And if novelties are to be shunned, believe me, the most alarming of all novelties, the most wild of all projects, the most rash of all attempts, is that of rending us in pieces in order to preserve our liberties and promote our happiness. (14.144)

Federalist 14 speaks the discourse of emotional suasion, imploring the reader to remain true to what amounts to a religious faith—unperceivable, untestable, evidenced solely in the American Revolution itself—in national homogeneity. Or perhaps more accurately, number 14 relies on faith in the purported vital kinship (the “kindred blood”) of all citizens of the thirteen states. On the one hand, Federalist 10 and Federalist 14 use different idioms. On the other, they both worry the question of faction through the metaphorics of contamination: Anti-Federalists poison the national blood; factional politics is a malady that may taint only one section of a large republic. Others have enumerated the contradictions in Madison’s theory of politics (insofar as The Federalist—its own reflections notwithstanding—provides such a thing).65 One incongruity is worth pursuing here:  the fractured social world we see in Federalist 10 is clumsily glued together in number 14 in a series of gestures that could stand as exemplary specimens in a textbook of nationalist ideology. This is easily explained away, to be sure, by a reiteration of the fact that The Federalist was written under a deadline, at an average pace of one thousand words a day, and so on. But it is one thing to write clumsily and quite another to strategically deploy multiple modes of writing in the service of political persuasion; given the skill with which these incongruent papers are executed, appeals to speedy composition catch only modest traction. The turn to “hasty writing” here obscures not only why The Federalist finds these rhetorical forms expedient but also how the problem of the splintered society itself shapes these forms. What, Federalist 31 invites us to ask, “commands the assent of the mind”? When Hamilton employs this phrase in the above-quoted passage, it opens the question of social complexity through the image of well-governed thought, responding in scripted fashion to universal laws. Federalist 42 reiterates the point through its invocation of cold mathematics against the too-warm passion of the Anti-Federalist. Federalists 10, 14, 16, and 28 raise the question on the level of the social itself. To what extent is the “body politic,” distended by the Madisonian factions, to command its own assent? How does the “whole” remain when the “parts” refuse to join? Is the Constitution, that is, forced to subvert a mathematical axiom by taking away a part and letting the whole remain? Or might we instead, taking our lesson not from the arguments of the text but, rather, from the structure of The Federalist itself, say that the whole is

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always composed of the parts, episodically formed through time, wrought through its expansions? The appeal to mathematical neutrality over diseased passion returns for a final appearance in the last pages of the series, in which Hamilton argues that the state legislatures are a foolproof guarantee against the encroachment of national power because it is mathematically all but impossible that enough of the states would agree to pernicious constitutional amendments. “If the foregoing argument is a fallacy,” writes Hamilton, “certain it is that I am myself deceived by it for it is, in my conception, one of those rare instances in which a political truth can be brought to the test of mathematical demonstration” (85.486). Here Hamilton effectively includes the negative example of the poorly reasoning combatant through the dialogical articulation of his own opinion. The conditional construction (if. . . then) veers toward the subjunctive in the independent clause, but grammar and sense are opposed: What is “certain” is so only in the unlikely case of a fallacious argument; using this grammatical staple of eighteenth-century political writing, Hamilton proffers the wrong opinion under the indeterminate verb mood. Writing against the theoretical model of the impartial reasoner, Hamilton asserts the person of Publius, simulating the exposure of personal and emotional “reserves” that the author has already declared he “feels” (1.89):  “that I am myself deceived [. . .] in my conception.” Thus, in the context of a discussion of what constitutes a proper whole, a discussion that is offered under the sign of absolute mathematical truth, The Federalist splits the writerly voice in three. In the first division, the quasi-dialogue between enlightened and unenlightened zeal is performed with grammatical efficiency: “If the foregoing argument is a fallacy.” In a second move, Hamilton divides the voice of Publius and so displays the spectacle of the cool reasoner (embedded here in the passive construction) examining his own warmer self: “certain it is that I am myself deceived [. . .] for it is, in my conception, one of those rare instances in which a political truth can be brought to the test of mathematical demonstration.” We have a prelude to the final sentences of this last essay, where Publius admits his “trembling anxiety” as he awaits ratification (85.487). Hamilton achieves mathematical neutrality, that great tonality of Federalist argument, through the fragmenting (the dialogism) of the writing voice. Much work is therefore concretized in the phrase “commands the assent of the mind.” Federalist 31 is a paradigmatic dilation of the microstructure we see in the above sentence in Federalist 85. Through a complex play of voices, Hamilton in number 85 commands the assent both of the reader and (rhetorically) of Publius (i.e., of the emotive aspect that is otherwise off limits even in a “copious discussion” [85]); and it is the spectacle of the self-commanding Publius that produces what I have argued is the drama of persuasion in these passages. Moreover, to use the language of number 31, both Hamilton and Madison (in Federalist 42) enact the infinite divisibility of a (seemingly) finite

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object: namely, the authorial position itself. In short, the text is layered with the issues of compression and fragmentation. Clarity and difficulty, visibility and invisibility, good “reason” and bad “passion,” and, perhaps most critically, wholes and parts—The Federalist appears unable even to voice an opinion without thematizing one version or another of the problematic that is both its object of inquiry and its own form of presentation. The repeated slip from social detail to abstract assertion extends the political claims, naturalizing (through association) the Federalist perspective and, in turn, delegitimizing the Anti-Federalist. The Federalist’s apparent self-referentiality, its tendency toward the problematic of the part and the whole, ultimately in fact refers to the political and social formations that it intends to shape. The social problem in this political text is a formal problem.

Mercantile Time and the Periodical Plot To summarize where we have been: I have argued thus far for the significance of The Federalist’s distinctive renovation of a process into a form and for the further translation of that form into an integral aspect of the rhetoric of ratification. Now, in inflecting my close reading of the text into a discussion of the matter of format adumbrated at the opening of this chapter, the remainder of the chapter insists upon the necessity of reading itself:  of the text of The Federalist, first of all, since we shall see how quickly it evaporates as a legible object even in 1788, and, second, of the social world that The Federalist would seek to displace. For the literary achievement of The Federalist’s episodic poetics is also the triumph of a peculiar erasure of origins in the movement from newspapers to book. By resituating the essays within the context of their newspaper publication, I wish to recover the relationship between mercantile modes of reading and the episodic poetics of The Federalist and to reveal some of what is occluded by the consolidation of the essays into book format. I began my discussion of The Federalist’s reach (and its implications for a reading of social hierarchy in the text) with the analogy to publishing in parts. That analogy is helpful, too, for understanding the relation between periodical time and commerce. Fascicle publishing in the eighteenth century was a kind of extreme serialization, producing textual episodes sometimes with and sometimes against the narrative or argumentative flow of the text. The episodic temporality of this form of publication followed from and helped to constitute a mercantile style of reading in time. Sheets ended randomly, fragmenting the reading process (for anyone who was actually reading the sheets as they were printed, week by week). In an edition of maps or in the case of an encyclopedia, this might be merely annoying; in a London edition of Don Quixote, it might curiously complement Cervantes’s play with narrative form. Whatever the text, numbers publishing emphasizes that continuity in the reading experience

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is developed only through discontinuity.66 Like the more familiar convention of serialization, numbers publishing severely implicates the time of reading in the time between reading sessions and vice versa. Fascicles, however, foregrounded the delay of printing in a more extreme way, for if the serial essay effected at least temporary and partial closure (or controlled interruption), the fascicle was a perfect fragment awaiting its eventual completion—oftentimes on the grammatical or syntactical level of the sentence. Such interruption was the result solely of the limitations of the size of the sheet and the number of sheets stitched into the fascicle. A more dramatic reminder of the materiality of the printed text would be hard to find. Publishing in installments, whether as serial or fascicle, participated in the restructuring of experienced time through a variety of cultural forms. The periodicity of print determined the time of reading, whether in journals or in letters, and reading itself became a kind of event, with the consequence that periodical writing was transformed from chronicle to sense-making journalism.67 Periodicals were similarly posted in the late eighteenth-century United States. The decision by Postmaster General Ebenezer Hazard to change from stagecoaches to postriders for mail delivery infuriated Anti-Federalists, who saw the resulting delays and frequent loss of mail as a blatant attempt to silence their critiques of the Constitution.68 The periodicity of the serial essay in colonial New England was tightly linked with the development of republicanism, for the “normative routinization of print discourse underlies the very idea of the serial essay.”69 In mid-eighteenth-century New England, both letters and periodicals were delivered to and read primarily in the coffeehouse, “the places privy to the newest news,” thus instantiating a ritual of reading and sociable communication among the commercial class. As the century wore on, a printer’s control of the posts became essential to success, for “the authority of a newspaper depended upon access to both the conversation and writing of public persons.”70 In short, periodicals established an intimacy with the experience of time homologous to (if not fully coincident with) the rhythm of epistolarity. The historians’ basic observation that reading had become an event identifies an essential relationship, both historical and formal, between narrative fiction and periodical nonnarrative prose:  it is a relationship that turns us once again away from the term event and toward episode. For although reading more and more became a regular event within the day, the convergence of print, epistolary, and commercial forms of reading edged closer and closer to a diaphanous form of plot.71 The novel reader is carried along by the logic of cause and effect, or the teleology of plot; the reader of a serial periodical essay is carried along, as Michael Ketcham has argued in his study of The Spectator, by habit:72 habit, not plot—or, we might say, habit as plot.73 Yet the structure of habit changes when the essays are read as a book collection. With consolidation, the text attains a new kind of openness in which

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the reader’s ability to read at will across the bound volumes, or to concentrate attention on certain passages, converts the implied order of habit (next week’s paper will be read after today’s) into a set of choices made over a single and synchronic text that most often retains only minor traces of its previous format.74 In what kind of social formation is reading an episode within an unfolding plot? The private realm of correspondence is only part of the larger story; techniques of interiorized reading enable notable distortions of social reality. For commerce was the essential aim of eighteenth-century print communication, and we cannot understand the temporality of print discourse unless we locate its source in the pulse of trade. U.S. newspapers up until the ratification debate were primarily vehicles for commercial news and for the advertisement of newly arrived commodities from Europe. Daily newspapers, in particular, were an extension of the increasingly busy commercial realm. London’s first daily appeared in 1702; Augsburg’s, in 1712; Paris’s, in 1777. Benjamin Towne’s Pennsylvania Evening Post began as a triweekly; on May 30, 1783, it assumed the subtitle Daily Advertiser and became the first American daily newspaper. (It lasted as such for seventeen months, until Towne, a well-known loyalist, was indicted for treason.) Towne’s paper was filled mostly with shipping news—a telling fact, given that in hawking it himself on Philadelphia street corners, the publisher would reportedly cry out, “All the news for two coppers!”75 For it is not simply that shipping news made up the major part of the daily papers but, rather, that its dissemination was the papers’ major function. The commercial class needed to be frequently informed of the arrival of sailing vessels and the wares they carried. The coffeehouse had been the repository for such information, which was kept on file there. Chocolate, coffee, tea, a “segar,” and a bit of civil conversation constitute the motifs of our most recently favored accounts of the eighteenth-century coffeehouse, but perusal of the “ships entered” list, with its descriptions of cargo, along with the personal work of transacting business, was the baser motive for these gathering places. The extent to which both coffeehouse and newspaper were, in the 1780s, emphatically not zones in which socially unmarked interlocutors would congregate for pleasure and mutual enlightenment—and, furthermore, the extent to which the effect of class-neutral socialization was emphatically secondary—is clear in the average daily’s cost: “This was definitely class journalism; indeed the price of six cents a copy, which was soon adopted [after Towne’s two-cent experiment], put these papers beyond the reach of the popular audience.”76 The poor, the economically marginalized, the popular audience:  these people were not direct participants in the print culture of the metropolitan newspaper. Yet, as we have seen, this segment of society was clearly implicated in that world as an obsessive concern of The Federalist. If the commercial newspaper was class journalism, an elite form produced for and by the merchant class, where does the “popular” fit in? If, taking The Federalist and the

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Constitution at their word, we were to search for the ubiquitous “people” in commercial print culture, where would we find them, and what would they look like? The example of one Federalist number’s placement in a New York newspaper helps to orient the pressures that shape that text. Federalist 24 provides an illustrative case for the examination of this question because it takes reading to be one of its key concerns. Addressing the question of a standing army, Hamilton imagines the perspective of “[a]‌stranger to our politics, who was to read our newspapers at the present juncture without having previously inspected the plan reported by the convention” (24.188). Such a reader would experience a series of misimpressions that could only be corrected through direct, comparative engagement with the Constitution, the state constitutions, and the Articles of Confederation—or, as luck would have it, through a simple reading of Federalist 24. Hamilton therein offers a digest of each plan’s policy on the power of raising armies and thereby attempts to demonstrate that the Anti-Federalist objection to the Constitution’s stance on the sources of military power “rests on weak and unsubstantial foundations” (24.188). Such is The Federalist’s will to comprehensiveness that Hamilton represents the first half of the essay through the perspective of the hypothetical “stranger to our politics”: the reader not only is given sound information but is made witness to the process of proper self-instruction. Like so much eighteenth-century political polemic, Federalist 24 models appropriate reading through the character of an uninformed man of sense. Federalist 1 may be understood as (among other things) a set of instructions for the good reader: the “People of the State of New York” are the “you” who is “called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution” (1.87). Number 24 continues the pedagogical effort by depicting the incredulous stranger’s effort to understand the grounds for Anti-Federalist objections to the Constitution’s standing-army provisions (in Article I, Section 8). And yet, self-instruction in the finer points of the ratification debate may not have been as straightforward, or as pleasurable, as Hamilton might have his readers believe. A real stranger to early U.S. politics who read the newspapers might be less absorbed in the political to and fro over the Constitution than in columns of advertising and shipping news, debt notices, reports from abroad, and the occasional poem—the scattered materials that made up an eighteenth-century American newspaper. As the Federalist judge A.  C. Hanson put it, the Federalist essays simply did not “force the attention, rouze the passions, or thrill the nerves.”77 Reading New York’s Independent Journal; or, The General Advertiser for December 19, 1787 (the issue of which Federalists 23 and 24 were about a quarter),78 Hanson would have perhaps preferred to scan J. & F. Atkinson’s advertisement for goods newly arrived from London; in addition to silks, high-quality paper, and gunpowder, “[t]‌hey have also for SALE, A Quantity of High Proof Old Jamaica SPIRITS.” In short, a newspaper reader might not be absorbed at all.

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The clash between modes of reading—between the scanning of a page of short (from three lines to, occasionally, half a column) advertisements and the sustained attention demanded by a Federalist essay—is registered in the very title of the newspaper: an independent journal or a general advertiser.79 Or perhaps we might say that the paper’s title conveys its double function in the marketplace, to order and to lubricate commodity circulation. Journal in 1787–88 had long since lost its medieval sense of a book containing the prayers for day hours; in a material development that modifies Max Weber’s formula for the “objective aspect of the economic process,” or double-entry bookkeeping, the diurnal prayer books of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries gave way to travelogues, accounting journals, and, in the eighteenth century, the newspaper.80 Like the day hours, these objects still marked time at regular intervals, but they increasingly did so with the Franklinian understanding that time is money—or, at least, that time could be clocked in terms of money.81 As a semiweekly accounting of the condition of New York’s (and the world’s) commercial and political life, the Independent Journal resembles the rational bookkeeping we have (since Weber) come to associate with the rationalized accumulation of capital. The columnar layout of the page is itself a marker of the effort toward rationalization: an easy means of organizing content into its proper location, issue after issue. A front page of advertisements will always be followed by a page (or two) of political writing and world news, followed by a poem, after which is tagged a page (or two) of advertising and reports of arriving and departing ships. The regularity of each installment, the durability of the presentation format, enabled the reception and evaluation of always-changing content. Recalling Beawes’s Lex Mercatoria, it is the capitalist acquisition drive as a model of unfolding time.

Debt and the Rhythm of Exchange As a title, Independent Journal declares the rationality and periodical regularity of the newspaper, even (with Independent) the uniqueness of each issue—its bookkeeping moment, we might say. General Advertiser reminds us that this field of circulation is rooted not in the satisfaction of needs but in the production of appetites, which seem to emerge from the mere announcement of their possibility. Thus, in addition to Atkinson’s silk, gunpowder, paper, and rum, there are ads for countless goods and services:  tea, linen, sugar, nails, canvas, linseed oil, wine, pepper, flaxseed, tobacco, spermaceti candles, sewing and millinery, and so on. A hairdresser informs of a change of location, and John Smith, master of the ship Jenny, announces the intention to sail for Londonderry. We also read of the consequences of appetite—or, more accurately, of the consequences of individual insufficiency to the obligations that attend

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participation in the economic sphere. If the explosion of commodities signifies wealth, other elements of the newspaper point to the pernicious social effects that attend the pleasures of exchange. Juxtaposed with “A new and favourite Scotch song” in which a young lady pledges to wed her “constant youth,” we find several notices relating to the transfer or liquidation of assets in relation to repayment of (or default on) debts. Constancy gets the girl in an idyll of an era (or simply a location) prior to the market; inconstancy—or simple lack of affluence—advertises one’s name with the staining epithet “absconding or absent Debtor.” The failed financial independence of New York’s debtors points us back to the newspaper’s primary title. Several late eighteenth-century American newspapers included the word independent in their names to portray themselves as “open to all but influenced by none.”82 As such protestation all too readily reveals, however, “political independence, for man or newspaper, was virtually unknown.”83 Newspapers quickly established positions for or against the Constitution. Or more accurately, they swiftly rose to champion the new plan for national government. The December 19 issue of the Independent Journal included the following as its only item of domestic news: New-York, Dec. 19 We learn from Philadelphia, “That the State Convention of Pennsylvania adopted the New Constitution on Thursday last.” Yeas 46 Nos 23. Extract of a letter from a respectable Merchant of Philadelphia, dated Dec. 13, to a gentleman in this city. “Yesterday our Convention adopted the new Federal Constitution—great rejoicings here this day.” Two columns further on, we find a theater notice announcing the Friday performances: a “Prose Tragedy” entitled The Mysterious Husband, to be followed by a comic opera, The Deserter. As if to condense the connotation of disintegrated domestic life into a full-blown museum of disloyalty (that is, of constancy interrupted), the same column proffers twenty shillings’ reward after the plainest complaint: LOST A Newfoundland DOG. The Newfoundland is, like the hinted-at shipwreck of the home in The Mysterious Husband, lost in the sea of the marketplace. The announcement of union, of Pennsylvania’s ratification of the Constitution, leads the news (and provides the latest installment in the year’s running story); but this progress toward political integration is fairly saturated in signs of independence gone

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awry:  contracts—from debt to marriage—are broken under circumstances that belie the very premises of the discourse of consent.84 Even Fido, that staple of the iconography of stability and reliability (not least in depictions of marital fidelity), has gone missing. American political argument had, at least since Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, wrestled with the relation between independence and self-sufficiency. The newspaper reveals independence to be less a chosen state of autonomy than a pathology born of social crisis. Independence is not enacted through declaration but, rather, recognized through ex post facto description in which the newly independent is tagged “deserter” or simply “lost.”85 Or, most often, “debtor.” The Independent Journal is representative in terms of the quantity of debt notices that occupy its columns, though debt itself carried different meanings for different classes of people. Protestant principle regarded the indebtedness of the poor in terms of moral corruption, in conflict with the axiom that “man be dependent on God alone”: “If the wealthy must beware complacency, the poor must beware a laziness and indolence that would render them indebted and dependent.”86 The observation strikes at one aspect of contemporary perspectives on independence; in a broader sense, the question of debt was in the midst of a transformation—in both the law and the wider cultural discourse—from a matter of morals to one of strictly formal property relations. Insolvency was redefined in the 1790s:  “from sin to risk, from moral failure to economic failure.”87 But debt was as much about the story of another kind of success as it was about failure. There was a tight connection between the blossoming of the U.S. legal profession and large-scale transformations in the American economy and society en route to the hegemony of the market: Lawyers were, as Charles Sellers puts it, “the shock troops of capitalism”; the bar expanded with the explosion of new contractual relationships, and the movement away from the moral economy of debt was part of the quite literal (and more definitive) transition away from morality in the legal system altogether. Offenses against “morality” constitute more than half of criminal prosecutions in Massachusetts before the Revolution; by 1800, they had shrunk to 7 percent, while prosecutions for theft amounted to more than 40 percent of cases.88 Debtors—among the most visible bearers of social inequality in the years between the Revolution and the Philadelphia convention, a faction that could not easily fit—represented the problem of confederation. Material deprivation and social humiliation for the poor and struggling were, on one side, signs of disunity, of radically uneven qualities of life. On the other side, men like Hamilton articulated their worries with the increasing volume that finally spurred the Annapolis and then Philadelphia conventions. By 1787, credit had become crucial to the operation of the newly energetic market economy, which, though it would not accelerate to full speed for a couple of decades, had already manifested a dramatic rise in consumption—a transformation legible

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in American newspapers, where between 1720 and 1780 the number of different goods advertised (most of them British imports) rose from around fifteen to more than nine thousand per month; the overall market for imports grew 120 percent between 1750 and 1773.89 Widespread consumption in the mid– eighteenth century was grounded in credit: the accumulation of goods corresponded—for the middling sort—to the accumulation of debts.90 The ethics of credit began to change somewhat in the 1760s, when consumption became the basis for proto-nationalist identification. As T. H. Breen argues, the American Revolution itself was in its earliest stages organized via a historically new structure of horizontality, in which citizens were in some measure collectivized through their various identifications with the consumption (or, during the protests against the Stamp Act, nonconsumption) of imported commodities. The equalizing tendency of such identification is easily overstated; nevertheless, the shared consumer experience established a revolutionary trust that stands somewhat apart from the Rights of Man tradition that would emerge in 1789. In 1774, an early act of the Continental Congress was to establish an association of committees whose aim was to stop the importation of British goods, and in “this distinctively bourgeois rebellion, the ideological police ferreted out hidden canisters of tea and suspicious pieces of cloth.”91 The association’s subscription lists (which were collected door to door or posted in public places for affixing one’s mark or signature) constructed one almost-stable referent for rhetorical appeals to “the people” in prerevolutionary activity.92 By this account, consumption choices articulated independence from Britain before the political fact: Something like a nation took shape through the shared practices of import consumption, though these practices also provided, in a prelude to Veblen, an obvious vocabulary of class inequality; something like independence was enacted through the refusal to consume imports (and, in the early 1770s, through the ritual public destruction of imports, most notably tea).93 When we turn to the question of basic subsistence, we begin to see the outlines of a young credit system in which speculation and subsistence are two sides of the same coin. It is notoriously difficult to find the line between necessity and luxury. The “genteel life,” which had formerly been understood (when considered at all) as a court mode, was by the late eighteenth century the chosen pretense of an amorphous middle class: “smaller merchants and professionals, ordinary well-off farmers, successful artisans, schoolteachers, minor government officials, clerks, shopkeepers, industrial entrepreneurs, and managers.”94 As the modifiers in this list of occupations hint, on the other side of the new vernacular gentility’s mode of association were sharper standards for exclusion.95 (As for the leaders of the ruling class itself, the ultrarich, such as George Washington, William Bingham, and Robert Morris, they worried to no end about the leveling impulse behind the “stunning shopping spree” on which artisans and farmers were embarked.)96 The difficulties of evaluating consumer preferences aside, the relation between the structure of debt and

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month-to-month solvency is reasonably clear, especially for New England farmers—a most troublesome group for the Federalists. After 1783, transatlantic credit ran from rural farmers to British merchants. The latter loaned capital to American wholesale merchants, who sold their wares on credit to American retailers. They, in turn, sold manufactured goods on credit to farmers, who often paid their debts in kind (i.e., in crops or in seasonal work). When one end of this financial structure was squeezed—as were U.S. wholesalers in the late 1780s, by the double pressure of weak exports (and thus a diminution of capital) and British capitalists demanding debt repayment—the agents below felt considerable distress. Retailers, forced to settle current accounts with wholesalers, required specie payment from farmers, who pressed their right to pay, if no longer in kind, then in paper; they were early agitators in a long line of, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, nineteenth-century “currency cranks” who demanded what was then clearly seen to be “financial unorthodoxy.”97 These were the men who joined Daniel Shays in his rebellion, a social disruption they understood as part of the grammar of legitimate reform: “Their understanding of republicanism did not include submitting to ruinous policies, though adopted by duly constituted government.”98 To return, finally, to the appearance of Federalists 23 and 24 in the Independent Journal, we can see the extent to which the temporality of serialized reading—the pace of the commercial newspaper—is itself saturated in the problem of social cohesion, of a “factional” populace whose predisposition toward “conflagrations” is symptomatic of an unequal distribution of social resources and the wrenching processes of dispossession. If, as I have suggested, time was in part constituted through the rhythms of exchange and its attendant forms (the post office and the newspaper), unfolding the story of debt from the newspaper reminds us that even the market’s unbroken chain of reading— Marx’s constant and monotonous repetition of the same process—is subject to rupture. And yet, it is the unflagging rhythm of appearance from which The Federalist derives so much of its canonical fortitude—its self-proclamation of full comprehension of early U.S. society as a single, indivisible nation.

Unreadability and Nationalism’s Chain of Reading We have seen how episodic form both supports and resists The Federalist’s dispersive and consolidating energies. I want to close this chapter with a final turn to the amalgamating force of The Federalist as a whole composed of parts and more specifically as a piecemeal composition whose own unification operates as a powerful symbolic argument for the ideology of national unity. As an image of continuity, the chain of reading suggests sequence:  new moments that emerge from and refer to their predecessors. The sequence may amount to a narrative stutter: Madison argues sourly in Federalist 44 that “one

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legislative interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions, every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects of the preceding” (44.288). But the chain is also, of course, an instrument of binding. As in Federalist 44, so too in the Lex Mercatoria, the repetition of the same seems compulsive rather than progressive, and as a monument to constitutional unification, The Federalist operates on this level of abstraction. Bound as a book, titled with its singular substantive, authored by the lone (if, as we have seen, protean) Publius, it instantiates a chain of reading with ideological force: the United States of America. Indeed, the book itself is formally bound from the start by the strong ties that fasten the numbers to one another and the rhetoric of the book that frames them. Hamilton’s anthologization looks, in this light, almost to be overkill. Yet, as we have seen, the force of The Federalist’s ideological binding is achieved only through the prior recognition of the elided elements (the debtors, the insurrectionaries, the Anti-Federalists) and through the ostentation of their absorption—that is, through reading.99 When, as with the gift books to the Virginia ratifying convention, The Federalist offers itself not as contingent and in process but, rather, as a concretized, determined, physically unopened presentation of the national order, the opportunity to account for and therefore to critique its contents is foreclosed. The book represents the nation simply by being a book; its contents are secondary. And indeed, the contents of the papers literally disappear in its “finer” version. Recall my discussion of the publication history of The Federalist: Hamilton planned to make a book of the text from the start. If The Federalist’s refutation of all significant arguments against the Constitution were to assume its full political significance, Hamilton reasoned, its rhetoric of completeness should be reinforced by true physical durability. And so it is that only one book emerged from the debate over the ratification of the Constitution: one book, but printed in two volumes, and two versions, one “common” and the other “finer.” In his letter to Madison, Hamilton referred to the quality of the paper, and the “finer” stuff truly is finer. These finer copies were distributed to the Federalist crème de la crème, and we see the evidence on the books today. The bindings of the finer copies are, it is fair to say, obscenely gorgeous, gilt-stamped, with thick and ornate spines. Sitting on the shelf, they announce their significance even despite their relatively small format. These are expensive and serious books. But if one takes the trouble to try to read any of the finely bound, fine-paper copies, one immediately notices that the noble binding conceals a trick: volume 1 of the typical thick-paper copy contains thirty-six (or so) blank leaves, filler that was needed to balance the width of the spines, to enable symmetry in the ornamental tooling. In other words, these are books that are not only designed to be not-read but are in fact, strictly speaking, unreadable. The blank leaves that fill out the finer copies of The Federalist’s first volume add a new dimension to my account of the emergence of that text’s argument

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as the ruling commentary on the Constitution. The Federalist’s seizure of authority, enacted in the movement from newspaper essays to bound books, is in fact legible in the binding itself. What we could call Hamilton’s erasure of the text’s episodic origins in its republication as a book takes an artifactually dramatic shape: The Federalist’s legible authority is symbolically purchased at the price of the legibility of the book’s content, an erasure that is literalized in the inclusion of the blank leaves in volume 1. Nation, that eminently holistic term, does not appear in the preface to the 1788 bound version of the text, nor does Hamilton use it in Federalist 1.100 But in Federalist 2, John Jay proffers some exceptionally wishful thinking on the foreordination of the unity of the thirteen states. As we might expect (nationalisms since The Federalist have consistently found a stable home in the reference to Nature), Jay turns first to Providence’s gift to the United States: “one connected, fertile, widespreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty” (2.91). Jay implicitly contrasts this “connected” land with the alternative form of a series of unconnected states (something of a real possibility, had the revolutionaries of 1776 been more successful in persuading Nova Scotia rather than, say, Georgia, to join their cause), which would offer much less in the way of predestined political boundaries. But even so—even with the contiguity of the states (a strange thought in itself, given the history of those states’ borders) and the large mass of land in which they were inscribed—how is one to keep them stable? How to ensure the bodily integrity of the whole? “A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together” (2.91). As if knotting the dispersed episodes of one story into the disciplined line of another plot (or simply binding eighty-five episodes into a book), Jay links his imagined chain around the borders of North America, asserting alongside Hamilton and Madison that, despite all appearances, the chain of reading remains uninterrupted.

{2}

The Life in Episodes Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action. Hence the error, as it appears, of all poets who have composed a Heracleid, a Theseid, or other poems of the kind. They imagine that as Heracles was one man, the story of Heracles must also be a unity. —Aristotle, Poetics

Any chain of reading—The Federalist’s is, as we have seen, no exception to this rule—depends upon interruption as much as continuity. The structuring of this relationship—of, as Aristotle might put it, this unity of part and whole, episode and plot—establishes the criteria for interpretive prioritization. Aristotle is the first to remind us, however, that such a unity is always fictive: fictive not in the easy sense of simply false but, rather, in the more precisely social sense of imaginary but nevertheless somehow true. The fictive unity of episodes and plot is in this way like the fictive priority of circulation as we have seen it in the 1780s: an accurate representation of the appearance of social reality. One man does not make a unity any more than the movement of money makes everything into a matter of honest exchange. Yet what matters most is how the fiction of unity works, how it orders its material (the narrative events, the piecemeal parts) and how it prioritizes that material for readerly attention. In The Federalist, constitutional consolidation is modeled in the organization of textual parts into the fictive unity of the two-volume book, a process that is itself represented in the double movement of dispersion and consolidation of the social material—the people—in the unfolding of the argument across the eighty-five essays. The gravitational center of this universe, rendered in and through the unfolding of the argument, is the unity of Publius/The Federalist. What might appear as an a priori authorial figure is in fact the outcome of the essays. What The Federalist performs for politics, Benjamin Franklin’s memoirs achieve for individual biography. For The Federalist, as chapter 1 showed,

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politics collapses into economics through abstraction; for Franklin abstraction works its solvent (and society-building) effort on the social subject itself. That subject is the dubious hero of this chapter.

Structure and Dispersion Life writing offers an especially charged case for the study of episodic poetics because, by its very nature as a form, it dramatically raises that persistent question of the integral and the extractable. Even when they try to proffer answers in advance, life narratives force us to ask: Given so many events, what constitutes a life? What, in short, is the relationship between greater and lesser events, more and less significant episodes? More specifically, scholars have argued that postrevolutionary American memoirists participated in a transformation in life writing taking place on both sides of the Atlantic: a shift from the properly eighteenth-century “type” toward a narrative intimacy that the earlier tradition would call “vanity.” In that process, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography is seen as a transitional text.1 This is a productive line of argument, but with the Autobiography it leads to a scholarly focus on the principal figure that accedes too quickly to the genre’s overall claim for the unproblematic centrality of its subject. Whether a stark “type” or a richly textured “character,” the autobiographical subject is simply given as the bones on which the flesh of form is hung. But when we examine the Autobiography through the framework of episodic poetics, we are able to see not just two different kinds of narrative centrality but also how that centrality is produced, how the life takes shape through the formal manipulation of narrative episodes and the other figures (the other characters) they contain. Following from this approach, the new question is:  How are social multiplicity and social antagonism registered in and managed by the narrative structure of episodic memoir? To anticipate my argument, we may say that the Autobiography offers both a kind of “Benjamin Franklin Problem”—modeled on the old Adam Smith Problem—and its solution.2 Social competition is registered through the episodic logic of Franklin’s narrative and refigured as the central character’s ability to thrive amid social and textual variety. To put it in the terms of chapter 1, this chapter explores the ways social multiplicity—the mass and variety of the increasingly un-ignorable “people”—is registered in and managed by the narrative structure of episodic memoir. Such socionarrative management is, I  will argue, Franklin’s special contribution to the ruling-class ex-nomination this book recounts. As with The Federalist, the significance of Franklin’s imaginary solution to the problem of social antagonism is a complex problem–solution plot: the most persuasive (and successfully hegemonic) form is the one that is able not only to provide a compelling solution but also to establish the very terms of the problem.

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Some basic textual heuristics, highlighting Franklin’s unique method of organizing the writing of the Autobiography, will point the way to the more complex aspects of episodic poetics and social competition. Written sporadically on two continents over almost twenty years (between July 1771 and Franklin’s death in April 1790), the Autobiography exhibits, even despite the vagaries of its composition, a curious symmetry. (Franklin’s handwriting in the last lines of the manuscript of part 4 is so slanted that the text’s most distinguished editors suggest that he may have written it in bed in the days preceding his death, on April 17, 1790.)3 It is conventionally divided into four parts, and its two halves are almost equal in length. When we boost the degree of magnification and shift observational gears to the manuscript itself, we find an array of breaks and transformations on the sentence level, where Franklin inserts or rearranges text. Yet even here symmetry and structure assert themselves: Franklin divides each leaf into two sections, right and left—the right side for the running text, the left side for addenda and interpolations.4 As these observations suggest, the Autobiography oscillates between structure and dispersion. On the one hand, according to the logic of the manuscript, Franklin’s preparation of the leaf emblematizes freedom within structure: the running text to the right is at once the primary, ordered narrative line and also a zone radically open to revision, addition, and emendation by the supplemental text to the left. On the other hand, structure itself operates as a disruption: the text (the narrative, too) is broken into parts that offer little in the way of navigational guidance to the reader. Rather than giving us a system of coordinates for an understanding of the Autobiography as a whole, the division into parts seems to serve precisely to interrupt that understanding. One might object and say that there is no “Autobiography as a whole” and that Franklin’s text resists structural analysis or any kind of formal engagement because it defies the very stability such an analysis requires just to get off the ground. Yet I want to suggest that it is the interplay between structure and its dissolution that invites analysis and explanation. And, even more, I  want to argue that this interplay amounts to the Autobiography’s most significant achievement, as Franklin designs a formal method of absorbing dispersion—and, crucially, the social dimensions of dispersion—into structure itself. That formal method is already hinted at in my description of the holograph manuscript of the memoirs. The overall shape of the four parts of the Autobiography is, we might say, profoundly episodic: it is episodes all the way down, an extended exercise in the dialectics of continuity and interruption. But this fullest of articulations of episodic poetics is as complex as we should expect such a potent cultural artifact to be, and I want to establish its contours at the outset, to give a kind of topological description of Franklin’s versions of episodic poetics before moving on to my analysis. Speaking schematically to start, we can say that the four parts move from the formation of the principal figure (Franklin, of course) against its social context or background

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to the dissolution of narrative into Franklin’s social activity. Readers of the Autobiography know the basic picture of the four parts: Part  1:  Formation of the subject. The Franklin character in the story (as opposed to the Franklin narrator, at the level of the discourse) emerges out of his collisions with and manipulation of other characters, each of which constitutes a separate episode in the narrative. This section, written in two weeks at the start of August 1771, begins with the address (as if in a letter) “Dear Son” and runs from genealogy and family history to Franklin’s founding of the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Junto, in 1730. Part 2: Division of the subject. This section moves from part 1’s model of formation toward the interlinking of the self/subject with Franklin’s various public projects. The famous moral-perfection project that closes part 2 is the longest sustained section in the memoirs and stands as a kind of meta-episode: a highly abstract and ironized decomposition and division of the subject (the Franklin character) we saw formed in part 1. Drafted between May and August 1784 and revised during the summer of 1789, this section is preceded by letters from Abel James and Benjamin Vaughan encouraging Franklin to complete the story of his exemplary life. Part 3: The subject in the world (1): structure. Part 3, the longest of the four, plunges into the public projects that were partially treated (and finally turned inward, in the moral-perfection project) in the previous section. This section presents the unity of the subject against the diversity of the world. Franklin’s self-imposed task is, again and again, to order and partially ameliorate—that is, to structure—problems created by this dispersion. This section was written sporadically between May 1788 and August 1789. Part 4: The subject in the world (2): dispersion. Part 4 is demarcated primarily by a break in the writing rather than a formal division between parts. Nevertheless, its formal interest lies in its extreme and apparently unmotivated dilation: the section simply runs out (without closing punctuation) during the account of Franklin’s negotiations, in London, with the proprietaries of Pennsylvania. This final openness of the text is the result, first, of Franklin’s death (he wrote this section between November 1789 and April 1790). It is also a logical (if not properly planned) extension of the memoirs as a whole, since the full Franklin subject could have no other end than his worldly activity, the obverse of the social competition that motored his formation in part 1. Structure and dispersion, self and society, episodic poetics and social competition: these are the concepts that will underwrite my discussion. Franklin’s Autobiography unfolds in a number of ways in relation to these concepts and to episodic poetics generally. My initial concern here will be with the dynamics of formation, and to begin, I will focus specifically on the Autobiography’s

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most famous use, and perhaps its most tricky use, of episodic form—in the so-called errata with which Franklin organizes his text.

Erratum and Episode: Duration and Narrative Binding Franklin’s memoirs are famous for nothing more than their author’s insistence on referring to his mistakes as “errata” and for his printerly avowal that the errata could be corrected—if not in this world, then, as his famous auto-epitaph announced in 1728, “In a new & more perfect Edition.”5 Franklin relates five errata explicitly as such: (1) his assertion of freedom from his indentures to his brother James; (2) his illegitimate use of the money he collects for Samuel Vernon; (3) his breaking ties with Deborah Read and his philandering—what he later calls “Giddiness and Inconstancy”—while in London; (4)  his writing the freethinking pamphlet A Dissertation on Liberty & Necessity, Pleasure and Pain in response to William Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated; and (5) his attempt at “Familiarities” with his friend Ralph’s sometime companion, Mrs. T. All of these are named as errata in part 1; of the three that are “corrected,” only one—Franklin’s conflict with his brother—lingers until part  3. The publication of the retort to Wollaston is never mentioned again. If we exclude this last (Franklin never explains why this is an error, implying only youthful arrogance, and its importance seems doubtful; moreover, it is implicitly corrected by the lifetime of publications that follows it), and if we assume that the advances on Mrs. T. are “covered” (in Franklin’s actuarial logic) by the marriage with Deborah Read, then the story offers us three complete circuits of error and amendment: 1. Clashes with brother James → Helps nephew adjust to the printing business after James’s death 2. Spends Vernon’s money en route to Philadelphia → Repays debt after effectively finessing his need for forbearance 3. Breaks off engagement with Deborah Read and philanders in London → Marries Read in 1730 The model for each of these sequences is a kind of cleansed version of the second one: a simple debt repaid. Recall the circumstances of the Vernon episode. In Newport, Franklin visits his brother John, who asks him to convey a repayment (a significant £35) to Samuel Vernon upon his return to Pennsylvania. En route, however, Franklin and his friend Collins spend most of the money to defray the costs of travel, mainly due to Collins’s high-priced “Dramming.”6 Soon after their return to Philadelphia, Collins goes off to Barbados to tutor a gentleman’s sons, promises to repay his debt to Franklin, and, true to his “sotting” form, is never heard from again.

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Franklin’s correction occurs several years later, after he has left the printing house of Samuel Keimer with capital supplied by his partner Hugh Meredith’s father. Franklin has just written of his newly flourishing newspaper (purchased from Keimer) and of the financial boon resulting from his circle of friends in the Pennsylvania State House, when Vernon returns to the story:  “Mr Vernon about this time put me in mind of the Debt I ow’d him:—but did not press me.—I wrote him an ingenuous Letter of Acknowledgments, crav’d his Forbearance a little longer which he allow’d me, & as soon as I was able I paid the Principal with Interest & many Thanks.—So that Erratum was in some degree corrected” (1366). What has occurred between the young Franklin’s assumption of responsibility for the cash and its repayment? It is expressible in the form of “Interest & many Thanks.” That is, the period of the Autobiography between the two moments, the arc of an episode delimited by the erratum and its correction, is expressed in the form of money-time: the time in between the loan (in this case, Franklin’s possession of the money) and the remittance.7 When represented as the period of the circulation of money, duration not only loses much of its qualitative character but also becomes radically, retrospectively, compressible. If there is something new and peculiar in Franklin’s use of the trope of the erratum, it is not just that the notion of superficial “mistake” replaces that of fundamental “sin” from Christian conversion narratives; it is that this mode of presentation distorts and delimits narrative time in a new way, binding it—appropriately enough, given the metaphorics—like a book.8 In a passage that has become central to theories of narrative representation, Sigmund Freud writes of the pleasure principle as the drive to lower an “undesirable tension” in the mind: “[W]‌e have decided to relate pleasure and unpleasure to the quantity of excitation that is present in the mind but is not in any way ‘bound.’ ” Unpleasure is the increase in such tension, pleasure is its diminution, and Freud notes that the feeling is probably determined by “the amount of increase or diminution in the quantity of excitation in a given period of time.” The reality principle, on the other hand, enables the subject to delay pleasure, to put up with tension when faced with the prospect of future gratification; it is an instinct of “self-preservation.”9 What we see in Franklin’s use of the metaphor of erratum and correction is the development of a structure of self-preservation that transforms the apprehension of time and duration in the Autobiography. It is not that nothing happens in between the error and its amendment; quite the contrary, Franklin is able, through the series of errata, to mitigate the force—to bind the energy—of narrative events. In effect, he produces a second temporality that operates alongside the primary one of the narrative. In the first, events follow one another simply in time: sometimes in a relation of cause and effect, sometimes merely through the logic of metonymy or experience (one thing after another).10 In the second, periods of time are produced through the structure of the erratum and its correction: chunks of experience are delimited along the vector of the organizing mistake and its

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resolution. This narrative strategy is all the more remarkable for its significant success in producing an almost literal “self-preservation”:  the staging of the Franklin character-narrator as a static and stable unity. The structuration of Franklin’s errata episodes differs from the economy Freud describes insofar as it is not the amount of unbound stimulus that is concentrated (or cathected) but, rather, the experience of the period of time as given by the narrative.11 Franklin acknowledges other mistakes in the Autobiography: His errata are not the only ones, nor are they the only missteps Franklin uses as instructions to the reader. And that is precisely the point: by selecting moments and naming them “errata,” Franklin establishes a kind of punctuation system in his narrative. “Corrections,” then, mark the recurrence to the original moment of error, and in erasing it, they squeeze both the temporal and the character development of the narrative into a manageable mass of (inert) meaning. As development is compressed, so contingency evaporates from the Autobiography: erratum and correction are joined, like systole and diastole, along the axis of their separation. Unlike real slips of the compositor’s hand, Franklin’s errata come into the narrative world already married to their corrections. Already joined, but elaborated through narration nonetheless—and this is a crucial point. We need to take the measure of the Autobiography’s dynamic unfolding in the structuration of episodes, for—speaking first in formalist terms—one reason for launching the discussion of episodic poetics in life narrative with Franklin’s errata is to establish a method of analysis for the representation of episodic duration. From there, it will be possible to explore the way Franklin establishes his own position within the narrative. How, in short, does the episodic structure produce or distort temporality? We saw this as a key question in the ratification debate, where The Federalist moved to the commercial rhythm of New York’s newspaper columns. The logic of money-time, which I am arguing provides the logic of the Franklinian erratum-correction sequence, lends itself all too easily to a synchronic analysis in which the passage of time is, accidentally as it were, excluded. Indeed, as I have already argued, this is Franklin’s intention: to demolish the developmental aspects of time. Pierre Bourdieu has pointed to this problem in the structural analysis of social exchanges generally (of which Franklin’s debt repayment would be a case in point), in which objective observation may inadvertently (and with distorting effects) freeze a practice into a structure: “The detemporalizing effect [. . .] that science produces when it forgets the transformation it imposes on practices inscribed in the current of time, i.e. detotalized, simply by totalizing them, is never more pernicious than when exerted on practices defined by the fact that their temporal structure, direction, and rhythm are constitutive of their meaning.”12 In the case of Franklin, the moment of his correction of the erratum does not open onto a reflection on changes that occurred during the time in between but, instead, encloses that in-between time within a statically defined period: repayment predetermined by debt, amendment simply awaiting delivery from within the integument of error.13

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In the Autobiography, the freezing of practice into structure is a matter of the operations of discourse on implied story.14 The Vernon episode is classed among the “great Errata” of the Autobiography at a key moment, when Governor Keith dismisses concerns about Franklin’s youth and agrees to aid Franklin in setting up a printing house, and the passage connects several storylines in a remarkable chain of sentences. Franklin’s complex representation of the scene and its sequel (the repayment) illustrate his conversion of practice into structure through the manipulation of duration: He [Collins] left me then, promising to remit me the first Money he should receive in order to discharge the Debt. But I  never heard of him after.— The Breaking into this Money of Vernon’s was one of the first great Errata of my Life. And this Affair show’d that my Father was not too much out of his Judgment when he suppos’d me too Young to manage Business of Importance. But Sir William [Keith], on reading his Letter, said he was too prudent. There was great Difference in Persons, and Discretion did not always accompany Years, nor was Youth always without it. And since he will not set you up, says he, I will do it my self. (1337–1338)

Franklin’s account jars the reader because, of the four characters, only he and Collins know of the money Franklin is obliged to deliver to Vernon. Franklin’s father, Josiah, has already expressed his skepticism of his son’s ability to run a shop, and Keith is responding skeptically, in turn, to Josiah’s letter. But the hinge sentence, “And this Affair show’d that my Father was not too much out of his Judgment when he suppos’d me too Young to manage Business of Importance,” is Franklin’s purely internal reflection. The Autobiography has often been treated as a textbook of public-persona creation, and “showing” is integral to the Franklinian project such readings invoke. But if the Vernon affair “shows” the truth of Josiah’s judgment, it does so to nobody but Franklin and the reader of the memoirs. Franklin’s conjunctions therefore operate to confuse the story levels: “And this Affair,” “But Sir William.” If And serves to integrate Franklin’s own judgment of his soon-to-be-labeled erratum with his father’s assessment of the son’s maturity, But forces the next sentence to operate as a response to Franklin’s internalization of Josiah’s viewpoint. This effect precedes Keith’s reaction, which can only be to Josiah’s letter (safely quarantined within a subordinate clause), not to Franklin’s conflation of the letter and the erratum. The effect of this complicated discursive maneuvering is to set up Keith’s proposal as a counterargument to the reader’s own skepticism of Franklin’s preparedness for business. When Franklin repays the debt and thereby corrects the erratum, he rescues his reputation from his father’s skepticism and from what has been revealed to be his naiveté in trusting Keith’s word. (Keith promises to furnish Franklin with a letter of recommendation so that he may set up shop but proves to be unreliable; there is no letter. Franklin interprets the whole episode as a lesson

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in the perils of secrecy: had he discussed the matter with others, he undoubtedly would have learned of Keith’s character.) Interrupting the account of his printing house partnership with Hugh Meredith, the correction serves to return us—at a moment of financial crisis, as Meredith’s father is unable to provision all the funds needed to pay off the printing house—to an earlier episode in which what seemed to be Franklin’s youthful folly emerges as an example of his responsibility and acumen. And, indeed, such is the very structure of smallholder capital-investment debt in mid-eighteenth-century America. The Autobiography makes a strong argument for the “necessity of credit” for the young tradesman: Franklin is burned several times by others’ unpaid debts (Collins and Keith are prime examples), but he always pays.15 And he pays, as he puts it, “the Principal with Interest & many Thanks.” Yet, if Franklin’s debt to Samuel Vernon establishes the Autobiography’s preferred structure of the erratum-correction episode, the other two primary cases suggest that more than interest may accrue during money-time. The episode containing Franklin’s rejection of and subsequent return to Deborah Read is perhaps the most obviously painful to today’s readers, but it is at the same time an effective narrative evasion of both the harshness of the rejection and the moral stain of infidelity.16 Mitchell Breitwieser summarizes the effect well:  “Franklin adumbrates a feeling of plan or destiny meant to suggest that the germ of marital economism was in him from the first; the effect is to reduce the subsequent philanderings to relative insignificance, to errata that do not express anything essential about him.”17 Franklin’s evasion is all the more remarkable for the fact that, during this particular money-time, he produced his son William, to whom part 1 of the Autobiography is ostensibly addressed.18 The break with James is not so tidy, and it will raise for us a new set of questions. Perhaps the most striking fact about this erratum-correction sequence is that, pace many critics’ assertions to the contrary, it extends into part 3.19 In so doing, it not only speaks to the persistence of the money-time form I have discussed but also illustrates the relation between that form and the episodic dimensions of narratorial mode and characterization that I will pursue below. For many readers, Franklin’s conflict with his brother James establishes the defining feature of his early life:  a propensity to strike out on his own and to deny what he sees as unnatural authority. In these terms, the overall Autobiography is “the optimistic report of a prodigal son.”20 Franklin’s first description of the erratum, however, lays out a set of problems that are not fully comprehended by his professed self-propulsion through life. Recall the scene. Franklin has just assumed formal, though not actual, control over the printing of his brother’s newspaper, the New-England Courant. (James had been barred from publishing for offending the clerical authorities in Boston.) This state of affairs forces James to publicly release Franklin from his service, while they privately arrange for the continuation of the indentures through the original

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term: “At length a fresh Difference arising between my Brother and me, I took upon me to assert my Freedom, presuming that he would not venture to produce the new Indentures. It was not fair in me to take this Advantage, and this I therefore reckon one of the first Errata of my Life: But the Unfairness of it weigh’d little with me, when under the Impressions of Resentment, for the Blows his Passion too often urg’d him to bestow upon me. Tho’ He was otherwise not an ill-natur’d Man: Perhaps I was too saucy & provoking” (1325). A page earlier, Franklin has told us that his father often mediated the conflict between the brothers: Tho’ a Brother, he considered himself as my Master, & me as his Apprentice; and accordingly expected the same Services from me as he would from another; while I thought he demean’d me too much in some he requir’d of me, who from a Brother expected more Indulgence. Our Disputes were often brought before our Father, and I fancy I was either generally in the right, or else a better Pleader, because the Judgment was generally in my favour: But my Brother was passionate & had often beaten me, which I took extreamly amiss; and thinking my Apprenticeship very tedious, I was continually wishing for some Opportunity of shortening it. (1324)

Moreover, Franklin includes a footnote about his beatings, lest the reader fail to feel their impact: “I fancy his harsh & tyrannical Treatment of me, might be a means of impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro’ my whole Life” (1324n). Franklin positions the episode such that no one can take issue with the break, even expressing pro forma doubt as to his own responsibility for the antagonism (“Perhaps I was too saucy & provoking”), as if to project an image of full, third-person comprehension. And, indeed, the passages describe his suffering under the hand of a brutal man. Given Franklin’s emphasis on James’s “tyrannical” and “passionate” nature, which interlocks neatly with contemporary language in the attack on illegitimate monarchy, the episode is most often read as a declaration of independence: Franklin is simply too good, and too big, for the small world of the eighteenth-century smallholder-class family. In this reading, the remainder of the Autobiography confirms the early inkling that Franklin sprang fully formed into the world, ill-equipped for nothing other than indefinite apprenticeship to an unworthy master. What we see when we examine the whole arc of the erratum-correction sequence is exactly how big Franklin represents himself to be and how unworthy James appears in contrast—and, most to the point, how Franklin establishes both characteristics in a specific way. The fracture in the family is written in the very form of Franklin’s narration. Near the beginning of part  3, situated amid Franklin’s story of his foreign-language acquisition strategy and the expansion of his club, the Junto, Franklin writes of his return visit to New England and his visit to James, who has relocated to Newport, due either to

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failure in Boston or to the attractions of business in Rhode Island (Franklin does not tell us which):21 In returning I call’d at Newport, to see my Brother then settled there with his Printing-House. Our former Differences were forgotten, and our Meeting was very cordial and affectionate. He was fast declining in his Health, and requested of me that in case of his Death which he apprehended not far distant, I would take home his Son, then but 10 Years of Age, and bring him up to the Printing Business. This I accordingly perform’d, sending him a few Years to School before I took him into the Office. His Mother carry’d on the Business till he was grown up, when I assisted him with an Assortment of new Types, those of his Father being in a Manner worn out.—Thus it was that I made my Brother ample Amends for the Service I had depriv’d him of by leaving him so early.— (1401–1402)

The key point to extract from the whole erratum-correction sequence here is that Franklin represents himself, from the beginning, as occupying the role of paternal authority. We might then describe the conflict between Franklin and James as one based on scarcity: They both, in effect, want to occupy the same social position, and, unfortunately for the integrity of the family, there is only one slot available. Josiah, the biological father, is notably reduced to the status of mediator between the battling sons; the narrative extends this deflation of the father when Keith undercuts Josiah’s axioms about youth and maturity:  by inflating the son to the status Franklin has already represented himself as (structurally) occupying, Keith correspondingly reduces the father. Keith’s own unreliability serves only to reinforce Franklin’s stand-alone vigor: Franklin not only cannot rely on anyone else but, moreover, need not.22 Visiting his dying brother in Newport, in part 3, Franklin narratively makes the most of James’s weakened state. The death of James, written into the structure of the characters’ relationship from the get-go, shifts Franklin into the paternal position he has symbolically occupied from the start. Apprenticing the son so as to nurture him in the printing business, Franklin becomes surrogate father to his brother’s child. Relieving the mother’s burden through the training of the son, Franklin becomes surrogate husband to his brother’s wife. And Franklin underscores both points in his most characteristic fashion, through a cruelly customized variation on the dominant metaphor of printing: “His Mother carry’d on the Business till he was grown up, when I assisted him with an Assortment of new Types, those of his Father being in a Manner worn out.” Like a transfusion of new, vital blood into a weak and withered body, Franklin—taking up the role of the good father—restores James’s family: The son is schooled and trained, the mother is returned to her properly inactive position, and future material well-being is secured.23 Providing “new Types” to the son, Franklin erases James’s “worn out” impression, replacing it with his own. We may note the echo of James’s own “impressing” of Franklin

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through his beatings. Recall that, while under his indentures, Franklin felt “the Impressions of Resentment” when beaten by James and that this treatment “impressed” him with a lifelong intolerance of tyranny. Lest the reader underestimate the extent of Franklin’s superiority, he emphasizes—in a unique variation among the three erratum-correction sequences—that “I made my Brother ample Amends for the Service I had depriv’d him of by leaving him so early.” This is the only occasion in which Franklin uses a modifier to accentuate the plenitude of a correction.24 The point, of course, is that Franklin was “ample” from the start. Money-time asserts that the only duration is that stretch of sameness between the assumption of the debt and its repayment; the condition for the debtor assuming the debt is an already evident worthiness, and when the circuit has been completed, it is as though precisely nothing has occurred: the repayment of a debt is the return to the prior state of worthiness. By punctuating his narrative with the three major erratum-correction sequences, Franklin institutes a narrative form that obliterates duration in the service of a static, and ample, self-characterization.25 What we begin to see here, and what I will pursue in more detail in the next section, is the form of Franklinian self-representation through competition. Franklin’s technique of narrative binding through recursion, in the errata, demonstrates the amenability of structure and form to the representation of success in social competition. We might bring out the distinctiveness of this technique by contrasting the Franklinian mode of success with the relationship between prose and social competition in Balzac, as described by Franco Moretti: “[I]‌n a narrow and competitive universe, every action is like the proverbial snowball: it becomes each time an avalanche, generating a myriad of echoes and replies that can no longer be controlled or opposed. Each action, once performed, can never be undone, cancelled. It is the triumph of prose as defined by classical rhetoric.”26 Franklin certainly operates in a world of prose, but the Autobiography is starkly architectonic when viewed against the prosy avalanche of Balzac’s novels. In Franklin, then, we find a contradiction between theme and form: the thematics of the snowball (action following upon action, error upon error, triumph upon triumph) versus the formal binding of episodes through recursive distortions of duration.

Character and Competition, Success and Failure Franklin’s fraternal-cum-characterological conflict with James raises the question of character competition in the Autobiography. Franklin’s effort to fix his character status in the narrative through the use of the erratum-correction sequence, which compresses duration according to the logic of money-time, produces a certain perverse side effect, fixing everyone else as well. The deck is, as readers are well aware, already stacked against secondary characters in

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the Autobiography. There is Franklin, and there are others: one central character amid a sea of minor players; and readers have noted how dramatically Franklin looms above the rest, even by comparison with other autobiographical narratives.27 I explore the dynamics of characterization in more detail below, but here I  want to linger a moment on the relation between Franklin’s depiction of James and the structure of the Franklin family. The central problem, as I have already noted, is one of scarcity of role positions. Franklin affects an outsized paternal pose from the start; if there is any sincerity in his expression of doubt as to his saucy and provoking behavior, it may be in some recognition of this performance. Yet sincerity has its limits, and we ought to take note of the material concerns that might spur such a representation in the narrative of the Autobiography, concerns that span from Franklin’s account of his father’s family to his own story of novel success as a printer in Philadelphia. These will help us to see the relationship, within the memoirs, between material pressures on the Franklin family and the representation of character conflict and time compression through episodic poetics. According to the opening pages of the Autobiography, the livelihoods of Franklin’s paternal forebears look like this: His grandfather was a smith and a freeholder; his uncles were, respectively, a smith-become-scrivener, a wool dyer, and a silk dyer. Josiah, his father, was a wool dyer trained under his older brother. Josiah worked as a dyer until, in 1682, he arrived in New England, where he found low demand for dyeing and so took up tallow chandling and soap boiling. Franklin’s brothers were all apprenticed to different trades.28 Josiah introduces Franklin, who is third from the youngest of the children and who has a desperate desire for the sea, to the various trades and finally installs him as an apprentice cutler to his cousin Samuel. This apprenticeship ends when Samuel requests a fee for the apprenticeship, and Josiah, unwilling and perhaps unable to part with the funds, decides that, given his son’s “Bookish Inclination,” he should become a printer, even “tho’ he [Josiah] had already one Son (James) of that Profession” (1317). Josiah arranges for Franklin to be “bound” to his brother, and Franklin signs the indentures in 1717, when he is twelve years old, agreeing to serve his brother as apprentice until he is twenty-one (1317).29 Franklin is set up under, but in direct competition with, James. Moreover, we have already learned that Josiah’s anxiety about Franklin’s desire to “break away” and go to sea was informed by the fact that an older son, also Josiah, did just that, “to his [Josiah Sr.’s] great Vexation” (1316). The abundant variety of trades and the wonder of fine workmanship in which Franklin takes such pleasure during his “tour” of possible occupations evaporate when Josiah fastens him in service to James; the freedom of the sea and the exhilaration of labor-as-delight (which Franklin experiences when he is only watching the workmen) are suddenly repainted in the grayish hue of endless drudgery.

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Most important of all, Franklin becomes a double of his brother: a secondary figure, a redundancy. If his imaginary doubling of older brother Josiah opened the possibility of the sea, the corresponding relation with James brings only the recognition of necessity. We can read in these early passages of the Autobiography a refraction of the historical forces at work in the Boston of the first third of the eighteenth century, when commercial development strained the family and loosened its position as the basic social unit.30 While farming families and some among the lower half of the propertied class (including smallholder artisans like Josiah Franklin) met with mounting difficulty as they tried to keep up traditional generational continuity within the family trades (or farms), Boston society saw an increasing concentration of wealth at the top of the class structure. High levels of exports (based on relatively low costs of production) sustained the artisans, but their relative position declined vis-à-vis their social betters (in the main, merchants). Thus, on one side, the young Franklin was tantalized by ambition and the fruits of speculative adventure in a thriving merchant port town; on the other side, he recognized a turbulence that seemed to bring ashore only the perils, and none of the pleasures, of the sea voyage. Franklin represents his own position as locked between the rigid track of the tradesman and the freedom of the sea (or, as his youthful wandering gaze suggests, the supervision of work).31 The problem of social failure is registered in the narrative not by its presence—Franklin is provided with perfect opportunities to learn three trades—but by the force with which young Franklin is jostled through the three trades and by the resistance he puts up when at last confronted with the beginnings of a livelihood in apprenticeship: “I stood out some time, but at last was persuaded” (1317). Franklin’s comma reinforces the resistance subtly enacted in the phrase “I stood out some time,” and we can almost hear Franklin’s fall into indenture under the pressures of “persuasion” as it is performed by the sentence itself. “Some time” here is ever too brief. Franklinian entrepreneurialism emerges out of novel opportunities for success that take shape within a field of novel opportunities for failure. That Franklin’s version of success is defined against social failure becomes most evident in relation to the great counterpoint to Franklin in the period, John Fitch. Fitch was a Philadelphia metalworker who invented a steamboat, failed to secure a patent on it, and committed suicide in 1798. Like Franklin’s, Fitch’s memoirs (which are in fact two different manuscripts: the Life and the so-called Steamboat History, which relates Fitch’s tribulations with his invention) were not delivered into print by their author. Whereas Franklin “published” his memoirs in manuscript form, Fitch deposited his at the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1792, with instructions to keep them sealed for thirty years. Fitch had two reasons for wishing that his memoirs remain secret. First, he had been involved in a marriage of form to the mother of his friend Harry Voigt’s illegitimate child, and he wanted to protect the reputations of

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those involved; second, and more to the immediate point, Fitch was so convinced that the world was against him that he assumed the U.S. government would destroy his text before it could be circulated. As he wrote in one of his letters to the Library Company, “[T]‌he warmth of the present age is so much in favour of the first officers of the Government whom I have so strenuously called in question their candour that I  much fear they would be destroyed without ever giveing the world an opportunity of knowing in what manner I have been treated by them.”32 Like Franklin’s text, Fitch’s memoirs are composed in sections:  six large quarto writing tablets constitute his Life and Steamboat History. But in Fitch’s life memoir, episodic poetics takes another form entirely. Whereas Franklin uses the erratum-correction sequence to control—to bind and configure—narrative time, Fitch’s narrative is marked everywhere by the central figure’s inability to control anything at all. Thus, whereas the Franklin of the Autobiography succeeds because he is never too much of one thing, Fitch fails, according to his account, because he can never be enough of anything: episodic consolidation is replaced by episodic diffusion. But at the same time, in another turn of the episodic dialectic, Fitch also finds that he is too much of a bad thing and that his fundamental lack defines him throughout life—just as Franklinian fullness stands in productive tension with Franklin’s representation of himself as permanently fungible. This sense of deficiency figures even in the description of his birth, and the deletions in the manuscript serve to emphasize Fitch’s vexed liminal perspective—and the extent to which Fitch conceives of his failure as a predestined condition: The House that I  was born in was upon the line between Hartford and Windsor but as the bigest part of the Place was in Windsor it was said that I was born in Windsor but from the singularity of my make shape and disposition and [inserted between lines: forturne in this World] I am inclined to believe that I should be born upon the very line itself it was the design of Heaven that I should be born on the Very line and not in any township whatever yet am happy that it did not happen also between two states that I can say that I was born somwhere.33

Perhaps the most dramatic contrast with Franklin is Fitch’s return to a childhood trauma, when he was wrongly blamed and beaten for a fire in his family home: And when I had the first extinguished notwithstanding my painful hands and smarting face which was then covered in blisters I went to relate the tale to my elder bretherin but I no sooner arrived at the yard than my brother fell foul of me boxing my ears and beating me beyond reason for the greatest fault and would not give me leave to say a word in my behalf. And as my father had that evening gone acourting I had nowhere to apply to for redress therefore was obliged to submit not only to the greatest indignities but the

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greatest injustice. On the return of my father I  made my complaints but without any satisfaction or redress. This Sir being what I may call the first act of my life seemed to forebode the future rewards that I was to receive for my labours thro’ life which has generally corrisponded exactly with that.34

For Fitch, failure—and not Franklinian success—is inscribed from the start, and the most dramatic formal contrast between the two memoirs is Franklin’s ability to effectively manipulate the flow of his narrative, while Fitch never exceeds the paradigmatic failure of his youth. Fitch’s own memoirs powerfully illustrate the unsteady world that is imperfectly suppressed in Franklin’s narrative.35 When viewed together, the memoirs indicate both the flexibility of episodic narrative structure and the extent to which the Franklinian version of success won the day as the historically triumphant version. Rufus Griswold, writing in his nostalgic The Republican Court; or, American Society in the Days of Washington (issued in parts in 1856), describes Fitch in shrill terms. Fitch is included in the Republican Court only to indicate exactly who must be purposefully excluded from its ranks; the brevity of the passage conveys the completeness of Fitch’s failure: “John Fitch, who had invented the steamboat, was wearying incredulous people with applications for money for new experiments, and with his confident predictions of the time when the Atlantic should be crossed by steam in a fortnight. Soon after, baffled and disheartened, he retired to Kentucky and selected a grave beside the Ohio, that his restless spirit might be lulled to repose through coming ages by the music of steam engines ascending and descending that majestic river.”36 Griswold’s account shows the divergence between Franklinian and Fitchean episodic structure to be a culturally recognizable one. Writing in the antebellum period, Griswold was himself unavoidably shaped by the Franklinian model; his image of the steamboats ascending and descending, easing Fitch to rest through an oscillation that amounts to stasis, elegantly—painfully—captures the narrative form of Fitch’s Life.37 Georg Simmel expresses the contradictory structure of opportunity so exemplified by the Franklin/Fitch contrast in his account of what he terms “the antinomy between freedom and equality” that emerges in the eighteenth century: [T]‌his need for the freedom of the individual who feels himself restricted and deformed by historical society results in a self-contradiction once it is put into practice. For evidently, it can be put into practice permanently only if society exclusively consists of individuals who externally as well as internally are equally strong and equally privileged. Yet this condition exists nowhere. On the contrary, the power-giving and rank-determining forces of men are, in principle, unequal, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Therefore, complete freedom necessarily leads to the exploitation of this inequality by the more privileged, to the exploitation of the stupid by the clever, of the weak by the strong, of the timid by the grasping.38

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Franklin communicates this condition throughout the Autobiography, but it is perhaps most pungent in his account of the formative conflict with James.39 For it is in that collision between two characters, each with a claim to the same socionarrative position (James thematically, through his role as older brother and boss; Franklin formally, through his role as narrator and central figure developed, as it were, against James-as-ground), that the Autobiography registers both the primary struggle over scarce resources and the narrative struggle through which the autobiographical “I” is itself dynamically forged. Through attention to episodic poetics, we are able to see how Franklin effectively lifts the Franklin character from the story to the discourse: how, that is, the version of the successful Franklin who narrates the Autobiography is developed through the narration itself. That Fitch’s narrative presents an interiority mostly absent from Franklin’s should also indicate to us how much the Franklinian fiction of competitive success as rule determines the contrary model of failure as exception—despite the fact that in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century, Fitches outnumbered Franklins.40 In recognizing the development of Franklin’s narrating “I” both within the structure of the family and in relation to Fitch’s version of its opposite, we can now more fully register the importance of the episodic structure of Franklin’s erratum-correction sequence, the extent to which that “ample” quality that is both constant and emerges fully only in the correction (“I made my Brother ample Amends”) is constituted through a narrative process that is, in the structure of the sequence, denied or negated. Moreover, in hardening the form in this way, Franklin effects a major reduction of James—a reduction that operates across the Autobiography. In this way, what the narrative illustrates is the development of “Benjamin Franklin” at the expense of all other figures in the Autobiography. Franklin thus shows us the obverse, or unredeemed underside, of what Alex Woloch has shown to be the aesthetic redemption of a related structure of inequality in Jane Austen. Austen’s novels powerfully develop their central figures (as with Elizabeth Bennet) through the employment of minor characters. According to Woloch, the functioning of the overall asymmetry of this structure of characterization depends upon the reader’s detection of the distortion—and so upon the ever-deferred promise of social equality itself: What makes Pride and Prejudice a representation of, rather than simply a derivative reproduction of, this structure is precisely the way that we recognize minor characters as caricatures. At the root of caricature is an implied standard that organizes the interpretive process. Our sense that these characters are distortions implies, if only in a negative form, a radical sense of human commonality. Beneath the fragmentation and dispersion inherent in Austen’s asymmetry is a controlling vision of human equality, without which the poetics of the narrative system would not coalesce. The alienating

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nature of the structure she is depicting, however, makes the notion of equality invisible, persisting only as the receding assumption of an ineluctable human quality.41

If the aesthetic value of Austen’s novel comes out of its unavoidable recognition of the formal distortions it enacts—if the novel is, in other words, oriented despite itself toward the social—the Autobiography is no less notable for its solipsistic alignment, its construction of a concavity (remarkable even within the self-life-writing tradition) oriented toward the aggrandizement of the Franklin character-narrator. Thus, while we may disapprove of its social vision, the aesthetic achievement of the Autobiography is precisely opposite that of Pride and Prejudice: rather than resisting the emerging contradiction between freedom and equality, Franklin runs toward it, relishing his strength and his cleverness amid the weak and the stupid and swallowing the whole with what we might call a world-historically “ample” appetite.42

Society, Mischief, and the Episode Franklin’s technique for establishing the center of the Autobiography ensures that, for all its episodicity, the narrative will never drift far from its eponymous anchor. Indeed, my reading of the narrative points to the similarity between the Autobiography and The Federalist:  Both produce dispersion as the prior condition for successful consolidation; they move from process to form, from structuration to structure. In chapter 1, I used the language of complexity and consolidation; for most of chapter 2 I  have spoken of dispersion and structure. This is primarily a technical distinction between the specific forms of the chapters’ two central texts, and it makes a difference: it is, among other things, a difference between two kinds of plot. In The Federalist, we have a representation of the movement from the many to the one within political argument—e pluribus unum, from “the people” to the wishful “we.” Again, as I have already put it, the form here is put in the service of political rhetoric. A complex social field is represented in a double movement; complexity and consolidation are dialectically united. In the Autobiography, formally, Franklin’s plot operates according to the logic of antinomy, not dialectics. My own dialectical reading has been aimed at showing the process of production that Franklin’s text presents as a process of circulation alone. We can see how the Autobiography brings the commercial logic of The Federalist into the subject itself: the exemplary life is the life mystified into M-C-M'—an ever-swelling mass of more and more valuable and quickly circulating money. And yet, as for The Federalist, for Franklin the smooth accumulation of money—the one that emerges so speciously out of the many—is always threatened by the overwhelming force of social particularity.

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Franklin several times expresses marked concern about tendencies toward dispersion, most notably the social dispersion that mirrors the Autobiography’s narrative form: many people collectively producing large-scale effects. By pursuing the implications of these moments, we can achieve a firmer grasp on how the episodic structure tout court works in the Autobiography, and we can make some further connections to the social and political questions I  have already raised regarding the constitution of the autobiographical “I” from the range of social materials. Overt social conflict is mostly absent from the Autobiography.43 Yet, especially in the latter half of the narrative, Franklin turns his attention to the development of social-improvement plans, and he explicitly conceives these to be a means of diffusing conflicts within society. In this section, I situate the Autobiography’s episodic form against its sociohistorical ground. In particular, this section deals with Franklin’s vision of the formation of society (or even, to underscore a homology that will be developed below, social Bildung—the form of a well-functioning society, its conflicts controlled), a vision in which Franklin faces a challenge to the form of centrality we have seen to be his dominant mode of self-presentation. No single character is a match for Benjamin Franklin, but a multitude of individuals, organized into mobs or even social classes, threatens to distend the narrative world over which that figure presides. The problem of accretive collectivities, like the problem of accretive problems, must be interrupted and resolved.44 We may call this Franklin’s Publius moment. Near the beginning of part 1, Franklin apologizes for the digressive form of his narrative by noting that it is a private rather than a public letter (ostensibly addressed to his son).45 Midway through part  3, Franklin provides a related justification of his long account of his public projects in a form that, in its attention to the accumulation of particulars into large-scale social outcomes, echoes the almost contemporary form of anxiety we tracked in the ratification debate: Some may think these trifling Matters not worth minding or relating: But when they consider, that tho’ Dust blown into the Eyes of a single Person or into a single Shop on a windy Day, is but of small Importance, yet the great Number of the Instances in a populous City, and its frequent Repetitions give it Weight & Consequence; perhaps they will not censure very severely those who bestow some of Attention to Affairs of this seemingly low Nature. Human Felicity is produc’d not so much by great Pieces of good Fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day. [. . .] With these Sentiments I have hazarded the few preceding Pages, hoping they may afford Hints which some time or other may be useful to a City I love, having lived many Years in it very happily; and perhaps to some of our Towns in America.— (1428–1429)

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A little becomes a lot: the miniscule specs of dust accumulating in many individuals’ eyes amount to a public nuisance of “Weight & Consequence.” Writing in Philadelphia in 1788, after the American Revolution, having been separated from the existing manuscript of his memoirs in the commotion of his travels during the war, Franklin had some sense of what he saw as the weight of accumulated minor events, of which the text of the Autobiography bears the traces.46 At the same time, it must be stressed that Franklin would have had to work quite hard to see history, including contemporary social conflicts, as merely the weight of minor events. The War of Independence, most obviously, weighed rather more heavily than its cumulative component events by themselves might have suggested. David Ramsay, himself no political radical, expressed the transformation from events to historical deluge in his History of the American Revolution, published in 1789: “The revolution was not forced on the people by ambitious leaders grasping at supreme power, but every measure of it was forced on Congress, by the necessity of the case, and the voice of the people. The change of the public mind of America respecting connexion with Great-Britain, is without a parallel. In the short space of two years, nearly three millions of people passed over from the love and duty of loyal subjects, to the hatred and resentment of enemies.”47 Writing in the late 1780s, while Franklin was composing part 3, Ramsay here navigates treacherous political waters as he attempts to accommodate a rhetoric of populist sentiment to a Federalist government, the former being associated both with Anti-Federalists and, by the time of the publication of his History, with a Jeffersonian republicanism that Federalists were soon to link with Jacobinism. Ramsay’s task was, in effect, to represent the Revolution as the advent of Constitutionalism rather than an ongoing social transformation oriented toward the ideals of 1776.48 The difficulty he faced speaks to my overarching argument rather less than does the fact that he assumed his charge despite its evident hopelessness. By the late 1780s, history looked—from the new U.S. vantage as much as from the western European one—less and less like the mere accumulation of particulars and more and more like a complex process for which the logic of linear cause and effect would simply not suffice.49 Franklin had encountered a version of this complex historical process in London during the Wilkes Affair, when what he saw as the accretion of petty violence amounted to, in his terms, the “mischief ” of the “mob.” In a letter to none other than his son, William, on April 16, 1768, Franklin wrote of the “inconceivable mischief done by debauching the people and making them idle, beside the immediate actual mischief done by drunk mad mobs to houses, windows, &c.”: The scenes have been horrible. London was illuminated two nights running at the command of the mob for the success of Wilkes in the Middlesex

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election; the second night exceeded any thing of the kind ever seen here on the greatest occasion of rejoicing, as even the small cross streets, lanes, courts, and other out-of-the-way places were all in a blaze with lights, and the principle streets all night long, as the mobs went round again after two o’clock, and obliged people who had extinguished their candles to light them again. Those who refused had all their windows destroyed. [. . .] The mob, (spirited up by numbers of different ballads sung or roared in every street) requiring gentlemen and ladies of all ranks as they passed in their carriages to shout for Wilkes and liberty, marking the same words on all their coaches with chalk.50

As the historian of social movements Charles Tilly has pointed out, Franklin here and elsewhere uses the language of the British police. From this perspective, the mob—the “mobility” or mobile vulgus—“make[s]‌riots,” and “[r]iots, in the language of the authorities, are collective actions (whether violent or not) whose impropriety justifies the use of force to terminate them.”51 Social particulars, like all details in Franklin’s writings, are never innocent:  “And again, [Poor Richard] adviseth to Circumspection and Care, even in the smallest Matters, because sometimes a little Neglect may breed great Mischief; adding, For want of a Nail the Shoe was lost; for want of a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want of a Horse the Rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the Enemy, all for want of Care about a Horse-shoe Nail.”52 The language of universality in Poor Richard’s maxim, in which the smallest detail (the nail) assumes a massive seriousness (the death of the rider), is translated into reactionary suspicion when it is fastened around the specific shape of Wilkes’s common supporters. “A little Neglect” on the part of the state may indeed have bred the “great Mischief ” of the London mob: the ease with which the term mischief slides from one context (loss in battle due to neglect of a detail of equestrian grooming) to another (political radicalism in the long run-up to what will eventually become the populism of the French Revolution) is a measure of the consistency of Franklin’s form of thought across widely divergent social situations. In the language of the state, mob was a technical term frequently used alongside words such as sedition and outrage. The ease with which Franklin adopts the language of the besieged state regarding masses of people is all the more striking because of his evidently genuine ambivalence vis-à-vis questions of social equality and the “crowd” altogether. In this regard, we can see Franklin thinking along the fracture line between what E.  P. Thompson famously characterized as two general patterns of thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If “the moral economy impinged very generally upon eighteenth-century government and thought, and did not only intrude at moments of disturbance,” so also was it true that the “new political economy” of the late eighteenth century “was disinfested of intrusive moral

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imperatives.”53 If in 1768 Franklin refused (or was unable) to register the grammar of social contention embodied by Wilkes’s supporters (a political iteration of the eighteenth-century moral economy that would survive the ideological triumph of bourgeois political economy), by 1788–89 (when he composed part  3) the Autobiography has cleansed what we might call “social management” of conflict altogether, concentrating on processes of public betterment that are based on a benign version of the economic ideology that displaced morality in the period. In short, this is pure calculation without the mess of the mob—and all the purer for it. What Weber called Franklin’s “philosophy of avarice” is written into a form of social arithmetic.54 For a comprehensive reading of the sociohistorical import of the Autobiography’s episodic structure, there is good reason to home in on Franklin’s use of the term mischief across several decades and two seemingly heterogeneous contexts. Against the bureaucratic (though opportunistic) fixedness of mob, the word mischief as a word itself embodies the Franklinian narrative’s fungibility, compressing major and minor actions—“trifling Matters” and “Weight & Consequences”—into a single term. In the 1780s, the meaning of the word was shifting: from actions that caused grave and intentional harm to those that provoked only minor, childish annoyances.55 Given Franklin’s emphasis on dramatically unintended consequences, it is worth making the composition of the word explicit:  to mis-chieve is to arrive at a wrong, or diverted, end. One of the great dangers, and the great freedoms, of episodic narrative is its capacity to unfold centrifugally against determinate endings. Its components grouted together more precariously than virtually all other narrative forms according to the logic of contiguity, the episodic narrative continually teases toward multiple possible endings, each conjured by the status of the story at the close of an episode.56 Franklin’s anxiety and outrage at the Wilkesite mischief represent his own effort to close down multiplicity. Franklin’s try at consolidation—at narratively binding the social energy on the London streets—is an attempt to account for everything, to close down the possibility that too many parts will overwhelm, or radically transform, the whole. This is an endeavor that we may see as pitted against the centrifugal energy of the Autobiography itself. The task for Franklin’s narrative is to prevent “trifling Matters” from coalescing into objects of “Weight & Consequence,” and Franklin’s effort is surprisingly coherent—given the memoirs’ conditions of composition—across the Autobiography. And it is all the more remarkable given, as this discussion shows, the historical pressure being exerted against Franklin’s continued insistence on piecemeal, politically neutralizing social improvements.57 Franklin’s “great Pieces of good Fortune” recasts the abstract problem of the part and the whole in terms that resemble nothing so much as Kant’s mathematical sublime, a concept the philosopher was crafting during the period while Franklin wrote parts 3 and 4 of the Autobiography in Philadelphia. In

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Franklin’s case, however, it is a matter of inverting the Kantian ideal. For Kant, grappling with the problem of aesthetics in the third Critique, we experience the mathematical sublime when we attempt to take in a great quantity or numerical concept as a whole, and the attempt itself is a tribute to reason and to the human imagination, since “even being able to think of it as a whole indicates a faculty of the mind which surpasses every standard of sense.” Reason demands full comprehension even where it is impossible: “But now the mind hears in itself the voice of reason, which requires totality for all given magnitudes, even for those that can never be entirely apprehended although they are (in the sensible representation) judged as entirely given, hence comprehension in one intuition, and it demands a presentation for all members of a progressively increasing numerical series, and does not exempt from this requirement even the infinite [. . .], but rather makes it unavoidable for us to think of it (in the judgment of common reason) as given entirely (in its totality).”58 In the Autobiography, Franklin insists, contra Kant, on parceling the social, on short-circuiting the unification of particulars into any whole, staving off the sublime. The magnitude that would be overwhelming must be refused:  divided, parceled, discretely bound. His 1768 letter to William is a representative example of what happens when Franklinian social arithmetic is met not with manageable particulars but, rather, with an unruly collectivity, a mass: Franklin finds here what Kant would call the “monstrous,” an object whose magnitude “annihilates” its own purpose.59 “The scenes have been,” writes Franklin, “horrible.” It is a measure of his tenacious focus on the most resolvable problem that Franklin notes, with an attention to the details of property damage that seems almost to concede that he cannot fathom the events, that the resistant citizens had “all their windows destroyed.”60 Franklin’s resistance to internal differentiation has been cast as his “constant reductive exercise of will against the threat of qualitative plurality,” and it is the specter of the sublime that inflects Franklin’s narrative of social projects in parts  3 and 4.61 For if, on the one hand, the Autobiography’s episodicity produces an anxiety about internal differentiation, the multiplicity of social concerns and the tendency of a rebellious underclass to organize itself into a crowd, and then a mob, spur a fear of external differentiation that is at least equally unsettling.62 If, as Terry Eagleton has shown, Kant’s Critique of Judgment emerges from what we can now recognize as a distinctive historical dilemma, the predicament is the Autobiography’s, too: “To be free means to calculate the moves of your competitors while remaining securely impervious to such calculability oneself; but such calculations may themselves modify one’s competitor’s behaviour in ways that impose limits on one’s own free project. There would be no way for the mind to master this volatile situation as a whole; such knowledge, in Kant’s terms, would be the metaphysical fantasy of a non-perspectival understanding.”63 Though Franklin’s memoirs are replete with stories of competition (in printing and in politics), in terms of social

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unrest, Franklin’s competitors are in fact the mass of the people themselves. The social projects of part 3 meld the two versions of competition, as Franklin soothes social unhappiness by leveraging his central situation. Having integrated his printing business as closely as possible with the government of Pennsylvania, and having profited nicely from his position, Franklin tries to narrate his social-improvement plans from a kind of fantastic nonperspectival position, one that attempts to make the most of episodic structure and to reduce the threat of multiplicity that is registered there.64

Experience, Selection, and Narrative Unity Benjamin Franklin is perhaps the closest thing to a universal character within American literature; the influence of that character over U.S. (indeed, world) culture and subject formation can hardly be overstated. The Autobiography has shaped the possibilities for imagining life trajectories, and even the very sense of time, since the late eighteenth century.65 The central paradox of the Autobiography, of course, is that Franklin is represented there as utterly exceptional; his universality as the hero of the narrative is an effect of readerly identification. The Franklin effect resembles what Susan Stewart has characterized as the omniscient narrator’s capacity “to disguise the temporality of his or her own voice, to assume an all-at-onceness and all-knowingness that is seductive to the reader. [. . .] The triumph of the omniscient narrator is worked in pulling the reader out of sympathy with any particular time system other than his or her own.”66 But Franklin’s effect is based on more than the technique of narrational omniscience. Episodic structure is essential to the Franklinian legacy. In particular, Franklin’s distinctiveness is based on the character-narrator’s configuration of the narrative, his control over the unfolding of time through the narrative binding of episodes. The erratum-correction sequence is the paradigm of Franklinian formation, establishing a principal subject so robust that it may confront its own self-division (in part 2) and even dissolution into its activity (in parts 3 and 4) as only further evidence of its a priori self-sufficiency. It is worth dwelling for a moment in that last, illustrative (and most striking) episode in the Autobiography, in part  4, when Franklin’s account of London negotiations with the Pennsylvania proprietors swells with a new density of detail as the story simply runs out, without closing punctuation. The episode, which is itself largely the account of a delay, of stalled negotiations, is remarkable because of its utterly unmotivated dilation and its relative lack of control compared to the text that precedes it. It is worth pausing over this point. A large body of literary criticism has arisen to discover the obvious: that Franklin’s Autobiography is not a “whole” text, as nineteenth-century printings might suggest, but is, instead, an unfinished manuscript memoir never released into print by the author. Yet no sooner is this textual truth

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proclaimed than the Autobiography so often seems to put itself together again before our very eyes. Frequently it is as though the mere fact of stating that the Autobiography is flawed, incomplete, or fragmentary licenses the immediate disregard of the same. Two critics offer illustrative cases, not least because their work is robust enough to sustain the criticism. Christopher Looby’s influential analysis of the Autobiography is notable for its subtle and ingenious reading of the silences and gaps in the text, but it finally stitches together the autobiographical swatches with the thread of Franklin’s intention to achieve social unity, to heal the wounds of the Revolution and its shortcomings, through “the recuperation of paternal authority in a conciliatory style of discourse.”67 Betsy Erkilla’s discussion of Franklin’s revolutionary politics, too, finds the text’s missing cohesiveness in its author—in this case, in his very person, figured as a “revolutionary body,” which expresses a socially harmonizing “virtue” that, she argues, chafes against the classic Weberian picture of Franklin as ideal-typical bourgeois.68 Both Looby and Erkilla are representative critics in their assertion that the Autobiography is formally fragmented but thematically unified. That they arrive at opposing conclusions—Franklin as revolutionary versus Franklin as counterrevolutionary—speaks to the flexibility of thematic analysis, but the disparate results do not affect the procedures. What is lost on the level of form is found again on the level of meaning. Episodic control is integral to the obstinacy of Franklin’s project. If we analyze the Autobiography simply as an imperfect narrative, merely a fragment, we gloss over its quite successful manipulation of readers (or to put it in other terms, its aesthetic achievement). When episodic poetics is linked too quickly with fragmentation, we miss the extent to which episodic form is a powerful generator of narrative meaning. The concept of Bildung itself took its shape partly in relation to the episodic poetics that organizes Franklin’s Autobiography, and its emphasis on cultivating a self that is already fundamentally constituted resonates with Franklin’s narrative:  “Bildung required self-activity, self-development, and self-direction.”69 The Bildungsroman, or novel of formation, structurally echoes Franklin’s narrative form, presenting “the episode organized as an opportunity: as a satellite so rich in potentialities that the hero may well want to transform it into a kernel.”70 In a vast expanse of “background,” the hero of the Bildungsroman is able to subjectively constitute “experience” (a concept in which, as Franco Moretti is right to notice, modern culture was schooled by the episode). Life and narrative are spread before one as, in Barthes’s phrase, “areas of safety, rest, luxuries.”71 But if, as Barthes notes, cardinal functions (or kernels) cannot be deleted without altering the story, so too catalyzers (or satellites) cannot be expunged without transforming the discourse. What Moretti discerns is the extent to which the novel of formation is built upon the ability of the subject (the character-narrator of the Autobiography) to convert catalytic into cardinal functions (and, it is worth adding, vice versa). The Bildungsroman, in other words, makes the most of

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what Barthes saw as the complete meaningfulness of the literary text (“in differing degrees, everything in it signifies”): those inexpugnable moments of discursive rest are refunctionalized (though perhaps we should use a synchronic term) as integral to the formation of personality.72 The transformation may be seen as a weakening of narrative energy insofar as this very form, as we have seen, depends upon the exclusion of destabilizing narrative moments. For the late seventeenth-century autobiographer Francis Kirkman, the accumulation of seemingly limitless narrative digressions was the point of the story: “Narrative control” was, for him, “an ethical act, for it ensures that however much we wander, we will not err.”73 Stephen Burroughs, the American forger, counterfeiter, and memoirist, referred to the picaresque plot of his own life narrative (published between 1798 and 1811) as “the chain which has connected these events together” and explicitly related that chain to those that led him into error, “those chains of habit which education has forged.”74 Both writers orient themselves in relation to error, and we may, finally, find a similar circularity in Franklin’s Autobiography, in which even to err is not to err, provided one is in control of the narrative. The Franklin character-narrator’s capacity for configuration, like the late eighteenth-century logic of experience, enables any ex post facto choice to appear as the correct choice. In the Autobiography’s perverse teleology, Franklin is always and already—as the narrative’s frequent prolepses hint—at the end of the story. “Infinitely various are the incidents of one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity”75 —Aristotle was no doubt correct in his assertion, which encompasses, too, the social relationships and antagonisms that constitute those incidents; the persistent appeal of Franklin’s strange illusion of unity speaks to the unresolved question of what a “life” may be in an antagonistic society—and of what it might be capable of becoming in a world less determined by the inequalities that structure Franklin’s success. But to pursue the further exchange between unity and diversity in episodic poetics, we must turn to the novel.

{3}

The Fiction of Hesitation [W]‌hen syntax and punctuation relinquish the right to articulate and shape the facts, to critique them, language is getting ready to capitulate to what merely exists. —Theodor Adorno, “Punctuation Marks,” in Notes to Literature

My first two chapters have dealt with the market only in ideological terms. That is to say, the texts and situations I have treated so far were not substantially subject to the market. They argued for it, fought over it, helped integrate it into the very sense of self and sociality of their readers, but none of the texts before us—at least none of the texts I have examined with sustained attention—was produced primarily as a commodity within the market. With the novel, we are set upon the free sea of the marketplace from the start. In the 1790s, which will be my primary focus, we will not find, it is true, a fully mature literary market; the novels I examine are far from the perfect commodities of forty or fifty years later (to say nothing of our time). Indeed, I will argue in chapter 4 that the literary episode has a supremely limited life span as pure commodity in this period (though it was very pure indeed): only the year 1807–8 and only in the brilliant oddity of Salmagundi. But en route to that peculiar situation, we must confront the fact that fiction was partially (primitively, perhaps) commodified in this period and that the market determined at least part of what novels were capable of being. (If my approach to commodification here sounds tentative, so much the better: we need to recover a real sense of what it meant for literary texts to be imperfectly commodified in this period.) And the market looms largest, its pressure is most immediate, at precisely the moment when my book turns to the field of the literary as such:  away from the expressly political work of the ratification debate and some distance—institutionally, if not in spirit—from the interpellative heavy lifting of Franklin’s memoirs. By the 1790s, aesthetic judgments of narrative fiction meld with moralizing recommendations for (or against) purchase; and the recognition that a book has to prove itself to a readership that either will or will not keep it alive and circulating as an item for sale exerts real force on writers.1 And here we need to notice an additional difference between fiction and the two genres I have already discussed. The Federalist’s usurpation of the

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public discourse is usurpation because it is not based on popular assent: The people are invoked; they do not speak. Such is the nature of political polemic that seeks to secure hegemony. Franklin’s Autobiography establishes a position from which the reader may be absorbed into a market culture; its popularity is decidedly subordinate to (though, as I have argued, directly the result of) its ideological work. And perhaps that must be the case when life writing is called upon to serve as a model for emulation—when, that is, social conditions force a new paradigm of narrative self-conception onto the scene, enticing readers to rechart the path of “a life.” In those circumstances, life writing is a form that lends itself to compression, remediation, and recirculation. But fiction is popular, when it is popular, primarily because it sells. The range of democratic reading practices I consider in this chapter appears here because these practices are admitted, even encouraged, by the market for literature. There may be an irony in the fact that the adjective democratic appears in this book only in such close proximity to the substantive market.2 But again, the (literary) market reveals itself above all in aesthetic terms. In the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century this meant, among other things, the amplification and adjustment of existing literary values. So on May 13, 1807, The Literary Tablet, of Hanover, New Hampshire, reprinted Alexander Pope’s “Receipt to Make an Epic Poem.” Pope’s enduring joke, written in 1727, turned the genre of the kitchen recipe into an attack on Grub Street scribblers, and it is itself an assault waged from the position of an elevated culture sharply aware of the promise—and the threat—of the market. Imagining Homer as hack is, after all, the source of its satire. Any narrative will provide a suitable subject for a ready-made epic, the recipe insists, but it must be organized around a single hero. What to do with what escapes this organization? Turn it into an episode: “Take any remaining adventure of your former collection, in which you could no way involve your hero: or any unfortunate accident, that was too good to be thrown away; and it will be of use, applied to any other person, who may be lost and evaporate in the course of the work, without the least damage to the composition.”3 Behind the joke lies a persistent aesthetic truism. Episodes are integral to any narrative, and yet they always press outward to trouble the shapeliness of plot. If the excess of the supplementary episode is to be enveloped within the strictly coherent “course of the work,” it can only be through evaporation. The unfortunate accident that was too good to be thrown away is, in fact, thrown away even as it is thrown up in front of the reader. James Butler expresses the friction between the two modes of reading entailed in this division—one that sees the episodic as fatal to narrative unity, another that finds episodes to be always integral because contiguous—in the apologetic preface to his 1797 novel Fortune’s Foot-ball; or, The Adventures of Mercutio: “’Tis true, I have introduced some persons and incidents which appear to be unconnected with the foundation of the story; yet, it will be found, that were any of these withdrawn, the chain of events would be broken, and the

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congruity of the piece destroyed.”4 We will return to the apparent paradox of this recipe, its insistence on the easy ephemerality of the episode. The pervasiveness of the episodic plot in the fiction of the early republic is striking. Remove pages 95 through 125 of volume 2 of novel X, and the reader may not even notice: Such an excision will damage the syntax of the novel (Butler’s “congruity”), but it will do little to affect a reader’s paradigmatic understanding of the text’s meaning. Syntax is what evaporates when a text is distilled into its meaning or summarized through its themes. Or so at least we have been taught— to return to the terms with which I began this book—by the traditional reading of the episodic plot, which takes seriously only one side of Aristotle’s dichotomy. But when it becomes possible to excise virtually whole novels and then to excise virtually the whole of a country’s prose-narrative product over several decades— when, in other words, the episodic itself bears so heavily on a cultural field of production—then we need to think about the meaning of the structure itself.5 The meaning of that structure is integral with the broadly generic terms through which it is articulated. Domestically produced fiction, and the nascent culture of magazines and criticism that emerges with it, is a phenomenon of the 1790s.6 For the history of the novel as a genre, then, the stakes of my argument about episodic poetics in the early republic are substantial: episodic poetics helps us to understand not only why this form of fiction took shape (and why fiction took this shape) in the period but also why literary fiction emerged at all as an American product at this moment. Again, one of the virtues of a microstructural or subgeneric literary history and theory told through the episode is that it enables us to recast literary genres in terms of their interrelationships, along the axis of the subgeneric unit; and sometimes it is the configuration of the units (rather than the genre as such) that produces a hegemonic fantasy solution to real social contradictions. To provide a picture of the shapes and functions of the episode within literary fiction, this chapter follows three modes of inquiry: first, an examination of contemporary literary theories of the episode and their relationship to styles of reading; second, a synoptic account of two novels—Susanna Rowson’s Trials of the Human Heart and the anonymous History of Constantius and Pulchera—that exemplify the combination of adventure and didacticism in the period’s peripatetic plots; and finally, a closer, more sustained analysis of Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond, which draws out the way episodic poetics functions not only at the level of plot but also—and in this case, perhaps more tellingly—at the level of novelistic discourse.

Reading the Episode in the Novel The place to start, since it was the place that so many late eighteenth-century readers started (if only by proxy), is back with Aristotle himself. Recall that

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the Poetics tells us that episodes in drama (in other words, acts) must each be integral to the overall structure: if one can remove an episode without “disjointing” or “disturbing” the whole, then one had better rethink one’s story. Poets who compose episodically distend plot: “[T]‌hey stretch the plot beyond its capacity and are often forced to break the natural continuity.” Yet, as we have already seen, there is another side to the episode in the Poetics: it is the episode as the enrichment of the text. In epic, the digressive episode “diversifies” the poem and “relieves” the story with “variety,” helping to preclude the “satiety” of the reader.7 Both Lord Kames and Hugh Blair, authors of the most widely read rhetorics of the period, reconstruct an essentially Aristotelian argument about the episode, but they lean their weight on the latter portion, on the episode’s reader-relief work in epic. Kames, whose 1762 Elements of Criticism set the agenda for elite literary criticism and reading alike, assigns the episode a place subsidiary to plot itself (which he calls “principle action”); and he specifically emphasizes the episode’s quasi-cathartic function: an episode secures the reader’s relationship with the text while suspending the narrative line.8 Indeed, the episode secures the reader’s relationship with the text by suspending narrative line. Steady attention is the result of carefully deployed distraction: fed enough variety on the page, the reader shall have no reason to look up. Kames refigures formal distention as spatio-narrative displacement: movement within the story (Pope’s remaining adventures and unfortunate accidents) replaces (the reader’s) movement away from the story. Blair even suggests that the episode itself may be the measure of the writer’s art. As a “professed embellishment,” the episode is the place where writers “put forth their strength.”9 In this case, the episode becomes a kind of jewel, a moment that, in its very smallness, provides the writer with an occasion to prove skill:  a textual detail that exceeds its limited, functional role through its tendency to represent the full capability of the artist.10 And for a student of Kames, this makes sense: Kames’s point is that the elsewhere of the narrative episode is nonfunctional for the plot but integral to what we would call the phatic function of the text—that is, to keeping the reader reading.11 Blair extends Kames’s ethics of variety into an aesthetics of captivation. Roland Barthes’s fundamental narratological distinction between cardinal and catalytic functions resonates with the Kamesian paradigm. Everything in narrative signifies, writes Barthes, even if its function within the plot seems trivial: “This is not a matter of art (on the part of the narrator), but of structure; in the realm of discourse, what is noted is by definition notable. [. . .] [O]‌ne could say that art is without noise (as the term is employed in information theory): art is a system which is pure, no unit ever goes wasted, however long, however loose, however tenuous may be the thread connecting it to one of the levels of the story.”12 Barthes’s is an argument for the comprehension of detail; all elements function structurally to create meaning. His discussion applies

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equally well on the scale of episodes in the novel. Moments may appear immaterial or inconvenient to interpretation, and yet they contribute meaning. In Barthes’s structuralist terms, catalyzers are details that function as expansions, dilations. Narrative nuclei, cardinal functions that “inaugurate or conclude an uncertainty,” are the bare minimum of a narrative and suffice in themselves. But Barthes notes that catalyzers have a constant phatic function: they maintain contact between the narrator and reader. At this point, we have traveled quite far from the simple denigration of the episodic, and when Kames and Blair unfold Aristotle’s ancillary argument, the outlines of a proper literary-historical question come clear. Episodes mark the formal divide between key categories, yes: between an aesthetics of order and one of variety, between the consolidation of narrative line and the free rein of complexity, between shape and distention, between one story and the many stories it may contain. This seems to be a fact of narrative structure, a trans­ historical matter of stories and their shapes. But the structural fact gathers historical weight when we recognize that a culture that prizes the episode as such is above all embracing the narrative device par excellence of ambivalence and compromise, the unit of meaning situated on the formal threshold between autonomy and absorption. This is the very power of episodic poetics as we have seen it instantiated in The Federalist and in Franklin’s Autobiography. For all of the violence done in those texts to the many, they both rely for their persuasive power on a settlement with the many: In both cases the one only emerges out of the many, and in both cases the ideological work is done through the control of the precise form that such a consolidation takes. In the case of narrative fiction, episodic form was eminently accommodating to both of the opposing poles of reading in the period: sustained, absorptive reading and a quick dip into the commodified short-narrative serial format. So, first, reading itself. With the U.S. instantiation of what Rolf Engelsing called the “reading revolution” of the turn of the nineteenth century, a new field of extensive reading took shape, in which readers acquired or borrowed (from lending libraries) new texts. The range of reading practices and the effectiveness of the episode as a flexible object for narrative engagement within this culture are indicated in William Gilmore’s conclusion that such new texts “were read entire or in part, either all at once or in several readings over a relatively short period of time.”13 The chapter itself, as the most common means of organizing a book of narrative fiction, belongs to this period. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there emerges a myth of continuous reading: normative reading goes from page 1 to page 2, from chapter 1 to chapter 2. What Barthes called the “readerly” text is an artifact of this period, a historically specific mode of textual engagement. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many novels were printed without chapters: Defoe’s novels are the most prominent examples (another, late example is The History of Constantius and Pulchera, to which we will turn in a moment). The chapter

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enables discontinuous reading: Interruption is built into the technology of the nineteenth-century novel, but so is a certain indexical quality.14 A reader can refer back to preceding chapters or jump ahead—especially when short summaries are provided as chapter heads (or, compressed even further, as titles), as they so often were. Novels without chapters, by contrast, resisted discontinuity. Rebecca Connor has called this the “deterministic” character of the narratives:  Crusoe, Moll, Roxana, and the rest insist that there is no clearly demarcated ending of the episodes that constitute their narratives.15 Yet, at the same time, nobody read (or, for that matter, reads) Defoe’s works in a single sitting. Places had to be marked. And certainly marks could be made in the books themselves to keep track of the plot:  to cut up the text for indexical purposes. It is accurate, in other words, to speak of a “writerly” production of episodes on the part of the reader. Opening up Barthes’s distinction between the readerly and writerly in S/Z, we may say, with historians of the book, that reading always takes place “between constraint and invention.”16 As a formal device, a unit of narration, the episode persists across this transitional period in the history of reading (and of literary production): at once both the residue of the archaic form of the romance (or the epic) and a reminder that the path to the nineteenth-century realist novel is as meandering and recursive as the plots of its wildly emplotted forebears.

Adventure and Didacticism Yet, if the episode as a formal device sustains such intimate links with practices of reading in the eighteenth century, literary critics today tend to assume, with a bias that grows from the uneasy marriage of classical and modernist aesthetics, that there is something primitive, something crude, about episodic plots. If it were possible to argue otherwise for the most radically episodic narratives, my discussion of the novel in the early United States would be the occasion for it. But no: what I will eventually refer to as the iterable aspect of the episodic was compelling to readers in the early republic. Henri Petter notes that the apparent variety (think of that epic quasi-catharsis) of early U.S. novels may be misleading:  plots that at first look “inventive, even wildly so,” are in fact merely “new combinations of old and familiar elements.”17 Petter’s misaligned assumption that literary history is most interesting when most “new” or unfamiliar helps us to see precisely what it cannot name: that there is something intrinsically interesting in the recombinations he identifies. What is it that makes the repetition of narrative topoi, the reorganization of essential story elements and motifs, the busy but uncannily immobile variety of adventure, so appealing to early U.S. readers? My first two cases meld adventure and didacticism. The History of Constantius and Pulchera was first published anonymously and serially in

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Boston in 1789, in the Gentlemen and Ladies Town and Country Magazine, and then regularly reprinted in book form into the first third of the nineteenth century. Susanna Rowson’s Trials of the Human Heart was printed in four volumes in Philadelphia in 1795. I have already noted that episodic form may operate according to a logic of compromise or ambivalence. In these novels, we might say that the compromise amounts to not having to choose between change and stasis. The world happens to the weak protagonists of these novels, and each in its way ends with restoration. That restoration, however, is somewhat different than merely the necessary return to equilibrium after the travail of what D.  A. Miller would call “the narratable.”18 We are dealing here instead with something like hypernarrativity. It is almost as though the series of events that crowd the stories could not have happened at all. We are close, in these texts, to Bakhtin’s description of adventure-time: based on chance, adventure-time “leaves no defining traces.”19 Defining is, of course, the telling word: The traces of adventure do not themselves add up to anything; they cannot mean except in aggregate, and even then only through severe reduction under a thematic rubric. In adventure-time, the narrative injunction to properly select material and to order it into meaning is subordinated to procedures of combination.20 “An event,” to put it in Jurij Lotman’s terms, “is that which did occur, though it could also not have occurred. The less probability that a given event will take place (i.e. the greater the information conveyed by the message concerning the event), the higher the rank of that event on the plot scale.” Following Lotman and Bakhtin, we may say that a lot happens in these novels, but not too much matters: defining traces are sparse. “A plot,” writes Lotman, “is organically related to a world picture which provides the scale for determining what constitutes an event and what constitutes a variant of that event communicating nothing new to us.”21 A  world picture is such, according to Lotman, precisely because it provides the scale for distinguishing between more and less important events. A world picture is such because it converts events into episodes. In these terms, the two novels before us present a question of scale, and the best way to convey the erasure of priority in these narratives is, first, to summarize them. In Constantius and Pulchera, which is set during the American Revolution, the adventures begin when Pulchera’s gentleman-farmer father changes his mind, forbids her marriage to Constantius (who was once her father’s favored suitor), and instead arranges her betrothal to the French aristocrat Le Monte. There follow an escape, a battle, a separation of the lovers, a sea journey, a chance reunion of the lovers, a duel, a tempest, a separation of the lovers, a shipwreck, privateers, a disguise (in which Pulchera becomes the sea lieutenant Valorus), a sea battle, an imprisonment, an escape, a shipwreck, a Crusoe-inspired set piece upon a desert island, the specter of cannibalism, a rescue, a chance reunion of the lovers (but for the disguise: Pulchera is still Valorus), a test of a lover’s fidelity, a true identity revealed (and no questions

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asked), and—finally—a return to the father in Philadelphia, who blesses (and, more to the point, agrees to underwrite) the union of Constantius and Pulchera. At fewer than fifteen thousand words, the novel is an efficient eighteenth-century narrative-topos generator.22 Trials of the Human Heart is an altogether more serious affair. The novel mainly comprises letters from our heroine, Meriel Howard, to her friend in a French convent. Whereas Pulchera proffers the spectacle of the beautiful soul as shapeshifter, triumphing in her travels through an unjust world by fitting her outward self to the challenge, Trials of the Human Heart narrates the repeated clash between the beautiful soul and a fallen world. Meriel does not change shape; she does not accommodate the situations into which she is thrown by chance—a seducing stepfather, a lost fiancé, an endless train of beloved but dying protectors, countless betrayals and thefts and financial disasters, a confusion of false and hidden names, and the untimely death of her own daughter, all delivered across a range of locations in and around London and Paris. Instead, she simply resists, in fine illustration of the novel’s epigraph: “The soul secured in her existence, smiles,/At the drawn dagger and defies its point.” Like Constantius and Pulchera, Trials of the Human Heart ends in restoration. Meriel’s true parents are in fact alive and well, her once-fiancé’s wife dies (thus opening the way for The Marriage That Should Have Been), Meriel’s fortune is restored (indeed, we learn that it was never lost), and she marries her beloved Kingly. The recurring drama of the novel is Meriel’s oscillation between an annual income and being forced to live, as she says, “by the fruits of my own industry.”23 While the plot returns us to page 1, we might say that Meriel’s character never leaves it: the trials of the human heart teach us that the human heart never changes. And so Meriel’s friend Amelia writes of her: “Her fortitude has ever been conspicuous, it has sustained her under some of the heaviest trials to which the human heart is incident. [. . .] I am fully sensible how much the human heart is capable of, it is tempered by a great, an all wise Being, who will never inflict trials beyond our power to support.”24 Here, then, is the novel as saint’s life. But the kind of inward formal turn that we would typically align with the mélange of the virtuous example and the novel, namely, Richardson’s innovations a half-century earlier in Pamela and Clarissa, which dominated the world of narrative prose in anglophone America, differs in an essential respect.25 Pamela and Clarissa organize the spatial dispersion of the picaresque and funnel its energy toward social mobility and subjective development. As Thomas Pavel has pointed out, spatial displacement corresponds to “social” fixity in the adventure or picaresque; in Pamela, spatial fixity structures the development of social relations: social mobility replaces spatial movement.26 But the social and subjective development that we arguably find in Pamela (and in Clarissa) is absent from Trials of the Human Heart. The genitive grammar of the title announces as much: this will be the “Trials of the Human Heart,” not the properly predicative “Virtue

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Rewarded.” Trials is not as far removed from the peripatetic world of Pulchera as might at first appear.27 Indeed, more like Richardson’s edited version of Clarissa than the actual novel, the episodes of Trials of the Human Heart are occasions for the oracle of virtue to speak her epigrams. In the copy that I first read (which was originally owned by a circulating library in Salem, Massachusetts), readers had generally marked the fortune cookie moments, such as “The severest reflections lose their force, when we can listen to them with good humour, and return an answer with a smile.”28 The novel’s didacticism is, strictly speaking, separable from its narrative form: all the tests of virtue do is confirm the virtue that was evident at the start. When the question of narrative enters, it unsettles easy moralizing. Late eighteenth-century parenting manuals, inspired by Locke and Rousseau, recommended the use of stories to teach children virtue. Narrative, the argument went, spurs curiosity, and a yarn-spinning parent can gratify curiosity and tie things up with a moral, too. As Enos Hitchcock’s quasi-novel-cum-parenting manual Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family put it, “[A]‌s long as curiosity is gratified [. . .] the heart will be beguiled to virtue.”29 And yet, some contemporary readers noted the problem with piecemeal narration in Hitchcock, bearing down on how didactic narrative may produce pleasure without achieving its educational aims. In a review of the book in December 1790 (a review that was itself serialized between July and December of that year), the Massachusetts Magazine expressed the problem in terms that underscore the contradiction of episodic didacticism—namely, that the parts may not add up to the whole for readers accustomed to thinking in episodes due to the habits of “pernicious reading”: “Take the volumes before us, in detached parts, as containing excellent lessons upon the relative and social duties, they have great merit. Unite the whole together, as one complete system, without a break in any link, and there is something of the Utopian kind, that will not be extremely easy to introduce amid the great and the vulgar.”30 Part of the discomfort we see in the reviewer for the Massachusetts Magazine may be provoked by the all-too-easy assimilation of novelistic didacticism to a much more established tradition:  scriptural reading. Trials and The Bloomsgrove Family follow the logic of the biblical episode as a normative poetics. Long before the 1790s, the indexical possibilities of the biblical codex (the tacking back and forth among verses, books, chapters, testaments) opened the way for an episodic style of reading. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Bible remained the most commonly read book in the United States, and reading practices dovetailed quite congenially with absorption in secular forms.31 A significant hinge between the two was the religious or moral tract. Hannah More’s Cheap Repository pioneered this field of print production, effectively making the biblical episode, however renarrated and repurposed, into a portable, pamphlet-sized materialization of chapter-and-verse

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citation. The extensive reading revolution of the eighteenth century, emblematized by what has been termed the Pamela “media event,” probably provoked the philosopher J. G. Fichte to remark on the narcotic attractions of reading.32 More herself designed the Repository to be an antidote to anything, printed or otherwise, that would either lull the masses into less-than-industrious pleasure or inspire them to carry the banner of universal fraternité. Yet these counterrevolutionary morsels, first printed in London between 1795 and 1798, became quite popular, were reprinted in Philadelphia in 1800, and soon gave rise to an American variety of tract literature (exemplified in the English, German, and Spanish pamphlets of the American Tract Society).33 The didactic subgenre of the novel under examination here, typified by Trials and Constantius, is consonant, in terms of both narrative form and evident sociopolitical ambition, with the tract enterprise. But again, morality establishes the general atmosphere for literary commodities in this period. Hannah More’s tracts brought the protocols of biblical reading into the age of mass publication. But the trouble for moralizing reviewers of novels—perhaps especially didactic novels—was that the episodic style of reading would wash back into the biblical mode. What if readers were in fact reading their scripture as if it were merely one more episodic fiction? The iterable quality of these episodic narratives, their indifference to the meaning that might be invested in the order of or the linkages between episodes, revealed their increasing subordination to the market. Or to put it more crisply, episodic fiction began to give literary shape to the market. As a result, perhaps the best word for this type of crude plotting at the turn of the nineteenth century, following some speculations by Malcolm Bull, is commodified. For Bull, two cultures of capitalism are discernible: a classical culture, committed to mimesis, and a commodity culture, committed to self-reproducibility over representation, to indexicality over iconicity. Commodity culture as such achieves its full flower only at the turn of the twentieth century, but its outlines are clearly legible by the middle of the eighteenth century, not least in the negative form of reaction by a text like Pope’s Dunciad. Neither Trials nor Constantius appears to have been, as it were, written to the market, but the point vis-à-vis Bull is how these novels assume the commodity shape nevertheless. Iterable form is on its way up.34 If the optimal site for such reading was the home, it is fair to say that both Constantius and Pulchera and Trials of the Human Heart bring home along with them in their adventures. Meriel’s safe home is ruined, replaced by sundry poor imitations, and finally restored (when we learn that home was not ruined at all). Pulchera’s Atlantic travels terminate at home, safe on the farm outside Philadelphia, where she and Constantius, as the narrator tells us, “now live the greatest ornaments of the married state.”35 Such a return to “home” has an overt (thematic) political register, too, in Trials, which closes with Meriel’s invitation to her friend in the French convent:  “My husband bids me say,

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should the commotions which at present agitate the Gallic shore, disturb you in your religious retreat; remember, you have a home, to which you can commence repair—a home, where you will be received with transport, and where you may consider yourself in the mansion of a sister!”36 This letter is signed by the newly married Meriel Kingly. Anglo-American culture at the turn of the nineteenth century notoriously fetishized young women—mind and body, or as Mary Wollstonecraft would have pointed out, mind as body—and obsessively policed their reading practices; but the episodic form of these two texts is reiterated within multiple genres in the period. Both Trials and Constantius cultivated audiences across gender lines. Rowson’s works were read and reviewed by the very critics (most famously, William Cobbett) who did much of the policing,37 and Constantius was first published serially in the Gentlemen and Ladies Town and Country Magazine, among the pages of which there was no overt gendered division of content. John Adams, the monthly’s most prominent and patrician subscriber, may very well have read the novel in serial parts. And this itself should not be cause for surprise: Adams was, after all, the one who, in commenting on Democratic-Republican popularity, said that “the People are Clarissa.” Even in rural New England, far from Adams’s Boston, “private libraries were truly family libraries,” as the spread of literacy and the circulation of printed matter eroded distinctions between women’s and men’s reading: “Less and less was the substance of printed matter read and retained likely to differ according to gender.”38 The cross-gender reading habits I am pointing to here edge us away from the view that novels (especially Constantius and Pulchera) were mainly the fare of young women.39 In this regard, it is worth underlining the point that to “decide in advance of detailed research that women’s reading was narrowly restricted is too eagerly to believe the rhetoric of the cult of domesticity.”40 These narratives employ the tropes and topoi of domesticity and femininity, but it does not immediately follow that women actually constituted the sole audience for the texts. The history of reading is as complex and contradictory in terms of gender as it is in terms of class; one of the functions of the episode in this novelistic literature is precisely to organize readers into a contradictory unity across the fractures of gender and class.41 On the one hand, for example, a small-format copy of The History of Constantius and Pulchera in wooden boards includes the dedication “To the Young Ladies of Columbia” (the same one that was included in various other novels around the same time, including, most famously, William Hill Brown’s 1789 Power of Sympathy). This copy is replete with marginal comments that veritably swoon along with the narrative: “She loves him,” “Die for love,” “Love/Love/Love/Love/curse the Father,” “O how she loves him.”42 On the other hand, we should take seriously, mutatis mutandis, the argument that the formation of an elite and sufficiently cohesive national culture “from disparate regional cultures” (and, we may add, class cultures) “still took precedence over constructions of gender, accommodating

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the participation of women writers in forging [. . .] the nation’s political imaginary.”43 The young woman who filled the blank space in her book with repetitions of “love” found a stability in that episodic tale that is not so far from the stasis of the postrevolutionary “home” that the culottes-clad Boston merchant or lawyer would have welcomed in both Constantius and Trials. Each may have been reading for a different thematic pleasure, but the form of that pleasure— the iterable repetition of adventure within stasis, of stasis through adventure— was the same.

Incipits and the Incitement to Reading: From Clarissa to Constantia What does episodic poetics look like when we shift our focus from narrative structure to the texture of narrative prose? Does the Kamesian phatic function still dominate? And can we identify a specific relationship between episodic structure and the syntax of novelistic speech, what Bakhtin called “its basic social tone”?44 The obvious candidate for such a treatment is Charles Brockden Brown, so it is curious that, despite the abundant attention literary criticism has paid to Brown, critics rarely discuss what would appear to be the most distinctive feature of the writing: namely, the language of novelistic discourse.45 Ormond; or, The Secret Witness condenses the main characteristics of Brown’s fiction into a single work: extreme dilation in the representation of both narrative events and characters’ consciousness, and the combination of apparently haphazard storytelling with orderly thematic architecture. Students of early U.S. literature know Brown’s distended plots all too well, and we have become accustomed to sharp critical discussions of the political implications of Brown’s themes.46 For example, Julia Stern, among the most thorough close readers of the novels, emphasizes with great astuteness Brown’s attraction to assuming the “female voice” and produces powerful analyses from this initial observation. Yet Stern explores the richness of Brown’s interest in the dynamics of a female narrator by underplaying her key move: Stern isolates the novel’s discourse as discourse but then seems to proceed as though the productive work of identifying and analyzing its gendered form (“female voice”) satisfied all questions about that form.47 I will return at the close of this chapter to the question of gender as it structures the novel. But my primary task in what follows will be to explore the episodic dynamics of Ormond as they take shape in the relation between story and discourse. I want to focus, throughout, on the novel’s peculiar narrative language, a style of speech that operates as a continual incitement to further narration:  that is, to invoke a phrase I  used at the opening of this book, a narrative discourse caught in determinate ways between the one story it aims to tell and the many other stories that it incessantly generates along the way. To turn to the language of

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Brown’s novels, to attend to questions of plotting and narrative structure, is, I want to suggest, not to retreat from the political reading of Brown’s work to the solipsism of sheer text but, rather, to engage deeply with the politics of the novel’s form. To establish the coordinates of a reading of narrative incitement in Ormond, we need to consider the question of beginnings, one so essential to Brown’s style. “To write a romance is a task too great for the powers of man, and under which he must be expected to totter. No man can hold the rod so even, but that it will tremble and vary from its course”48 —William Godwin’s commentary on fiction in his essay “Of History and Romance” would seem to have been more influential on Brown, his most devoted American emulator, than even Caleb Williams itself, condensing as it does a theory of plotting as a kind of imperfection.49 Bowed by the demands of invention, the romancer wavers; the pattern of imperfection is story.50 And the pattern of imperfection is established by the novels’ openings. Compare the incipits of three Brown novels—Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798), Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), and Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (1799): Wieland: I feel little reluctance in complying with your request. You know not fully the cause of my sorrows. You are a stranger to the depth of my distresses. Hence your efforts at consolation must necessarily fail. Yet the tale that I am going to tell is not intended as a claim upon your sympathy. In the midst of my despair, I do not disdain to contribute what little I can to the benefit of mankind. I acknowledge your right to be informed of the events that have lately happened in my family. Make what use of the tale you shall think proper. If it be communicated to the world, it will inculcate the duty of avoiding deceit. It will exemplify the force of early impressions, and show, the immeasurable evils that flow from an erroneous or imperfect discipline.51 Edgar Huntly: I sit down, my friend, to comply with thy request. At length does the impetuosity of my fears, the transports of my wonder permit me to recollect my promise and perform it. At length am I somewhat delivered from suspence and from tremors. At length the drama is brought to an imperfect close, and the series of events, that absorbed my faculties, that hurried away my attention, has terminated in repose.52 Ormond: TO I. E. ROSENBERG You are anxious to obtain some knowledge of the history of Constantia Dudley. I am well acquainted with your motives, and allow that they justify your curiosity. I am willing, to the utmost of my power, to comply with your request, and will now dedicate what leisure I  have to the composition of her story.

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My narrative will have little of that merit which flows from unity of design. You are desirous of hearing an authentic, and not a fictitious, tale. It will, therefore, be my duty to relate events in no artificial or elaborate order, and without that harmonious congruity and luminous amplification which might justly be displayed in a tale flowing merely from invention. It will be little more than a biographical sketch, in which the facts are distributed and amplified, not as a poetical taste would prescribe, but as the materials afforded me, sometimes abundant and sometimes scanty, would permit.53

We might start with the observation that the original combustion motoring these novels is information withheld. Employing the epistolary response, Brown produces a readerly desire to know, whether that desire is instantiated in any particular reader or not. Brown’s technique differs from Richardson’s canonical opening in Clarissa (a major influence), which takes the form of an initial request. Compare Brown’s openings with Anna Howe’s initial letter to Clarissa Harlowe: I am extremely concerned, my dearest friend, for the disturbances that have happened in your family. I know how it must hurt you to become the subject of the public talk; and yet upon an occasion so generally known it is impossible but that whatever relates to a young lady, whose distinguished merits have made her the public care, should engage everybody’s attention. I long to have the particulars from yourself, and of the usage I am told you receive upon an accident you could not help and in which, as far as I can learn, the sufferer was the aggressor.54

This paragraph is followed by a piecemeal account of the “rencounter” between Lovelace and Clarissa’s brother. In Richardson’s novel, the first letter withholds—and only for a paragraph—the basic information about one question, “the disturbances that have happened in your family.” That single question unfolds at length; but the central players and the basic elements of the story are onstage from the get-go: Lovelace and Clarissa, the vicissitudes of trying to “raise” a bourgeois family, a conflict between residual forms of honor (Lovelace) and emerging status (Solmes, perhaps, and certainly the Harlowe family), and so on. The obscurity of Brown’s openings comes from their refusal to isolate any event or even sequence of events.55 The closest we come is Ormond’s delimitation of its subject matter to “the history of Constantia Dudley.” Brown begins with a virtually limitless field for the production of text, whereas even Richardson—Clarissa is by far the longest novel in English—tethers his discourse production from the start to a defined collection of events. Even so, Richardson’s didactic aims in Clarissa were confronted, almost immediately, both by a narrative tendency to distract attention away from the intended moral exempla (e.g., toward Lovelace rather than Clarissa herself) and by

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the simple enormity of the text, which invited (even as it resisted) fascination with the countless hinted-at-but-untold stories comprised by what we might call the partially represented social field of the central narratives (the referent of what Anna Howe calls the “public care”). Yet it is precisely the failed effort at a streamlined structure that makes Richardson’s such a potent model for novelistic narrative in, as we have seen, Rowson’s Trials of the Human Heart; in that novel, the centripetal force of didacticism and the centrifugal tendency of the picaresque operate as two sides of the same episodic coin. With Brown, only the traces of this model remain.56 And the most significant trace points precisely to the “trace” itself as a spur to readerly desire. Alexander Nemerov has suggested that Arthur Mervyn instructs readers in a whole framework for reading. Brown, in “making the story itself the revelation of a secret [. . . ,] represents the very act of reading as a form of intrusive curiosity. With each staging of silence, the novel creates a [. . .] desire in the reader to have the inscrutable character or situation made clear in a stream of satisfying revelations.”57 And so Constantia Dudley’s feeling in Ormond becomes a key to the overall public culture of the early republic:  “What knowledge was imparted, instead of appeasing, only tended to inflame, her curiosity” (180).58

Against the Episode: Morality and Form in the Literary Market Brown’s withholding opposes what was sometimes recognized as the tendency of novels to reveal everything at the start. In “Hints on Reading” published in the Lady’s Magazine in 1793, readers are told that they should resist the urge to begin reading a novel with the last volume for two reasons. First, it is “unfair” to the author; second, it is unnecessary “because in most modern novels you will discover the whole plot in the first two or three chapters, so communicative are those authors that they cannot even keep their own secret.”59 Nothing could be further from the logic of a Charles Brockden Brown novel. Brown, as Alexander Cowie wrote in a comment that remains surprisingly current for many readers, “lacked ballast: when he soared into the higher reaches of the imagination, there was no assurance that he would reach a definitive object—if indeed he possessed one.”60 You do not, in other words, get it all at the beginning. If we attempt to extract an aesthetic position from Cowie’s response to these novels, it may be that what I have called Brown’s withholding operates as a way of reserving narrative options. In the opening passages I have quoted, withholding is another word for possibility: a combination of emotionally calibrated language and allusions to events. To employ a metaphor that conveys the ambivalent nature of these narratives, we may say that the storehouse of narrative is fully stocked, if lacking an inventory, at the start of Brown’s novels. We find limitless narrative potential, then, but also a peculiar desire not to

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develop that potential but, rather, to store it up. Brown’s narratives seem, above all, to try to keep the spring coiled, even to wind it tighter. Why? A reviewer for the Weekly Museum in 1801, reading Ormond alongside Wieland, expressed some ambivalence about Brown’s centrifugal story, noting that while the book was “inferior in the regularity of the plot and the coherence of its parts,” it “abound[ed] with a greater variety of characters and incidents [than Wieland].” This cloven response immediately assumes a now-familiar ethico-aesthetic tone:  “Though rigid critics may discover some faults in the structure and management of the story, the generality of readers, whose tastes are not wholly depraved by gothic romances, will find much amusement and instruction in the perusal of this volume.”61 Here we see that recurring division of thought on episodic poetics, between the pleasures of narrative diversity and the order of narrative line. But whereas the author of “Hints on Reading” criticized a tendency of writers to overly consolidate their stories, giving away all the good stuff at the start, the Weekly Museum emphasizes the diffractional quality of the episodic (the incoherence of the novel’s parts, the faulty structure and management of the story). Understood in this light, the denigration of Gothic-romance readers, which might otherwise strike us as merely pro forma dismissal of the nondidactic novel, typical of American periodicals even in the first decade of the century, takes on a certain literary-critical seriousness. Narrative diversity, not the novel tout court, is essential to the problem: the “Gothic romancer” marches along his wandering route, mustering a sorry lot of depraved readers who are all too eager to follow. If the wavering line of error is essential to Godwinian plotting, it is here understood to be sinister: the maze of error destroys good taste. And taste, as the coupling of “amusement and instruction” indicates, is a matter of morality. The reader whose sense of how to be amused has been eroded by Gothic plotting will have uncoupled this pair: The episodic plot, the novel whose “management” fails to achieve sufficient “coherence of its parts,” will only satisfy that reader’s depravity; the specifically instructive function of the book will be lost. It is all, for this reviewer, a matter of degrees, of sufficient management of the parts. Brown does not count here as an errant Gothic romancer—only the “rigid critic” would say so. There is pleasure to be had in Ormond, and good morality too. The episodicity of the book will in fact contribute to the didactic dimension—“the heart,” as we have already heard Enos Hitchcock promise, “will be beguiled to virtue.” But it also risks missing the mark. And finding this balance between narrative dispersion and ethical charge (between, in another register, telling it all in three chapters and telling too much in two volumes) appears to be a tricky matter in the novel market of 1800. A clash of narrative-aesthetic values is beginning to take shape in the Weekly Museum. For the first time in the United States, a desire for a whole and coherent narrative is challenging the episodic norm of the novel. True

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enough, the review itself only hints at the conflict; it will be a long time before critics decide that “some faults in the structure and management of the story” indicate actual insanity in the author (a verdict that landed hard on Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities in 1852), but it is exactly the quantitative nature of the Weekly Museum’s ambivalence that marks off a new mode of aesthetic engagement. Episodic is fine, but too episodic is simply too much. Strangely, the trouble with episodic form here is that too much is also always too little. I  suggested above that Brown’s novels begin fully stocked though lacking an inventory; the reviewer for the Weekly Museum expresses suspicion that the situation may be precisely the opposite: a novelistic inventory without any credit toward the store of goods. Equally indicative of such tentative shifts in a new direction is the way the reviewer abjects what we might call bad episodicity by foisting its burden onto a particular readership (of the Gothic novel). An articulate aesthetics and epistemology of totality, or of the organic whole, are not to hand in the United States in 1801; Ormond evidently provides the occasion for this reviewer to search, however gropingly, for related terms to convey such already half-formulated concepts.62 We see here a deepening of the division Bull suggests between the classical and commodity forms of aesthetic production in capitalist culture. A certain literary-critical commitment to formal mimesis (to what Bull calls the classical tradition) could prevent us from registering these incremental changes, insofar as commodity culture in this period is still only beginning to diverge from classical culture: predisposed to read in terms of the classical culture, literary criticism may falter in recognizing early gestures toward its historical antagonist. But sensitivity to moments in which the division between “high” and “low” is marked out or enacted—as in the Weekly Museum’s categorization of readers—helps us see developments in the classical/commodity relationship. (We will see the momentary, and prescient, collapse of episodic into commodity form a few years later in Salmagundi.) In the Weekly Museum’s review of Ormond we see the dialectical development of the pair: as commodified literary forms seize the field, the negative definition of the classical intensifies— even, as here, in terms of the work’s division against itself.63 Such a division between high and low was apparent elsewhere, in, for example, the separation between the Connecticut Wits, to whose “literary eyes America appeared a polity of organic community, sacrifice to the common good, and deference to paternal social leadership,” and “literary entrepreneurs” such as Mason Locke Weems.64 Weems is perhaps the perfect counterpoint to elite New England literature, as his Life of Washington both built on and helped to liquidate the combination of deference and republicanism celebrated by the Wits. It is, furthermore, an exemplary version of the episodic text as both commodity and instrument of nationalist fantasy:  the extraordinary flattening of biography into a series of emblems, each sufficient in its equivalence to “Washington,”

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prime example and proper proof that “we may fairly conclude that great men and great deeds are designed for America.”65

Nothing Happens So Ormond is one part, however distinctive, of a pattern of class-inflected aesthetic conflict within early republican cultural commentary. My first question—Why does Brown insist upon coiling the spring of narrative?—can now be joined to a second: How does the novel stack up in relation to the contemporary critical response? And what do these two questions, about form and reception, tell us about both the novel and its determinant culture? Through its ambivalence, the Weekly Museum registered a significant point. Ormond is itself split:  a story whose all-but-unbounded centrifugal energy is pitted against, even as it is articulated through, a narrative discourse whose technical arrangement of plot may be summed up as “reluctance.” This combination may be better identified as a contradiction because although it is extremely productive of narrative, it ultimately works against the arranging and binding work of plot. By examining the formal dynamics of Ormond in terms of contradiction—rather than as, say, an antimony of story versus discourse—we are able to see both the generally integral relationship of discourse and story (which are formally inseparable) and the specific ways this integral relationship, in Ormond, organizes the form of the novel as a whole. I shall begin by considering the episodic development of a specific narrative line in the novel and then move on to connect this analysis with a broader reading, with a focus on the way Brown’s narrative organization of the key characters (Constantia Dudley and Ormond) relates to the question of episodic poetics. My object of analysis here is the relationship between syntax in the discourse and development in the story, and my approach here counterbalances my synoptic treatment of The History of Constantius and Pulchera and Trials of the Human Heart. But this portion of the chapter is, like the earlier, finally aimed at the connections between the microstructures of novelistic language and plotting and the social pressures that orient the text—and on which, in turn, the text exerts a certain attenuated influence. At the end of chapter 2 of Ormond, the prelude to the novel’s main plot has come to a close. Constantia Dudley’s father, Stephen, has been betrayed in business by his former ward and partner, the forger Thomas Craig. The Dudley family (father and daughter and their hired servant, Lucy) is now destitute in Philadelphia. For a brief few pages, the narration (through the voice of the novel’s ostensible narrator, Constantia’s friend Sophia Westwyn, later Courtland) gives us an idyll of poverty as the easy life, as both Constantia and her father (recently stricken blind, woe following upon woe) return to long-missed leisure:

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She purchased what books her scanty stock would allow, and borrowed others. These she read to him [her father] when her engagements would permit. At other times she was accustomed to solace herself with her own music. The lute which her father had purchased in Italy, and which had been disposed of, among the rest of his effects, at public sale, had been gratuitously restored to him by the purchaser, on condition of his retaining it in his possession. His blindness and inoccupation now broke the long silence to which this instrument had been condemned, and afforded an accompaniment to the young lady’s voice. (58)

The image of pleasurable poverty was an important topos in the early republic, functioning as a nostalgic source of identity for the driven members of the propertied class (Ah, what a full self I would have, if only I had nothing!) and a salve on the social wound of increasing inequality (The poor are enjoying themselves!). As “Irus” wrote in the Gentlemen and Ladies Town and Country Magazine in August 1789 (following the third installment of The History of Constantius and Pulchera), “I solemnly declare that I  had rather be a poor man than a rich man. [. . .] I  would not prefer poverty for its own sake, but for the sake of its usual appendages; viz. health, peace of mind, contentment.” It is, above all, the inertness of poverty that attracts the writer, who quickly produces a version of material deprivation as Romantic pastoral:  “O happy poverty! With thee this amiable stranger has taken her abode; with thee she delights to dwell. The rural cottage, surrounded with evergreens, is the retreat of temperance, joy, ease, and placidity. At the ideal sight of these, a transient ray of delight breaks through the awful gloom; but alas! it soon vanishes away, and sad dereliction envelopes my soul!”66 Two observations will bring us back to Ormond. First, poverty is pleasing because it is a state in which nothing happens, in which one is freed from (as “Irus” says at another point) “care, anxiety, unhappiness.”67 Second, “Irus” can achieve only a glimpse of this treasured state, after which he is swept back into the world of work, wealth, and worry.68 Both fixed and fleeting: this is how poverty is registered in the Gentlemen and Ladies. In Ormond, we find a related representation of material need: Stephen Dudley’s grief at his loss of wealth and vision gently recedes, “aided by time,” and we learn that “stillness not unakin to happiness” became the order of the day. Even Dudley’s blindness is conscripted into the service of this worldview, enlivening a conversational eloquence that is now “undiverted from its purpose by the intrusion of visible objects” (59). At this early point in the novel, after an inaugural whirlwind of events, we have a state rather than a story. In chapter 2, Ormond lulled its reader into the appreciation of eventless want; chapter 3 begins with the spur to action—though, as her name suggests, the tendency of Constantia’s character is largely to obstruct change in the story, a situation that will ultimately set her (in self-defense), both in the discourse and in the story, against Ormond. “This period of tranquility,” we are

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told at the opening of the chapter, “was short.” Necessity presses in on the family, and by chance (“Accident suggested. . . ”), Constantia notices that a small house is being let in the center of the city; she plans to arrange to rent it. This provides both a potential solution to the financial problem and Constantia’s first opportunity to act in the novel. What we find here is a syntactical train wreck en route to action: “Unconversant as she was with the world, imbued with the timidity of her sex and her youth, many enterprises were arduous to her which would, to age and experience, have been easy. Her reluctances, however, when required by necessity, were overcome, and all the measures which her situation prescribed executed with address and dispatch. One marking her deportment would have perceived nothing but dignity and courage. He would have regarded these as the fruits of habitual independence and exertion, whereas they were merely the results of clear perceptions and inflexible resolves” (60). Action takes shape through a language of deferral and dilation. The first sentence expresses only Constantia’s tendency to inaction; even the word unconversant continues the thread of what the novel’s second chapter presented as her “chief employment,” conversation, which became “the best means of breaking the monotony of the scene” (58). In the second sentence, Constantia’s “reluctances” stand in the nominal position, and although they are at last “overcome,” the sentence extols her expedience with anything but the “address and dispatch” she evidently displayed. As for display itself, while our imagined observer would have noted our heroine’s courage, she herself is, grammatically speaking, nowhere to be found. First evaporated into a passive construction (“Her reluctances [. . .] were overcome”), she then disappears in the contest between perceived and actual qualities: apparent “habitual independence and exertion” are in fact “clear perceptions and inflexible resolves.” Were Constantia-as-character simply reduced to her qualities, that would be notable enough as an erasure of her presence and a minimized representation of her agency. But the passage puts story at a further remove from the language of the discourse through the mediating function of the imagined observer. In combination with the passive construction of the earlier sentence, the observer’s perception works to blur Constantia’s qualities, too, which are now situated between intention and appearance (and so fully neither habitual independence and exertion nor clear perception and resolve). In doing so, it also undercuts what might otherwise appear as the sentence’s movement away from recurring (habitual) behavior toward condensed and acute activity (these perceptions and these resolves). Through the mediation of this imagined observer, the discourse dulls the specificity of Constantia’s actions: what is really (according to the story) situational behavior appears (according to the discourse) as the expression of a tendency. The discourse doubly attenuates the immediacy of Constantia’s actions: it identifies the specific as what is “merely” the case, even as the conflation of the specific with the habitual blunts the force of Constantia’s “clear perceptions and inflexible resolves.”

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This opening moment in chapter 3 instigates, through its reluctance, a series of transformations in the story that are essential to the overall plot of the novel. Were this simply a matter of Constantia’s character (it is perfectly unremarkable, even by the standards of the Weekly Museum, to express a problem of personal agency syntactically as well as thematically), we might stop our analysis here. But when we consider this brief episode in relation to the development of the chapter (and the chapter, in turn, vis-à-vis the novel), we can observe an entire approach to episodic poetics. For as Ormond creaks into motion, the function of this scene becomes clear. The Dudleys must move from the suburbs to the city center so that the novel can embed its plot in the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793. Constantia is newly imbued with efficiency, opposed to her father’s stubborn pride, but both of these lead to a mutual “love of seclusion,” in which “[v]‌isitants were hated by the father, because his dignity was hurt by communication with the vulgar. The daughter set too much value upon time willingly to waste it upon trifles and triflers” (61). Cloistered away from her neighbors, living in trepidation of the moment when the “toil to which she was condemned” would become unavoidable, Constantia escapes into reading. Readerly habits become, in turn, a possible source of income, as Constantia plans to prepare herself to become a “female instructor.” Therefore, to the bookseller, Mr. Watson, whom she recalls once offered her, “at a very low price,” an Italian grammar. Arriving at the shop, Constantia is met with the first direct speech in the novel: “Mr Watson do you mean? He is dead; he died last night of the yellow fever” (63; emphasis in the original). Constantia’s previous self-absorption is undermined by this news, and the walk home constitutes her first observational encounter with the city: “The purpose of her walk was forgotten amidst more momentous considerations. She bent her steps pensively homeward. She had now leisure to remark the symptoms of terror with which all ranks appeared to have been seized. The streets were as much frequented as ever, but there were few passengers whose countenances did not betray alarm, and who did not employ the imaginary antidote to infection—vinegar” (64). These first glimpses of faces on the streets, partially obscured by their vinegar-soaked cloths, stingingly interrupt the self-absorbed dream state of the preceding pages. Formally, they continue the wavering thread of story that began with the family’s double relocation: physical (to the city) and social (to the margins of the underemployed poor). But this story-level continuation is another kind of interruption, as well—of Constantia’s plan to learn and then teach Italian grammar. Recall Lotman’s point about greater and lesser events in plotting:  “A plot is organically related to a world picture which provides the scale for determining what constitutes an event and what constitutes a variant of that event communicating nothing new to us.” Constantia’s trip to the bookseller encapsulates Ormond’s tendency to obliterate this distinction:  Variants themselves constitute new events; catalytic functions become cardinal functions. What we

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saw in Franklin’s case as panic in the face of mischief, the marriage of “trifling Matters” and “Weight & Consequences,” is elaborated as a principle of narrative development in Ormond.

Endless Prolixity It is notable that this hyperdevelopment of episodes finds its footing in the turn toward the public, those terrorized faces on the Philadelphia streets. For if the need to work has transformed Constantia’s inward compulsion into an outward orientation (the recognition of those faces), then it also effectively brings one of those strange faces back into the home with her: the Dudleys’ neighbor, “a thrifty, sober, and well-meaning, but ignorant and meddling, person, by name Whiston,” who has visited Stephen Dudley in his daughter’s absence. But Whiston is too much, an excessive addition in every way—“being equally inquisitive into other men’s affairs and communicative of his own, [he] was always an unwelcome visitant”:  “On this occasion, he had come to disburden on Mr. Dudley his fears of disease and death. His tale of the origin and progress of the epidemic, of the number and suddenness of recent deaths, was delivered with endless prolixity. With this account he mingled prognostications of the future, counselled Mr. Dudley to fly from the scene of danger, and stated his own schemes and resolutions. After having thoroughly affrighted and wearied his companion, he took his leave” (64). Whiston is the first markedly minor character in the novel. His babbling presence amid horrific circumstances is an echo of the servants who populate the pages of Gothic fiction from The Castle of Otranto onward. But Whiston is notable, too, for opening up a reflection onto both the plotting and the discursive shape of Ormond. His greatest offense, that which makes him most “unwelcome,” is the “endless prolixity” with which he delivers his account of the epidemic. The novel register’s such peculiar speech as a paradox: Whiston’s prolixity is represented only in summary in the discourse; the novel gives no example of Whiston’s purportedly chattering talk via direct speech. Whiston is an emblem or tag for the discourse of the novel, which is not only prolix but also endlessly productive of simply more story (though in ever-decreasing proportion to the language it takes to tell the story). Whiston thus appears in the novel at the moment when (a) plotting has truly begun and (b) the relationship between the plot and the inefficiency of the discourse has become evident. We may take this line of thought a bit further by noting that Whiston is the only nonservant character to be named quickly after his appearance in the text:  “neighbour,  —a thrifty, sober, and well-meaning, but ignorant and meddling, person, by name Whiston.” Names are crucial to the interwoven storylines of Ormond, and they are unstable for all of the central characters, whose names change with some frequency. Among other things, these shifting

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signifiers function, like the long-winded discourse, to open up new avenues for narration: a change of name can work both to produce an ex post facto explanation of Brown’s narrative circumlocution (as when we belatedly learn that the Dudleys changed their name to Acworth) and to generate new episodes (where name change spurs a disguise subplot).69 Whiston’s quick nomination defines him clearly in the text, but it also reinforces how excessively defined he is—not only by the list of characteristics that precedes his name but also by the inset episode that follows his introduction into the story. Indeed, once Whiston is on the scene, he appears to have always been there: he was, it turns out, “always an unwelcome visitant,” despite being till this point nothing more than always absent. Whiston himself is the source for widespread and unproductive alarm over the epidemic. He reappears midway through chapter 4, again as Constantia is returning home. Having been dismissed from his job as a cooper due to the epidemic, he is free (the conflation of unemployment with freedom persisting in the novel) to follow the opposite route of the Dudleys, leaving the city for the suburbs—but not before creating public panic: Hitherto his apprehensions seemed to have molested others more than himself. The rumours and conjectures industriously collected during the day were, in the evening, copiously detailed to his neighbours, and his own mind appeared to be disburdened of its cares in proportion as he filled others with terror and inquietude. The predictions of physicians, the measures of precaution prescribed by the government, the progress of the malady, and the history of victims who were hourly destroyed by it, were communicated with tormenting prolixity and terrifying minuteness. [. . .] On these accounts as well as on others, no one’s visits were more unwelcome than his. (70–71)

All of this minute description is, however, analeptic, providing a flashback account of Whiston. At the moment Constantia encounters him on the threshold to her home, Whiston is convinced of his affliction with yellow fever and has thus resolved to remain in the city. The ills of a prolix discourse have circled back to infect the bearer. Whiston remains in the city, but he disappears from events. Mr. Dudley sends him home with reassurance that he will recover. The next day, he fails to pay his customary visit, and with some concern, Constantia resolves to visit Whiston and his sister (with whom, we have suddenly learned, he lives). Dudley objects to the danger involved (what if Whiston has the fever?). Constantia’s counterarguments, conveyed through indirect speech, take the form of a series of possible futures: “She reflected that the evil to herself, formidable as it was, was barely problematical. That converse with the sick would impart this disease was by no means certain. Whiston might at least be visited. Perhaps she should find him well. If sick, his disease might be unepidemical, or curable by seasonable assistance. He might stand in need of a physician, and she was more able

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than his sister to summon aid” (73). The chain of conditionals is emblematic of Brown’s narrational style throughout Ormond. It enacts the protracted speech of Whiston—speech the reader never encounters directly but whose verbosity is a veritable obsession of the discourse. Constantia’s hypothetical outcomes— “might,” “perhaps,” “if,” “or”—echo the effect of Whiston’s “prognostications of the future,” which come to a discursive full stop in Stephen Dudley’s reasoning: “After a pause, he gave his consent. In doing this, he was influenced not by the conviction that his daughter’s safety would be exposed to no hazard, but from a belief that, though she might shun infection for the present, it would inevitably seize her during some period of the progress of the pest” (73). Dudley’s fatalist position, in fact, is solidified after the initial encounter with Whiston, when Dudley announced to his daughter that “[a]‌n evil destiny will pursue thee to the close of thy life, be it never so long” (65). Thus we can see how, once Whiston and the plague arrive on the scene, the dynamics of the novel are polarized. On the one hand, we have Stephen Dudley’s pessimistic sense of necessity: regardless of what events may delay the future, what comes will be a terrible end. On the other hand, Constantia’s mode of thought—and, significantly, the language through which it is conveyed—is not so much optimistic as it is situated within the delaying events Mr. Dudley conceives as so much empty time. I want to pursue this dichotomy, but first it will be instructive to understand the overarching structure in relation to the way Ormond dispenses with the intrinsic source of the dilemma, Whiston himself. Constantia ultimately arrives at the Whiston home and finds Mary Whiston (the sister) bedridden with yellow fever. Whiston is nowhere to be found, and Constantia assumes that he has gone for help, though his day-and-a-half absence raises the thought that he himself may have died. “What was his real destiny,” the narrator proffers with bathetic gravitas, “it was impossible to conjecture” (74). Impossible indeed, but the novel goes on to include an interpolated prolepsis that interrupts the narrative only to at last eliminate Whiston—whose functionality has never been stabilized—from its story. As it turns out, Whiston abandoned his sister to save his own skin but was stricken with the fever outside of town. Collapsing next to a hayrick, he is discovered by the residents of a nearby farmhouse, who pass him by in order to preserve their health. A second passerby feels sympathy and carries Whiston to a barn: Whiston, deserted by every human creature, burning with fever, tormented into madness by thirst, spent three miserable days in agony. When dead, no one would cover his body with earth, but he was suffered to decay by piecemeal. The dwelling, being at no great distance from the barn, could not be wholly screened from the malignant vapour which a corpse thus neglected could not fail to produce. The inhabitants were preparing, on this account,

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to change their abode, but, on the even of their departure, the master of the family became sick. He was, in a short time, followed to the grave by his mother, his wife, and four children. They probably imbibed their disease from the tainted atmosphere around them. The life of Whiston and their own lives might have been saved by affording the wanderer an asylum and suitable treatment, or, at least, their own deaths might have been avoided by interring his remains. (74–75)

One may be reminded here of an old critical argument about The Red and the Black, that Stendhal simply ushered Julien Sorel off to die because he had no other way of closing his plot. And, as with Stendhal, whatever value such a cynical dismissal has is surrendered by its inability to understand that transparently “bad” plotting is interesting in the specific ways it manifests its “badness.” Within the story, the trouble with Whiston—alive and dead—is his too-easy diffusion into the atmosphere. But if there is something crude in Whiston’s thoughtless chatter in Philadelphia, there is something even cruder in his reduction to mere matter: the outcome seems, to say the least, excessive. Brought onstage as the marker of the social in a state of emergency—the harbinger of plague—Whiston ends as a literal, material source of contagion. Yet this chain of thematic association, which we could extend to the political by linking Whiston to the failure of sympathetic identification critics have identified as among Ormond’s obsessive materials,70 gains its thematic political analysis at the price of losing what I want to suggest is the more deeply structural connection among episodic poetics, temporality, and history in the novel. Earlier I suggested that, in Ormond, catalytic functions tend to swell into cardinal episodes. Whiston is a version of this problem, of a character who exceeds what we could imagine to be his severely bounded function within the narrative and who instigates the production of new episodes that pull our attention away from the central narrative line (even as Shandean a line as we find in Ormond). Whiston is left “to decay by piecemeal,” but his function in the novel up to this point has been to scatter attention and to—as James Madison might have said—rend the narrative itself to pieces. Within the story, the farmhouse residents, for their part, might have saved Whiston by bringing him in. But the narration expresses little grief at his loss, noting that they could have at least saved themselves by interring Whiston’s body. To contain Whiston is the problem, and we might think of the death of the unnamed family as a kind of narratological collateral damage: the essential point is that these other characters appear at all in the novel, as mere instruments to eliminate Whiston. The “Meanwhile” with which the present action of the novel resumes, after the Whiston episode, underscores the latter’s supplementary relation to Constantia’s story. Like The Federalist, it is as though Ormond raises the specter of total disorder only to ostentatiously ensure its total containment.

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Episode versus Futurity From here we may return to the polarization of Constantia/episode production versus Dudley/narrative closure. Whiston mediates this opposition, which is effectively provoked by his appearance in the novel, and the final, proleptic account of his death (“It was not till some months after this period that satisfactory intelligence was gained upon this head”) emblematizes the narrative problem of this novel. In failing to distinguish between more and less significant episodes—Lotman’s events and variations—Ormond finds itself organized as a contest between narrative repetition or diffusion (all Constantia-esque delay) and fatal narrative closure (the inevitable death foretold by Dudley). This is the paradigm set forth in the novel’s early chapters and which continues in the central antagonism between Constantia and Ormond. One last note, then, on this antagonism, and we can leave Ormond behind. More than anything else, Constantia presents the paradox of a motivational energy that tends away from narrative change. The hero of a novel, writes Shklovsky, “plays the role of a godson in a photograph or as chips of wood floating on the river current. That is, he vastly simplifies the mechanism for focusing attention.”71 Constantia, we might say, oversimplifies our attention. When the storylines of the novel take flight it is in her absence, in the digressions away from the “Constantia plot,” each of which is drawn back to Constantia in a kind of exhaustion of narrative energy. This is not, according to the logic of the novel, wholly a bad thing. The development of the central Constantia storyline leads, as Mr. Dudley indicates, toward ruin, towards Ormond’s attempt to rape her. We may see this as the collision of the personal history of Constantia and the world history of Ormond’s various digressive episodes, each of which brings the narrative back—often via unstable connections—to Constantia herself. This dichotomy is thematized in the desire of the narrator, Sophia Westwyn, to return to America from Europe, where she has gone in service to her mother’s insatiable appetite for change. Sophia wants nothing more than to return to her friend Constantia, who orients Sophia’s vision while the latter is forced to follow her mother’s whims: No time seemed to diminish her [Mrs. Westwyn’s] appetite for novelty and change. During three years we traversed every part of France, Switzerland, and Italy. I could not but attend to surrounding scenes, and mark the progress of the mighty revolution, whose effects, like agitation in a fluid, gradually spread from Paris, the centre, over the face of the neighboring kingdoms; but there passed not a day or an hour in which the image of Constantia was not recalled, in which the most pungent regrets were not felt at the inexplicable silence which had been observed by her, and the most vehement longings indulged to return to my native country. (223–224)

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Amid this revolutionary history, the events following 1789 are recast as a large-scale process that can be conceptualized only spatially, in the overflow of effects to those “neighboring kingdoms.” And if space—“every part”—is saturated with revolution, so too every moment—“there passed not a day or an hour”—is filled with thoughts of Constantia. In The History of Constantius and Pulchera, the spur to narrative arrives each time Constantius leaves the scene; he is a figure of, but more importantly the functional enabler of, constancy. Ormond presents a variation on these terms: it is no accident that Constantius and Constantia in effect share the name that is a synecdoche for early U.S. fictional narrative. As the center of the novel— Shklovsky’s woodchips revealing the structure of a current—Constantia is always the organizing force of the central plot. But that plot (the vicissitudes of the Dudley family, the threat of and final resistance to Ormond) takes shape through the series of digressions that pull us away from even Constantia herself. If Sophia’s choice, between revolution and constancy, pits space against time, it is because Constantia’s character functions to slow time, to absorb it and the events of which it is constituted into a slow accretion of deferrals and hesitations. And so Constantia’s wish never to waste time (as we have seen it above) becomes, in the narrative, a tendency to accumulate time, to effect a widening separation between events in the story and “prolixity” in the discourse. The polarization we saw between Constantia and her father takes place at this level, and it is refracted through the conflict between Constantia and Ormond. Ormond speeds up the narrative. Like Sophia Westwyn’s mother, he has an endless and dangerous “appetite for novelty and change.” Constantia’s avoidance of time-wasting leads to the obliteration of any specification of time from the discourse; Ormond’s acceleration of story time is emblematized in the novel by the irruption of details. Ormond tells Constantia twice that he will eat his dinner in exactly six minutes; he introduces himself to Mr. Dudley in exactly three minutes (159, 164). Uneven as ever, Ormond nevertheless finds its only provocation to a temporal reality effect in its eponymous character. But in an elaboration of Mr. Dudley’s worldview, change for Ormond terminates in a bleak and terrible futurity. On the one hand, Ormond arrives steeped in history. A member of a secret revolutionary organization (a hint of the Bavarian Illuminati), with murderous experience of the battlefields of Europe, Ormond fascinates both Sophia and Constantia because he provides a direct connection to the history that looms over the novel. “His political projects are likely,” we are told, “to possess an extensive influence on the future condition of this Western World” (126). What these projects are, we never learn; but the threat of this imagined future is tied directly to the threat of the social itself, in a connection that resonates with the fearful language we examined in The Federalist. As for Hamilton and Madison, for Sophia the threat of the social lies precisely in the revolutionary energy of too many people.72 She expresses Ormond’s social philosophy thus: “Man could not be otherwise than

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a cause of perpetual operation and efficacy. He was part of a machine, and as such had not power to withhold his agency. Contiguousness to other parts— that is, to other men—was all that was necessary to render him a powerful concurrent” (127). The image here is of a social machine that exceeds the sum of its parts; it is an image of historical change that constitutes the core threat in—and, as I have been tracking it, the central formal motivator of—the novel. “Man” suddenly appears as hero here. Altering the emphasis in Shklovsky’s image, it is the unified multiplicity of those woodchips that produces the historical concurrent, blurring the line between agency and history.73 This structure of relationships, Mr. Dudley → Constantia ← Ormond, is not perfectly stable through the novel. Once Ormond is established in his key position, what we may think of as “his” temporality competes with and significantly challenges Constantia’s, as the novel is contorted in the contest between models. Constantia herself is bewildered by Ormond in a way that bespeaks the formal dilemmas of the novel. Each detail he shares with her about his political plans leads only to further questions, and these questions produce a specifically temporal confusion:  “His disclosures, however, were imperfect. What knowledge was imparted, instead of appeasing, only tended to inflame, her curiosity. His answers to her inquiries were prompt, and, at first sight, sufficiently explicit; but, upon reconsideration, an obscurity seemed to gather round them, to be dispelled by new interrogatories. These, in like manner, effected a momentary purpose, but were sure speedily to lead into new conjectures and reimmerse her in doubts. The task was always new, was always in the point of being finished, and always to be recommenced” (180). Constantia’s confusion here, her desire to know counterbalanced by the accrual of more and more information, reflects the syntax of the account back to the reader on the thematic level of the story. The problem with agency, however, with the space opened up by Ormond’s sociohistorical imagination and endlessly rehearsed by the discourse of Ormond, finds its solution only in the nonsolution of the accident that closes the novel.74 Struck with insanity (as a result, it is implied, of his political radicalism), Ormond attempts to rape Constantia. She saves herself by killing him with a penknife. But if Constantia’s action might have offered the novel’s solution to its self-assigned problems of temporality and historical change, it does not. Instead, it produces what we may think of as a programmatic encapsulation of Brown’s episodic syntax itself: “My stroke was desperate and at random. It answered my purpose too well” (274). For Brown, interruption—and its obverse, Constantia’s narrative-slowing impulse—provides an end to the problem of narration itself. In the forced convergence of revolution and seduction, in what I have described as the inefficiency of novelistic discourse vis-à-vis the binding work of plot,75 we see the form of Brown’s aesthetic solution to the problem of revolution (that is, of directed, systemic social transformation).

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Episode and Ideology Combining my synoptic account of Constantius and Pulchera and Trials of the Human Heart with my reading of Ormond, what are we to make of the role of the episode in these novels? For a long time, debate has been polarized among political critics of early American literature in ways that reflect tendencies in the wider fields of literary history and theory:  these texts either reproduce dominant ideologies or, in their most secret ways, resist the social inequalities of the early republic through the expression of mourning for the radical spirit of ’76. But these episodic novels enable a hesitation before these weighty questions, and if there is a purely ideological moment in this form, it must lie in the politics of hesitation itself, in the pleasures of constancy. As I have analyzed it, this hesitation is a matter of plotting, of the composition of narratives in which development is inversely proportional to the production of episodes. The long chains of events in Trials and Constantius and Pulchera yield plots that wind their way from adventure to adventure, from crisis to crisis, in noncumulative fashion. Ormond’s dilations, its spontaneous generation of more and more language, draw our attention to the dynamics of discourse as it leans toward the binding work of plot, evades it, and finally renders plotting itself to be deeply troubling—lacking in the basic function of prioritization to which Lotman alerts us. If in my account Brown’s seems to be the more fully achieved aesthetic quality, it is only because Trials and Constantius have enabled us to read Ormond in a way that isolates the formal problem of plotting in relation to the range of episodic literary production in the early republic. Similarly, my reading of Brown forces our attention back toward the other novels’ wandering stories with a recognition of their political and formal purchase on the wider field of narrative in the period. As a result, identifying these novels as exercises in hesitation is not to say that they are merely light or politically brittle forms to be dismissed as wispy ephemera. On the contrary, they are texts to be read historically: that is, texts that insist upon our producing robust formal analyses that are themselves supple enough, attentive enough to both our objects and their historical circumstances, to generate new knowledge about both form and history. Our reigning judgments of taste are crucial components of the work of reading historically insofar as they alienate us from texts like Trials, Constantius and Pulchera, and Ormond, enabling an evaluation of the aesthetic in terms of how it works and for whom. The aesthetic achievement of the novels I have analyzed is precisely their functionality, their imaginary resolution of sociohistorical problems via what would appear to us as formal nonsolutions—broken narrative lines, diffuse plots, endlessly prolix discourse, and a seeming inability to meaningfully integrate episodic parts into a narrative whole. The apparently crude and ahistorical evaluation of these novels as simply bad, as primitive examples of a

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soon-to-be-superseded form, becomes, when pursued in both its formal and its historical dimensions, the means of engaging with the very history that the judgment “bad” would appear to have denied. The literature of historical hesitation produces the effect of no effect. As Lord Kames might have told us, the rather bitter measure of the early U.S. novel’s success as an episodic form is precisely that, in the face of a dynamic, confusing, and so often brutal history, it kept a cross-class and cross-gender coalition of readers reading.76 Nevertheless, this very constancy is the sign of a further complication. For if these novels ultimately reinforce the class politics we saw more purely in chapters 1 and 2, they do so in freshly unstable conditions. The imperfectly commodified character of these texts troubles reviewers and cultural policemen who, as we have seen, are unsure what, finally, will constitute virtue or stability in this new period in the circulation of texts and the proliferation of readers. The politics of hesitation itself is a substantial falling away from the self-confidence of The Federalist, where the propertied class was able to assert itself as the only available force for gathering together the social whole. Franklin’s Autobiography, too, boldly performs its universality. Where is the social unity of the novel? On the one hand, we can see that the formal compromise that was already operating in those earlier texts (first to display the heterogeneous parts as a spectacle of dispersion, then to organize them into a consolidated whole) is exacerbated or radicalized here. But on the other hand, the heightening of the effect surely takes away in concerted force what it just as surely gains in the broadening of its readership in the nascent literary market. Commodity culture, which would seem to be the ideal environment for owning-class ex-nomination, is an uncomfortable site for articulate class politics. The problem with plotting in these novels is one measure of the inverse relationship between politics and hegemony in the marketplace for reading: hesitation is the best it can do. What is bad is, in commodity culture, good. To consider more fully what it might mean for it to be good, and for whom, requires that we leave the novel behind and delve more deeply into the quickening milieu of literary ephemera at the turn of the century.

{4}

Miscellany and the Structure of Style Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. —Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations

Formally, Salmagundi; or The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others is the anti-Federalist: the two texts tend toward the opposing extremes of dispersion and consolidation. In chapter 1, we saw that Hamilton’s vision of a constitutional book is evident in the Federalist text: the newspaper essays themselves enact the monumentality of the bound format through what I have called the chain of reading. So when the first volume of The Federalist appeared in March 1788, the material format of the book crystallized or sealed the rhetorical style that aimed to institutionalize federalism from the start. The Federalist uses episodicity to produce completeness, part and whole converge in and through the convergence of the parts, form reifies process, and a poetics of constitutional consolidation formally elaborates the political argument for national unity. The representational cost of this unification is, as we saw, literalized in the blankness of the empty pages at the end of volume 1. The nation is organized, the book is bound, and the text evaporates into unreadability. The first chapter of Episodic Poetics thus sought to recover the process—of writing, of publication, and of the erasure of episodic origins—congealed in The Federalist’s final form. In moving from The Federalist to Salmagundi—my two central examples of essayistic rather than explicitly narrative episodic poetics and the bookends of my study—we register a shift from the negative figure of contagion (which, as we saw, provided the logic for Federalist episodic poetics) to the positive figure of the whim. This chapter anatomizes Salmagundi’s episodic whims as a form of commodity writing. Beginning with an account of the text’s formal principle of whimsicality, it situates Salmagundi within the nascent literary marketplace and the position of the writer circa 1807 and relates those conditions to the long anglophone tradition of belletristic criticism; the second half of the

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chapter marks the specific difference of Salmagundi as a startling case of commodity writing, evacuated of political force and wholly in tune with the signifying system of the market. I  align Salmagundi’s announced commitment to whim with the logic of volubility, which allows me to analyze the way the text produces style—the literary instantiation of volubility—as itself a governing structure. The chapter concludes with a full elaboration of Salmagundi’s formal compromise: style is what happens to episodic poetics during the transition from the constitutional moment into the Jeffersonian period. It marks the end of the Federalist early republic as my book conceives it and presages transformations within the literary culture of the episode under the new pressures of the unevenly developing market for literature.

Commodity Writing Like The Federalist, Salmagundi begins as a piecemeal materialization of episodic form. The writing was the collective labor of James Kirke Paulding and the brothers Washington and William Irving (though Washington Irving seems to have written the major part). It appeared in New  York in twenty small, paper-wrapped numbers of between eighteen and twenty-six pages each from January 24, 1807, to January 25, 1808, typically comprising two to seven sections of distinct but often interlinked items. (See the appendix for the table of contents and collation for the full run of Salmagundi.) Paulding and the Irving brothers contributed essays as various (and perhaps shared) characters:  Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., a kind of head editor and master of ceremonies, who usually pens the opening piece, from his “elbow-chair”; William Wizard, Esq., critic; Anthony Evergreen, Gent., critic; Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, who presents Langstaff with a bundle of his nine reports back to Tripoli on U.S. culture and politics; Pindar Cockloft, Esq., poet; and Jeremy Cockloft, the Younger, author of travel pieces. Each of these writer-characters contributes a number of pieces voiced within a single genre or form:  general commentary and editorial notes to the reader (Langstaff), criticism and about-town reports on fashion (Wizard and Evergreen), orientalist reflections on American customs (Mustapha), poetry (Pindar Cockloft), and travelogue (Jeremy Cockloft, as Mustapha’s native-born counterpart). The result is enough of a structure to enable a series of variations on themes, experiments in continuity, extension (sometimes overextension) of jokes, and interruption. Like the recurrence of forms of writing, more or less in the same order within each number (so that a number typically begins with a note from Langstaff and ends with a poem by Pindar), the stability provided by the repetition of characters’ personalities opens Salmagundi to transformations that obey its principle of whim. So, for example, Langstaff ’s comments from his

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elbow-chair in the second number (February 4, 1807) introduce the Cockloft brothers in terms that extend the conceit—we are whimsical bachelors—that already has motivated all the writing to this point: The evening of his thirtieth birth-day, as he sat by the fire-side, as much in love as ever was man in this world, and writing the name of his mistress in the ashes, with an old tongs that had lost one of its legs, he [Pindar Cockloft] was seized with a whim-wham that he was an old fool to be in love at this time of his life. It was ever one of the Cockloft characteristics, to strike to whim, and had Pindar stood out on this occasion he would have brought the reputation of his mother in question. From that time, he gave up all particular attentions to the ladies, and though he still loves their company, he has never been known to exceed the bounds of common courtesy in his intercourse with them. He was the life and ornament of our family circle in town, until the epoch of the french revolution, which sent so many unfortunate dancing-masters from their country to polish and enlighten our hemisphere. This was a sad time for Pindar, who had taken a genuine Cockloft prejudice against every thing french, ever since he was brought to death’s door by a ragout: he groaned at Ca Ira, and the Marseilles Hymn had much the same effect upon him, that sharpening a knife on a dry whetstone has upon some people—it set his teeth chattering. He might in time have been reconciled to these rubs, had not the introduction of french cockades on the hats of our citizens absolutely thrown him into a fever: the first time he saw an instance of this kind, he came home with great precipitation, packed up his trunk, his old fashioned writing-desk, and his chinese ink-stand, and made a kind of growling retreat to Cockloft Hall, where he has resided ever since.1

Pindar is like the broken tongs: unpaired, resolutely single, an instrument for grasping that has been repurposed (purposelessly) as an instrument for writing, for tracing ephemeral objects of desire in a pile of ashes. We begin with a description of the love-struck Pindar, who quickly renounces “all particular attentions to the ladies”; this is both a turning away from the world (away from formerly appropriate libidinal objects) and a new opening toward it, for we are told immediately that Pindar was the toast of the town until the wave of refugees from revolutionary France turned him back inside after—of course—first turning his stomach and then revolting him with their fashions. We might call this final entity, holed up in the family mansion with his antiques and his bile, a Federalist-lite.2 The anti-French politics that we might find here—that cultural historians might long to find here—is little more than a rejection of any object that would hold fast Pindar’s interest. And that is the achievement of these lines: to enact whim as a principle of composition, one that is able to use the barest outlines of a character (little more than the name “Pindar Cockloft”) as the vehicle for tracing a wavering line from the fireside to the neuralgic “Ça Ira” on the street and back.3

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Again, Pindar is a figure of writing, not grasping—of a writing that refuses grasping. Even in Langstaff ’s initial descriptive vignette, Pindar is characterized both as and through sheer desire. That characterization itself, in its wandering movement from whim to wham, rigorously follows the writerly program set out in the first number of the series: We have said we do not write for money—neither do we write for fame;—we know too well the variable nature of public opinion, to build our hopes upon it—we care not what the public think of us, and we suspect before we reach the tenth number, they will not know what to think of us. In two words— we write for no other earthly purpose but to please ourselves—and this we shall be sure of doing; for we are all three of us determined beforehand to be pleased with what we write. If, in the course of this work, we edify, and instruct, and amuse the public, so much the better for the public;—but we frankly acknowledge that so soon as we get tired of reading our own works, we shall discontinue them, without the least remorse, whatever the public may think of it.—While we continue to go on, we will go on merrily—if we moralize, it shall be but seldom; and, on all occasions, we shall be more solicitous to make our readers laugh than cry; for we are laughing philosophers, and clearly of opinion, that wisdom, true wisdom, is a plump, jolly dame, who sits in her arm chair, laughs right merrily at the farce of life—and takes the world as it goes. (1.52)

What does it mean, in 1807, to take the world as it goes? For one thing, it means claiming to jettison the need for a whole to comprise—to grasp—the parts. In place of that whole, we have the presentation of a purely subjective expression of the parts-as-parts, unified primarily by their principle of whim. By asserting that the numbers will contain only whim-whams, Salmagundi uses episodic poetics to turn away from the culture of the episode as we have seen it so far. The text comes as close as possible to reconstituting the culture of the episode as a culture of the fragment or the mere literary event. But the loose structuring of the whole—the repetition of writer-characters, the crosscommentary on other pieces within Salmagundi, and the apparently casual repetition of types of writing (criticism, travelogue, etc.)—signals to us that the episode has been attenuated but not superseded. Instead, as we shall see, Salmagundi reverses the formal movement we have generally followed so far. Whereas my concern in the preceding chapters has been to show the movement from structuration to structure, from process to form, in Salmagundi we find a dedication to following the opposite vector: from structure to structuration, from form to process. This is a dedication, a commitment, on the part of the text and its authors; it is, like bachelorhood, a conceit, and my account of it will therefore track the relationship between the explicit figure and the actual shape of the text. The logic of its movement, the formal device through which structure accommodates dispersion in the miscellany, is the logic of the whim,

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and it is—here is my further claim, the one that chafes against Salmagundi’s self-assigned ambitions—cut to the demands of the market. In “striking to whim,” Salmagundi strikes out into new literary territory, transforming the centralizing work of The Federalist and the stuttering hesitation of the novel into an eagerly sought commodity. Salmagundi itself, the celebration of whim, becomes, in the nascent literary marketplace, a whim to be chased. The literary basis for that commodity, the bearer of Salmagundi’s whim, is primarily the obscure object that literary criticism (and Salmagundi itself) calls style. By way of a basic illustration of the point, consider an example, this time of criticism itself, from Salmagundi no. 6. As so often, William Wizard’s review in that number insistently circles back to the critic’s own act of writing. So as a nonchalant postscript to Wizard’s review of a performance of Othello in Salmagundi no. 6, we are told that the performance he criticizes never happened: “P.S. Just as this was going to press, I was informed by Evergreen that Othello had not been performed here the lord knows when; no matter, I am not the first that has criticised a play without seeing it, and this critique will answer for the last performance, if that was a dozen years ago” (6.142). The writing persists after—because—the purported referent evaporates. This triumph over the object of criticism may look like nothing more than any critic’s wish fulfillment. As early as 1758, Samuel Johnson’s idler was already performing belletristic autonomy for his readers: “If men will struggle against their own advantage,” Johnson wrote, “they are not to expect that the Idler will take much pains upon them; he has himself to please as well as them, and has long learned or endeavored to learn not to make the pleasure of others too necessary to his own.”4 But Wizard’s obliteration of the object of criticism exceeds the bounds of Johnsonian tact. His critique will stand, he says, for the last performance, whenever it was. What matters is the critic’s style of expression; the referent of that expression (not least a referent as ephemeral as a stage performance, an event that requires critical commentary or other commemoration to persist beyond the moment of its completion) disappears. Wizard’s gesture is representative of Salmagundi, which proffers the triumph of style-as-substance and, in so doing, marks a moment of prescience in U.S.  literary culture. For Salmagundi is the limit case of episodic poetics in the early republic: the moment in which an episodic structure edges right up against sheer seriality and in which the episodic is perfectly—and fleetingly—assimilated to the commodification of literary writing. Episodic structure is wedded here with writerly style. This coupling of style and structure helps to explain why Salmagundi remains the most neglected of major early U.S. literary texts. It is style—the logic of gesture, practice, personality, and the crystallization, however fictional, of the moment of writing—that distinguishes this text within the early national literary field and dramatically separates it from the typical literature of the turn of the nineteenth century. “Style” in Salmagundi is an achievement, to be sure, but it is the achievement of

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a decidedly market-oriented form of writing, of a writing fully saturated by the market. And it is fleeting because Salmagundi remains an aberration: several decades ahead of the full flowering of an American literary market and even further ahead of the flattening and semic proliferation of consumer culture as such. To recover this text as an endpoint, a caesura in the U.S. culture of the episode after two decades of currency across literary genres, is to celebrate what the value form can produce at its (historically recurring and intensifying) moment of maximal damage to the texture and tone of literary language; it is, as Launcelot Langstaff would put it, to make the most of an illusion (14.265). At the moment of its appearance, the illusion was a sensation. The Federalist served the interests of a mercantile class without securing a market for itself as a text; Salmagundi, by contrast, spurred an extraordinary swell of literary buying. Readers could not get enough of these pamphlets, despite the fact that the printing and paper were the cheapest around. Because the numbers proved so popular, David Longworth, the publisher, soon printed a “Second Edition” of the text; this was in fact a reprinting of earlier numbers in order to make complete sets of the whole available. (Having substantially underestimated demand, Longworth needed to make up for the small runs of the earliest numbers relative to the later. The inability to produce full sets was a persistent problem in publishing books in parts.) But in completing copies of the book version of Salmagundi, Longworth revealed absolute indifference to the protocols of bookmaking at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a result, Salmagundi is a notoriously difficult text for bibliographers, who have noted Longworth’s casualness in binding together sheets and numbers from a range of printings. As the Bibliography of American Literature puts it in a gesture of resignation, “The final collation of Salmagundi has not been achieved.”5 The original wrappers themselves are a site of confusion, spurring the bibliographer Jacob Blanck to confess himself “convinced that a complete set, in which each part is of absolute primacy as regards both text and wrappers, is an impossibility within the life span of any single collector.”6 The printing appears to have been rushed even on the first runs, well before the printers felt the crunch of unexpected demand. Messy impressions combine with bizarre gathering, awkward typesetting, and frequently absent punctuation to produce the very picture of ephemerality: nothing about the numbers themselves implies durability.7 And that is precisely the point about Salmagundi:  everything about it— from the format to the form—flies in the face of the durable, the organized, and the disciplined. Citing what he took to be its many faults, Washington Irving himself all but disowned the work. Paulding disagreed, and his defense gives a further insight into the formal logic of the text: “I don’t hold this early bantling of ours in such utter contempt as you do, and can’t help viewing it in the light of a careless popular thing that will always be read in spite of its faults, perhaps in consequence of these very faults.”8 It is a “careless popular thing,” a

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work that even might have made a virtue of its faults. Paulding here seems to recognize that the careless and the casual, the ephemeral and the faulty, are of a piece with Salmagundian whimsicality. The very invitation to read the text as a fleeting but regular commodity—a careless popular thing—ensured that readers would translate “fault” into “whim-wham.”

Whim-Whams on the Market And readers were smitten. They bought copies as fast as Longworth could print them (one reason that, for example, the first number exists in nine different typesettings), shopping to the steady pulse of flattering reviews. In March 1807, the Port Folio printed an excerpt from the third number with a swooning introduction:  “We should think our time but ill spent, were it merely employed in criticising and animadverting on the trifling faults of this witty production. Its beauties so far predominate over the defects that we are inclined to pass them over in total silence. Its claims to excellence, are however, strong and decisive. It bears the stamp of superiour genius, and indicates its unknown authours to be possessed of lively and vigorous imaginations, a happy turn for ridicule, and an extensive knowledge of the world.” The passage goes on, somewhat incredibly, to celebrate Salmagundi as an American Spectator, designed “to mend the morals, correct the manners, and improve the taste of the age.”9 In May, The Balance, and Columbian Repository of Hudson, New York, ran an excerpt from number 7, noting that the whole was “a very amusing little work,” and the following week Montpelier’s The Precursor published a notice that Salmagundi’s “[g]‌enuine wit, keen sarcasm and smart repartee drive gloom from the face and heaviness from the heart.”10 The Philadelphia Tickler, a weekly miscellany newspaper published by George Helmbold Jr., happily included a Salmagundi sampling, noting that “[w]e have selected the following piece from a facetious work [. . .], as a specimen of our native talent for wit and satire. The reflections on the present administration of the general government, are diametrically opposite to our opinions.”11 Readers with empty pockets, too, rushed to acquire copies. In the Troy Gazette, the booksellers Wright, Goodenow & Stockwell politely requested that a sticky-fingered browser return a stack of Salmagundis: BOOKS, Not for sale, but for—for—say, forgotten. SELFRIDGE’s TRIAL and a few Numbers of SALMAGUNDI have, some time since been taken from our Library and Store, by some persons who have doubtless forgotten them or thought them returned. Whoever may find either of them (belonging to us) in their possession will oblige us by returning it to the Rensselaer Book-Store.12

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We should note a few things about these comments. With the exception of the Port Folio, none speaks of Salmagundi as anything but amusing. This text is fun, so pleasing a confection that it inspires contagious witlingship in its readers: “Not for sale, but for—for—say, forgotten.” Here is shoplifting as ersatzgenteel sociability, a petty-theft republic of letters. Salmagundi’s “very amusing” wit is “genuine,” and, crucially, it is light, driving “gloom from the face and heaviness from the heart.” The Port Folio’s gesture toward didacticism only amplifies the amusement, prefiguring Salmagundi’s own grinning peroration, with which Launcelot Langstaff closes the final number and the book’s second volume:  “And now having said all that occurs to me on the present pathetick occasion—having made my speech, wrote my eulogy, and drawn my portrait, I bid my readers an affectionate farewel; exhorting them to live honestly and soberly—paying their taxes and reverencing the state, the church and the corporation—reading diligently the bible, the almanack, the newspaper and Salmagundi—which is all the reading an honest citizen has occasion for—and eschewing all spirit of faction, discontent, irreligion and criticism” (20.361). After twenty numbers of Salmagundi, its place in that list of texts should be clear: it is the only one that is not explicitly useful. If the Bible is to instruct and the almanac and newspaper are to guide and inform, then Salmagundi can only be seen as the instrument of amusement; the good reader will avoid conflict through the pleasure principle alone—and this despite the text’s saturation with the dissonant, the critical, and the irreligious. At the same time, like the Bible, the almanac, and the newspaper, Salmagundi aims for regularity; it takes its place within that culture of extensive reading we have already seen in chapter 3. Amusement displaces instruction here at the level of everyday, regular reading. Amusement and the miscellany have a long-standing relationship in English literature. Edward Bysshe promised in 1708 that the variety of his miscellaneous poetical handbook The Art of English Poetry “may divert and amuse [the reader] better” because “here is no Thread of Story, nor Connexion of one Part with another to keep the Mind intent, and constrain him to any length of Reading.”13 In 1789, the Boston Gentlemen and Ladies Town and Country Magazine, Consisting of Literature, History, Politics, Arts, Manners, and Amusements, with Various Other Matter bound diversion and amusement together: It is important that “amusements” rub shoulders with “various other matter” in the Gentlemen and Ladies, for amusement is variety. That proximate identity helped to motivate the plotting of Trials of the Human Heart and Ormond, where the tension between diversion and attention was instantiated in narrative amusement as the purported bait for both novels’ didacticism. The Port Folio mistakes a one-directional vector for an elective affinity in its puffing about Salmagundi’s mending, correcting, and improving qualities, as though the spoonful of sugar (amusement) must always accompany the bitter pill (improvement).

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But again, Salmagundi is the anti-Federalist; it refuses narrative binding of the kind we saw in Franklin, and it has no truck with the didacticism of Trials of the Human Heart or even with the roundabout histrionics of Ormond. It flaunts its rejection of plot, reveling in the miscellaneous mode. In this regard, Salmagundi is a peculiar text in early U.S. literature. It is writing: not writing about something. This is not a referential text in the way of Franklin’s memoirs or even the fictions I considered in chapter 3, and its refusal of referentiality startles all the more because Salmagundi plays at being à clef, inviting readers to guess who among New York’s landed and mercantile classes is being satirized in any particular piece.14 William Hedges, one of the few critics to undertake a serious examination of the text, responds to this form of writing that takes itself seriously only as writing with an illustrative longing for meaning and stability:  “Salmagundi, in revulsion against various abuses of language, labels contemporary newspaper editors ‘SLANG-WHANGERS’ and redefines the United States as a ‘LOGOCRACY,’ or government of words. Yet to a degree this vituperation is itself a surrender to the forces working to debase language.” Hedges proceeds to elaborate on this surrender as a confusion of both politics and language, a “quagmire of relativity.” In Salmagundi’s essay on style, for example, the text “tends to become a verbal stew, as though the ‘editors’ were determined to prove that they live in a logocracy simply by taking pleasure in the sounds of their own words”: “Seized in one section, for instance, ‘with a violent fit of the pun mania,’ and generally entranced with the onomatopoetic possibilities in bizarre canting names, they seem to be saying that words can be delightful to play with but that one must be careful when one attempts to make them mean something. [. . .] Inevitably in the general scramble—‘salmagundi’ means hash—points of view are radically shifted.”15 As a first stab at understanding Salmagundi’s significance within early U.S. literary culture, we could do worse than Hedges’s discomfort. Salmagundi is, above all, a ludic text: words, for this writing that is at once the moment’s great miscellany and its single antimiscellany, are precisely to be played with. Delight assumes—much to the critic’s chagrin—an almost political dimension. Almost political. Why almost? What interrupts the properly political here, what spurs Hedges to bristle at Salmagundi’s slide from “proof ” of the logocratic slang-whanging of party politics to its authors “simply [. . .] taking pleasure in the sounds of their own words”—even as the critic himself indulges such pleasures? What appears to be a stumbling block is, in fact, the source of a distinct literary value in Salmagundi: namely, the commodity form. We have seen this shadow before; indeed, we might say that Episodic Poetics has given an account of the episode as the literary device par excellence of a mercantile society, a form of writing that approaches—and frequently collapses into—that other great emblem of circulation, the commodity itself. Salmagundi is the first example of what it might be like for the distinction

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between writing and commodity to be overcome—and for literary value to be absorbed within the system of value that has dictated our other concerns so far (from state building to individual class advancement). Salmagundi offers a case of a group of writers producing market literature before the market for literature is fully developed. An emphasis on Salmagundi’s description of political speech is important precisely because it brings us to the cul de sac of the commodity form. If, as Christopher Looby shows us, Irving “seems to have sensed that language was not necessarily a pacifying medium” but, rather, that “its mediations of social differences might very well sometimes exacerbate conflict,” then the result is a style of writing that isolates and crystallizes the utterance itself: “It would not be too much to claim that Irving’s denomination of America as a ‘logocracy’ was meant to suggest that in the endemic legitimation crisis that beset the new nation [. . .] the only social institution readily available to the young republic was language itself.”16 Whether or not Irving commits himself to the view that language was the early republic’s only institutional hope for legitimation, it is clear that in Salmagundi all vectors point toward language: the fictionally referential language of the “logocracy,” yes, and, more crucially for my purposes, the swirl of language that is the text itself. This is not a matter of the transhistorical play of signifiers; rather, it is a historically specific instantiation of that play, a case of “signification” mattering as such because of a determinate relationship between writing and the market.

Criticism and the Work of the Writer To take the full measure of Salmagundi’s determination by the market, we need to explore the way it transforms the robust Anglo-American tradition of criticism itself. Since that tradition had always been, since the turn of the eighteenth century, precariously situated on the threshold between public and market, the slide from one toward the other is telling. Consider the great contrast between Salmagundi and its sometime model: Addison and Steele’s Spectator. The satirical wit of Paulding and the Irving brothers owes much to that early bearer of critical writing, but it diverges from its precedent where it counts most: in the protocols of criticism and in the relationship of criticism to its objects. In Spectator no.  291, Addison provides a primer on criticism, and he sets a high standard: “The truth of it is, there is nothing more absurd, than for a Man to set up for a Critick, without a good Insight into all the Parts of Learning.” Nevertheless, it is “in Criticism, as in all other Sciences and Speculations; one who brings with him any implicit Notions and Observations which he has made in his reading of the Poets, will find his own Reflections methodized and explained, and perhaps several little Hints that had passed in his Mind, perfected and improved in the Works of a good Critick; whereas

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one who has not these previous Lights, is very often an utter Stranger to what he reads, and apt to put a wrong Interpretation upon it.”17 The Spectator’s dialectic of taste-making, in which the critic shapes an intelligence already present within the reader, insists upon that circuit of rational exchange that has been so important to students of the public sphere; in its production of a “quasi-transcendental community of subjects,” this “ceaseless circulation of polite discourse among rational subjects” amounts to “the cementing of a new [bourgeois] power bloc at the level of the sign.”18 Addison’s good critic is a master of right interpretation, the perfecter of the good reader’s spontaneous response, a moral instructor who cleaves to the line of Taste. Salmagundi, as the introduction to its first London edition, by John Lambert, told English readers, admits no such pretensions: The distinguishing feature of the Salmagundian Essays is humourous satire, which runs through the whole work like veins of rich ore in the bowels of the earth. These essays partake more of the broad humour and satirical wit of Rabelais and Swift than the refined morality of Addison and Johnson; their chief aim is to raise a laugh at the expense of folly and absurdity, and to lash the vices of society with the rod of satire:—they do not pretend to improve mankind by a code of ethics and morals, and, therefore, should not be tried by the same critical laws as the British Essays. The American Salmagundi bears much the same relation to the Spectator and Rambler as Roderic [sic] Random does to Sir Charles Grandison and Pamela.—The authors, however, have, in several instances, proved that they can speak to the heart as well as the mind; it is only to be regretted that they have not oftener written in a style that seems by no means a stranger to their pen, and which might have contributed to give their work a more classical and instructive tone than it at present bears; nevertheless, it possesses a rich fund of information for those who are desirous of becoming acquainted with the manners of the American people; for, though it naturally partakes of caricature, yet the features of society are rather heightened than distorted.19

I will return to the relationship between representation and caricature, as we see it in the Mustapha letters, but for the moment the key observation is that the London introduction works a little too hard to situate Salmagundi within the appropriate generic forms. The repetition of satire and satirical in the opening lines of the passage, with its tacking against the wind of the text’s vulgarity and inscrutable hilarity, suggests the inadequacy of old terms; a rhetorical trial under critical law is held only unsteadily at a distance. For ultimately the English critic wants more “heart,” more sincerity, and more good critical morality—reinforcements for that semiological power bloc—than Salmagundi is willing to give. The text is instead a celebration of those impolite impulses from the bowels of the earth and of the violence of the satirical rod. Rabelais

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and Roderick Random are insufficient formal markers:  Salmagundi is, as its title suggests, outside these categories.20 One could suggest that John Lambert is merely an Addisonian epigone.21 And indeed, by the nineteenth century, particularly in the United States, the confidence of Augustan critical ambition has slipped. The great critic is replaced by the “man of letters,” the one who “knows as much as he does because he cannot make a living out of only one intellectual specialism.” In Terry Eagleton’s schema, the nineteenth-century man of letters is the dialectical inversion of the eighteenth-century critic: Both share the pretense of a “generalised ideological wisdom,” but the man of letters achieves nonparticularity only through the very particular circumstance of his needing to write for a living.22 General wisdom in periodical prose, like liberal tolerance in the marketplace, is good for business, and the dignity of generality rescues the successful man of letters from the status of hack, which would have been his destiny in the earlier period. Shorn of its Popean absolutism, a new style of wit or taste, a fresh expression of good judgment, seizes the literary marketplace.23 But American writing around 1807 sits oddly between the two historical positions Eagleton identifies in English letters, and Salmagundi appears even odder. Its strength, its appeal to readers in 1807–8, lies less in its general wisdom than in what we can call, for the moment, its pseudo-aristocratic posture. Washington Irving’s first ambition was to become a lawyer because, as he later put it, the law had little concern with “the risks and harrassing cares of commerce.”24 The law connected its practitioners to the wealthiest people in New York (the ones who figured themselves, and were figured by those below them, as gentility), and it fit the “idle habits” of the future author. But writing was itself understood to be a supremely “gentlemanly” and idle pursuit within the hall of mirrors that was New York high society circa 1800, virtually guaranteeing that one would secure a reputation, even (perhaps especially) for work of the most limited capability. Learning was, in this sense, something to be worn lightly; shallow drafts from the Pierian spring were perfectly suited to the socially ambitious young man of “standing.”25 An approach to writing that understood it as work, or even more distantly, as a career, was more than a decade away—specifically, the moment when Washington Irving’s Sketch Book could be a desirable—and preferable—alternative to the family’s merchant business.26 At that point, writing relinquished its position as leisured alternative to commerce and installed itself within the marketplace; the Sketch Book was both written and printed to sell.27 In 1819, Irving was genuinely surprised by the warm response to the Sketch Book; the “eulogiums that have passed upon it in the American papers and periodical works,” he wrote, “overwhelmed” him, going “far, far beyond my most sanguine expectations.”28 For my purposes, the historical point here is not the approving response to the Sketch Book but, rather, the basic authorial expectations themselves:  seasoned by his experience from the Oldstyle

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letters, via Salmagundi, to the History of New York, and enveloped within the “exten[sion] of the ideology of the market to the communicative and intentional activity of authorship,” Irving wrote precisely with the existing market in mind.29 He knew it would be successful enough. That it was better than he had expected matters less, historically, than the solidity of his anticipation of success.30 Even in 1819, Irving could write that the origins of his work lay not in the market but in the ungovernable and irrational whim-whams of the earlier period: “I feel almost appalled by such success, and fearful that it cannot be real—or that it is not fully merited, or that I shall not act up to the expectations that may be formed—We are whimsically constituted beings—I had got out of conceit of all that I  had written, and considered it very questionable stuff—and now that it is so extravagantly bepraised I begin to feel affraid that I shall not do as well again.”31 The writerly anxiety is unsurprising: Irving was in the midst of composing the Sketch Book as he penned the letter. But the persistence of the earlier term—whimsically—is the telling detail. For, even in 1819, writing holds out the promise of a realm outside the market, a condition of personal self-determination that is only contingently compatible with substantial sales. Or so Irving would have it in his moment of triumph and self-doubt. Yet the charm of Irving’s most successful work—from the Sketch Book to the Alhambra—lies in its salable gentlemanliness, cannily grafted onto the imported stock of English manners and German folktales. Whimsicality as such, the uncompromising insistence on a writing answerable to no one (“we care for nobody,” as Salmagundi no. 1 put it), is absent from the later work.32

Salmagundi: An Arthrology of the Episodic Miscellany What are the immediate touchstones in 1807–8 for a writing answerable to no one? When they went looking for a field of influences beyond the traditional forms of criticism and belles-lettres, what did Paulding and the Irving brothers find? What is a salmagundi? A “salmagundi” is, as Stephen Jones’s Pronouncing Dictionary put it in 1804, “a kind of hotch-potch.”33 Specifically, cookbooks in the 1790s and first decades of the nineteenth century always included at least one recipe for a salmagundi, a chopped salad of fish, meat, and eggs. Elizabeth Raffald offered two representative versions in her Experienced English Housekeeper, of 1795: To make a SALMAGUNDIE TAKE the white part of a roasted chicken, the yolks of four boiled eggs, and the whites of the same, two pickled herrings, and a handful of parsley, chop them separately exceedingly small, take the same quantity of lean boiled ham scraped fine, turn a China-bason upside down in the middle of a dish,

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make a quarter of a pound of butter in the shape of a pine-apple and set it on the bason bottom, lay round your bason a ring of shred parsley, then a ring of yolks of eggs, then whites, then ham, then chicken, then herring, till you have covered your bason, and use all the ingredients; lay the bones of the pickled herrings upon it, with the tails up to the butter, and the head lying on the edge of the dish; lay a few capers, and three or four pickled oysters round your dish, and send it up. SALMAGUNDIE a second way CHOP all the ingredients as for the first, mix them well together, and put in the middle of your dish a large Seville orange, and your ingredients round it, rub a little cold butter through a sieve, and it will curl, lay it in lumps on the meat; stick a sprig of curled parsley on your butter, and served it up.34

The dish is a rich and hearty offering; with its butter curled or shaped into a pineapple, and replete with an ornamental Seville orange, a salmagundi is a rather royal kind of hash: intended for display. A certain piquancy pokes, too, through the heavy ingredients, in the form of pickled fish and capers. Hannah Glasse’s recipe, of 1812, brightens the offerings a bit—and reminds us that when Paulding and the Irving brothers christened their work in 1807, the dish was still being served by a certain set of propertied Americans: To make Salmagundy. Mince two chickens, either boiled or roasted, very fine or veal if you please: also mince the yolks of hard eggs very small, and mince the whites very small by themselves; shred the pulp of two or three lemons very small, then lay in your dish a layer of mince-meat, and a layer of yolks of eggs, a layer of whites, a layer of anchovies, a layer of your shred lemon pulp, a layer of pickles, a layer of sorrel, a layer of spinach, and shalots shred small. When you have filled a dish with the ingredients, set an orange or lemon on the top; then garnish with horse-radish scraped, barberries, and sliced lemon. Beat up some oil with the juice of lemon, salt, and mustard, thick, and serve it up for a second course, side dish, or middle-dish, for supper.35

Lemons, horseradish, raw shallots, a mustard dressing: a second course that begins to overbalance its proteins with sharp and sour accents and a fitting culinary model for the satire of Salmagundi. Such a potent and miscellaneous dish was quickly linked to any form of “hotch-potch”; etymologically, the word appears to have come from the French salmigondis, derived from sal, a variant of sel, or “salt,” and a form of condire, meaning “to season” or “to pickle.” Its geographical and linguistic transformation—from salmigondis to the Jamaican Solomon Gundy—suggests both the ubiquity of the preparation (where wouldn’t we find some version of such a hash?) and the slipperiness of the term itself: today, a salmagundi or salmigondis is first and foremost a mélange without any logic or coherency.

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Within literature, salmagundi was turned to good metaphorical use in the eighteenth century, its metafictional possibilities particularly employed by Tobias Smollett. Thus, at the comic moment of reasserting his life in the midst of a fever epidemic at sea, Roderick Random announces to Morgan, who assumes Random dead, that “I hoped to live and eat some salmagundi of his making in England.”36 In other words, the episodic adventures must continue: What else should Roderick Random desire but further miscellaneous events, of salmagundian flavor? Near the opening of Peregrine Pickle, a plate of “salmagundy” is on offer; and later Morgan returns to receive from Roderick Random “a barrel of excellent herrings for salmagundy, which he [Random] knew to be his favourite dish.”37 The Quixote-esque quality of the latter episode, with its metafictional reference to characters from another Smollett novel, recalls Smollett’s translation of Cervantes’s novel (reprinted in Philadelphia in 1803), in which we learn at the outset that the Don’s income is hardly enough to cover the miscellaneous meat salad:  “Three fourths of his income were scarce sufficient to afford a dish of hodge-podge, in which the mutton bore no proportion to the beef, for dinner; a plate of salmagundy, commonly at supper; gripes and grumblings on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and the addition of a pigeon or some such thing on the Lord’s day.” Smollett adds a footnote gloss on the term:  “Salpicon, which is the word in the original, is no other than cold beef sliced, and eaten with oil, vinegar, and pepper.”38 The letter of the translation is baldly inaccurate, but Smollett captures the spirit: of course Don Quixote sups on salmagundi. Smollett, who perhaps more than any other eighteenth-century novelist married quixotic adventure with market-oriented narrative, was uniquely situated to make the connection.39 The strictly narrative connotation of the word therefore locates us squarely within the episodic tradition, albeit at a moment when the circularity of the medieval romance has already mutated into the novel—and into an especially flattened and wandering form. Salmagundi is here conceived as a miscellaneous narrative dish, structured out of bits and ornaments, with a hint of the picaro in its pickled, sour, and salty additions: miscellaneous—and therefore edging toward the nonnarrative altogether. The miscellaneous, or additive, quality of Don Quixote’s adventures, for example, is, we might say, antiplotted in the logic of Don Quixote’s connections. Viewing the text in terms of what Barthes would call an arthrology—a “science of apportionment”—we can see that the metonymic order of the linkages creates a narrativity that resists plot to the extent that each episode is both self-contained and radically open to recombination with other episodes.40 It is fitting that Viktor Shklovsky described Cervantes’s novel as “laid out like a dining table.” We might say that the quixotic tradition remains true to the salmagundian model of dining—a side or supplemental dish itself composed of fragments. So many of the Quixote’s stories are, as Shklovsky notes in his description of the novel’s perfect episodic threading, “connected to the novel only by the fact that Don

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Quixote is present at their telling.”41 As Boris Eichenbaum puts it, this tradition “is not fully motivated or [. . .] deliberately tears away motivation and bares its construction.”42 Eichenbaum’s description might be equally applied to the salmagundi recipes themselves: Physical structure (stacking, layering; organization of fragments around a central object; the thinly metaphorical topping of herring bones) holds the place of gastronomical order, and the device of flavor combination is, as it were, laid bare by the full visibility of its components. Laying bare the device is a procedure that may or may not assume political weight: there is no necessary content in the literary paratradition of salmagundian writing. But it is important to recognize that the New York Salmagundi’s antireferentiality and effacement of politics have as their perfect opposite a text published little more than a decade earlier in London:  Politics for the People; or, A  Salmagundy for Swine. Daniel Isaac Eaton, the radical printer (who was the last Englishman sentenced to the pillory, for his printing of part of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason in 1812), began printing the text as a weekly serial of political satire and education for the class of people recently christened the “swinish multitude” by Edmund Burke.43 First titled Hog’s Wash; or, A Salmagundy for Swine, the pamphlets were collected in two volumes in 1793 and 1794, after running for sixty numbers. The form of the text is as miscellaneous as the Irving/Paulding project, and its style and tone as sharp and inventive, but the content of the numbers is serious political writing: [O]‌ur swineherds do not permit us to enjoy the produce of our hard labour: when we have chafed our snouts to bare stumps of bone, by turning up the earth to procure a few roots, they send their deputies to take a great part of it to feed themselves, and they never fail to cull the best; this we have, from time to time, patiently borne, but, alas! to our inexpressible mortification, for these forty years past, we have seen the number of these plundering deputy swineherds rapidly increase, and to add to our misfortune, each of these has his circle of sycophants, his levee of creatures surrounding him, while we, wretched we! are plundered to feed the whole, they grow fat on the choicest fruits of our labour, leaving us to shift on the refuse as well as we can. Nay, worse than this, our swineherds grow fat by feeding on the most delicate part of the produce of our labour, wax wantonly wicked, and concert, between themselves the basest schemes to injure us—not satisfied with depriving us of the best portion of that which our laborious snouts have provided, they cowardly covet what the whole world affords.44

The stridency of this piece is matched by its sharp clarity: a radical critique of the English state is coupled with a sophisticated, if schematic, description of ruling-class greed. Material like this led to Eaton’s various prosecutions for seditious libel, notably for printing John Thelwall’s “King Chaunticlere” satire of the monarchy, which depicted the king as a tyrannical gamecock that,

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beheaded and stripped of its fine feathers, appears “no better than a common tame scratch-dunghill pullet.”45 Any number of details in Eaton’s publications invite careful reading, but for the purposes of an analysis of Salmagundi, one aspect stands out:  the scrupulous attention to and celebration of writing as a fundamentally political act. Tone, style, satirical edge, allegorical extension, and hortatory gesture are always connected with the primary aims of political language: to persuade and to inspire. Eaton’s trials (to say nothing of Thelwall’s) provide some historical sense of the stakes; but so too do the texts themselves. Thus, following Thelwall’s speech, we find the report of the response at the Capel Court Society meeting, during which Thelwall’s celebration of French liberty against monarchical reaction spurred a violent response from members of the audience. The following night, the society voted to reassert “the free discussion of political opinions in public assemblies” as “an invaluable and constitutional right of Britons, which must be defended with the most jealous caution, and transmitted inviolate to our posterity,” and sanctioned the chairman for failing to maintain it.46 Nothing could be further from this than the realm in which Salmagundi circulated. If its intertext includes Eaton, its more characteristic emblem is the strange work of J. R. D. Huggins, a New York barber well known as a wit and writer of satirical squibs advertising his shop. Readers who found themselves the objects of Salmagundi’s “happy turn for ridicule” took offense, and their offense animated speculation about the work’s true authors. Most peculiarly these speculations turned to Huggins, the only New York writer of the moment to rival Salmagundi in stylistic craziness. Huggins’s response of April 3, 1807, was printed in full in two New York papers and reprinted as far away as Salem, Massachusetts: I AM sorry to perceive that a rumour has gone abroad of my being the writer of Salmagundi—Unfortunately for me the report received a sort of confirmation in the total silence of that work as to myself, while Mrs Tool and Mad Bouchard received their share of notice And in truth so firmly has this report been credited, that in consequence of it I have lost some of my best customers. A certain Lady whose name I shall not mention, has ceased to be indebted to the fashionable academy [Huggins refers to his shop as the “academy”] for these three weeks past, during which time however she has broken very sensibly, and is thought by her friends to be in a decline. A  gentleman who was once a very valuable visitor at the dressing Room, telling long stories and taking snuff, being one day under the operation of the imperial Pinchers and taking up the Salmagundi of the week, a page of it threw him into such a passion, that he overturned journeymen, apprentices, &c. with as little mercy as if they had been so many block heads, and bounced into the street like a cork from a bottle of Champaine Since which

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time he has never crossed my threshold, tho’ I perceive he visibly declines in his personal appearance, his hair not being by any means as white, nor his cheeks as red as formerly

Huggins’s defense is characteristic of his prose: thickly ironic, replete with fake allusions to goings-on around town. The piece draws on what would appear to be an endless reservoir of cheap but chatty sentences, the wit of the advertiser: Among the ill consequences of this report, I  have to add the total loss of my military customers—Fag rag, (alias Captain) Spitfire, who has sworn by his whiskers that I  shall never touch a hair of them again And declaring pon honor, that sooner than I shall profane the pericranys of his voluntary company, they shall be drest by the lump—and he will engage some itinerate Chop-Scrapper to do them off rank and file, as they stand in the line of march To add to these misfortunes, I am every now and then assailed by some written reprimand, from some lady who conceives herself pointed at in SALMAGUNDI These are so numerous that it would be endless to recount them. The fat Lady in the red shawl wonders that I would have the assurance to compare her to such filthy and blush-worthy articles as bolsters and bed curtains—and Madame Bouchard is astonished that Salmagundi having so much reputation as a Wig Maker, should have mistaken a Full Dress Wig for a Crop. To prevent such applications in future, therefore, and to regain if possible the customers this evil report has cost me, I, HUGGINS, do most solemnly assure the public, that I am not the author, aider, nor abetter of Salmagundi That I have no Elbow chair, such as can be written from, nor am I guilty of Pindar Cockloft’s Poetry, or Launcelot Langstaff ’s Prose.47

Huggins signs the piece, “Empereur de Frizzeurs et Rois de Barbois.” I quote Huggins at such length to indicate how fully this writing works as writing:  as advertising, yes, but equally as a literature of advertising. In Huggins we see what writing circa 1805 looks like when it relishes its commodification. Huggins creates an entire world based on a wink:  nothing should be taken seriously, because everything points back to the point—which is, of course, to sell. Whereas Eaton’s Salmagundy for Swine operates allegorically to index social struggles and so turns satire to politics, Huggins’s own miscellany, called Hugginiana, empties the same form of reference while heightening its self-referential dimensions. As John Strachan puts it, “The cumulative effect of Huggins’ parodic method is subtly to associate his advertising copy with decidedly more elevated cultural forms. Because of its verve and engaging comic brio, Hugginiana’s parody, while it exploits the cultural distance between its form and its content, does not involve the diminution of Huggins’s products, which are subtly celebrated and, in the final analysis, elevated.

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Huggins’s mercantile burlesque has its comic cake and eats it, too.”48 In this regard, Huggins almost seems to have taken a lesson from Paulding and the Irvings themselves. In Salmagundi no. 2, they had already reminded readers of the instability of their own satire: Perhaps the most fruitful source of mortification to a merry writer, who for the amusement of himself and the public, employs his leisure in sketching odd characters from imagination, is, that he cannot flourish his pen, but every Jack-pudding imagines it is pointed directly at himself:—he cannot, in his gambols, throw a fool’s cap among the crowd, but every queer fellow insists upon putting it on his own head; or chalk an outlandish figure, but every outlandish genius is eager to write his own name under it. However we may be mortified, that these men should each individually think himself of sufficient consequence to engage our attention, we should not care a rush about it, if they did not get into a passion, and complain of having been ill-used. (2.74–75)

The Salmagundians have no concern for those who would try to guess the authors of the text—though, at least in this case, they do provide that crucial nourishment, amusement: “One of the most tickling, dear, mischievous pleasures of this life is to laugh in one’s sleeve—to sit snug in a corner unnoticed and unknown, and hear the wise men of Gotham, who are profound judges (of horse-flesh) pronounce from the style of our work, who are the authors. This listening incog. and receiving a hearty praising over another man’s back, is a situation so celestially whimsical that we have done little else than laugh in our sleeves ever since our first number was publisht” (3.85). The pleasure of laughing anonymously is part of the charm of the text: if Salmagundi refuses referential satire, it savors the incorporation of its reception into the writing. Style is the signature of the writer here, but it is a signature that refers, rather like Pindar Cockloft’s traces in ash, only to its own writing.

The Rejection of Reference If, as I wish to claim, Salmagundi rejects referentiality and embraces the flatness of style, then I must show at least that even in those moments in which the text would appear most eager to invite us to look beyond its writing, it is nevertheless playing only one more version of its game of sealing writing off from the world. The primary pieces that invite, even demand, a reading for reference are the nine letters from Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan to correspondents in Tripoli. They regularly punctuate the twenty numbers of Salmagundi; one imagines (and without any manuscript or other evidence of composition, one must imagine) that Paulding and the Irving brothers stumbled upon Mustapha: trying out the device in number three and realizing that it worked. Worked, that

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is, both to formalize the installments (ensuring the appearance of a familiar but ever-fresh voice as the series unfolded) and to capture something essential about the enterprise itself. The Mustapha letters are far and away the best-known moments in the text; critical commentary extends from Looby’s emphasis on the linguistic as such to Malini Johar Schueller’s reading of the pieces as the creation of “an indigenous version of the genre of Oriental letters.” Mustapha himself was based on a real-life Tripolitan captive, one of seven brought to New York as prisoners in 1805, capturing the curiosity of the New York papers.49 My view is that the story is both better and worse than Schueller would have it: better because Mustapha is an emphatically etiolated, late-period instantiation of the narrator of the oriental tale; worse, however, because even despite their connections with real events in New York, the Mustapha letters refer to little more than their own style of reference. The real Mustapha was an object of curiosity; the narrator Mustapha’s curiosity is only a prerequisite for a writing that turns everything it touches into an object that can be nothing more than the occasion for writing, and of writing that rarely reaches beyond the possibilities of writing tout court: “Thus I conclude my observations. The infidel nations have each a separate characteristic trait, by which they may be distinguished from each other:—the spaniards, for instance, may be said to sleep upon every affair of importance—the italians to fiddle upon everything—the french to dance upon every thing—the germans to smoke upon every thing— the british islanders to eat upon every thing,—and the windy subjects of the american logocracy to talk upon every thing” (7.150). Salmagundi might be better said to talk upon anything and to reduce everything to mere talking. Salmagundi’s babble is exceptional in its refusal of reference.50 The Mustapha case is instructive: Schueller’s research, its effort to pinpoint the precise correspondence between the fictional character and the real-world captive, indicates the irrelevance of the latter to anything but the supremely literary matter of the oriental tale. And even here, what Salmagundi in the end produces is less oriental tale than oriental-tale effect:  what interests Paulding and the Irving brothers is nothing more than the evocation, the hint, the detail or gesture that may be mobilized as part of their endless verbosity.51 In this sense, the Mustapha letters reveal the truth of the late oriental tale in the early nineteenth century, the truth of a worn-out commodity renovated through a concentration on its most superficial elements. Srinivas Aravamudan has illuminated this aspect of the oriental tale as a form, evident already soon after its emergence in the eighteenth century: Montesquieu’s creation of Oriental singularity [in Lettres persanes, of 1721] in eighteenth-century fiction took the publishing world by storm. As [in the Lettres] Rica’s interlocutor asks, clearly grasping that the condition of defamiliarization is a desired vantage point, “How can one be Persian?” In other words, how can one aspire to a singular vantage point from which all

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utterances have the likelihood of communicating instant novelty and whose import, upon reflection, leads to apprehending unfamiliar truths? [. . .] At the same time, Oriental singularity was vanishing even as Montesquieu’s fiction was widely read. That was the paradoxical sign of its erstwhile success. The literary commodity will not last forever, and neither would Enlightenment Orientalism.

From instant novelty to regular novelty.52 Perry Anderson has pointed out that Montesquieu’s orientalist narrator may be seen as one historical origin for what Viktor Shklovsky would identify as the fundamentally estranging function of literature.53 But in Salmagundi, Mustapha does not estrange U.S. political speech: he makes it familiar. Readers are gathered around the assuring spectacle of what they already know. Political content is rendered utterly recognizable (so familiar, in fact, that it need be only connoted), and its form—the multiplication of voices saying nothing and meaning even less—is emphasized but never estranged. Or to be precise, we should say that it is fetishized. Political speech is reified, separated from its social—even its political—determinants, and finally naturalized as if its specific historical character were a spontaneous and eternally recurring feature of language as such. Mustapha’s letters are, to be sure, freighted with marshal metaphors aimed at Jefferson’s administration. But these are, crucially, metaphors; and the metaphors give us a war of words, nothing more: “I have beheld the community convulsed with a civil war, (or civil talk) individuals verbally massacred, families annihilated by whole sheets full, and slang-whangers coolly bathing their pens in ink, and rioting in the slaughter of their thousands. I have seen, in short, that awful despot, the people, in the moment of unlimited power, wielding newspapers in one hand, and with the other scattering mud and filth about, like some desperate lunatic relieved from the restraints of his waistcoat” (11.202). Salmagundi’s hostility to emergent mass party politics is evident, but it would be a mistake to take these lines too seriously as political critique. Civil war for Salmagundi is, in fact, civil talk:  Talking is, in its way, war-making, and war is what the mass of the people make when they talk. Notice how the “unlimited power” of the people is simply the unlimited power to speak—and, indeed, not even to speak: rather, the power of a certain unregulated (but not therefore universal) capacity of some to speak. The voice of the people is the voice of a lunatic social body. The significance of Mustapha’s concern with speech alone becomes clear when we ask what makes these lines funny. As so often in Irving’s best work, the laugh comes (if at all) from caricature: first, from the recognizable distortion of familiar materials (as with Anderson’s line on estrangement in the oriental tale) and then, in a second move, from the separating out of one seemingly subordinate aspect of the representation and making it primary. Or to use Mustapha’s phrase, the entire depiction resembles “a vessel, which is best governed by its tail” (3.81).

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And so a readership laughs at the purportedly permanent condition of political language.54 Yet the laughter must be, most fundamentally, a knowing laughter. Neither Salmagundi nor its readership believes that language as such—that is, language in its most basic condition as symbolic system— assumes such a baldly determinant role as both the substance and the medium of political struggle. The joke relies on the figure of Mustapha because he (and his correspondents) must look with innocent (in)credulity on the scene of U.S. party politics. Salmagundi’s fetishization of language posits Mustapha as its ideal fetishist: ideal because structurally suited, via the traditional function of the orientalist narrator, to occupy the position of the one who sees what others do not. For him, as Slavoj Žižek has put it, the Americans “are not simpletons [. . .] but simply ignorant: the fetishist has privileged access to the Object, the significance of which ‘ordinary people’ overlook.”55 Caught in the linguistic crossfire, Salmagundi’s Americans cannot see what Mustapha recognizes from his reifying distance. Economy is one of Mustapha’s key words, the essential cant term that reveals the emptiness of U.S. political speech: “ECONOMY, my friend, is the watch-word of this nation; I have been studying for a month past to divine its meaning, but truly am as much perplexed as ever. It is a kind of national starvation, an experiment in how many comforts and necessaries the body politic can be deprived of before it perishes. It has already arrived to a lamentable degree of debility, and promises to share the fate of the arabian philosopher, who proved that he could live without food, but unfortunately died just as he had brought his experiment to perfection” (5.113). What replaces food? Not economy, the ostensible thing, whether institution or practice, signified by the word; instead, it is the word economy itself: “Words are but breath—breath is but air, and air put in motion is nothing but wind. This vast empire, therefore, may be compared to nothing more nor less than a mighty windmill, and the orators, and the chatterers, and the slang-whangers, are the breezes that put it in motion; unluckily, however, they are apt to blow different ways, and their blasts counteracting each other—the mill is perplexed, the wheels stand still, the grist is unground, and the miller and his family starved” (7.148). Mustapha enacts the self-generating power of words through anadiplosis, following the spiral of repetition from words to breath, from breath to air, and from air to wind. These are words that repeat and expand but which signify nothing; instead, they displace the very something they should serve to convey in their recursion to bestial and ineloquent wind. Words signify nothing, perhaps, except signifying itself, a signifying that is itself a form of money. As Mustapha’s captor, an American officer, tells him: “[T]‌he administration have the good of the people too much at heart to trifle with their pockets; and they would sooner assemble and talk away ten thousand dollars, than expend fifty silently out of the treasury; such is the

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wonderful spirit of economy, that pervades every branch of this government.” “But,” said I, “how is it possible they can spend money in talking— surely words cannot be the current coin of this country?” “Truely,” cried he, smiling, “your question is pertinent enough, for words indeed often supply the place of cash among us, and many an honest debt is paid in promises; but the fact is, the grand bashaw and the members of congress, or grand talkers of the nation, either receive a yearly salary or are paid by the day.” “By the nine-hundred tongues of the great beast in Mahomet’s vision but the murder is out—it is no wonder these honest men talk so much about nothing, when they are paid for talking, like day laborers”: “you are mistaken,” said my driver, “it is nothing but economy!” (9.180)

If words supply the place of things, they also supply the place of that other great symbolic system, money. In this caricatured vessel that is the United States in 1807–8, the tail that governs happens to be an exceptionally important one for Paulding and the Irvings, since a nation of slang-whangers can only be engaged by a group of writerly whim-whammers. Here is the place to revise David Reynolds’s insight that Salmagundi “taught the great lesson of American humor: one could register democracy’s disruptions but at the same time distance oneself from them and thus strip them of terror. [. . .] Self-referential humorous style provides a kind of artistic haven for the American writer.”56 There is little “terror” in the politics of 1807–8; but, more to the point, the haven of Salmagundi is not simply an aesthetic one. As the Mustapha papers indicate, Salmagundi’s is an aesthetics of the market: aestheticizing the commodity form, commodifying the literary form, the text depoliticizes politics in the service of a powerful and disorienting style of piecemeal, episodic writing.

Volubility and Formal Compromise To be driven by whim-whams is not to lack a principle of structure. Quite the contrary, Salmagundi is clear about both its organizing impulses and their relationship to the form of the text: “[W]‌e care just as much about the public and its wise conjectures, as we do about the man in the moon and his whim-whams, or the criticism of the lady who sits majestically in her elbow-chair in the lobster, and who, belying her sex, as we are credibly informed, never says anything worth listening to. We have launched our bark, and we will steer to our destined port with undeviating perseverence, fearless of being shipwrecked by the way. Good-nature is our steersman, reason our ballast, whim the breeze that wafts us along, and MORALITY our leading start” (8.170). The spirit of whim propelling the series is invoked at its opening, where, as we saw, solipsism is embraced as a literary value in itself. Salmagundi wants to be writing for the sake of writing; writing for sheer pleasure; sheer writing, we might even say.

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Though the mid–twentieth century’s many sheer text projects might seem pertinent here, such examples are more useful as a historical heuristic or formal pressure gauge than as a proper comparison. For in its determined purpose to be absolutely for itself, Salmagundi closes down far more than it opens. Few critics have taken such statements seriously as a literary program. The telling exception is Roberto Schwarz, who identifies “cheap wit” as a central device within the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis’s great work, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1880), and distills Machado’s formal principle—his odd revitalization of Sternean variety—as volubility: “We can say then that in the course of affirming itself, the narrator’s versatility demotes all the contents and forms that appear in the [text], and subordinates them to itself, so providing the narrator with a kind of fruition or enjoyment. In this sense, volubility is [. . .] the formal principle.”57 Volubility dictates the narratological and dramatic (i.e., emotional) structure of the novel: the transformations that produce episodes, the linkages between them, and the variations in affective intensity that emerge from them. The result is an exceptionally successful effort to produce a meaningless narrative: The succession of episodes is directed by volubility and lacks internal necessity. There is no lack of desires, which indeed have plenty of life, but there exists no continuity of aims. [. . .] In short, this is a rhythm without a dramatic nucleus but still full of temporary necessities, since all its moments, the characters’ as much as the narrators’, are ruled over by caprice. A strange conjunction, in which life is full of satisfactions but empty of meaning; in which the logic of separate moments, short and monotonous like caprice itself, and repeated over and over, underlines the aleatory character of the whole.58

No lack of desires, but a text replete with plenty of life, yet still lacking in continuity of aims: this is the logic of Salmagundi, where the caprice of writing rules in place of the grasping work that would comprehend the parts as the whole.59 This is the logic of separate but interlinked moments. Schwarz’s insight is that Machado’s distortion of Enlightenment volubility on the periphery of the world system yields a devastating critique of the purported flexibility of Enlightenment:  its ability to thrive within a robust slave economy in Brazil, long after slavery had been formally abolished in the capitalist core. Enlightenment in the South American periphery is overseen politically by rapacious functionaries and shows the bourgeoisie to be a class supremely out of joint with its ideology of reason and equality. And this reflection on the disorientation of the bourgeois on the periphery of capitalism shines incriminating light back onto the European project itself, indicating the limits of a class-oriented claim to universal human emancipation. “The universalization of caprice,” Schwarz argues, “means the incorporation of the results of the Enlightenment, but without the corresponding creative process, and under the guidance of a principle [. . .] opposed to it.”60

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In Salmagundi, volubility is instantiated at the level of structure—of narrative form—and at the level of style. My ultimate claim is that volubility must be registered as style—style is the literary instantiation of the general principle of volubility, or whim; and style becomes the ordering logic of the text. But style in Salmagundi does not achieve the principled elevation of what D. A. Miller has celebrated as the master stylist’s claim to virtuosity. Salmagundi’s style is homologous to virtuosity, but it is not the same; it is abstract rather than elevated. Or, to be absolutely clear about it, I should say that its claim to elevation achieves only abstraction. For Miller, achieved literary Style (enhanced with its capital S) is a kind of abstraction that is precisely “the work of abstracting,” a “willed denial of particularities whose traces nonetheless persist in giving it, not its structure, which is what negates them, but something more intimate: its texture, that constant reminder of what remains unsublated.”61 The very process of sublation or subsumption of particularity flaunts its dependence on the particular. Miller develops the concept of Style as a specific shirking of political, social, and aesthetic responsibility in his essay on Federico Fellini’s 8½, where the distinction between “master” and “virtuoso” emerges as a function of artistic practice: “Partial, sporadic, limited to a ‘piece,’ ‘passage’ or ‘moment,’ virtuosity never commands the whole in which it appears only as a discrete, contrastive episode. Virtuosity is essentially hurried, even short-lived: so many notes, so few measures: that difficulty is the gauge of its necessarily quick and belaboured brilliance. [. . .] No doubt, virtuosity is style’s assertiveness, its way of conscripting our attention and diverting it from so-called matters of substance. But what also gets asserted in the process is style’s evanescence.”62 Style is evanescent, for Miller, because it is temporary, fleeting, compressed. Its life span is the episode rather than the full work. But style is evanescent in another way, too, in its relationship to the process of production. In my reading of The Federalist, I  sought to recover the process congealed in The Federalist’s final form. Process appears to be prior to form: The process is the doing or the making of the text, and the form is what is made.63 The distinction between process and form is one between an action and an object. Literary criticism has traditionally brought the question of process closer to the question of form through the concept of style. For Seymour Chatman, whose brief comments on the subject remain invaluable, the difference between style and form is precisely that style indexes a process. A stylistic element may also be a formal element, as a brushstroke in a painting. But form and style are, for Chatman, conceptually and analytically distinct: [A]‌given feature may be at once an element in the form, that is, part of the object, and a stylisticum, that is, part of the process. Thus the brushwork in a painting is a formal (more exactly a textural) element but at the same time stylistic insofar as it is a vestige of the process of painting it. Furthermore what is signaled by that particular brushwork (or use of the past participle,

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or whatever the feature) is the artist himself; from the stylistic point of view, he is the referent, whatever the internal, that is, formal reference or function may be, the role that the feature plays in the economy of the whole work of art.64

The limit of Chatman’s distinction between style and form should be clear: logically speaking, there is no reason to see form, too, as anything other than the “vestige” of the process of creation. We may get closer to the point by following T. J. Clark’s working notion of form as “controlled repetition,” since the phrase has at least the virtue of expressing aesthetic production as a social and historical process: repetition, of previous forms; controlled, insofar as it is directed both by the artist (the writer, the composer) and by the socially determined limits of “form” as such (what counts as a story, a lyric, a nude, a chapel, a sonata, a review, etc.). Clark’s method of attack has the added benefit of conceptualizing form as activity: “Form aims at truth. Truth is to be understood as an operation on the world, not a set of equivalents to a world in place. Formalists and functionalists have up to now too often seen the characteristic shapes taken by artifacts as responses to a world (duplications of certain of the world’s aspects, and/or adaptations to a task or threat); the point is that form—repetition—is change.”65 My brief tour of recent approaches to style may be summarized in a few proposals. First, style, even (especially) in its supreme instantiation as virtuoso performance, is evanescent, recalling in its full flower both the slide back into everyday writing and the fleeting moment of writing itself. Second, style is marked or coded as the vestige of process. Third, form itself—of which style is one part—is activity, an operation on the world rather than a simple reproduction, repetition, or reflection. Repetition, always with a difference, is transformation. These three proposals usefully blur the distinction between style and form: Chatman’s problematic separation of style from form, in which style is marked as the vestige of process, is better reconstructed as a comment on form itself. The brushstroke in painting is a formal aspect of the work, and its reference to the hand of the painter is really no more embodied than the composition or color of the picture. At a certain moment within the history of art, the brushstroke is marked as the bearer of the painter’s body; but we should see this as a properly formal aspect of the painting, an ideological expression of the relationship between the application of paint and the overall composition and making of a picture. A properly formalist conception of style therefore understands it to be the elevation to the level of literary device the trace of the (notional) writers’ subjectivity. That subjectivity is, as Miller helps us to see, rendered by style as abstraction—as a notional substancelessness that achieves its literary substance only in the evanescent and short span of an episode. And for Salmagundi this means, as Schwarz would put it, the rule of caprice against

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the grasping or binding work of continuity. This redescription helps us provisionally—that is, still without a full political situating of the text—to make sense of style in Salmagundi. F. O. Matthiessen’s negative judgment on Irving, that he had “taken considerable pains to develop a style, but had not desired to pass beyond current models or usage,” is accurate for the major work that follows Salmagundi.66 But for the 1807–8 moment, Matthiessen is left short because he cannot grasp that the style of that text is out of joint with its time in the worst and best possible way, delivering a luscious morsel of literature from the future of spectacular sameness that the literary market would largely become. Whether or not the cultivation of Salmagundi’s style was deliberate or desirable, it was of decisive value, speaking in evanescent but highly potent language to a readership breathlessly awaiting each new installment. So much for the provisional description of volubility as style. What remains to be explained is how this version of episodic poetics—this logic of volubility—operated in relation to my argument about politics and class in the early republic. For Salmagundi’s reduction to mere speech is not innocent. The decade after the election of 1800—the second American (Jeffersonian) Revolution, as some have called it—was full of political chatter of a newly spectacular kind, enabled and encouraged by the partisan press and a nascent populist political language.67 One distinction that emerged with force from the 1800 moment, though at a remove from the immediate debate, was between broadly “federalist” and “republican” conceptualizations of social life. Insofar as the republican or Jeffersonian position embraced long-developing notions of individual autonomy (which we have seen exemplified in Franklin’s Autobiography) and a formally leveling political theory (expressed in, for example, The Federalist’s praise of merchants as representative citizens), it took the internal or personal drives of each individual to be the “inner dynamic” of the market itself: individuals added up to a society. This position turned away from a residual (and broadly federalist) notion of values, of traditions that exceeded the additive parts of the social formation. Schematically speaking, a division was articulated between two versions of the part–whole relationship: between the whole as greater than the parts (federalist) and the whole as the sum of its parts (republican).68 The new dominance of the latter position is vividly illustrated by the city itself, not least New York. Dell Upton has described how a republican “spatial imagination” extended the orthogonal or grid plans for U.S.  cities. The earliest urban grid, the seventeenth-century Penn–Holme plan of Philadelphia, was originally conceived as a “closed, hierarchical community” (despite many later celebrations of the grid as a timeless product of Enlightenment). When the grid plan was reconceptualized in the early republic—the New York City grid was extended for the last time in the Commissioners’ Plan, in 1811—it “offered a template for the relationships of a diverse, more loosely ordered citizenry.” This new spatial imagination “envisioned urban society and the

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urban landscape as a set of relationships ordered from within rather than from without, from the inherent qualities of humanity manifested by freely acting, self-disciplined individuals rather than from the contingencies of social structure.”69 Traditional hierarchy appeared as contingent or unnecessary within the freshly dominant view because it was merely inherited, untethered to the capacities of the individual. From the new vantage, then, a noncontingent or necessary social structure could only be based on those capacities:  a distribution of the means of living that obeyed the intrinsic force of the free and self-disciplined person. It bears repeating that the newly noncontingent social structure would be as fierce and as brutal as anything that had come before, not least because of its Janus-faced dual revolution, reconstructing individual subjectivity as it reconstructed social relations themselves. We have already dealt with the fantasy of the free actor as articulated by Franklin’s Autobiography. As in chapter 2, my object here is not simply the real conditions that might lurk somehow behind the literary representation. Instead, I am interested in what is at stake in the representation itself. To what extent do Salmagundi’s authors believe in the fantasy? Salmagundi believes enough, I want to argue, to construct an elaborate solution to the problem posed by republican styles of speech and social thought. Specifically, style itself is Salmagundi’s great compromise with the new order; and it is, I want to argue further, a brilliant compromise in that—like all the best representational settlements—it enables a hegemonic articulation of class power. The gentlemanly style of Salmagundi, which is (again) the literary manifestation of its whimsical logic of episodic poetics, appears, first, as a traditional or even aristocratic gesture. It harks back to Shaftesbury’s pleasure in his “Episodick Liberty, and Right of wandering,” or Rousseau’s neo-aristocratic (and proto-Romantic) assertion of his Confessions as an exertion of subjective will. But—like volubility in Machado—this seemingly backward gesture undermines what it would seem to inherit; it is expressed in and through the literary commodity. Salmagundi is, as we have already seen, a literary commodity in two senses: First, as a material text, it expresses the ephemerality and circulating energy of a precocious moment in the literary marketplace; second, and in line with developments in literary Romanticism on both sides of the Atlantic, it commodifies individual style as the most valuable thing the author has to sell. Style, as I have already said, is the signature of Salmagundi. It is a signature that signifies only itself—that is part of its pleasure. And in this way, it adumbrates and presciently parodies the signatures that would emerge as value markers for literary commodities in the coming decade: the names of writers that would designate the literary text as the creation of an autonomous and “creative” author.70 So a “Federalist” style appears in Salmagundi as both a reaction to and an instrument of literary commodification, a commodification that aligns with—and would be energized by—the republican

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market revolution underway already in 1807–8. What we see here is an ideological compromise in literary form, a spectacular ex-nomination of class. What is named—the whimsical, the forcefully subjective, the traditional, the Federalist—is not what is enacted and made. The latter is a distinctively bourgeois form of writing, hidden in plain sight beneath the playful abstraction of Salmagundi’s twenty numbers. The “Federalist” form of subjective self-assertion returns as its dialectical opposite, the “Republican” volubility of an episodic commodity literature.71

Conclusion The king said, “[Scheherazade], you have drawn my attention to everything that I have been neglecting, so give me more of these examples.” —The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights

This book has argued for the priority of the episode to the literary culture of the early United States. More specifically, I have claimed that the episode made literary culture central to the ideology of class and nation in the period after the composition of the Constitution. I will be happy if the reader takes the enterprise to be a contribution to the dialectical study of literary genres in history, with the proviso that my literary history reconstructs its object: not merely the genre but, instead, a complex of genres bound together by their constituent components. If Episodic Poetics has a modest methodological injunction to offer, it is this: literary history is better understood as an integral part of history if we understand literary texts at multiple levels of scale and abstraction. In the case of this book, the determinant categories are the genre (political essay, memoir, novel, miscellany) and the subgeneric unit or device—the episode. The genre here is by and large constituted within a given period or historical situation by its coordination and ordering of the parts it comprises. These parts, as literary units, are shared across genres; the challenge—the real historical challenge for the literary critic—is to take account of this necessarily dialectical unity. The episode is, for me, the epitome of this literary-historical problematic, since (as I will insist now for the last time) it only takes shape as a part in relation to a real or notional narrative whole. One result, for the critic, is that both the whole and the part need to be constructed as objects of study through the analysis. There is no transhistorical or given relationship between the part and the whole: everything will depend upon the specific episodic poetics of the texts at hand. And that means, it follows, that everything will depend, too, on a substantial account of the situation that shapes that episodic poetics. For once we have identified, provisionally, the particular logic of episodic poetics for this text within this generic field, and once we have—next step—connected that logic in that generic field with others, then we must pose questions to the historical

146  Episodic Poetics

situation that will help us understand why this total field of multigeneric production looks the way it does. The vector of explanation here is to be understood in two directions: we pose questions to the historical situation to see how the episodic poetics is shaped by its interaction with its conditions of conflict, accommodation, compromise, opportunity, and so on. All of this is, I think, basic to dialectical criticism (though the stick is perhaps too often bent in the direction of infrastructure-to-superstructure causality). My methodological adjustment is to maintain that decomposing narrative wholes into narrative parts—tracing the dialectical logic of episodic poetics—helps us to more fully apprehend the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic criticism. Invoking Brecht at the start of this book, I promised that it would eagerly pursue connections with whatever its chosen texts might touch; at its end, I will add only what I hope is already clear: to pursue such connections is also to make the field of “history” (of extrinsic criticism) freshly dependent on the close readings provided by intrinsic criticism. Such an approach may, on the one hand, lead us far from the work “itself.” But, on the other hand, “the work itself may appear in curious, unexpected places; and, once disclosed in a new location, the work may never look the same again.”1 Such is the hope of this book. The four logics of episodic poetics it identifies in its chapters together give an image of the literary culture of the early republic: contagion, in The Federalist; error, in Franklin’s Autobiography; hesitation, in the novels of chapter 3; and volubility, in Salmagundi. Each of these edges toward episodic dispersion; each is a figure of the whole vulnerable to the parts that it would comprise. But each is also, and for that very reason, a figure of the parts comprised by the whole. Such dynamism—parts pressing against whole, whole sustaining shaky control over the parts—is intrinsic to episodic poetics. Two qualities mark the specific difference of the early republic. First, we can see the basic literary situation: these episodic wholes are held together in an especially volatile play on the part–whole dynamic. Even The Federalist, that early bearer of national consolidation, depends utterly on the first moment of dispersion to enact its centralizing mission. Franklin’s memoirs would seem to be a relatively straightforward case of parts-into-whole: after all, at least in that text centrality is already substantially established by the name itself. But constitutive variety there is also the device or means by which the principal subject is formed. By chapter 3, Episodic Poetics registers a shift, however slight, toward the embryonic literary market. The result is a notably strong tilt in the balance of literary-structural forces: The parts really do threaten the whole, and a poetics of hesitation (of a plotting that goes nowhere by going everywhere, that says nothing by saying everything) is the uneasy result. Salmagundi embraces a more robust instantiation of that literary market and, in so doing, nearly unleashes the parts from episodic poetics altogether. Yet through its logic of volubility the text looks back, at the same time, to a version of wholeness that can only be achieved by the unifying work of style itself.

Conclusion  147

Precarious wholes, then, distinguish episodic poetics in the early republic. A second observation about the distinction of this situation follows: what we are seeing here is a transition from the first 1787–88 moment of Federalist consolidation toward a Republican moment in the first decades of the nineteenth century. But I should stress that I do not want to reify what are effectively party labels in the period. For the argument of this book has been that the movement from the first broad style of episodic poetics to the second is actually a shift within the owning-class logic of representation. The rather disoriented poetics of the early U.S. novel should be seen as a properly cautious moment in the ideological work of this literature, as a consolidationist logic of static, hierarchical class society confronts, in myriad ways, a readership that is in no recognizable way “Federalist.” And that must finally be the great achievement of Salmagundi: to produce a properly hegemonic literary style out of the confrontation between a propertied-class ideology and a market organization of its forms of representation. Episodic Poetics claims that the dates 1787–88 and 1807–8 mark out a proper period in the social history of literature, a moment when the most significant ideological issue—how a national ruling class, stable as a class amid reassignments of its personnel, could obscure its identity as a class—was rendered with special intensity and invention in literary writing. The episode, we might say, like Scheherazade spinning stories for the king, draws our attention to what we might have missed in the significance of literary language to the early republic: that this language was (that maybe it is) especially effective at reifying process into form, at converting structuration into structure, and thereby manufacturing—as if “innocently”—those purportedly natural relationships that underwrite the social order of things.2 That the age-old poetics of the episode may yet serve to reveal these operations is one lesson—however naively hopeful—of the 1,001 Nights. For although none of Scheherazade’s tales alone constitutes an episode, it is impossible to isolate any individual tale from the telling of the whole. Every one of Scheherazade’s tales is always on the threshold of another, and the telling and tale are—well—hard to tell apart. This is why each new night in the cycle begins with the same sentences: “Morning now dawned and [Scheherazade] broke off from what she had been allowed to say. Then, when it was the [next] night, she continued.”3 Telemachus and Penelope have served as this book’s emblems of episodic complexity as it is organized into the line of plot. Scheherazade may stand now as its emblem of the episode itself. She reminds us that each tale connects to the others. What we are allowed to say may open the way— through the telling and across the interruption of daybreak—to saying more.

{ Acknowledgments } “Erst kommt das Fressen,” to quote the man once more—and I am ever grateful for the material support that buoyed this book. A  fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies enabled me to complete the writing, and crucial provision for writing and research came, at various points, from the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and Wesleyan University. Happily for me, the project took its first shape in the Stanford English Department, among a vibrant and generous group of critics and scholars. The McNeil Center for Early American Studies supplied a nourishing environment for it in its adolescence, and I  thank Dan Richter and my McNeil colleagues for their engagement. Thanks go, too, to the staff at the Newberry Library for their hospitality during the final phase of the writing. The wonderful librarians at the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company, the Newberry, the New York Public Library, Stanford University, Yale University, and especially Wesleyan University have been vital to my research. An early version of parts of chapter 2 appeared as “The Liquid Life:  Money and the Circulation of Success after Franklin,” in the Journal of Cultural Economy 4, no.  3 (2011):  315–328, and was reprinted in Beyond Liquidity: The Metaphor of Money in Financial Crisis, edited by Brad Pasanek and Simone Polillo (Routledge, 2013). Brendan O’Neill steered this book into print with extraordinary skill from the start; he is the platonic ideal of an editor. I am cheerfully in debt to him, and to the press readers, whose thoughtfulness and care with the manuscript made it better, casting its strengths and stress points back to me in the most helpful way. As the text reached its complete form, Elisabeth Graves was a sure and subtle copy editor. It’s a special pleasure to express my gratitude to the people without whom this book could not have been written. My primary intellectual debts are substantial, and they make for happy accounting. No one has taught me more about reading than Alex Woloch, whose friendship and example are essential to all my work. Chris Looby is a steadfast supporter and shrewd reader— many thanks go to him for that and more. Bryan Wolf ’s sunny style of critique has, I hope, brightened some of the darker pages of this book. And about Jay Fliegelman, whose lasting impact on my work is impossible to convey, I can only say that I am fortunate to be among his students.

150  Acknowledgments

Friends, colleagues, and students at Wesleyan University, and particularly my colleagues in the English Department, have made the past several years a pleasure. Special thanks go to Joel Pfister for his energetic reading of the whole manuscript (and too much more to recount here). I was lucky to be a rookie professor at Wesleyan alongside Joe Drury, who remains a great interlocutor. My brilliant friend Amy Tang has read my work for a long time and has helped me to be smarter and to have more fun. Joe Shapiro keeps me sharp. Discussing anything (including this book) with Brad Pasanek must be what the learned life was made for. Hwa-Jen Liu sets the standard: nothing counts until I’ve deliberated over it with Hwa-Jen. Thanks go to her for the years of camaraderie. My parents, Teresa and Bruce Garrett, and my extraordinary sisters and brother—Erin, Megan, Elizabeth, and Andrew—have read parts of this book, and they keep me in good company always. And I  would be lost without Margot Weiss, the first, last, and best reader of all, whose intelligence and friendship mean everything. This book isn’t for her, but the rest is.

{ Appendix } Contents and Collation of Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others

Note: The collation of Salmagundi is notoriously unreliable, since “editions” were mixed from the start, and bound (and disbound) copies have long been manipulated for the rare-book market. For details on the print history and collation of the text, beyond my discussion in chapter 4, see the excellent entry on Salmagundi, “Salmagundi, 1807–08,” in Bibliography of American Literature, vol. 5:  Washington Irving to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Jacob Blanck, Virginia Smyers, and Michael Winship (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955–91), item 10097, which should be supplemented by Jacob Blanck, “Salmagundi and Its Publisher,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 41 (1947): 1–32.

No. I. Saturday, January 24, 1807 pp. [3]‌–20; A9

1. [untitled] 2. Publisher’s Notice 3. From the Elbow-Chair of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. 4. Theatrics. Containing the quintessence of modern criticism. By William Wizard, Esq. 5. New-York Assembly. By Anthony Evergreen, Gent.

152  Appendix

No. II. Wednesday, February 4, 1807 pp. [21]–38; A9

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

From the Elbow-Chair of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. Mr. Wilson’s Concert. By Anthony Evergreen, Gent. [untitled, from Langstaff ’s elbow chair, signed L.L.] To Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. [poem by Pindar Cockloft] Advertisement [on attribution of authorship of Salmagundi]

No. III. Friday, February 13, 1807 pp. [39]–56; A9 1. From My Elbow-Chair 2. Letter from Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, Captain of a Ketch, To Asem Hacchem, principal slave-driver to his highness the Bashaw of Tripoli. 3. Fashions. By Anthony Evergreen, Gent. 4. [untitled, on reception of Salmagundi, particularly by Christopher Costive] 5. Proclamation, from the mill of Pindar Cockloft, Esq.

No. IV. Tuesday, February 24, 1807 pp. [57]–82; A4 A4 1. From My Elbow-Chair 2. Memorandums For a Tour, to be entitled “The Stranger in New-Jersey; or, Cockney Travelling.” By Jeremy Cockloft, the Younger [six chapters]. 3. From My Elbow-Chair 4. Flummery from the Mill (I) of Pindar Cockloft, Esq. Being a Poem with Notes, or rather Notes with a Poem, (2) in the manner of Doctor (3) Christopher Costive. Notes by William Wizard, Esq. 5. General Remark 6. Notice 7. Card

No. V. Saturday, March 7, 1807 pp. [83]–104; A9 B2 1. From My Elbow-Chair 2. Letter from Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, to Abdallah Eb’n al Rahab, surnamed the Snorer, military centinel at the gate of his highness’ palace.

Appendix  153

3. By Anthony Evergreen, Gent. 4. To the Ladies. From the Mill of Pindar Cockloft, Esq. [poem]

No. VI. Friday, March 20, 1807 pp. [105]–124; A9 B 1. From My Elbow-Chair 2. Theatrics. By William Wizard, Esq.

No. VII. Saturday, April 4, 1807 pp. [125]–142; A9 1. Letter from Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, To Asem Hacchem principal slave-driver to his highness the Bashaw of Tripoli. 2. From the Mill of Pindar Cockloft, Esq. [poem] Notes by William Wizard, Esq.

No. VIII. Saturday, April 18, 1807 pp. [i–ii], [143]–162; A11 1. By Anthony Evergreen, Gent. 2. On Style. By William Wizard, Esq. 3. [untitled]

No. IX. Saturday, April 25, 1807 pp. [163]–188; A9 B4 1. From My Elbow-Chair. 2. From My Elbow-Chair 3. Letter from Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, captain of a ketch, to Asem Hacchem, principal slave-driver to his highness the bashaw of Tripoli. 4. From the Mill of Pindar Cockloft, Esq. [poem]

No. X. Saturday, May 16, 1807 pp. [189]–206; A9 1. From My Elbow-Chair 2. To Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. 3. The Stranger in Pennsylvania by Jeremy Cockloft, the Younger [two chapters]

154  Appendix

No. XI. Tuesday, June 2, 1807 pp. [207]–228; A9 B2 1. Letter from Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, captain of a ketch, to Asem Hacchem, principal slaver-driver to his highness the bashaw of Tripoli. 2. From My Elbow-Chair. Mine Uncle John.

No. XII. Saturday, June 27, 1807 pp. [229]–254; A9 B4 1. From My Elbow-Chair. 2. The Stranger at Home; or, A Tour in Broadway. By Jeremy Cockloft the younger [preface and five chapters] 3. From My Elbow-Chair 4. From the Mill of Pindar Cockloft, Esq. [poem]

No. XIII. Friday, August 14, 1807 pp. [255]–280; A9 B4

1. 2. 3. 4.

From My Elbow-Chair Plans for Defending Our Harbour. By William Wizard, Esq. From My Elbow-Chair. A Retrospect, or, “What You Will.” To Readers and Correspondents

No. XIV. Saturday, September 19, 1807 pp. [281]–306; A9 B4 1. From Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, To Asem Hacchem, principal slave-driver to his highness the Bashaw of Tripoli. 2. Cockloft Hall. By Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. 3. Theatrical Intelligence. By William Wizard, Esq.

No. XV. Thursday, October 1, 1807 pp. [307]–324; A9 1. Sketches from Nature. By Anthony Evergreen, Gent. 2. On Greatness. By Launcelot Langstaff, Esq.

Appendix  155

No. XVI. Thursday, October 15, 1807 pp. [325]–342; A9 1. Style at Ballston. By William Wizard, Esq. 2. From Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, To Asem Hacchem, principal slave-driver to his highness the Bashaw of Tripoli.

No. XVII. Wednesday, November 11, 1807 pp. [343]–360; A9 1. Autumnal Reflections. By Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. 2. [untitled] By Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. 3. Chap. CIX. Of the Chronicles of the Renowned and Antient City of Gotham

No. XVIII. Tuesday, November 24, 1807 pp. [361]–378; A9 1. The Little Man in Black. By Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. 2. Letter from Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, to Asem Hacchem, principal slave-driver to his highness the bashaw of Tripoli.

No. XIX. Thursday, December 31, 1807 pp. [379]–404; A9 B4 1. From My Elbow-Chair 2. Letter from Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, to Muley Helim al Raggi, (surnamed the agreeable Ragamuffin) chief mountebank and buffa-dancer to his highness 3. By Anthony Evergreen, Gent. 4. To Anthony Evergreen, Gent [fictional letters from readers] 5. Tea, a Poem. From the Mill of Pindar Cockloft, Esq.

No. XX. Monday, January 25, 1808 pp. [405]–430 [plus four pages: title page and contents page for vol. 2]; A9 B4 [plus two unsigned leaves] 1. From My Elbow-Chair 2. To the Ladies. By Anthony Evergreen, Gent. 3. [untitled by William Wizard]

{ Notes } Introduction 1. Aristotle’s “Poetics,” trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 68, 106, 108. For a treatment of ancient episodic tragedies, see H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (New York: Routledge, 2002). Margalit Finkelberg has noted that Aristotle ignores not only Aeschylus but also most early tragedies, as well as the choral sections of plays: “[N]‌ot only the episodic tragedy as such but also all the elements of plot structure that earned Aristotle’s disapproval are in fact different aspects of one and the same kind of composition, which we may tentatively identify as ‘episodic.’ ” The reasons for Aristotle’s distaste may be myriad, but as Finkelberg indicates, two passages (from Metaphysics A and N, respectively) explain the essential problem: “It is reasonable to suggest on the basis of its manifestations that nature does not act episodically, like a bad tragedy”; and “those who say mathematical number is first and go on to generate one kind of substance after another and give different principles for each, make the substance of the universe a series of episodes [. . .] and they [i.e., Plato and his school] give us many principles; but the world must not be governed badly” (Margalit Finkelberg, “Aristotle and Episodic Tragedy,” Greece and Rome 53 [2006]: 64–65). Mimetic disorder hints too much at a disorderly natural world. 2. “The key to a particular work’s integrity is the contemporary problematic in which its poetics take shape. [. . .] Once we relate the text to a problematic, we can perceive its distinctive codes as solutions rather than as aberrations from our current aesthetic criteria” (Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel [Princeton, N.J.:  Princeton University Press, 1999], 21). 3. Étienne Balibar, “The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism,” in Reading Capital, by Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1997), 229. 4. Bertolt Brecht, “Über den formalistischen Charakter der Realismustheorie,” in Ausgewählte Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Werner Hecht, Wolfgang Jeske, and Jan Knopf (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 6: 352. 5. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, trans. Albert Sbragia, new ed. (London: Verso, 2000), xiii. 6. “Society is a battlefield of representations, on which the limits and coherence of any given set are constantly being fought for and regularly spoilt. Thus it makes sense to say that representations are continually subject to the test of a reality more basic than themselves—the test of social practice” (T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984], 6). 7. Wayne C. Booth, “The Poetics for a Practical Critic,” in Essays on Aristotle’s “Poetics,” ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 398. 8. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot:  Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 3, 5. 9. Ibid., 37.

158  Notes to pages 5–8 10. Poetics is “the systematic study of literature as literature” (Benjamin Hrushovski, “Poetics, Criticism, Science:  Remarks on the Fields and Responsibilities of the Study of Literature,” Poetics and Theory of Literature 1 [1976]:  xv, qtd. in Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics [New York: Routledge, 1983], 2). Or in Roman Jakobson’s neater formulation, “Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of painting is concerned with pictorial structure” (“Linguistics and Poetics,” in Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap–Harvard University Press, 1987], 63). 11. The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), i.194–199. All further references to this edition of the Odyssey are given parenthetically by book and line number. 12. Telemachus’s every word is, we might say, imbued with the play of contingency and determinism. Lattimore’s translation exfoliates the Greek emphatic first-person pronoun and particle (ἐγώ γε) into the phrase “I for my part.” The Loeb translation is more conservative: “My mother says that I am his child; but I do not know this, for never yet did any man know his parentage of his own knowledge.” The Greek gives “μήτηρ μέν τέ μέ φησι τοῦ ἔμμεναι, αὐτὰρ ἐγώ γε/οὐκ οἶδ᾽: οὐ γάρ πώ τις ἑὸν γόνον αὐτὸς ἀνέγνω” (Homer, Odyssey, Books 1–12, trans. A. T. Murray, rev. George E. Dimock [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998], 28–29 [i.215–216]). 13. Erich Auerbach agreed with Schiller and Goethe that the Homeric “ ‘retarding element,’ the ‘going back and forth’ by means of episodes” is “opposed to any tensional and suspensive striving toward a goal,” though he found the true cause of epic “retardation” of action “in the need of the Homeric style to leave nothing which it mentions half in darkness and unexternalized” (Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954], 5). 14. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 67–68. 15. In opposing epic form to novelistic formlessness, Lukács was striving, as Moretti has it, “to save the warmth of life and the purity of form.” Better, following Moretti’s reconstructed Lukácsianism, to analyze the work of literature toward what Lukács characterized as the “petrifaction of existence” and the “wearing out of form” (Franco Moretti, “The Soul and the Harpy: Reflections on the Aims and Methods of Literary Historiography,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller, rev. ed. [London: Verso, 1988], 12). 16. Marilyn Katz schematizes the “character-centers” in terms of three versions of indeterminacy—sociological indeterminacy (Penelope), geographical uncertainty (Odysseus), and chronological indeterminacy (Telemachus): “The plot of the Odyssey, then, is organized as a narrative complement to the state of radical indeterminacy around which its mise-enscène is formulated. For Penelope, as Telemachus says early in the poem, ‘neither refuses the hateful marriage nor does she bring matters to a teleutēn [i.e., to an end]’ ” (Penelope’s Renown: Meaning and Indeterminacy in the “Odyssey” [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991], 7, citing Odyssey i.249–250). 17. Nancy Felson-Rubin has most crisply defined Penelope’s narrative as a problem of social location, emphasizing Homer’s repeated insistence upon our asking whose plots constitute the poem, as well as how they vary as we move across the character field. Felson-Rubin’s study is, among other things, an exemplary instance of the use of interiority as a concept within the

Notes to pages 8–11  159 structural analysis of narratives. See Nancy Felson-Rubin, Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). 18. Seduce, as the OED indicates, comes to English from the Latin seducere, “to lead aside or away.” The classic seduction plot will, as c­ hapter 3 shows, depend on the narrativization of this literal meaning, which remains active in current usage. 19. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 187. For the German, see Theodor Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 278. 20. Jenny Strauss Clay has shown that Odysseus’s cleverness (metis) disguises itself against suspicious reactions, symbolically splitting the hero into “wise philosopher” and “archvillain,” the opposition held in balance by the structuring epithet polytropos, “of many turns” (The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the “Odyssey” [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983], 31–33). John Peradotto has further developed the analysis of polytropos as “the very opposite of a name,” establishing that Odysseus will be “a character in the middle voice, between the purely active and the purely passive”: “[F]‌or instead of fixing its referent, as a name would, in an identifiable location within the social matrix or locking him into a narrative destiny manifest in the name, it suggests polymorphism, mutability, plurality, variability, transition, the crossing of borders, the wearing of masks, the assumption of multiple roles. It unsettles, elicits a mental activity that in the language of the poem is [. . .] to be in a quandary. It is no accident that, in our extant evidence, the only other bearer of the epithet polytropos is the volatile divine crosser of borders, Hermes, great-grandfather of Odysseus” (Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the “Odyssey” [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990], 116). 21. In his characteristically reparative mode, Bakhtin put it thus: “One cannot embrace, in a single epic, the entire world of the absolute past [. . .]. But this is no great loss, because the structure of the whole is repeated in each part, and each part is complete and circular like the whole” (M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination:  Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981], 31). 22. Bertolt Brecht, “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” in Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 70; Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:  Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 61. 23. Fredric Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971–1986, vol. 1: Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 79. 24. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.:  Cornell University Press, 1977), 111. 25. See Boris Tomashevsky, “Thematics,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 61-95; Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 79-124; and Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse:  Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, N.Y.:  Cornell University Press, 1978). Franco Moretti provides one of the few historically situated discussions of the two kinds of episodes vis-à-vis the European novel, in his essential essay “Serious Century,” in The Novel, vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 364-400.

160  Notes to pages 11–13 26. Peter Haidu, “The Episode as Semiotic Module in Twelfth-Century Romance,” Poetics Today 4 (1983):  680. The variable scale indicated by these approaches to episodic poetics, wherein it is the narrative function that matters rather than the “size” of the episode, remains for my study an essential rule in the study of episodic form. For an alternative perspective, which discusses episodes as minute structures of narrative based solely on temporal or spatial continuity and oriented toward an analysis of the empirical study of reader response, see David S. Miall, “Episode Structures in Literary Narratives,” Journal of Literary Semantics 33 (2004): 112. 27. E.  M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New  York:  Harvest-Harcourt, 1955), 30, 86. The works of any number of critics who follow Aristotle’s basic line in the Poetics (which, as we have already seen, establishes essential terms for the study of episodes) might do as examples. A richer case is Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, which not only elevates the “encyclopedic” above the “episodic” but also, more intriguingly, asserts a tendency for the encyclopedic to develop from the “germ” of the episodic (Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957], 56). Among its virtues, Frye’s theory helps to focus attention on the ways that narrativity may be immanent in even the most fragmented forms, which may imply emplotment through their very fragmentation. For an embrace of the “episodic” as a salutary refusal of plot or point, see Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). 28. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (New  York:  Routledge, 2006), 170. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, vol. 3, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 17. James Phelan’s concept of “progression” offers the most developed recent account of narrative order as the meeting of structure and readerly process. See James Phelan, Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), 15–21. 29. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 97, 92. See also, for the most dynamic account of narrative structures, Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1990), especially “The Structure of Fiction,” 52–71. 30. Hayden White, “The Structure of Historical Narrative,” Clio 1 (1972):  13. This significant claim about the force of the narrative discourse is supplemented by Hilary Dannenberg’s recent work on the poetics of coincidence, which emphasizes the ways literary narrative incorporates contingency into plot. See Hilary P. Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 89–108. 31. See “Events and Event-Types,” in David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds., Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (London:  Routledge, 2005), 151–152. Ryan has divided events into three types: happenings, actions, and moves. The central distinction here is between the mere occurrence of something (the happening) and goal-oriented action with or without a human agent. Actions are made by goal-oriented human characters (or agents); moves are, in effect, riskier actions, aimed at solving high-stakes conflicts. The threat of failure defines the move in terms that are familiar from Claude Bremond, who attempted to show how narratives are structured through the relationship between possible and actual outcomes. See Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); as well as Claude Bremond, Logique du récit (Paris: Seuil, 1973); and Claude Bremond, “The Logic of Narrative Possibilities,” New Literary History 11 (1980): 387–411. For a recent reconsideration of the relationship between

Notes to pages 13–15  161 action and narrativity, see Françoise Rézal, Introduction à la narratologie: Action et narration (Brussels: De Boeck, 2009). 32. Within narrative theory, scenes are identified as events of a notably nonnarrational type: they are a properly theatrical form in which telling is replaced by showing. The term scene itself comes to narrative from drama (and ultimately from the Latin for “stage”). Mieke Bal explicates the basic opposition between summary (telling) and scene (showing) by focusing on the rough equivalence of story time and discourse time. “Scene,” as Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck put it, “indicates an almost perfect overlap of the duration of an event with that of its representation or reading.” See Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 102; and Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 61. Roland Barthes elaborates on the concept of scene in terms of the exchange of lines of dialogue as a “volley of codes”; a scene is sealed as scene by the victory of one code over another (Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller [New York: Hill and Wang, 1974], 154). 33. Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” in On History, trans. Sara Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 27–28. James Chandler describes Braudel’s turn to the long time span (la longue durée) as a “trade upward” to gain “intelligibility,” while literary history and cultural studies took the opposite tack in the 1980s and 1990s, “trading downward for a gain in information” (James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 72–73). Yet again, it is a false dichotomization: plot versus event and event versus episode. 34. Croce’s histories of Europe and of Italy are themselves profoundly vexing on just this point, producing plots shaped as much by the distortive exclusion of events as by their selective inclusion: “With respect to these two works, the questions at once arise: is it possible to write (conceive of) a history of Europe in the nineteenth century without an organic treatment of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars? And is it possible to write a history of Italy in modern times without a treatment of the struggles of the Risorgimento? In other words: is it fortuitous, or is it for a tendentious motive, that Croce begins his narratives from 1815 and 1871? I.e. that he excludes the moment of struggle? [. . .] One can say, therefore, that the book on the History of Europe is nothing but a fragment of history” (Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith [New York: International Publishers, 1971], 118–119). Hayden White has also pointed to the peculiar fact that the History of Europe begins after the fall of Napoleon and ends before World War I  (Metahistory:  The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973], 403). 35. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005), 201. 36. Terry Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers:  A  Study of Ethics (Oxford:  Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 262. See also Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2008), 188. 37. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 48. “Diachronic development,” Anderson writes, “is reduced to the chance outcome of a synchronic combinatory” (50). 38. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, preface to A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap–Harvard University Press, 1989), xiv.

162  Notes to pages 15–16 39. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 130. See Badiou, Being and Event, 180. 40. In this regard, see Ian Baucom’s analysis of the Zong massacre of 1781 as “a truth event in the full sense. The truth discernible in it, however, is the truth of catastrophe” (Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005], 123). The sliding of such overvaluation toward the oppressive state of “catastrophe” itself may be a tendency of the event, as Reinhart Koselleck suggests: “Every event produces more and at the same time less than is contained in its pre-given elements: hence its permanently surprising novelty” (“Representation, Event, and Structure,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004], 110). 41. Reinhart Koselleck, “Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution,” in Futures Past, 44. 42. Albert Mathiez, The French Revolution, trans. Catherine Alison Phillips (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 3. 43. Allan Kulikoff, “Was the American Revolution a Bourgeois Revolution?” in The Transforming Hand of Revolution:  Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J.  Albert (Charlottesville:  University Press of Virginia, 1995), 89. Woody Holton examines the complex class character of early resistance in Virginia, emphasizing that, as he puts it, “[w]‌hen the rulers of Britain’s largest American colony took it into the American Revolution, they did so partly because they were feeling pressure from below” (Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999], 220). The significance of the war for my book lies less in its role as what a classical line of historiography would see as a “moment of class discovery” in which a self-conscious “new actor [. . .] step[s] onto the world-historical stage” than in the contradictory representational situation created by the Revolution and its immediate social and political aftermath (T. J. Clark, “Painting in the Year Two,” in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999], 19). On the American Revolution and pressures “from below,” see also Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra:  Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000), 211–247. 44. Historians of the early United States have tended to avoid the term bourgeois, preferring the historically neutralizing (and properly Anglo-Saxon) middle class or middling sort. Nevertheless, recent work has attended to the class in all its emergent force. See, for example, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire:  The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 28–36 and passim; and the essays by Konstantin Dierks, Susan Branson, Jennifer Goloboy, and Andrew M. Schocket in Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith, eds., Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Ronald Takaki’s Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) remains indispensable. Though it does not present itself as such, Wendy Bellion’s Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)  should be read as an account of a class-consolidating visual culture organized through the trope of citizenship. On the relationships among bourgeois, middle class, and ruling class, see the entry “Class” in Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of

Notes to pages 16–19  163 Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and the discussion in Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London: Verso, 2013), 6–12. 45. That “national formation” is a flimsy rubric for all manner of research by now goes without saying (see, for example, Stephen Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel:  Reading the Atlantic World-System [University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007], 1–49). That it is, nevertheless, an essential category of historical explanation and analysis is rather less frequently mentioned. As with any conceptual designation, the methodological question is always, “Useful for what?” In the case of this book, “national formation” describes a historical process that put distinct pressure on literary forms and was, in turn, shaped by them. Disgust with the nation-state form is, alas, not enough to force it out of history. 46. David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick:  National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 91. Kazanjian points to the forms of colonization already present within that earlier moment of upheaval, implicitly critiquing what Robin Blackburn calls the “falsely redemptive” argument for the “latent virtue” of the American Revolution vis-à-vis the abolition of slavery. See Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011), 26. 47. This distinguishes my argument from one that would see literary form as a matter of simple mimesis, such that an “episodic” social world gave rise to a correspondingly “episodic” literature. My understanding of textual production across the genres of my study is based on the observation that these texts are elements within their social world rather than reflections on it—though they are, inevitably, reflections too. The contrary position, on episodic form and the eighteenth-century British novel, is best stated in Jerry C. Beasley, “Life’s Episodes: Story and Its Form in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert W. Uphaus (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1988), 24–25. See also H. K. Russell, “Unity in Eighteenth-Century Episodic Novels,” in Quick Springs of Sense:  Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Larry S. Champion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974), 194. 48. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, new ed. (Boston: Beacon, 2001), 233–234. 49. Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 21. 50. Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2007), 112. The imaginary claims of Federalism, we might even say, predate the thing itself, as in the following comment by Benjamin Rush, printed by Mathew Carey in Philadelphia well before the Constitutional Convention: “It is often said, that ‘the sovereign and all other power is seated in the people.’ This idea is unhappily expressed. It should be—‘all power is derived from the people.’ They possess it only on the days of their elections. After this, it is the property of their rulers, nor can they exercise or resume it, unless it is abused. It is of importance to circulate this idea, as it leads to order and good government” (Benjamin Rush, “Address to the People of the United States,” American Museum, or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, Prose and Poetical 1, no. 1 [January 1787]: 9). 51. Gary Kornblith and John Murrin have outlined with superb clarity the limitations of an alternative concept of “ruling class” for the U.S. case, though they oddly insist that it should ultimately denote a “hereditary oligarchy.” Nevertheless, they emphasize the ambition of early U.S. elites to establish a classical, European-style ruling class on an aristocratic

164  Notes to pages 19–24 model, and they offer a balance sheet of its accomplishment into the nineteenth century (Gary J. Kornblith and John M. Murrin, “The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class,” in Beyond the American Revolution, ed. Alfred F. Young [De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993], 58). David Waldstreicher has argued that the 1780s, and in particular the 1787–88 constitutional moment, was a period in which national elites tried to “rein in” the “runaway representations” of the revolutionary period (In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997], 55). 52. Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 138–139. 53. Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 7. 54. Barthes, “Myth Today,” 141. 55. Ibid., 118. “Nation” is, for Barthes, the ne plus ultra of bourgeois myth. 56. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 187. 57. The term is Bakhtin’s, as reconstructed by Fredric Jameson, and designates a compressed form of ideology, the smallest represented unit of a historically and socially specific worldview. Ideologemes may take the form of an abstract philosophical concept or value system, proto-narrative or collective fantasy, narrative motif or topos: bricolages of bygone narrative forms and, sometimes, inarticulate hints of new forms to come. We could say that each narrative component—a set of values, a structure of characterization, a plot formation—implies a conceptual field that may be stated in the form of a proposition about the world. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 76, 115, 185; and V.  N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 33, 152–153. See also Drew Milne’s useful discussion of ideologemes as “ways in which discourse mediates social relations. The struggle over particular terms both determines and is determined by social relations, such that particular words or tropes are figured as litmus tests of class conflict. In the history of poetic theory, class struggle has often been articulated through the ideologemes of different metres, from classical metres to free verse, as forms which reflect and shape different class registers and experiences” (“Introduction, Part 2,” in Marxist Literary Theory, ed. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne [Oxford: Blackwell, 1996], 24). For an exceptionally productive use of the concept in the analysis of the discourse of love and empire in early modern lyric, see Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 58. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1991), 6. 59. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 83, in James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1987), 472.

Chapter 1 1. These collections, or Sammelbände, often hold the only surviving examples of ephemera. Though a typical anthology collection would comprise a reader’s favorite pieces, at the turn of the nineteenth century the Sammelband became an exercise in historical specimen collecting. The posterity-minded Isaiah Thomas, for example, gathered street ballads to ensure that they were “[b]‌ound up for Preservation, to show what kind of articles of this kind are in vogue with

Notes to pages 24–28  165 the vulgar at this time, 1814” (Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballad Collection, vol. 1, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.; Thomas’s note is inscribed in his hand on the flyleaf of the bound collection). See also Victor Neuburg, “Chapbooks in America: Reconstructing the Popular Reading of Early America,” in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989], 81–113). The “ephemeral,” as Richard Taws explains, “names both that which is fleeting and that which remains, the object to be destroyed, but also the mass-produced, collected, and preserved” (The Politics of the Provisional:  Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013], 168). 2. Madison et al., Federalist Papers, 87; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by paper number and page (e.g., 1.87). 3. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, The Independent Whig (Philadelphia: printed and sold by S. Keimer, 1724). The book comprised fifty-three numbers, which originally ran in London, January 10, 1719/20, to January 4, 1720/21. Keimer’s Whig is the first American book issued in parts, selling for 4s. 6d. in sheets, its type probably composed by Benjamin Franklin (then working in Keimer’s Philadelphia shop). See Edwin Wolf II, The Book Culture of a Colonial American City: Philadelphia Books, Bookmen, and Booksellers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 30; and Lawrence C.  Wroth, The Colonial Printer (Charlottesville:  University Press of Virginia, 1964), 236–237. 4. Here is the place to register my disagreement with Trish Loughran’s claim (surrounded though it is by superb argument) that “The Federalist labors as a literary text to repress all evidence of disorganization” (Republic in Print, 123). On the contrary, I take the central literary achievement of The Federalist to be precisely its use of disorganization, its reworking of the piecemeal, the partial, and the dispersed into the (episodic) form of unification. 5. Hobbes’s artificial man is, as Eric Slauter notes, “perhaps most intriguing in the way it seems both to include and exclude its subjects, to alienate them from the body politic at the same time it claims them as constituent parts.” Madison’s copy of Leviathan—a hard book to find in eighteenth-century America—was purchased in 1782 through his father’s sale of a twenty-four-year-old slave named Billey (Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009], 48). Slauter shows that bodily metaphors for the state had declined precipitously by 1787, but The Federalist is not alone in imagining a monstrous body politic at the turn of the nineteenth century: conservative discourse against the English Revolution rose again in a new period of social upheaval. 6. The Federalist’s frequent use of abstract or formal language is indicative of its centrality to the codification of federalist thought tout court: the self-assigned and heavy task of federalism was to overcome a century of political philosophy dismissing any form of imperium in imperio as “a solecism” (Allison L. LaCroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010], 14). 7. This misnomer is likely to have originated in Clinton Rossiter’s New American Library school edition of 1961 (Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution [New York: Knopf, 1996], 391n6). Titles tend to be divided between teaching and scholarship: Teaching editions (e.g., Penguin and Bantam) use Papers in the title, and those that aim for a purer scholarly pedigree (e.g., Wesleyan and Cambridge university presses) omit it. 8. Albert Furtwangler, The Authority of Publius: A Reading of the Federalist Papers (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 18, 44. 9. Jack N. Rakove, “Early Uses of The Federalist,” in Saving the Revolution: “The Federalist Papers” and the American Founding, ed. Charles R. Kesler (New York: Free Press, 1987), 235.

166  Notes to pages 28–30 Rakove himself enacts the problem in a fascinating way, disclaiming The Federalist’s representativeness even as he makes it the key text in his account of Federalism (and so, of the Constitution): “I have tried to give the Anti-Federalists their due by allowing their most trenchant objections to the Constitution to lay a foundation for the response they elicited from their Federalist opponents. In sketching that response, I have been surprised to discover how much emphasis I have given to The Federalist. The reason for this is the obvious one: Nothing equals it in analytical breadth and conceptual power” (Original Meanings, xv; emphasis added). That the historian would express his dependence on The Federalist in terms of surprise and discovery speaks to the gravitational pull this text exerts on scholarly engagements with early U.S. politics and the Constitution generally. 10. Isaac Kramnick, introduction to The Federalist Papers, by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, edited by Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth, England:  Penguin, 1987), 11. The ubiquity of comments like Kramnick’s contradicts the notion that “The Federalist stands forth today as the premier artifact of constitutional consolidation precisely because it is a collection whose readers have forgotten the original scene of its scattered production and reception” (Loughran, Republic in Print, 128). 11. Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 40. 12. Jay Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance:  Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 31. 13. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic:  Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 113. 14. Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781–1788 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 251–252. On Washington as the imaginary materialization of the nation’s body, see Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 57. 15. “The Constitution was subjected to unprecedented public scrutiny; every clause of the document was parsed and in some cases literally rewritten by readers who took issue with its phraseology or principles” (Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 [Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1999], 20). 16. For the most recent account of the outcome of the discussion, including and beyond the Bill of Rights, see Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787– 1788 (New  York:  Simon and Schuster, 2010). Maier ultimately takes the Panglossian long view typical of contemporary constitutional historians, arguing that the common critics of the Constitution won the day in subsequent amendments and Supreme Court decisions; as she puts it, “They made the republic work” (468). My argument in this book is precisely the inverse: the republic made them work. 17. R. M. Wiles, Serial Publication in England before 1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 8. 18. James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 247. 19. Other than legislative reports, which were issued in parts in the American colonies beginning in the early eighteenth century, fewer than twenty books were issued in parts through 1788. 20. An Impartial History of the War in America, between Great Britain and the United States, from Its Commencement to the End of the War (Boston: printed by Nathaniel Coverly

Notes to pages 30–31  167 and Robert Hodge, 1781–84). Hodge went on to reissue some of the remaining sheets of the first volume with a new title page, with a misbound part from volume 2, as An Impartial History of the War in America, between Great Britain and the United States (Boston: printed by Robert Hodge, 1783). On these volumes, see Orrin Grant Libby, “Some Pseudo Histories of the American Revolution,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 13, pt. 1 (1900): 419–425; and Kate Van Winkle Keller, “Nathaniel Coverly and Son, Printers, 1767–1825,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 117, pt. 1 (2007): 211–252. 21. Encyclopaedia; or, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature [. . .] the first American edition, in eighteen volumes, greatly improved (Philadelphia: printed by Thomas Dobson, 1798). Parts were offered at twenty shillings each or five dollars per complete volume in boards (as indicated in Dobson’s call for subscribers, A New Edition. . . Proposals, by Thomas Dobson. . . for Printing by Subscription, Encyclopaedia Britannica. . . [Philadelphia, ca.  1789], Evans 45466). See Robert D.  Arner, Dobson’s “Encyclopaedia”:  The Publisher, Text, and Publication of America’s First “Britannica,” 1789–1803 (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); and James N. Green, “The Rise of Book Publishing,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 2: An Extensive Republic, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 80–81. The best account of the economics of eighteenth-century American subscription publishing remains Donald Farren, “Subscription:  A  Study of the Eighteenth-Century American Book Trade” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1982). 22. Wiles, Serial Publication in England before 1750, 11. For further suggestion that fascicle-buyers may have been of the social-climbing sort, we can look to the invocation of book 13 of Tom Jones (1749), which mocks the bookseller’s habit of selling remaindered folios in fascicles to unknowledgeable customers: “[T]‌he heavy, unread, Folio Lump, which long had dozed on the dusty Shelf, piece-mealed into Numbers, runs nimbly through the Nation” (Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. John Bender and Simon Stern [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], 525). Wiles argues that this was not common practice and that Fielding is registering the success of number books. 23. Alexander Hamilton to James Madison, 19 May 1788, in The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, ed. Merrill Jensen, John P.  Kaminski, and Gaspare J. Saladino, 26 vols. to date (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976–), 20: 1103. The Documentary History is hereafter cited as DHRC. 24. Advertisement, Independent Journal, January 2, 1788, in DHRC 20: 564–565. Archibald M’Lean complained heartily about the gap between estimate and outcome:  “The Money expended for Printing Paper, Journeymens Wages and Binding was upwards of two hundred and seventy Pounds; of which sum I have charged Coll: Hamilton with 144 Pounds, which is not three shillings per Vol: I have several hundred Copies remaining on hand, and even allowing they were sold, at the low Price I am obliged to sell them at, I would not clear five Pounds on the whole impression” (Archibald M’Lean to Robert Troup, 14 October 1788, in DHRC 20: 880). Troup was part of the committee that, with Hamilton, commissioned the Federalist book. M’Lean ultimately offered the two volumes to nonsubscribers for eight shillings in an effort to recoup some of the expense, though he was still trying to sell the remainders in the summer of 1789 (DHRC 20: 880, 1116). John Tiebout reissued some of the remainders with new title pages in 1799 (The Federalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favour of the New Constitution, as Agreed upon by the Federal Convention [New York: printed and sold by John Tiebout, 1799]).

168  Notes to pages 31–32 25. Douglass Adair, “The Authorship of the Disputed Federalist Papers: Part II,” William and Mary Quarterly 3 (1944): 235. See also Loughran, Republic in Print, 118. On the circulation of some Federalist essays in Virginia prior to the book publication, see DHRC 8: 180–182. Only Federalists 1–6 and 16 are known to have been reprinted there (DHRC 9: 653). Randolph, in fact, surprised many by voting to ratify at the Virginia convention. Was this the effect of The Federalist’s argument or of the persuasive powers of a finer volume? 26. George Nicholas to James Madison, 5 April 1788, in DHRC 9: 704. 27. On classical tropes in the ratification debate, see Cornell, Other Founders, 68–74. On the culture of classicism and its discursive relationship to both slavery and emergent Romanticism, see Slauter, State as a Work of Art, 169–213. 28. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London:  Routledge, 1963), 177–181, 198. As Marx put it, the Mercantilists “already have faint notions of money as capital, but actually again only in the form of money, of the notion of mercantile capital, of capital which transforms itself into money” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus [New York: Vintage, 1973], 327–328). J. E. Crowley has argued for a distinctive division of political-economic thought in the making of the Constitution, between a domestic liberalism and an international mercantilism:  “Liberal principles provided the means to resolve the Philadelphia convention’s crucial issues regarding commercial freedom and privilege, but fiscal policy and the encouragement of navigation remained the priorities in the regulation of commerce. The crux of commercial competition was among foreign states, not merchants. Regulatory powers remained an unquestioned good when applied to overseas trade. And overseas trade was the archetypal commercial activity” (The Privileges of Independence:  Neomercantilism and the American Revolution [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993], 121). 29. Karl Marx, Capital:  A  Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 253, 257; and for the apparent paradox of merchant’s capital, 266– 269. See also Marx, Grundrisse, 225–226. For a fuller account of the circuits, see Karl Marx, Capital:  A  Critique of Political Economy, vol. 2, trans. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1978), 109–199. Giovanni Arrighi developed his theory of capitalist cycles in part by differentiating between secular M–C and C–M' phases in The Long Twentieth Century:  Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (London:  Verso, 1994). My cultural application, so to speak, of the theory of value takes a lesson from Moishe Postone’s salutary critique of nondialectical approaches to the economy. See Moishe Postone, “Theorizing the Contemporary World:  Robert Brenner, Giovanni Arrighi, David Harvey,” in Political Economy and Global Capitalism:  The Twenty-First Century, Present and Future, ed. Robert Albritton, Bob Jessop, and Richard Westra (New York: Anthem, 2010), 7–24. 30. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 7. For a balance sheet of arguments in early American economic history, see Cathy Matson, “A House of Many Mansions:  Some Thoughts on the Field of Economic History,” and David Hancock, “Rethinking The Economy of British America,” both in The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, ed. Cathy Matson (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press with the Library Company of Philadelphia, 2006), 1–70 and 71–106. 31. Wyndham Beawes, Lex Mercatoria Rediviva:  or, The Merchant’s Directory.  .  .  the Third Edition, with large Additions (London: printed for J. Rivington, T. Longman, B. Law, S. Crowder, T. Becket, T. Cadell, Robinson and Roberts, and R. Baldwin, 1771).

Notes to pages 32–36  169 32. Alexander Hamilton cites Beawes in The Farmer Refuted: or A more impartial and comprehensive View of the Dispute between Great-Britain and the Colonies (New York: printed by James Rivington, 1775). See The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke, 26 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–79), 1: 143; James Madison, “Report on Books for Congress,” January 23, 1783, in The Papers of James Madison, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal, 17 vols. (Chicago and Charlottesville: University of Chicago Press and University Press of Virginia, 1962–91), 6: 67 (item 19). Forrest McDonald suggests (based on The Farmer Refuted) that Hamilton had properly studied Beawes, whereas he had only cursorily reviewed Coke and other key law texts—though Hamilton’s quotations in that pamphlet are all quite tendentiously selected (Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography [New York: W. W. Norton, 1979], 51). 33. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 210–211. 34. Beawes, Lex Mercatoria, vi. 35. Samuel Johnson, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady and W.  K. Wimsatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 277. 36. Beawes, Lex Mercatoria, vi–vii. 37. Beawes, Lex Mercatoria, v. 38. Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, Translated from the French of the Celebrated Monsieur Savary, Inspector-General of the Manufactures for the King, at the Custom-House of Paris. With Large Additions and Improvements, Incorporated throughout the Whole Work; Which more particularly accommodate the same to the Trade and Navigation of these Kingdoms, and the Laws, Customs, and Usages, To which all Traders are Subject, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: printed for John Knapton, 1757), 1: vi. Hamilton’s attention to the text is evident in his reading notes in the paybook he carried as commander of the State Company of Artillery during the Revolution (Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 1: 373–411). On Hamilton’s continuing reliance on Postlethwayt, see McDonald, Alexander Hamilton, 35; Clinton Rossiter, Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), 119; and Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 110–111, 156, 296, 347. Madison includes Postlethwayt in his “Report on Books” in the category “Politics” (Papers of James Madison, 6: 87–88, item 169). 39. Smith’s claim was, of course, that there is “a certain propensity in human nature [. . .] to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976; rept., Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1981], 1: 25). For the now classic statement on what the Smithian perspective occludes, see Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review 107 (1977): 38. 40. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 142. 41. In this regard it is important to note that Lukács argued that, for the novel, “[t]‌he most important thing is to show how the direction of a social tendency becomes visible in the small, imperceptible capillary movements of individual life. [. . .] The essential aim of the novel is the representation of the way society moves” (ibid., 144). The representation of the way society moves: What better encapsulation of the commercial handbook’s ambition could we imagine? 42. Barthes, “Myth Today,” 141.

170  Notes to pages 36–37 43. “The Federalist, like Shakespeare’s sonnets,” can be a rich site for seekers of “orderly ingenuity.” Furtwangler’s belief in The Federalist’s self-presentation resonates (antiphonally, we might say) with my critique of the text’s ambition toward hegemony: “The Constitution and papers like The Federalist [. . .] should be understood as two aspects of the same historical change. The Constitution was drawn up to frame a government based on the assent of the people. The papers that had enlivened the American press from the 1760s onward were efforts to cultivate an informed public, a people who could give or withhold intelligent assent. And The Federalist encouraged such assent by drawing out common terms of discussion in several states, and preserving criticisms and full answers in a lasting volume” (Authority of Publius, 18, 58, 93). 44. A total picture of The Federalist can be obtained, at the most simple (but still significant) level, through a study of the individual titles of the essays, which indicate their basic themes. From this level, one can follow any number of lines of continuity and discontinuity, which can be deepened via various patterns of attention: discussions of articles and sections of the Constitution, recurrence of motifs, figural or rhetorical structures, etc. In this sense, readings of The Federalist in terms of episodic poetics are virtually unlimited. My concern here is not to provide a “complete” treatment of the text: to my mind, what matters most is what is necessary to our understanding, not what is possible, pleasurable, or somehow exhaustive. Another way to put this is to say that this chapter deliberately avoids proffering a purportedly neutral or zero-degree heuristic description of the episodic structure of the eighty-five essays. 45. “[T]‌he generation of meaning does not first take the form of the production of utterances and their combination in discourse; it is relayed, in the course of its trajectory, by narrative structures and it is these that produce meaningful discourse articulated in utterances” (Algirdas Julien Greimas, “Elements of a Narrative Grammar,” in On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 65; italics removed). 46. This is not to propose, of course, that a Federalist reader—now or in 1787–88—would read only sequentially or with sustained attention. Newspaper reading is largely organized around interruption. And as historians of the book have taught us, the codex itself is a kind of technology of discontinuous reading. Guglielmo Cavallo, for example, notes that in the medieval period, “[t]‌he notion of a book, which was no longer immediately connected to a work, came to coincide with an object that might contain writings of a quality and a quantity that were no longer controlled by definite conventions; the notion of total reading came to imply a reading that, in order to be total, had to be extended to cover the content of an entire codex” (“Between Volumen and Codex: Reading in the Roman World,” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999], 87). 47. Barthes, S/Z, 93. 48. One term for my approach here could be “close reading,” as described by D.  A. Miller: “[T]‌he practice of close reading has always been radically cloven: here, on one side, my ambition to master a text, to write over its language and refashion it to the cut of my argument, to which it is utterly indifferent; there, on the other, my longing to write in this language, to identify and combine with it” (Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003], 58). It is a matter here of closely reading the text of The Federalist, the better to bring out its claims on us—the unrecognized claims that underwrite so much political-historical writing on the text—so that we might not have to be so close to it after all. Analysis enables writerly choice, over against readerly compulsion. To reformulate Barthes’s

Notes to pages 37–38  171 admonition, those who fail to read closely are obliged to read the same story everywhere (see S/Z, 15–16). 49. Indeed, in The Federalist’s usage, the “character” of Publius would be self-governance itself. 50. Furtwangler has usefully described the rhetorical pose of Publius using the Federalist term candor, which connoted a “deferential sweetness of temper,” “quiet honesty,” and “refined development, a feeling or generous impulse behind disinterestedness.” He argues that, while the appeal to one’s candor was a common opening strategy in the polemical writing of the ratification debate, The Federalist “went beyond these tactics to focus on a generous candor that became almost an end in itself ” (Authority of Publius, 62–63). The description is accurate and helps us to see two further aspects: first, the combative dimension of the Publius pose and, more important, the ways this pose makes “candor” appear to be almost an end in itself— an effect that amounts to the absorption of competing arguments. 51. Locke’s influential discussion of enthusiasm in book IV, c­hapter  19, of the Essay set the philosophical stage for the conflict between Old Light and New Light ministers in mid-eighteenth-century New England. Nancy Ruttenburg has identified the world-historical significance of this exchange as “the advent of the individual,” a foundation of modern “democratic personality.” The Old Lights’ central objection to the new revivalism was that “the enthusiasts dissembled the questionable doctrinal content of their utterances [. . .] by their sensational manner of speaking, destabilizing the grounds upon which an auditor could safely consent to the representation of spiritual truth offered” (Nancy Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998], 26–27). See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1975). Individuation here, as in The Federalist, suggests multiplication, an explosion of too many speaking voices. For the debate as expressed in the context of the First Great Awakening, see the opposing positions set out in Charles Chauncy, “Enthusiasm Described and Caution’d Against” (1742), in The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences, ed. Alan Heimert and Perry Miller (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 228–256; and Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2: Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959). See also Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007); and Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). U.S.  partisan politics after 1789 may be crudely but accurately schematized through proxy identifications with either Britain (Federalists) or France (Republicans), identifications that marked the most dramatic connection yet between politics and affect. Once this connection was made, the language of sympathy and its fellow traveler, contagion, were in print everywhere. As Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick suggest, the new party politics tried to “manage public opinion not so much with reference either to personalities [. . .] or [. . .] to particular issues [. . .] but on a broad question of sentiment, back of which lurked the question of who should be the custodians of that sentiment” (The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 355; for general discussion, see 354–365). For a tightly expressed account of what he terms “fears of the Jacobinization of the impressionable American mind,” which partake of the language of disease and infection, see Jay Fliegelman, introduction to Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, by Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Jay Fliegelman (Harmondsworth, England:  Penguin, 1991), x–xiii. Cathy Davidson tracks the gendered aspects of Anti-Jacobinism through American uses (and

172  Notes to pages 38–39 abuses) of Mary Wollstonecraft (Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], 131–135). Christopher Looby distills these tendencies into a nationalist plot: “[O]‌ne of the ways the French Revolution figured in the literature of Federalist and Republican America was as the deferred action of the American Revolution, and as the relay station (as it were) between the revolutions of 1776 and 1800” (Voicing America, 57). 52. For an influential account of the paranoid style of politics in the future United States, one that locates the power of conspiracy in a historical moment in which the mechanistic model of cause and effect—in which event A leads to event B—failed in the confrontation with social and historical complexity (unintended consequences and overdetermined events), see Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982): 401–411. 53. For details on word frequency in The Federalist, see Thomas S.  Engeman, Edward J. Erler, and Thomas B. Hofeller, The Federalist Concordance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980). 54. Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations, ed. Lester H. Cohen, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1994), 2: 682–683. As we see in the ratification debate, there is good reason to believe that these metaphors begin to appear widely in English between the upheavals of the English and American revolutions. For a more general account, see Raymond Williams’s discussion of “Revolution,” in Keywords, 270–274. The counterrevolutionary imagination at long last fastens upon an unthreatening image of the crowd in the ebb and flow of Tocqueville’s account of an American multitude of the middle: “Just as there are no longer races of the poor, there are no longer races of the rich; the latter issue from within the crowd each day and return to it constantly. They therefore do not form a separate class that one can easily define and despoil; and besides, as they adhere to the mass of their fellow citizens by a thousand secret threads, the people can scarcely strike at them without hitting themselves. Between these two extremes in democratic societies is found an innumerable multitude of almost similar men who, without being precisely either rich or poor, possess enough goods to desire order and do not have enough of them to excite envy” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 607). 55. Compare Gordon Wood on elite political views in the 1780s: “An excess of power in the people was leading not simply to licentiousness but to a new kind of tyranny, not by the traditional rulers, but by the people themselves—what John Adams in 1776 had called a theoretical contradiction, a democratic despotism. It was too much government, not the lack of it, that was so frightening to some. Instead of falling into pieces, as could have been anticipated from the conventional theory of politics, the people appeared more capable of oppression” (Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969], 404; emphasis added). 56. “By honoring the conventions of anonymity, the framers sacrificed an opportunity to impose greater coherence on the overall public debate” (Rakove, Original Meanings, 137). 57. Cornell, Other Founders, 48. 58. The chain of disease-related metaphorics in reference to mass rebellion runs most potently through the following numbers:  1 (Hamilton), 10 (Madison), 14 (Madison), 16 (Hamilton), 19 (Madison), 21 (Hamilton), 26 (Hamilton), 28 (Hamilton), 34 (Hamilton), 37

Notes to pages 39–45  173 (Madison), 38 (Madison), 50 (Madison), 61 (Hamilton), 62 (Madison), 63 (Madison), 64 (Jay), and 73 (Hamilton). For the sake of expediency, I discuss the formal logic of the interactions among only the most salient of these. 59. David P.  Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion:  The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 120. Historians have disagreed for a long time about the significance of the agrarian uprisings of the 1780s to the consolidation of 1787– 88. Robert Feer argues that the Constitution would have been written and ratified regardless of the insurrection in Massachusetts because the historical forces had been, as it were, already mobilized; but his work ultimately supports Szatmary’s point that Shays’s Rebellion was a critical event in shaping and consolidating the views of the gentry and the commercial class (see Robert A. Feer, “Shays’s Rebellion and the Constitution: A Study in Causation,” New England Quarterly 42 [1969]: 388–410). Two more recent treatments appear to settle the argument in favor of the insurrectionaries. See Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); and Maier, Ratification. The most thorough treatment is provided by the essays collected in the excellent and comprehensive Robert A. Gross, ed., In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993). The baker’s dozen references to the Shaysites (and to insurrection) in The Federalist are, I am arguing, highly significant because they strike at the heart of the text’s complex ideological melding of national formation and value-based abstraction. (See Federalists 6, 8, 9, 16, 19, 21, 25, 26, 28, 29, 43, 74, and 85.) As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg puts it, pithily describing the newspapers’ attack on rebellious farmers, “the bourgeois press engaged the enemy” (This Violent Empire, 103; and, more generally, 88–135). 60. Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1967), 203. 61. The theorization of treason in the early constitutional period is itself worthy of a monograph. In The Federalist, Madison lauds the Constitution’s limitations on the punishment of treason to the convicted individual (in Article III, Section 3; see Federalist 43.280). Hamilton, in keeping with the passages I treat here, offers the following statement on the subject: “[T]‌reason is a crime leveled at the immediate being of the society” (74.423). There is an aesthetic dimension here, as well, as Terry Eagleton’s account of the category of the aesthetic in the eighteenth century indicates: “ ‘Deep’ subjectivity is just what the ruling social order desires, and exactly what it has most cause to fear. If the aesthetic is a dangerous, ambiguous affair, it is because [. . .] there is something in the body which can revolt against the power which inscribes it; and that impulse could only be eradicated by extirpating along with it the capacity to authenticate power itself ” (The Ideology of the Aesthetic [Oxford: Blackwell, 1990], 28). 62. The locus classicus of what we might call literalist reading as radical intervention (indeed, as the most powerful development of such a mode of reading after Thomas Paine) may be that early text by Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” which masterfully appropriates the eighteenth-century discourse of universality (and, rather more than incidentally, refers at length to both New England religious culture and several U.S. state constitutions) (Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton [Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1975], 211–241). 63. The image ran in The Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754. 64. The extraordinarily swift evaporation of the figure of the Indian in this passage from Federalist 42 is a chilling instantiation of the force of abstraction precisely because of its

174  Notes to pages 45–50 intimate proximity to the exterminating practices that proceed as a matter of course from the logic of U.S. national formation. 65. See, among others, Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 300; and Jennifer Nedelsky, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism:  The Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 180–182 and passim. 66. In this sense, the question of serialization modifies Cavallo and Chartier’s observation on the relation between the codex and discontinuous reading (see Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999]). The difference between the scroll and the codex may not be so much a continuous/discontinuous dichotomy but, rather, a transformation in how, by the eighteenth century, continuity is constituted in and through discontinuity. Moreover, as the sociology of print forms changes, so do the contours of this relation. For complementary analyses of related issues in nineteenth-century publishing, see Kevin McLaughlin, Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995); and Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 67. Dena Goodman has shown that the distribution of journals through the postal service in revolutionary France made “their periodicity [. . .] that of private correspondence” (The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994], 169–170). Elizabeth Hewitt has traced a similar link between epistolarity and political polemic during ratification, which amounted to a clash between two divergent modes of epistolarity. For Anti-Federalists, “union inheres in the process of correspondence itself, and not in any idealized text, and it finds its manifestations in the privileging of the circulation of familiar letters.” For Federalists, by contrast, “each citizen writes to the state, or through the state, or under the state’s watchful eye” (Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 18). 68. See Cornell, Other Founders, 122–123. For an overview of public-information time lags and news distribution in the period just after ratification, see Allan R. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973), 20–77; and on the post office circa 1787, 78–79. 69. Warner, Letters of the Republic, 65. 70. David S.  Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 60, 265. 71. In the period of the American Revolution, reading was an event in a more literal sense, as well. The requirement that the Declaration of Independence be read aloud made that text, as Fliegelman puts it, “an event rather than a document.” On the widespread effort to “make writing over in the image of speaking” in this period, see Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence:  Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 20–28 and passim. 72. Michael G.  Ketcham, Transparent Designs:  Reading, Performance, and Form in the Spectator Papers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 97. 73. At the moment when the periodicity of reading matter is assimilated to the temporality of commodity exchange, the time of the signifier (what Lévi-Strauss calls the “practical requirement” of the market) determines the signified; form determines content: again, habit as plot (Lévi-Strauss, Origin of Table Manners, 130).

Notes to pages 51–55  175 74. For a rich exploration of the ways this print technology operated in the “culture of the excerpt” to make outsized novels digestible, see Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 75. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 115–116. 76. Ibid., 118. That the secondary effect of socialization was nonetheless an extraordinarily rich site of development for its own (historically ephemeral) aesthetic is also clear from, among other studies, Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters. 77. Quoted in Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap–Harvard University Press, 1992), 328. 78. Federalist 24 appeared for the first time in this issue; Federalist 23 had been printed the day before in the New-York Packet. 79. Within the contemporary newspaper context, The Federalist was rigorous reading indeed. Robert Ferguson suggestively explores the extent to which The Federalist, even (or especially) in its book format, carries with it a paratextual apparatus to aid reading, a “numerology” that “provides a structure to be seen to go with the words that are read” (Robert A. Ferguson, “The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 1: 1590–1820, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 361). 80. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, 1992), 29. 81. Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, in which the OED locates the first use of journal to denote “newspaper,” criticizes the Grub Street connection between publication and economic exchange (if only to shore up Pope’s own status position in the field of literary production): “Hence Bards, like Proteus long in vain ty’d down,/Escape in Monsters, and amaze the town./Hence Miscellanies spring, the weekly boast/Of Curl’s chase press, and Lintot’s rubric post:/Hence hymning Tyburn’s elegiac lines,/Hence Journals, Medleys, Merc’ries, Magazines:/ Sepulchral Lyes, our holy walls to grace,/And New-year Odes, and all the Grub-street race” (The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963], 722–723 [I.37–44]). 82. Four of the American newspapers and magazines in John K. Alexander’s list for 1787 included independent in their titles (The Selling of the Constitutional Convention: A History of News Coverage [Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1990], 213, 223–227). 83. Mott, American Journalism, 118. 84. Holly Brewer has traced the transformations of consent in relation to the development of a distinction between the political identities of adult and child in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Children, in the view that emerged with the Reformation and began to take hold with the American Revolution, “were explicitly excluded from equality,” from “the right to choose.” Brewer points forward to the legacy of the new legal protection of children from the rule of contract: the strategic tagging of various inconvenient others (African Americans, women, Indians, Filipinos) as children and thus both unqualified to choose and in need of the protection of a benevolent white, male parent (Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority [Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2005], 4, 364ff.). 85. Fliegelman pursues the relation between independence and self-sufficiency in this period through the case of a husband’s responsibility for his wife after divorce (Declaring Independence, 149–150).

176  Notes to pages 55–56 86. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims:  The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 27–28. 87. Bruce H. Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 5. 88. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 47. 89. T.  H. Breen, “ ‘Baubles of Britain’:  The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 119 (1988): 78. Per-capita consumption during the same period increased 39 percent (James A. Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700–1815 [Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973], 42). 90. Jackson Turner Main discusses this type of credit in the context of standards of living (The Social Structure of Revolutionary America [Princeton, N.J.:  Princeton University Press, 1965], 115–163, especially 135ff.). The eighteenth-century discourse of “sorts” displaced the old hierarchical language of orders and estates while enabling the “middling sort” to emphasize their having risen above the “lower” and ever closer toward the “better sort.” (See, among others, Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003], 5–6). 91. T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 26. 92. The extent to which this public mode of signature- or mark-collecting was implicated in violence—symbolic or physical—through the pressures it put on those whose interests diverged is suggested by Gary Nash’s discussion of viva voce voting in New York in the 1760s and 1770s. The lack of a secret ballot is one explanation for the absence of class-conscious voting during the period: “[D]‌aily bread could not be compromised as easily as one’s vote, so when [the artisans] were forced by canvasses or public polls to declare themselves, some gave their support to those with economic power over them” (Gary B.  Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979], 371). See also William Huntting Howell, “Entering the Lists: The Politics of Ephemera in Eastern Massachusetts, 1774,” Early American Studies 9 (2011): 187–217. 93. By the mid-1780s, it was clear that at least economically, Britain had actually benefited from the American Revolution, since commercial relations had been reestablished without the costs of administering a settler empire:  “[I]‌t is far simpler—in terms of existing commercial, social, and cultural networks—for the excolonized to resume their old ties (in somewhat altered form) than to transfer this relationship to other core powers” (Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s–1840s [New York: Academic Press, 1989], 83). 94. Richard L.  Bushman, The Refinement of America:  Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992), xiii. 95. We may think here of Fernand Braudel’s astute observation (in his discussion of the seventeenth-century European upper bourgeoisie’s entrance into the aristocracy through ennoblement or marriage) that in the transition from feudal to capitalist modes of production, new individuals scurry to fill pre-legitimated slots, to clothe themselves in the status markers of the previously leading class (Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 2: The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Siân Reynolds [New York: Harper and Row, 1982], 474). Neil McKendrick famously argues that the consumer revolution of late eighteenth-century

Notes to pages 56–59  177 England—which was a European and transatlantic phenomenon—constituted a “new demand structure” in which “social imitation and emulative spending penetrat[ed] deeper than ever before through the closely packed ranks of [. . .] society” (introduction and “The Commercialization of Fashion,” in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.  H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society:  The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982], 6, 56). 96. This perspective is closely linked to the Protestant moralizing recounted above. See Janet A.  Riesman, “Money, Credit, and Federalist Political Economy,” in Beyond Confederation:  Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 147. The genteel perspective obfuscated social inequality in early America, where poverty and indigence—rooted in employment insecurity and enslavement and exacerbated by alcoholism, large-scale migrancy, and poor medical care—defined everyday life for many. On poverty in the eighteenth-century British colonies and the early United States, see the essays in Billy G. Smith, ed., Down and Out in Early America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). 97. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 39. 98. Richard D.  Brown, “Shays’s Rebellion and Its Aftermath:  A  View from Springfield, Massachusetts, 1787,” William and Mary Quarterly 40 (1983): 598. With an unfortunate nostalgia for an era of smallholder farmers, Allan Kulikoff refers to the freshly ruinous policies of the new Constitution as the “defeat of yeoman popular democracy” (From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000], 292). Shays and his contemporaries were, as Robert Gross puts it, perhaps “the first generation of Americans to have experienced acutely the relentless dialectic between expansion and consolidation that has marked the social history of the United States since the late eighteenth century” (Robert A.  Gross, “The Uninvited Guest:  Daniel Shays and the Constitution,” in In Debt to Shays:  The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Revolution, ed. Robert A.  Gross [Charlottesville:  University Press of Virginia,  1993], 20). What Gross sees as an oscillation between expansion and contraction is more specifically, in the Shays moment, a matter of a category of smallholder farmers facing a new phase of the transition toward the formal subsumption of their labor under (merchant) capital (see Karl Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” appendix to Capital, vol. 1, 1023). According to James Madison’s notes on the Philadelphia convention, Hamilton invoked Shays in his long remarks on provisions to be made for the “happiness of our Country”: “A certain portion of military force is absolutely necessary in large communities. Masss. [sic] is now feeling this necessity & making provision for it. But how can this force be exerted on the States collectively. It is impossible” (Alexander Hamilton, “Speech on a Plan of Government,” June 18, 1787, in Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 4:  189). Of the five extant versions of notes on Hamilton’s speech (Hamilton’s preparatory notes, as well as notes on the speech by Madison, Robert Yates, John Lansing Jr., and Rufus King), only Madison’s include the reference to Massachusetts. 99. This peculiar effect depends upon the structural positivity of ideological contradiction, “which, far from always marking a fissure of a social formation, may rather be one of the joints whereby such a formation is articulated” (D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 99). 100. Hobsbawm points out that political discourse at the turn of the nineteenth century in the revolutionary states (France and the United States) equated “the people” and the state

178  Notes to pages 59–61 but that the substitution of the one for the other served a distinct purpose in the United States: namely, the avoidance of “the centralizing and unitary implications of the term ‘nation’ against the rights of the federated states.” My account of The Federalist locates the text at the politico-ideological hinge point between this view and the one that Hobsbawm sees as the outcome of the French Revolution, namely, the nation as “the body of citizens whose collective sovereignty constituted them a state which was their political expression” (Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 18–19). For a more detailed political analysis of this balancing act, see Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Chapter 2 1. Stephen Arch has noted that postrevolutionary American memoirists wrote on the borderline between two conceptions of the written self: An older, properly “eighteenth-century” paradigm emphasized the subject of memoir as representative, as a type of man; a newer, “modern” understanding of self embraced what an earlier generation would dismiss as “vanity.” Franklin’s narrative, according to Arch, marks a notable, though uneven, shift in narrative accent: “[T]‌he door to a complete focus on what the eighteenth century called vanity—individuality, singularity, eccentricity—has been cracked open, despite the continued reticence of most self-biographers to talk at length about themselves” (Stephen Carl Arch, After Franklin:  The Emergence of Autobiography in Post-revolutionary America, 1780–1830 [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001], 42). Jay Fliegelman describes the sources and consequences of this reticence in the case of Jefferson, whose memoirs largely refuse the representation of the author’s singularity: Jefferson “resists constructing a narrative in which larger political or social principles or events are meaningful only insofar as they are visible in, and referable to, a specific individual’s scrutinized actions” (Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 121). In such a transitional cultural moment, when conceptions of the actual and the narrative-representational possibilities of the individual are in flux between two dominant modes, the mechanisms through which self-narration is enacted invite analysis. Most discussions of autobiographical narrative in this period revolve around the status of the individual self, cataloging texts according to a dichotomous periodization: early modern or properly modern? For example, Felicity Nussbaum’s excellent study of eighteenth-century life writing remains, in this regard, rather confusing in terms of the object it wants to deconstruct. In emphasizing that Franklin’s narrative consists of “sections that lack connective tissue or summary,” or that “though he lived until 1790, the narrative stops at 1758,” Nussbaum seems to slip into the very dichotomy—Whole! Fragment!—the study seeks to supersede (Felicity A.  Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject:  Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England [Baltimore, Md.:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989], 22). If one is looking for a “complete life,” then narratives like Franklin’s obviously do not deliver. But this dichotomy not only forces memoirs from the period into a decidedly modern framework (the modern “self ” will be found or will not be found); in doing so it also occludes the ways the life-narrative form itself is established through the interplay between self and society, which is not consistently represented within the narratives as one of self against society.

Notes to pages 61–62  179 2. The problem with Adam Smith was, of course, that the author of what was taken to be the handbook of free-market liberalism (Wealth of Nations) was also the great theorist of the sympathetic imagination (in The Theory of Moral Sentiments). See Keith Tribe, “ ‘Das Adam Smith Problem’ and the Origins of Modern Smith Scholarship,” History of European Ideas 34 (2008): 514–525; Leonidas Montes, “Das Adam Smith Problem: Its Origins, the Stages of the Current Debate, and One Implication for Our Understanding of Sympathy,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 25 (2003): 63–90; and Richard Teichgraeber III, “Rethinking Das Adam Smith Problem,” Journal of British Studies 20 (1981): 106–123. 3. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall, eds., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), xxiii. 4. A version of the text (lacking part 4) was first published in French translation in 1791 by the Parisian publisher Buisson, on behalf of Franklin’s friend Louis Le Veillard. That edition was based on one of two fair copies of the manuscript made by Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache; the other fair copy had been sent to Benjamin Vaughan in London. Most scholars agree that Franklin did not intend for the text to be published in this form, since he explicitly wrote to both Le Veillard and Vaughan that they were not to “suffer any Copy to be taken of them, or of any Part of them, on any Account whatever,” and he directed them only to share the manuscript with Richard Price (Vaughan) and the Duke de La Rochefoucauld (Veillard) for commentary (qtd. in Max Farrand, introduction to Benjamin Franklin’s Memoirs: Parallel Text Edition, ed. Max Farrand [Berkeley: University of California Press and the Huntington Library, 1949], xxv). Nonetheless, as Max Farrand notes, the manuscript circulation of the Autobiography was typical of Franklin’s “policy or program of publicity”; Franklin would judge the text’s suitability for various venues in a decidedly ex post manner: It was the outcome of a particular “public” exposure that mattered, and according to the protocols of the republic of manuscript letters, Franklin reserved the right to be pleased or outraged, in an appropriately public fashion, according to the result (Farrand, introduction, xxiv). The text itself was embedded in this field of social convention as merely one moment—though the primary one—in the unfolding of the exchange among text, reader, and author. Franklin wrote his memoirs as a public text, but he made some effort to regulate the size of its public. The first English versions of the text, incomplete and editorially idiosyncratic, appeared in serial form in the United States in 1790 (in the Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine and in Mathew Carey’s American Museum). Translated from the French, these versions were in fact narrated in the third person and included various supplementary accounts of Franklin’s life. Several English versions of the text as redacted by Franklin’s grandson William Temple Franklin were published after 1817. In 1868, the first version of the Autobiography as it has come to be known, including all four parts, was published in New York by John Bigelow. The appearance of a newly “complete” Franklin just after the consolidation of a “complete” union in the North’s victory in the Civil War is not wholly without significance from the perspective of nationalist mythology. As we have seen in the case of The Federalist, textual unity may stand, in especially charged cases, as a proxy for national unity. Carla Mulford provides an account of Franklin as an instrument of the nineteenth-century nationalist imagination, with emphasis on his importance to the development of both elite discourse and popular stories (Carla Mulford, “Figuring Benjamin Franklin in American Cultural Memory,” New England Quarterly 72 [1999]:  415–443). Two major points from this highly condensed summary of the Autobiography’s long road to textual stability in the age of mechanical reproducibility are essential: (1) Franklin’s manuscript was written as a public narrative, even though it was

180  Notes to pages 62–66 not written for immediate print publication, and (2) what we call the Autobiography was not branded as such until after the Civil War. In other words, we should think of the text as both more and less stable than it appears to be: more stable because it possesses essential characteristics of a “finished” narrative and less stable because Benjamin Franklin never published a book entitled Autobiography. These two points are an implied and constant context for the argument that follows. For the best history relating to the manuscript itself, see the introduction to Lemay and Zall, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin; for a good account of all major editions up to 1868, see Farrand, introduction; for the deepest engagement with the material form, see James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (Newcastle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2006). 5. Benjamin Franklin, “Epitaph,” in Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 91. 6. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, in Writings, 1337; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 7. Critics have noted the resemblance between Franklin’s narrative persona and the money form; my focus here is on the representation of time as money-time. Mitchell Breitwieser, who in many ways set the standard for critical commentary on Franklin, compares Franklin and the money form at some length, with a rich discussion—developed from, but not limited to, the work of Marx, Weber, and Simmel—of “bourgeois capital as a form of metaphysics, rather than as a practical opponent to metaphysics” (Mitchell Robert Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 219n17; see 202–230). 8. The distinctiveness of Franklin’s narrative representation may be seen by contrast with John Adams’s Autobiography, written in the first decade of the nineteenth century, which articulates the relation between life event and temporality in a manner much more in line with Protestant severity than Franklin’s. The very terms of Adams’s text would be unintelligible in Franklin’s: “I learned in my Youth in America, that Happiness is lost forever if Innocence is lost, at least until Repentance is undergone so severe as to be an overballance to all the gratifications of Licentiousness. Repentance itself cannot restore the Happiness of Innocence, at least in this Life” (Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols., The Adams Papers, Series 1: Diaries [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap–Harvard University Press, 1961], 3: 261). Adams’s own narrative devolves into a massive collection of already written documents (letters, diary entries, etc.), but James Farrell has argued that it is nonetheless organized around a “Ciceronian ideal”: a “rhetorical autobiography” that recounts the major “rhetorical events” in his life and part of Adams’s effort to establish himself as an orator-statesman (James M. Farrell, “John Adams’s Autobiography: The Ciceronian Paradigm and the Quest for Fame,” New England Quarterly 62 [1989]: 513, 521). Thus in Adams, too, linear temporal unfolding is subordinated to an episodic logic, though one quite different from Franklin’s. 9. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey [New York: W. W. Norton, 1961], 4, 7; emphasis in the original. 10. This is not to say that every narrative moment in the Autobiography is ordered chronologically; Franklin often organizes the narrative thematically. But the point is that it is only with the errata that Franklin uses an overarching structure. 11. Freud’s comments on the reality principle are most analytically useful because they so clearly articulate the logic of narrative binding as a social ideal: the world Franklin is making is, of course, the one that will become Freud’s bourgeois Europe, the natural habitat (and historical

Notes to pages 66–68  181 product) of the reality principle. A fuller psychoanalytical account of the libidinal dynamics of Franklin’s narrative might turn explicitly toward aggression and jouissance, following Freud’s complete argument in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to Jacques Lacan’s structural account of the formation of the subject, lingering longest, perhaps, on the latter’s foundational description of the “moment at which the mirror stage ends,” which “inaugurates, through identification with the imago of one’s semblable and the drama of primordial jealousy [. . .], the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations” (Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg [New York: W. W. Norton, 2006], 79). That last phrase could stand as a description of this chapter. 12. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 9; emphasis in the original. I have in mind the dynamics of story and discourse here. But of course reading as such is implicated in these issues, too. If writing is always “consumed” spatially (as words on a page), it is also always “consumed” in time. Gérard Genette makes this connection between textual space and narrative temporality and labels its effect pseudo-time: “The temporality of written narrative is to some extent conditional or instrumental; produced in time, like everything else, written narrative exists in space and as space, and the time needed for ‘consuming’ it is the time needed for crossing or traversing it, like a road or a field. The narrative text, like every other text, has no other temporality than what it borrows, metonymically, from its own reading” (Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980], 34). 13. Cf. Jean-Christophe Agnew’s discussion of the “serial self ” of seventeenth-century English character books and early novels: a self defined conceptually in contradistinction to the “cumulative” self, “composed in, of, and for successive performances.” Agnew’s reading of Franklin himself curiously fails to register this point, instead finding a “self-deprecating theatricality” and a “whimsical” common sense in the Autobiography (Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart:  The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 83, 193). 14. See Chatman, Story and Discourse. Also useful are Rimmon-Kenan’s distinctions among story (“the narrated events, abstracted from their disposition in the text and reconstructed in their chronological order”), text (“a spoken or written discourse which undertakes” the telling of the story), and narrative (“the act or process of production”) (Narrative Fiction, 3). 15. Jennifer Jordan Baker, Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 84ff. 16. Lack of moral corruption is, in this regard, an extension of physical health: “In the mean time, that hard-to-be-govern’d Passion of Youth, had hurried me frequently into Intrigues with low Women that fell in my Way, which were attended with some Expence & great Inconvenience, besides a continual Risque to my Health by a Distemper which of all Things I dreaded, tho’ by great good Luck I escaped it” (1371). 17. Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, 291. 18. Franklin assumed parental responsibility for William, a situation that suggests that William’s mother was not, contrary to the hints Franklin drops in the Autobiography, a prostitute or otherwise “low” woman but, rather, a woman of respectable standing who could not publicly acknowledge the birth. The great Franklin scholar J. A. Leo Lemay suggests that William’s mother may have been the wife of one of Franklin’s friends, perhaps a merchant, who was away from Philadelphia for long periods of time. Lemay also suggests that William’s

182  Notes to pages 68–70 illegitimacy may have been the reason for Franklin’s trouble finding a suitable wife, despite his financial success (J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2: Printer and Publisher, 1730–1747 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006], 3–9). Shurr makes much of the problem of bastards in his argument for part 1 as the only generically coherent section of the Autobiography (William H. Shurr, “ ‘Now, Gods, Stand Up for Bastards’: Reinterpreting Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography,” American Literature 64 [1992]:  443–446 and passim). William’s birth itself, of course, goes unmentioned in the text. 19. Many readers appear to misrecognize the character and extent of the erratum metaphor, simply because they fail to quantify it. It is, as I am arguing a delimited—though fundamental—strategy. Some critics also assume that it operates only in part 1. For example, Shurr bolsters his argument for the extractability of part 1 with the claim that “[t]‌he figure [of the erratum] is notable in Part 1, but it is dropped in later parts of the Autobiography” (“Now, Gods, Stand Up for Bastards,” 444). Critics’ traditional fascination with the secular rhetoric of Franklin’s memoirs seems to be largely responsible for the generally clumsy handling of the errata, which are seen in contradistinction to sin. Intrigued by what could only seem to be—given the historiography of the 1940s and 1950s—a unique shift away from Puritan structures of feeling in the very midst of the emerging U.S. literary canon, scholars predictably produced a Franklin whose secular character was, as it were, negatively defined by its corresponding features in New England Puritanism. In this regard, it is worth noting the ease with which The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was accommodated within the scholarship. Because of the differing temporalities of economic and ideological change, this scholarship was able to present a tenuous argument for continuity that overlooked a rigorous critique of the capitalism-as-Geist argument. For the classic and enduring critique of the Weber–Sombart Geist approach, and the positive articulation of the most robust alternative, see Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 1–32. 20. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 111. 21. According to Isaiah Thomas’s 1810 account, James continued to publish the New-England Courant under Benjamin Franklin’s name until 1726 (three years after Franklin left for Philadelphia), when he joined his brother John, a tallow chandler, in Rhode Island because he was “[n]‌ot satisfied with his situation in Boston.” In Newport, James established the colony’s first printing press (Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America:  With a Biography of Printers and an Account of Newspapers, ed. Marcus A.  McCorison [New York: Weathervane, 1970]), 110). Lemay suggests that the prospect of a monopoly on government printing drew him there (J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 1: Journalist, 1706–1730 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006], 94–95). 22. For the best account of the politics and psychodynamics of Franklin’s representation of patriarchy, see Looby, Voicing America, 99–144. 23. Franklin stresses that women should be schooled so as to be able to fill the managerial gap between husbands and sons, should the former die young. He draws this lesson from the case of one of his journeymen, whom he set up in business in South Carolina. After his death, his wife managed the business until she was able to purchase the shop and establish her son in it: “I mention this Affair chiefly for the Sake of recommending that Branch of Education [“Knowledge of Accompts”] for our young Females, as likely to be of more Use to them & their Children in Case of Widowhood than either Music or Dancing, by preserving them Losses by Imposition of crafty Men, and enable them to continue perhaps a profitable mercantile House with establish’d Correspondence till a Son is grown up fit to undertake and go

Notes to pages 70–72  183 on with it, to the lasting Advantage and enriching of the Family.—” (1399). Obviously, the case concerns only the artisan- or smallholder-class fraction. Franklin’s argument is characteristically utilitarian and unimposing—designed to persuade the skeptic rather than to confront patriarchy—and does not quite match Mary Wollstonecraft’s almost contemporary assertion that “virtue will never prevail in society till the virtues of both sexes are founded on reason; and, till the affections common to both are allowed to gain their due strength by the discharge of mutual duties” (Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects [New York: Modern Library, 2001], 170). Women in general receive astonishingly short shrift in the Autobiography. In addition to what we have already seen in Franklin’s treatment of Deborah Read, the text has this, and only this, to say about Franklin’s mother, Abiah: “My Mother had likewise an excellent Constitution. She suckled all her 10 Children” (1315). Abiah’s robust and equal care for all of the children—each is provided with enough and the same—stands in marked contrast to the structure of competition played out through the narrative as a whole, of which Franklin’s conflict with James is only the most potent instance. See Matthew Garrett, “The Self-Made Son: Social Competition and the Vanishing Mother in Franklin’s Autobiography,” ELH 80 (2013): 519–542. 24. In the others, Franklin if anything hints at the insufficiency of the rectification: “So that Erratum was in some degree corrected,” and “Thus I corrected that great Erratum as well as I could” (on Vernon, 1366; on his marriage, 1371). 25. Time becomes money, as Franklin puts it in his “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One” (1748). See Matthew Garrett, “The Liquid Life: Money and the Circulation of Success after Franklin,” Journal of Cultural Economy 4, no. 3 (2011): 315–328. 26. Moretti, Way of the World, 162. 27. While other memoirs obviously concentrate attention on the central figure, few— either those contemporary with Franklin or those from later periods—provide as extreme a divergence between the rich representation of the character-narrator and the impoverished depiction of nearly everyone else. As I am analyzing it here, this divergence is not of a proto-Romantic sort. That is, it is a structural matter rather than one of simple subjective fullness. The classic example of the latter is Rousseau’s Confessions, in which an episodic structure is articulated as an extension of subjective will: “My mind is impatient of any sort of restraint, and cannot subject itself to the rules of the moment. The mere fear of not learning prevents my paying attention. So as not to exasperate my instructor I pretend to understand. He goes ahead and I do not grasp a thing. My mind needs to go forward in its own time, it cannot submit itself to anyone else’s” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J.  M. Cohen [Harmondsworth, England:  Penguin,  1954], 118). Rousseau’s self-justifying whimsy echoes the aristocratic mode of Shaftesbury, who in the Characteristicks asserted his authorial right to episodicity, “reserving” to himself the “Privilege of Variation, and Excursion into other Subjects,” the “Episodick Liberty, and Right of wandering” (Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols. [Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2001], 3: 165). 28. By the time of Franklin’s adolescence, Josiah had purchased a small house with a mortgage. The Franklins were, at that point, established (if somewhat precariously) as a classic artisan-smallholder family. 29. Twenty-one was the standard age of majority following apprenticeship, according to long-standing custom. For example, during the English Revolution, The Case of the Army truly stated (1647), a pamphlet arguing for the nonservant manhood franchise, demanded “that all

184  Notes to pages 72–75 the freeborn at the age of 21 yeares and upwards, be the electors, excepting those that have or shall deprive themselves of that their freedome, either for some yeares or wholly by delinquency” (qtd. in C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962], 130). Christopher Hill describes contemporary challenges (among young Anabaptists, Ranters, and Quakers) to the apprenticeship structure as parallels to broader intergenerational conflict, of sons against fathers (The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution [Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972], 189). For a solid account of changes in the Anglo-American legal understanding of the child’s capacity to consent to a contract, with special focus on the eighteenth century, see Brewer, By Birth or Consent. On the use of indentures generally to secure the welfare of children in the New England colonies, see Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2nd ed. (New York: Touchstone–Simon and Schuster, 1985), 83–84. For the relationship among the new affectional family, the ideological challenge to patriarchal hierarchy, and the American Revolution, see Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims. 30. For good accounts of these dynamics, see Billy G.  Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality in Eighteenth-Century America,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 132 (1988): 85–118; and James A. Henretta, “Economic Development and Social Structure in Colonial Boston,” in Class and Society in Early America, ed. Gary B. Nash (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 139. 31. A similar freedom of work supervision is registered in Smith’s Wealth of Nations, written just after part 1 of the Autobiography: “All the improvements in machinery, however, have by no means been the inventions of those who had occasion to use the machines. Many improvements have been made by the ingenuity of the makers of the machines, when to make them became the business of a peculiar trade; and some by that of those who are called philosophers or men of speculation, whose trade it is, not to do any thing, but to observe every thing; and who, upon that account, are often capable of combining together the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects” (Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1: 21). 32. The Autobiography of John Fitch, ed. Frank D.  Prager (Philadelphia:  American Philosophical Society, 1976), 207–208. 33. John Fitch, “Life” (1792), manuscript held by the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1: 4. 34. Autobiography of John Fitch, 23. 35. “Whereas Franklin’s Autobiography traces his steady rise from the obscure rank of printer’s apprentice to his appearance as a celebrated character on an international stage, Fitch worked his way through life variously, as a clockmaker, brassfounder, silversmith, gunsmith, buttonmaker, engraver, surveyor, and Kentucky landjobber, before turning to steamboats in the early 1780s. And, where the myth of independence in Franklin’s Autobiography begins with the author’s flight from an oppressive apprenticeship under his brother in Boston to freedom and independence in Philadelphia, Fitch’s ‘Life’ remains irredeemably bound to corporate forms of patriarchal ‘tyranny’ ” (Rigal, American Manufactory, 60–61). Ric Northrup Caric has connected Fitch’s failure to conceptions of the laboring body during the period of transition between manufactory and industrialism: “Fitch responded to the problems of steamboat-building by first equating the blasting of his hopes with the torture of his body and then by postulating his death as a condition for overcoming his various ‘cares.’ Unable to identify himself with ‘independence’ and ‘honor’ while enmeshed in the steamboat project, Fitch engaged in a symbolic innovation—self-representation through torment and extinction—that

Notes to pages 75–77  185 took him outside the bounds of pre-industrial culture” (Ric Northrup Caric, “ ‘To Drown the Ills That Discompose the Mind’: Care, Leisure, and Identity among Philadelphia Artisans and Workers, 1785–1840,” Pennsylvania History 64 [1997]: 466). 36. Rufus Griswold, The Republican Court; or, American Society in the Days of Washington (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1856), 265. 37. Griswold’s effort to imagine the United States through biography is itself a noteworthy development of Franklinian exemplarity, one that entails imagining history in terms of biographical episodes; its wider cultural purchase is illustrated by an advertisement (printed on the back wrapper of one of the book’s parts) for The Pictorial Cyclopaedia of Biography: Embracing a Series of Original Memoirs of the Most Distinguished Persons of All Times: “A good Biographical Dictionary has long been a desideratum with the public. No book has been published for a long time which gave in a compact form for ready reference memoirs of all the distinguished persons who have figured in the world. Such a volume is of inestimable value, and should be placed side by side with a Dictionary of the English Language. The Scholar, the Merchant, the Statesman or the Mechanic, the Farmer or the Lawyer, may well dispense with many other books which are nevertheless of Standard Value, but he cannot if he read a book, a magazine, or a newspaper, (and who does not?) fail to have frequent cause for reference to a Biographical Dictionary.” The contrast between the biographies within the dictionary (each unique) and the readers of those biographies, who can only be typified (“The Scholar, the Merchant, the Statesman or the Mechanic”), underscores the point. 38. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt H.  Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 65. 39. Simmel, whose thinking is limited here to antinomies rather than contradictions, illuminates Franklin’s contradiction because he is incapable of seeing contradiction: he restates the Franklinian problem in its pure form. My analysis is one effort to remobilize the static terms of antinomy: “What, on the level of the ideologeme, remains a conceptual antinomy, must now be grasped, on the level of the social and historical subtext, as a contradiction” (Jameson, Political Unconscious, 117). 40. As David Waldstreicher puts it in his account of the specific function of slavery toward Franklinian mobility, “In so many ways, American freedom often depended upon running away and on keeping others from running away. The flip side of the self-made man in eighteenth-century America was the servant and the slave. In some cases they were the same people. In others, one person might play different roles in an ongoing drama of personal liberation and subjugation, freedom and unfreedom. But even those who never served or ran away were touched by the remarkable extremes of freedom and unfreedom that characterized the Atlantic littoral. When Franklin fled to New York and Philadelphia, he entered a changing social world. It was a world of new opportunity that depended on the unfreedom of a great many people, people just as mobile, and often just as creative and skilled, as Franklin. Some were able to use those skills to reinvent themselves. Others found that masters got the best of them” (Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution [New York: Hill and Wang, 2004], 6). See also David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 56 (1999): 243–272. 41. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 124.

186  Notes to pages 77–79 42. We might found the divergence between Franklin and Austen in the respective historical trajectories (careers, even) of their constituent characters, which we can summarize as rise and decline: In the crudest (but most fundamental) sense, Franklin is accumulating property, and the Bennets are (on the edge of) losing it. Although separated from the first three parts of the Autobiography by the advent of the French Revolution, Friedrich Schiller’s 1793 redaction of the Fichtean argument for what we might now call a “career” proves illuminating in relation to Franklin’s structure of self-aggrandizement: “Every individual [individuelle] human being, one may say, carries within him, potentially and prescriptively, a pure, ideal human being, and it is his life’s task to be, through all his changing manifestations, in harmony with the unchanging unity of this ideal. This pure human being, which is to be discerned more or less clearly in every subject [Subjekt], is represented by the State, the objective and, as it were, canonical form in which all the diversity of individual subjects strive to unite. One can, however, imagine two different ways in which the human being existing in time can coincide with the human being as Idea, and, in consequence, just as many ways in which the State can assert itself in individuals: either by the pure human being suppressing the empirical human being, and the State annulling individuals; or else by the individual himself becoming the State, and the human being in time being ennobled to the stature of the human being as Idea” (Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982], 17–18; translation slightly modified). 43. Christopher Looby provides the most prolonged assessment of this absence, which he analyzes in terms of the “desire to contain the disruptive power of the Revolution” (Voicing America, 101). 44. Here it may be heuristically useful to see this as the sociopolitical expression of that central distinction Aristotle makes in the Poetics, between the episodic plot as distended and the episodic digression as enriching. Franklin tacks uneasily between these two positions. 45. Many critics have remarked on the (lack of a) public/private divide in Franklin’s writing: “[S]‌till the Franklin of the Autobiography is the Franklin of persisting significance because that Franklin incorporates his central perception of the public nature of private character” (Larzer Ziff, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991], 85). 46. What Franklin calls the “Interruption” of the Revolution was, among more important things, at least nominally responsible for his stopping the text after part 1 and starting again without access to the preceding section, a situation that has led one critic to refer to the Autobiography’s four parts as its “four separate spurts” (Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the Individual:  Self and Circumstance in Autobiography [Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1978], 253). 47. David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, ed. Lester H.  Cohen, 2  vols. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1990), 1: 317. 48. Cf. the following account from the memoirs of the republican Benjamin Rush: “I was animated constantly by a belief that I was acting for the benefit of the whole world, and of future ages, by assisting in the formation of new means of political order and general happiness. Whether my belief as far as it relates to the last great object will be realized, or not, is yet a secret in the womb of time. Late events have at times induced me to believe my hopes were visionary and my labors lost, and with them the more valuable labors of all the patriots and the blood of all the heroes of the Revolution. At other times I have consoled myself by

Notes to pages 79–81  187 recollecting that the seeds of all the great changes for the better in the condition of mankind, have been sowed years and centuries before they came to pass. I still believe the American Revolution to be big with important consequences to the world, and that the labor of no individual, however feeble his contributions to it were, could have been spared. It was often said by the philanthropic Dr. Jebb ‘that no good effort was lost.’ Still less can it be true, that the American Revolution will be an abortive event in the divine government of the world” (The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: His “Travels through Life” Together with His “Commonplace Book for 1789–1813,” ed. George W. Corner [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press for the American Philosophical Society, 1948], 161–162). 49. Recall, from my discussion of The Federalist, the frequency with which late eighteenth-century social transformation was expressed in terms of natural disaster. Hobsbawm notes the proliferation of such metaphors after 1789:  “One of the first things observed about [the French Revolution] was that it resembled not so much a set of planned decisions and controlled actions by human beings, but a natural phenomenon that was not under, or escaped from, human control” (Eric Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise:  Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution [New Brunswick, N.J.:  Rutgers University Press, 1990], 62–63). But, as we see in Franklin (and as we saw in the ratification debate), there is reason to believe that these metaphors begin to appear with the mass upheavals that happen before the taking of the Bastille (the English and American revolutions and the turbulence in between). 50. Benjamin Franklin to William Franklin, 16 April 1768, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 15, ed. William B.  Willcox, Dorothy W.  Bridgwater, Mary L.  Hart, Claude A. Lopez, and G. B. Warden (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), 98–99. 51. Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2005), 153. More specifically, the term riot referred to “any assembly of twelve or more persons who frightened the public and threatened to break the law.” According to the 1714 Riot Act, once magistrates had labeled a gathering as a riot, they were empowered to break up the crowd by force after an hour’s warning (60). 52. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard Improved (Philadelphia: B. Franklin and D. Hall, 1758), n.p. (printed within the months of May and June). This text was subsequently reprinted, first as Father Abraham’s Speech (Boston: Benjamin Mecom, 1758) and then as The Way to Wealth (see Franklin, Writings, 1298). For the best account of this text and its travels, see Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin, 127–143. 53. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 79, 90. On the moral economy along the eastern seaboard of early America, see Daniel Vickers, “Competency and Competition:  Economic Culture in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 41 (1990):  3–29, which suggests that Thompson’s concept has less purchase on the American situation because of the availability of cheap land. Nevertheless, his account points toward conclusions similar to Thompson’s story of eighteenth-century England: “By comparison [with England], when Americans argued for regulation—even in the cities—they did so less because they disagreed with the notion of private marketing in general, and more because they feared the evil-minded intentions of powerful individuals and small cartels. The word that suffused their thinking on the matter was ‘monopoly’ ” (Vickers, “Competency and Competition,” 17). 54. Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 17. Franklin struck a pose somewhere between these two positions in response to the Wilkes Affair, writing in his piece “On

188  Notes to page 81 the Laboring Poor” (published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in April 1768) that the Wilkesites had failed to recognize the full generosity of “the rich in England”: “I do not propose to advocate for oppression, or oppressors. But when I see that the poor are by such writings [in favor of Wilkes] exasperated against the rich, and excited to insurrections, by which much mischief is done, and some forfeit their lives, I could wish the true state of things were better understood, the poor not made by these busy writers more uneasy and unhappy than their situation subjects them to be, and the nation not brought into disrepute among foreigners by public groundless accusations of ourselves, as if the rich in England had no compassion for the poor, and Englishmen wanted common humanity” (in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 15, 103–104). 55. The OED cites the first print use of mischief in this new sense in 1784. A complete examination of Franklin’s writings indicates that he uses the word with semantic consistency. 56. In this regard, we may see in Franklin’s episodic narrative something of the formal prehistory of what D. A. Miller has described as the logic of the nineteenth-century novel, defined by the problem of narrative closure: “Carefully cultivating our desire for a next installment or a future volume, the novel continually promises the totality it cannot, at any single moment, deliver.” The trouble with narrative, Miller argues, is that although every story is regulated by the promise of “the end,” the narratable itself troubles any ending; the discourse may cease, but the promise of the text does not. This is as much a matter of historical imagination as it is of narrative poetics proper, as Miller’s commentary on historical representation in Walter Scott shows. Scott’s historical novels are compromise formations in which social conflicts are avoidable; the novels “[allow] us to see the narrative as at least theoretically dispensable. People make history in Scott only because people make mistakes:  both can and should be avoided” (D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981], 279, 269–270). We will see a distinctive version of this problem in the early U.S. novel, in chapter 3. If the manuscript text of the Autobiography seems to resist the commodity logic implied by Miller’s analysis, the endlessly reproduced versions of Franklin’s narrative we find in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (on both sides of the Atlantic) virtually define the literary commodity for the period. The Franklinian episode shows itself to be the ideal form for the mass market, reproduced in words and in image, with set pieces from the narrative (arrival in Philadelphia, swimming in the Thames, etc.) engraved in many editions. Miller’s analysis entails the argument (developed theoretically by Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle) that the novel enables the colonization of the subject by commodity logic—the market penetrates the deepest reaches of the imagination, as it had done to physiology with tea, coffee, tobacco, and sugar. In this way, the novel is the precursor of the contemporary spectacle. With the subsequent history of the Autobiography, we can see how the convergence between Franklin-as-commodity and Franklin-as-life-model contributed to the acceleration of this process, reinforcing the point that the novel itself is only one moment in the wider commodification of print culture, one— albeit a crucial—moment in the historical advance of the market. See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994). For a cursory treatment of illustrations from the life of Franklin that indicates their spectacular dimension (without comment), see Christopher J. Lukasik, Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 2–5. 57. Franklin in this regard corroborates Tocqueville’s famous claim that citizens of democratic societies “vary, alter, or renovate secondary things every day; they take great care not

Notes to pages 81–83  189 to touch the principal ones. They love change, but they dread revolutions” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 610). 58. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 138. 59. Ibid., 136. 60. Given the expense of glass windows, and their consequent importance to class distinction, their destruction in 1768 was of course a politically significant act on the part of the London crowd. Franklin clearly understands the politics, but I mean to emphasize his focus on a matter—smashed windows and their need for replacement—that would almost comfortably fit among the projects of part 3 of the Autobiography. Robert Blair St. George provides the most powerful account of the political significance of attacking houses in the Atlantic world: “The house attack was a symbolic performance that permitted participants on both sides of the façade, each through their own broken-windowed view, to construct speculatively and literally through parody, politics, and social pain the mixed social vision that defined for New England the revolutionary ethos itself: a fluid blend of liberal thought on open markets tempered by fervent millennialism [of the laboring class], which tied the interchangeable images and people of the mechanized marketplace to the radical promise of spiritual renewal” (Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998], 295). 61. Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, 294. 62. “[I]‌t is part of the interest of crowds that they do not simply exist, but have to be imagined. They constitute a massive social fact of life in eighteenth-century London, but they also represent an epistemological block. They are experienced as an occasion to sense the limits of experience, and to reflect upon the extent to which our notions about ‘massive social facts’ are intellectual phantasms” (Thomas Reinert, Regulating Confusion: Samuel Johnson and the Crowd [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996], 7). 63. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 74. 64. Michael Warner argues that Franklin is empowered by the social authority that comes with print discourse, which “represents a public vision from a nonparticular perspective, as though the whole system of object-exchange could see.” In Warner’s version of disembodied print culture, social authority, “like truth, holds validity not in persons, but despite them” (Letters of the Republic, 82). Catherine Gallagher makes a related argument about the novelistic character, the author-as-entrepreneur, and narrative technique (Nobody’s Story:  The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 [Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1994], 174ff. and passim). Of course, the crowd might also be seen to emerge from the “whole system of object-exchange,” even if it lacks a printed “voice” of its own. 65. Countless examples offer themselves; three will suffice: The merchant Allan Melvill (father of Herman, who added the e) avidly read Franklin’s work, which taught him the ever-potent platitude that “virtue and hard work would make him a success” (Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography [New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996], 20); in 1822, the apprentice school of the elite U.S. mechanic’s group, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, took as its official symbols the Bible and the Life of Franklin (Sellers, Market Revolution, 284–285); and in 1869, the French bicycle manufacturer Compagnie Parisienne adopted the Franklinian slogan (in English) for its factories—“Time is money!” (David V. Herlihy, Bicycle: The History [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004], 128–130). 66. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 10.

190  Notes to pages 84–88 67. Looby, Voicing America, 144. 68. Betsy Erkilla, “Franklin and the Revolutionary Body,” ELH 67 (2000): 725. 69. Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 49. 70. Moretti, Way of the World, 233. 71. Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” 94. 72. Ibid., 89. 73. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 247. 74. Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs, ed. Philip F.  Gura (Boston:  Northeastern University Press, 1988), 3, 34. 75. Aristotle’s “Poetics,” 67.

Chapter 3 1. As Benjamin Rush, writing to his protégé John Foulke before the latter’s departure for Europe, advised, “Pick up your library on stalls or second-hand book stores, but buy no book without knowing its character” (Benjamin Rush to John Foulke, 25 April 1780, in Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 2 vols. [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press for the American Philosophical, 1951], 1: 251). 2. When we consider fiction to be located in the shared, mutually constituting spaces of the aesthetic and the commodified, we can better see the limitations of any particular writer’s attempt to escape the determinations of the market. Michael Warner’s suggestion that Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn “(vainly) strives for the same performativity as the Constitution” should be read in these terms (Warner, Letters of the Republic, 172). 3. “A Receipt to Make an Epic Poem,” The Literary Tablet; or, A General Repository of Useful Entertainment (Hanover, N.H.), May 13, 1807, 58. 4. James Butler, Fortune’s Foot-ball; or, The Adventures of Mercutio, 2 vols. (Harrisburgh, Pa.: John Wyeth, 1797–98), n.p. 5. The traditional opposition between properly “novelistic” and “episodic” remains a crucial heuristic tool because of (not despite) its attendant historical value judgment: this is the lesson I draw from Margaret Cohen’s insistence on the dialectical approach to aesthetic value. Gabriel Cervantes suggests eliminating the term episodic in his reading of Defoe’s Colonel Jack. Cervantes argues that the conditions of eighteenth-century maritime law make Defoe’s episodic plot mimetic rather than merely crude; my study recovers the aesthetic category of the episodic, and it remains skeptical of claims for unmediated mimesis in narrative plotting. See Gabriel Cervantes, “Episodic or Novelistic? Law in the Atlantic and the Form of Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24 (2011–12): 247–277. On the dialectical approach to aesthetic value, see Cohen, Sentimental Education of the Novel, 25; Margaret Cohen, “Narratology in the Archive of Literature,” Representations 108 (2009):  51–75; and Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). For a more general, and important, consideration of the inescapability of the question of value, see Tony Bennett, “Marxism and Popular Fiction,” in Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism, ed. Francis Mulhern (London: Longman, 1992), 188-210. 6. On the matter of genre history, a clarifying note is in order. The 1790s are notable for the emergence of a domestic field of novel production in the United States. Lyle H. Wright’s bibliography gives thirty-four new American titles between 1789 and 1799, thirty-two between

Notes to pages 88–89  191 1800 and 1809, and thirty-eight between 1810 and 1819. Drawing on Wright’s statistical survey of American fiction, Elizabeth Barnes shows thirty-three new American titles in 1790–99, twenty-five in 1800–1809, and twenty-eight in 1810–19. The precise numbers matter little; their range is the result of variant (and unsystematic) ways of discriminating between “fiction” and “novel.” The boom in book-length fiction occurs in 1820–29, when the number of new U.S. titles leaps to 128 and continues to increase dramatically thereafter. The percentage of U.S. titles as a proportion of all new issues remains relatively constant in the earlier decades: 39.3 percent in 1790–99, 32.0 percent in 1800–1809, and 42.4 percent in 1810–19. Even the (relatively rare) appearance of the word Novel on the title pages of book-length works of fiction is steady:  seven appearances in 1790–99, nine in 1800–1809, and six in 1810–19. Stephen Shapiro argues that the novel emerges fully formed in the 1790s and then “falls into a long decline after 1800 until its resuscitation in the 1820s.” Despite the interest of Shapiro’s historiographical review of the Atlantic system of trade and his contextualization of early U.S.  literature, his quantitative argument about fiction is unsubstantiated. Shapiro’s claim that the U.S. novel responds to the conditions of Atlantic trade after 1789 is suggestive, but it remains, finally, an innovative approach to the interpretation of the thematic patterns within literature of the period, not an explanation for the novel’s appearance. I would argue, rather, that what Shapiro describes as the reexport basis of the early republic is a necessary but insufficient precondition for the emergence of the U.S. novel—or, to be clear, for the emergence of the distinctively episodic novels we find in the period. Instead, and pace Shapiro’s complaints about what he terms a “nationalist” criticism, I am arguing here for the determining force of a distinctively ideological dilemma. For it is precisely the federal Constitution that creates the disjunction of part and whole that becomes the obsessive concern of U.S. literary culture until the 1820s. See Lyle H. Wright, American Fiction, 1774–1850: A Contribution toward a Bibliography, 2nd rev. ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1969), 363–364; Lyle H.  Wright, “A Statistical Survey of American Fiction, 1774–1850,” Huntington Library Quarterly 2 (1939): 309–318; Elizabeth Barnes, “Novels,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 2: An Extensive Republic, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 440–449; and Shapiro, Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel, 3 (and c­ hapter 1 passim). 7. Aristotle’s “Poetics,” 68, 106, 108. 8. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 6th ed., 2  vols. (Edinburgh, 1785), rept., ed. Peter Jones (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2005), 2: 664. 9. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (London:  printed for W.  Strahan and T. Cadell, in the Strand, and W. Creech, in Edinburgh, 1783; rept., Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 416. Blair refers specifically to epic here, but his comments are in keeping with his approach to both novels and romances, and (perhaps even more interestingly) historiography. 10. Novelistic episodes were, nevertheless, frequently represented as the building blocks of a patently inferior form of writing. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, for example, “though not productive of obscurity, [. . .] demands more strict attention, and we pause to meditate more frequently than if we were perusing a paragraph in a newspaper, or an episode in a novel” (“On the Style of Gibbon,” The Monthly Magazine, and American Review, July 1799, 246). 11. The phatic function of language sustains contact between addressers and addressees. The concept is Bronislaw Malinowski’s, as developed by Roman Jakobson (see Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” 68–71).

192  Notes to pages 89–93 12. Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” 89–90. 13. William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 267. On the reading revolution in Europe, see Reinhard Wittman’s authoritative account: “Evidently the reading societies [eighteenth-century European counterparts to American lending libraries] were at the intersection of two decisive achievements along the way to bourgeois emancipation: on the one hand, extensive reading (in general the financial wherewithal of an individual did not extend to satisfying his desire for reading) and, on the other, the aspiration to create a social organization of this new reading public of private individuals in a comparably autonomous form” (“Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999], 308–309). The reading revolution argument originates, of course, with Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800 (Stuttgart, Germany: J. B. Metzler, 1974); see, especially, 182–276. 14. See Moretti, Way of the World, 252n41. 15. Rebecca Elisabeth Connor, Women, Accounting, and Narrative:  Keeping Books in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Routledge, 2004), 146. 16. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, introduction to A History of Reading in the West, edited by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 33. 17. Henri Petter, The Early American Novel (Columbus:  Ohio State University Press, 1971), 397. 18. That is, “the instances of disequilibrium, suspense, and general insufficiency from which a given narrative appears to arise. The term is meant to cover the various incitements to narrative, as well as the dynamic ensuing from such incitements, and it is thus opposed to the ‘nonnarratable’ state of quiescence assumed by a novel before the beginning and supposedly recovered by it at the end.” Miller, moreover, proffers a sweeping generalization about the novelistic incitement to narrative whose specific historical selection we shall see in the novel of the early republic: “Carefully cultivating our desire for a next installment or a future volume, the novel continually promises the totality it cannot, at any single moment, deliver.” The promise of totality is the promise of the realist novel of the nineteenth century (Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents, ix–x, 279). 19. M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” in Dialogic Imagination, 100. 20. Robert Scholes, James Phelan, and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, Revised and Expanded (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 287. 21. Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Ronald Vroom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 236, 234. 22. This very efficiency raises questions about whether or not we are justified in identifying The History of Constantius and Pulchera as a novel at all. The book is indeed brief, though not brief enough to exclude it from previous treatments of the form. “If we assume the average size of the early American works of fiction to have been about 220 pages,” writes Henri Petter in the earliest comprehensive treatment of the subject, “one-sixth of these books are definitely subnormal in length, and as many have more than four hundred pages” (Early American Novel, 397). Although Lillie Deming Loshe refuses to grant it “the dignified title of historical novel,” Constantius and Pulchera nevertheless “illustrates the relationship sometimes existing between

Notes to pages 93–95  193 the novel of adventurous travel and the semi-historical novel” (The Early American Novel, 1789– 1830 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1907], 64). As for readerly engagement, my own examination of a half-dozen copies of the book from various editions, with special attention to readers’ marks, corroborates Cathy Davidson’s assessment that it was read no differently than Hannah Foster’s The Coquette or Rowson’s Charlotte (Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 182). 23. Susanna Haswell Rowson, Trials of the Human Heart, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1795), 1: 151. Similar comments abound, but most notably at 2: 55 and 2: 64 and in Meriel’s speech to her brother, 4: 115ff. 24. Ibid., 4: 162. 25. Anglophone here signifies more than national boundaries. The United States at the turn of the nineteenth century was by no means uniformly anglophone. 26. Thomas Pavel, “The Novel in Search of Itself: A Historical Morphology,” in The Novel, vol. 2:  Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, N.J.:  Princeton University Press, 2006), 3-31. On American versions of Richardson, in redactions and rewritings that appear to express American ambivalence about separation from the empire, see Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English:  American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 43–72. 27. In Trials, as Marion Rust puts it, “motion is, quite simply, everything.” My reading diverges from Rust’s in that I hold strictly to the thoroughness of this statement. The narrative has two poles, the stasis of home and the motion of not-home, but the “bad homes” Meriel visits during the course of her journey do not loom over the ending of the novel (Marion Rust, Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson’s Early American Women [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008], 178, 177). 28. Rowson, Trials of the Human Heart, 1: 107. 29. Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 2  vols. (Boston:  Thomas and Andrews, 1790), 1: 206. 30. “Monthly Review of New American Books,” The Massachusetts Magazine; or, Monthly Museum, December 1790, 758–759. This being the Massachusetts Magazine in 1790, an attack on the vulgar masses necessarily travels with an appeal to a good and hearty citizenry, which admits the question of social inequality as a matter of course: “There is only one fear we dare to express. The system of education laid down, is confessedly expensive, and therefore in all its parts can be adopted only by a few. The great body of Americans, and they who actually gave independence and liberty to their country, are honest rusticks, or worthy mechanicks. These, from their situation in society, have neither ability nor inclination to train Osanders and Rozellas [the Bloomsgrove children]; preferring the simplicity in which themselves were educated, to more modish refinements; and having nothing to spare from the common demands of life, for purposes of this nature” (758). 31. Paul C. Gutjahr provides a thorough account of Bible publishing, with some attention to reading practices, in An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). The best guide, despite its limited geographical range, remains Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, but see also Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 32. On the novel as media event, see William B.  Warner, Licensing Entertainment:  The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 33. Whether or not the legacy of the Cheap Repository remained consistent with More’s program is unclear, not least because by the first third of the nineteenth century both the tract

194  Notes to pages 95–97 format and its narrative models were being put to use in the liberal reform movements in Britain. See Linda H. Peterson, “From French Revolution to English Reform: Hannah More, Harriet Martineau, and the ‘Little Book,’ ” Nineteenth-Century Literature 60 (2006): 409–450. 34. Malcolm Bull, “Between the Cultures of Capital,” New Left Review 11 (2001): 99. 35. The History of Constantius and Pulchera; or, Constancy Rewarded (New  York:  John Tiebout, 1801), 140. 36. Rowson, Trials of the Human Heart, 4: 172. 37. [William Cobbett], A Kick for a Bite; or, Review upon Review; with a Critical Essay, on the Works of Mrs. S. Rowson; In a Letter to the Editor, or Editors, of the American Monthly Review. By Peter Porcupine (Philadelphia: printed by Thomas Bradford, 1795). Marion Rust points out that Cobbett suggested that Rowson’s “absorption into the profit-driven publishing industry deprived her of her womanhood” (Rust, Prodigal Daughters, 108). 38. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, 49. 39. For gendered readings of Constantius and Pulchera, see Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 184–185; along with Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Martin Brückner, “Geography, Reading, and the World of Novels in the Early Republic,” in Early America Re-explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture, ed. Klaus H. Schmidt and Fritz Fleischmann (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 385-410. 40. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, 221. 41. The precarious stability of this contradictory unity is captured by Edward Cahill’s claim that this field of early national novel production “brings into contact and complicity those whose regimes of aesthetic pleasure and taste promise to sustain, direct, and improve social collectives and those whose [eccentricity,] selfish passions, irrational associations, and mistaken judgments are thought to threaten their existence” (Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States [Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press,  2012], 168–169). Laura Doyle’s readings of a range of novels from the period (by Rowson, Brown, and others) bring out the thematic significance of gender separation toward the formation of an Atlantic ideology of white supremacy, though the history of reading itself is largely left to one side (Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008], especially 118–170, 231–254). 42. The History of Constantius and Pulchera (Springfield, Mass.: printed by T. Ashley, 1799– 1804?). This copy is held by the American Antiquarian Society; for the marginal comments, see 6, 8, 11, 15. The estimated publication date is based on the Springfield imprint and the fact that Ashley was located there between 1799 and 1804. That he was a member of the partnership Ashley and Brewer from 1800 to 1803 may suggest a publication date in 1799–1800 (since only Ashley’s name appears on the title page). 43. Joanne Dobson and Sandra A. Zagarell, “Women Writing in the Early Republic,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 2: An Extensive Republic, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 374. 44. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in Dialogic Imagination, 259. 45. Here I am returning to the narratological distinction between story (what is told) and discourse (the language of the telling). See, among others, Chatman, Story and Discourse. Studies that deal powerfully with nearly everything but the form of Brown’s novelistic discourse include Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy:  Seduction and Democracy in the

Notes to pages 97–98  195 American Novel (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1997); Norman S.  Grabo, The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Peter Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Kazanjian, Colonizing Trick; Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Shapiro, Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel; Julia A. Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Steven Watts, The Romance of Real Life:  Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture (Baltimore, Md.:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Michael Drexler and Ed White have drawn attention to the relationship between early U.S.  republican ideology and Brown’s use of free indirect discourse, suggesting the astonishing likelihood that the figure of the slave occupied the structuring role of imagined observer in early U.S.  republican culture (Michael J.  Drexler and Ed White, “Secret Witness; or, The Fantasy Structure of Republicanism,” Early American Literature 44 [2009]: 333–363). Stern has treated the same moments in the novel in terms of a structuring antipatriarchalism in Brown’s work (Julia A. Stern, “The State of ‘Women’ in Ormond; or, Patricide in the New Nation,” in Revising Charles Brockden Brown:  Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic, ed. Philip Barnard, Mark L.  Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro [Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 2004], 182–215). 46. For a lucid reading of plotting in relation to Brown’s understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and imagination, see Edward Cahill, “An Adventurous and Lawless Fancy: Charles Brockden Brown’s Aesthetic State,” Early American Literature 36 (2001): 31–70. 47. Stern, Plight of Feeling, 153–238. 48. William Godwin, “Of History and Romance,” in Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1987), 372. 49. Caleb Williams was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1795; Godwin’s Political Justice appeared in Philadelphia the following year. The case for Godwin’s interest in fiction as an alternative, and more promising, avenue to historical sensitivity is put forth in W. M. Verhoeven, “ ‘I Will Use No Daggers! I Will Unfold a Tale—!’: Historical Sensitivity and Generic Contiguity in the Narrative Theories of William Godwin,” in Revolutionary Histories: Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism, 1775–1815, ed. W. M. Verhoeven (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 166–187. On Brown’s theorization of fiction and historiography, see Amanda Emerson, “The Early American Novel: Charles Brockden Brown’s Fictitious Historiography,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 40 (2007): 125–150. 50. Patricia A. Parker traces the significance of “error” in the romance tradition in Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). The Gothic embeds such romance “error” within the novelistic form. As Daniel Couégnas points out, the Gothic’s success is tied to “its ability to offer the reader a temporary, libertarian, transgressive adventure,” to provide access to a “fantasmic place outside the law” (“Forms of Popular Narrative in France and England: 1700–1900,” in The Novel, vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006], 323). 51. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, ed. Jay Fliegelman (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1991), 5. 52. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, ed. Norman S. Grabo (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1988), 5.

196  Notes to pages 99–102 53. Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond; or, The Secret Witness, ed. Mary Chapman (Peterborough, England: Broadview, 1999), 37; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 54. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985), 39. 55. In this regard, the novels literalize Edward Said’s evocative notes on the incipit: “Insofar as a text, for reader or writer, cannot supply, no matter how much it says it is supplying, its whole field or even its intention in advance, it can properly be said to begin, therefore, with a large supposition. This is: herewith meaning is to be produced in writing. [. . .] From then on, from that beginning, which to the extent of its generality and dreamy ill-defined ambition is a fictional construct, more precise meaning is gradually approached during the course of the work” (Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method [New York: Basic Books, 1975], 59). 56. Here we might also recall another model for early U.S. novels. Even Rousseau’s Julie; ou, La nouvelle Héloïse (1761) begins à la Richardson, rather than Brown, indicating a delimited story: “Il faut vous fuir, Mademoiselle, je le sens bien: j’aurois dû beaucoup moins attendre, ou plutôt il faloi ne vous voir jamais. Mais que faire aujourd’hui? Comment m’y prendre? Vous m’avez promis de l’amitié; voyez mes perplexités, et conseillez-moi. [. . .] Vous savez que je ne suis entré dans votre maison que sur l’invitation de Madame votre mere” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie; ou La nouvelle Héloïse, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5  vols. [Paris:  Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959–95], 2:  31]). The 1796 Philadelphia edition (which followed the 1761 London edition exactly) displays language a bit purpler than the original French: “I must fly from you, Eloisa; I feel I must. I ought not to have stayed with you so long; or rather, I ought never to have beheld you. But now, what can I do! On what shall I determine? You have promised me your friendship; consider my perplexity, and give me your advice. [. . .] You are sensible that I only came into the family in consequence of an invitation from your mother” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eloisa: or A Series of Original Letters, Collected and Published by J. J. Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva. Translated from the French. Together with, the Sequel of Julia; or, the New Eloisa. [Found Amongst the Author’s Papers after His Decease.], 3 vols. [Philadelphia: printed for Samuel Longcope, 1796], 1: 31). Brown’s beginnings express Rousseauean emotion, but they are far more active in suggesting and then withholding information. The distinction between style and structure here is important, not least because “Rousseau” is so often paired with “early American novel” to signify simply “overinflated prose and [. . .] overheated didacticism” (Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 182). Brown himself first read the English Eloisa in 1788 (Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution, 51). 57. Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale:  Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 68. 58. Desire, writes Peter Brooks, is “that which is initiatory of narrative, motivates and energizes its reading, and animates the combinatory play of sense-making” (Reading for the Plot, 48). 59. “Hints on Reading,” Lady’s Magazine, and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge, March 1793, 173. 60. Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book Company, 1951), 69. 61. “Remarks on Wieland and Ormond, Two Original American Novels,” Weekly Museum, June 20, 1801, 3. 62. Although romance and novel both circulated as terms in English in this period, the opposition was far less stable—and less significant—than too many critics have suggested. The

Notes to pages 102–103  197 clearest prescriptive codification of the separation in fact emphasizes the novel’s purported didactic through line, not its unity of plot: “Modern writers use the word Romance, to signify a fictitious history of detached and independent adventures. [. . .] A Novel is another kind of work. Unity of design is its character. In a Romance, if the incidents be well marked and related in spirit, the intention is answered; and adventures pass before the view for no other purpose than to amuse by their peculiarity, without, perhaps, affecting the main story, if there should be one. But in a Novel, a combination of incidents, entertaining in themselves, are made to form a whole; and an unnecessary circumstance becomes a blemish, by detaching from the simplicity which is requisite to exhibit that whole to advantage” (Thomas Holcroft, preface to Alwyn: or The Gentleman Comedian, 2 vols. [London, 1780], 1: vi–vii, qtd. in James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750– 1800 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992], 77). Clara Reeve’s distinction between the heroism and fantastical nature of the ancient romance and the novel—probably the most influential of the period—also speaks only indirectly to the aesthetic revaluation I am tracking here. The novel, Reeve writes, “gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own” (Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries, and Manners, 2 vols. [Colchester, England: printed for the author by W. Keymer, 1785], 1: 111). The major literary-historical account of the romance in relation to the novel remains Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996). Michael McKeon emphasizes that the condensation of the opposition novel/romance is in fact a mark of the new ability to recognize the generic categories as categories:  the origins of the novel “entail the positing of a ‘new’ generic category as a dialectical negation of a ‘traditional’ dominance—the romance, the aristocracy—whose character still saturates, as an antithetical but formative force, the texture of the category by which it is being both constituted and replaced” (Origins of the English Novel, 268). McKeon’s dialectical analysis is especially helpful toward understanding Richard Chase’s effort to recuperate Reeve’s opposition for a history of nineteenth-century U.S. literature (see Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1957], 12–13). 63. Within modern aesthetic theory, the best analysis of the dialectical character of the classical/commodity division within a single work is Adorno’s critique of Wagner. For Adorno, the Gesamtkunstwerk bears a stunning contradiction: its apparent comprehension of everything is, in fact, merely a means of accommodating the artwork to commodity culture. From the leitmotif to the episodic character of the drama, Wagner’s operas solve the problem of artistic scale in the marketplace by breaking up the work into smaller units. The “radical process of integration, which assiduously draws attention to itself, is already no more than a cover for the underlying fragmentation”; a string of “small-scale models” takes the place of “true development” (Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, new ed., trans. Rodney Livingstone [London: Verso, 2005], 93, 47). Adorno corroborates Bull’s argument even as he helps us recognize a more supple cultural dialectic than Bull’s antinomy allows. 64. Watts, Romance of Real Life, 10–11. 65. Mason L.  Weems, The Life of Washington, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge, Mass.:  Belknap–Harvard University Press, 1962), 6.  Elsewhere, albeit more broadly, Watts makes the connection, arguing that republican traditions “served as the seedbed for the

198  Notes to pages 103–113 growth of liberal commitments” (Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn:  War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820 [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987], xviii). For the fullest treatment of the question within elite literary culture, see William C. Dowling, Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990). 66. “On Poverty,” Gentlemen and Ladies Town and Country Magazine, July 1789, 374–375. 67. Ibid., 374. 68. It should be clear that the intensity of this fantasy of want is proportional, as in all such cases, to the fantasist’s distance from want. In Philadelphia almshouse records from the 1780s and 1790s, the body that is absent in these idylls returns with force, as Simon Newman has shown, through the record keepers’ adjectives: poor, lame, sick, infirm, ailing, etc. Idle—that key word of emergent bourgeois dreamers and classical-republican epigones alike—was a technical term in the almshouse, for use in distinguishing the deserving from the undeserving poor (Newman, Embodied History, 26). The narratological point here is that while Ormond and the magazines picture poverty as eventless, the almshouse records indicate that all too much has already occurred: injury, illness, violence. Poverty is what remains; it is—and here reality rejoins fantasy—the state of things after the event. 69. “I ought to have mentioned that Mr. Dudley, on his removal from New York, among other expedients to obliterate the memory of his former condition and conceal his poverty from the world, had made this change in his name” (122). 70. “Ormond explores the relationship between contagion and sympathy, inverted, multivalent figures for the fate of collective fellow feeling as it strains toward dissolution in the Federalist era” (Stern, Plight of Feeling, 153–154). 71. Shklovsky, “Essay and Anecdote,” in Theory of Prose, 208. 72. Erich Auerbach emphasizes the literary effect produced in the wake of the French Revolution, which spawned “that process of temporal concentration, both of historical events themselves and of everyone’s knowledge of them, which has since made tremendous progress and which not only permits us to prophesy a unification of human life throughout the world but has in a certain sense already achieved it. Such a development abrogates or renders powerless the entire social structure of orders and categories previously held valid; the tempo of the changes demands a perpetual and extremely difficult effort toward inner adaptation and produces intense concomitant crises. He who would account to himself for his real life and his place in human society is obliged to do so upon a far wider practical foundation and in a far larger context than before, and to be continually conscious that the social base upon which he lives is not constant for a moment but is perpetually changing through convulsions of the most various kinds” (Mimesis, 459). My analysis of Ormond underscores the extent to which U.S. novels of this period resisted what Auerbach calls “modern tragic realism based on the contemporary.” Ormond enacts the problem through its hesitation between the two poles of stasis and historical transformation. 73. The anonymous novella Adventures in a Castle exhibits a related dichotomy of revolutionary anxiety/narratability versus domestic security/nonnarratability. After a Gothic plot provoked by the French Revolution’s interference with the stable world of a country castle, its closing lines read: “Large additions were made to the Chateau, and in this delightful retirement, far distant from the busy and tumultuous scenes of life [the family] passed the remained of their lives, in the enjoyment of a greater portion of felicity, than is the usual lot of mankind. No tales of woe, no descriptive scenes of carnage and bloodshed, ever disturbed their tranquility, but possessing within themselves inexhaustible resources of amusement, they lived insulated from the rest of mankind. No foe to domestic tranquility, ever passed their

Notes to pages 113–118  199 threshold, no intestine uneasiness inhabited their retirement, but as far as possible for humanity, they enjoyed permanent and unalloyed happiness” (Adventures in a Castle [Harrisburgh, Pa.: J. Elder, 1806], 70–71; emphasis in the original). 74. Michelle Burnham links epistolary form in Brown’s Clara Howard with the deferral of the radical ambitions of the American Revolution: “Revolution is here associated with a specific kind of temporality, one that offers pleasure through the prospect of diminishing delay.” Burnham finds in that novel “a paralysis brought on by the inconclusive terms of America’s revolution. It is such moments of ‘anticipated revolution’ that Clara Howard creates for its readers, as for its characters, over and over and over again through the narrative device of epistolary exchange” (Michelle Burnham, “Epistolarity, Anticipation, and Revolution in Clara Howard,” in Revising Charles Brockden Brown:  Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic, ed. Philip Barnard, Mark L. Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004], 275–276). David Waldstreicher provides, in a discussion of nationalist celebrations during the American Revolution, some indication of exactly how devastating the deferral of revolutionary goals was to a national politics of unity: “Appropriating the oldest English commemorative rituals and rhetoric, celebrants of the nation during the war struggled to keep the character of a first celebration by always celebrating the future—a strategy that helped deflect the difficulties of a less-than-perfect present. [. . .]Thus the problems of the present were incidental, local, passing, past” (In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, 43, 45; emphasis in the original). 75. On the binding work of plot, see Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 97. 76. My analysis of the episodic poetics of hesitation in these novels should help to illuminate Pierre Macherey’s encapsulation of the problem of ideology as it is manifested in literature: “In so far as ideology is the false resolution of a real debate, it is always adequate to itself as a reply. Obviously the great thing is that it can never answer the question. In that it succeeds in endlessly prolonging its imperfection, it is complete” (Theory of Literary Production, 146). What my analysis indicates is that the transhistorical problem, in Louis Althusser’s account, of ideology as an imaginary solution to real contradictions takes various historical forms—one of which, in the literature of the early republic, is the quite literary inability to answer the question. The endless prolonging of imperfection thus becomes a realized literary form.

Chapter 4 1. Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others, in Washington Irving: History, Tales and Sketches, ed. James W. Tuttleton (New York: Library of America, 1983), no. 2, 70–71; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by paper number and page (e.g., 2.70–71). The Library of America Salmagundi is a reprint of the standard edition:  Washington Irving, Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. and Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others, edited by Bruce I. Granger and Martha Hartzog (Boston: Twayne, 1977). 2. Jared Gardner traces Irving’s “moderate Federalism” back to the Oldstyle letters, which he takes to be an “attempt to stake out a neutral space [. . .] without speaking in the partisan voice so typical of political discourse during these tumultuous years” (Jared Gardner, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture [Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2012], 162).

200  Notes to pages 118–124 3. Nothing could set a Salmagundian’s teeth on edge quite like the “Ça Ira,” that revolutionary song designed to “electrify,” as one representative to the French revolutionary convention put it, “republican souls.” More to the point, the logic of popular appropriation during the French Revolution, whereby the fashionable tune becomes the setting for patriotic lyrics, is an almost perfect inversion of Salmagundi’s evacuation of politics from fashion (Robert Brécy, “Chansons patriotiques,” in Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, ed. Albert Soboul [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989], 204). 4. Samuel Johnson, Idler no. 13 (April 29, 1758), in Selected Poetry and Prose, 235. 5. “Salmagundi, 1807–08,” in Bibliography of American Literature, vol. 5: Washington Irving to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Jacob Blanck, Virginia Smyers, and Michael Winship (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955–91), item 10097. 6. Jacob Blanck, “Salmagundi and Its Publisher,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 41 (1947): 17. 7. “Another of [the printer David] Longworth’s eccentricities becomes evident when one collates Salmagundi and discovers the existence of many gatherings in nine, and one in eleven, the full significance of which can be appreciated only by a printer” (ibid., 7). Blanck here refers to the awkwardness of preparing such a collection of gatherings for binding, as well as the genuine scarcity of books gathered in nine leaves. 8. James Kirke Paulding to Washington Irving, 20 March 1824, in The Letters of James Kirke Paulding, ed. Ralph M. Aderman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 70. 9. Anglicanus, “For the Port Folio,” The Port Folio (Philadelphia), March 21, 1807, 179. 10. “Miscellany,” The Balance, and Columbian Repository (Hudson, N.Y.) 6, no. 18 (May 5, 1807): 140; “Salmagundi,” The Precursor (Montpelier, Vt.) 1, no. 25 (May 11, 1807): 4. 11. The Philadelphia Tickler, by Toby Stratch’em 1, no. 2 (September 23, 1807): 4. On the peculiar Tickler, which invites further treatment by critics, see David E. E. Sloane, “The Comic Writers of Philadelphia:  George Helmbold’s ‘The Tickler,’ Joseph C.  Neal’s ‘City Worthies,’ and the Beginning of Modern Periodical Humor in America,” Victorian Periodicals Review 28 (1995): 186–198; and Aaron McLean Winter, “The Laughing Doves of 1812 and the Satiric Endowment of Antiwar Rhetoric in the United States,” PMLA 124 (2009): 1562–1581. 12. Troy Gazette 4, no. 160 (September 22, 1807): 4. 13. Edward Bysshe, The Art of English Poetry Containing I.  Rule for Making Verses. II. A  Collection of the Most Natural, Agreeable, and Sublime Thoughts, Viz. Allusions, Similes, Descriptions and Characters, of Persons and Things; That Are to Be Found in the Best English Poets. III. A Dictionary of Rhymes. The Third Edition, with Large Improvements (London: printed for Sam. Buckley, 1708; rept., Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library–Augustan Reprint Society, 1953), n.p. (sig. *2). Barbara M.  Benedict discusses Bysshe and the poetical miscellany in Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 20. 14. By reference I mean most generally “the application of an undetermined, general potential for meaning to a specific unit”; referential writing points to the world outside the text (Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979], 268). At the same time, Salmagundi’s antireferentiality is anything but an escape into generality or some fictive ahistoricity; it is, rather, a historically induced pose. Salmagundi’s location within the political and fashionable milieux of New York is equally inescapable, as Mary Weatherspoon Bowden’s indispensable primer on its satirical targets indicates (“Cocklofts and Slang-Whangers: The Historical Sources of Washington Irving’s ‘Salmagundi,’ ” New York History 61 [1980]: 133–160).

Notes to pages 124–127  201 15. William L.  Hedges, Washington Irving:  An American Study, 1802–1832 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 49–50. A recent biographer concurs: The authors of Salmagundi “may not have been the dissipated pranksters suggested in later reminiscences, but their desire was simple: to stir things up and to laugh loudly, to entertain and to be entertained. At some point, their spirited laughter was molded into a comic composition. One thing led to another, and Salmagundi was born” (Andrew Burstein, The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving [New York: Basic Books, 2006], 49). 16. Looby, Voicing America, 82. 17. Joseph Addison, The Spectator no. 291 (Saturday, February 2, 1712), in The Commerce of Everyday Life:  Selections from “The Tatler” and “The Spectator,” ed. Erin Mackie (New York: Bedford–St. Martin’s, 1998), 380. 18. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From “The Spectator” to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), 14. 19. John Lambert, “Introductory Essay,” in Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. and Others (London: printed for J. M. Richardson, 1811), xxxvii–xxxviii. 20. Jared Gardner situates Salmagundi in terms that echo Lambert, finding in it both the “culmination” and the “end” of eighteenth-century periodical culture:  the culmination because, for its authors, “the pleasures of the project were clearly those long vested in the periodical form: ‘clubbing’ in print, reconnecting to the wit and culture of an earlier age, and engaging with readers in a decidedly interactive way”; the end because Salmagundi playfully rejected readers’ efforts to contribute to its pages (Gardner, Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture, 164–166). 21. A  reasonable enough assertion, given Lambert’s biography. Conscripted into service in his uncle John Campbell’s failed effort to encourage hemp cultivation in Lower Canada during the Napoleonic Wars, he is remembered today as the author of a very popular journal of travels in North America, first published in three volumes in the same year as his edition of Salmagundi and replete with passages like the following: “In walking the Broadway some mornings, I have been frequently tempted to believe, while admiring the beautiful forms that passed in review before me, that there existed a sort of rivalry among the New York beauties, as there did about a century ago among the ladies of England; and that instead of a patch on the right or left cheek, to denote a Whig or Tory, methought I could discern a pretty Democrat à la mode Françoise, and a sweet little Federalist à la mode Angloise” (John Lambert, Travels through Canada, and the United States of North America, in the years 1806, 1807 and 1808, to which are added biographical notices and anecdotes of some of the leading characters in the United States, 2nd ed., 2 vols. [London: printed for C. Cradock and W. Joy, 1814], 2: 91). 22. Eagleton, Function of Criticism, 45–46. 23. The canonical definitions are from Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, ll. 1–336, in Poems of Alexander Pope, 144–154. 24. Washington Irving to Sarah Storrow, Madrid, 2 August 1845, qtd. in Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), 1: 25. 25. Washington Irving’s brother Peter was, in fact, the first of the sons to be praised as such because of his writing and for the veneer of learning with which he ornamented his conversation (Williams, Life of Washington Irving, 1: 25–26). 26. Irving’s political satire in the Corrector, in 1804, provided little pleasure to its author, “still struggling to find his place in his family’s world of law, politics, and mercantilism” (Gardner, Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture, 163).

202  Notes to pages 127–130 27. Grantland S. Rice, The Transformation of Authorship in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 73. 28. Washington Irving to Henry Brevoort, 9 September 1819, in Washington Irving, Letters, vol. 1, ed. Ralph M. Aderman, Herbert L. Kleinfield, and Jenifer S. Banks (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 559, emphasis in original. 29. Rice, Transformation of Authorship in America, 73. 30. The expectation of substantial success was materialized in the format and price of the individual numbers of the Sketch Book, “printed in octavo on a large creamy paper with generous margins on all sides in twelve-point type on an eighteen-point body—that is, with half a line of space between each line of type. No fictional work, whether native or reprinted, had ever been produced in such large type on such large paper.” The seven parts sold for a total of $5.37½, at least double the price of a typical novel (Green, “Rise of Book Publishing,” 105). 31. Irving to Brevoort, 9 September 1819, in Irving, Letters, 559–560. 32. Formally speaking, Salmagundi’s whim-whams (and Irving’s residual whimsicality) seem to me a more radical expression of discontent with the normative order of family and career than the recurring theme of bachelorhood that Michael Warner identifies as Irving’s resistance to reproductive futurity. As this chapter suggests, the episodicity of Salmagundi’s whim-whams leads to the dead end of the commodity—though the commodity form does not marry fully into the family form until sometime after 1807–8. The resultant flicker of resistance in 1807–8 may be the richest basis from which to read Warner’s suggestion, elsewhere, that Irving turned “from politics to belles lettres” in 1807 (see Michael Warner, “Irving’s Posterity,” ELH 67 [2004]: 773–799; and Michael Warner, “A Soliloquy ‘Lately Spoken at the African Theatre’: Race and the Public Sphere in New York City, 1821,” in Publics and Counterpublics [New York: Zone Books, 2002], 246). Bachelor characters populate canonical nineteenth-century U.S. literature, from Irving to Melville, but they are—as the critical tradition initiated by Leslie Fiedler has shown—not much of a device for opposing the order of family and nation. 33. Stephen Jones, Sheridan Improved: A General Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language for the Use of Schools, Foreigners Learning English, &c. (Wilmington, Del.: printed and sold by Peter Brynberg, 1804), 358. 34. Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper, for the Use and Ease of Ladies, Housekeepers, &c. A New Edition (London: printed for A. Millar, W. Law, and R. Cater, 1795), 280–281. The London imprint is likely false; the book was probably printed in York for Wilson, Spence, and Mawman. 35. Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, Excelling Any Thing of the Kind Ever Yet Published (Alexandria, Va.: printed by Cottom and Stewart, 1812), 91–92. 36. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 193. 37. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, in Which Are Included Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, ed. James L. Clifford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 43, 185. 38. The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote. Translated from the Spanish of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. To Which Is Prefixed, Some Account of the Author’s Life, by T. Smollett, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: John Conrad and Co., 1803), 1:2–3. 39. Smollett’s market success, coupled with the low humor, violence, and intransigent misogyny of his novels, has secured his place at the bottom of the list of major eighteenth-century English novelists. See Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 223 and passim.

Notes to pages 130–134  203 40. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 57. 41. Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 73, 99. 42. Boris M.  Èjxenbaum, “The Theory of the Formal Method,” trans. I.  R. Titunik, in Readings in Russian Poetics:  Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 2002), 20. The flattening I emphasize as part of Don Quixote’s legacy is best viewed within the formal history of the romance novel tradition (specifically, as a criticism of the romance’s pretense to self-authentication) by Michael McKeon. See McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 273–294. 43. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 69. On Eaton, Paine, and the pillory, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), 97, 604–605; and William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 625. Eaton’s time in the pillory was a triumph over the oppressive state, which may be the reason his was the last punishment by pillory. As William Cobbett remembered it, “An immense crowd of people cheered him [Eaton] during the whole hour: some held out biscuits, as if to present him with: others held him out glasses of wine, and others little flags of triumph and bunches of flowers. While the executioner and officers of Justice were hooted! This it was that was the real cause of putting an end to the punishment of the pillory!” (Political Register, January 27, 1820, qtd. in Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 605). 44. “The Remonstrance, of the Swinish Multitude, to the Chief and Deputy Swineherds of Europe,” Hog’s Wash, no. V, in Politics for the People; or, A Salmagundy for Swine, 2 vols. (London: printed for D. I. Eaton, at the Cock and Hog-Trough, Newgate-Street, 1794), 1: 55–56. 45. “King Chaunticlere; or, The Fate of Tyranny: An Anecdote, related by Citizen Thelwall, at the Capel Court Society, during the discussion of a Question, relative to the comparative Influence of the Love of Life, of Liberty, and of the fair Sex, on the Actions of Mankind,” Politics for the People; or, Hog’s Wash no. VIII, in Politics for the People; or, A Salmagundy for Swine, 1: 105. Thelwall’s speech is interesting not least for its juxtaposition of two allegories— one of the gamecock, the other of a tortured slave in the West Indies; the piece is more violent, and more absurd, than the period’s typical allegorical use of slavery to make the argument for natural rights. Eaton published the proceedings of the libel trial as The Trial of Daniel Isaac Eaton, for Publishing a Supposed Libel, Intitled Politics for the People; or, Hog’s Wash: at Justice Hall in the Old Bailey, February Twenty-Fourth, 1794 (London: published by the Defendant, Daniel Isaac Eaton, 1794). For some useful contextualization of Eaton, see Michael Scrivener, “John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793–95,” ELH 67 (2000): 951–971; and Michael T.  Davis, “ ‘That Odious Class of Men Called Democrats’:  Daniel Isaac Eaton and the Romantics 1794–1795,” History 84 (1999): 74–92. 46. “King Chaunticlere,” in Politics for the People; or, A Salmagundy for Swine, 1: 106–107. 47. “Salmagundi,” New-York Evening Post, April 3, 1807, 3; reprinted in the New-York Herald, April 8, 1807, 3. The Salem Gazette reprinted Huggins’s final paragraph (April 21, 1807, 1). 48. John Strachan, “ ‘Trimming the Muse of Satire’:  J.  R. D.  Huggins and the Poetry of Hair-Cutting,” in The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period, ed. Steven Edward Jones (New  York:  Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), 202–203. Strachan argues elsewhere that Huggins’s distinction lies in large part in his “claim that his work is not advertising at all” (John Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period [New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2007], 252).

204  Notes to pages 135–139 49. Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790– 1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 68–69. 50. Salmagundi is therefore precisely not a Menippean satire, which is, as Howard Weinbrot puts it, “a genre for serious people who see serious trouble and want to do something about it—whether to awake a somnolent nation, define the native in contrast to the foreign, protest the victory of darkness, or correct a careless reader” (Howard D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005], xi). 51. This mobilization of antireferentiality differs from the nonreferentiality Meredith McGill identifies as the mark of the literary as such in U.S. publishing in the middle third of the nineteenth century, a nonreferentiality based on the repurposing of material from British literature. Far from the transatlantic borrowing that marks his career beginning with The Sketch Book, Irving’s refusal of reference in Salmagundi brings us immediately to questions of style, fashion, writing, and commodity—rather than to the question of the British inheritance. Manipulating the latter will become Irving’s great achievement (nowhere more clearly than in Bracebridge Hall [1822]), but my point is that Salmagundi’s distinction lies at the more fundamental level of the market as such. See Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 155–164. 52. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism:  Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2012), 78–79. “Regular novelty” is Franco Moretti’s term for the commodity, specifically the novel as it assumes the function of “the unexpected that is produced with such efficiency and punctuality that readers become unable to do without it” (Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History [London: Verso, 2005], 5). 53. Perry Anderson, “Persian Letters,” in The Novel, vol. 2: Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 164. 54. Cf. Looby: “It would not be too much to claim that Irving’s denomination of America as a ‘logocracy’ was meant to suggest that in the endemic legitimation crisis that beset the new nation—in the absence of established institutions of social control and traditional means of securing consent—the only social institution readily available to the young republic was language itself ” (Voicing America, 82). In its crisp move from the historically determinate (the Republican/Federalist divide in 1807–8) to the universally vast (language itself), this description usefully outlines the fetishistic structure I am describing. To use precise terms, “what is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations between elements, appears as an immediate property of one of the elements, as if this property also belongs to it outside its relation with other elements” (Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology [London: Verso, 1989], 24). 55. Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 249. 56. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 445–446. 57. Roberto Schwarz, A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism: Machado de Assis, trans. John Gledson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 8, 17; italics removed. 58. Ibid., 42–43. 59. “At the end of the episode, caprice looks back at what has just happened: it could have been otherwise”:  this is Moretti’s recent rendering of volubility as the narrative logic that wages “a frontal attack on the bourgeois reality principle” (Bourgeois, 148). My reading of Salmagundi amounts, perhaps, to something similar, with the proviso that the reality principle has been more an ideal than an actual rule in bourgeois life—hence its significance to Franklin’s self-representation in the Autobiography.

Notes to pages 139–147  205 60. Schwarz, Master on the Periphery of Capitalism, 19. 61. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, 28. 62. D. A. Miller, 8½ (New York: BFI–Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 105. 63. The form is what is made, but when we talk about form, we inevitably talk about what is made in abstract terms, in relation to the abstract shapes to which the actual object (the text) corresponds partially and dynamically (first this, then that form). 64. Seymour Chatman, “On Defining ‘Form,’ ” New Literary History 2 (1971): 221–222. 65. T. J. Clark, “More Theses on Feuerbach,” Representations 104 (2008): 7. 66. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 30. 67. The new populist language only unevenly displaced the effort, on the part of republican artisans, to “fit old ideals to new conflicts”—i.e., to cast the proletarianization of the turn of the century in terms drawn primarily from Thomas Paine and the radical republican tradition (Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1984], 97). See also Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 67–78 and passim. On the broader recognition of a threat to the semantic stability of language itself, see Bellion, Citizen Spectator, 195–208. 68. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order, 35–36. On the question of individual autonomy versus sundry versions of the social contract in the quarter century before Salmagundi, see Slauter, State as a Work of Art, 215–240. 69. Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 123–124. Samuel Otter figures the divergence between the abstract order of the Philadelphia grid and the lived experience of its inhabitants as an opposition of “space” and “place” (Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom [New York: Oxford University Press, 2010], 13). 70. On this phenomenon within the rhetoric of Romanticism, see, among others, St. Clair, Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, 161. On the uneven gendered development of the phenomenon in the United States, see the complementary accounts in David Leverenz, “Men Writing in the Early Republic,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 2: An Extensive Republic, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 351–353; and Dobson and Zagarell, “Women Writing in the Early Republic,” 368. 71. We find an unexpected characterization of just this form in Karl Polanyi’s rejection of liberalism, to which the peculiar market majesty of Salmagundi’s style corresponds: “It was an illusion to assume a society shaped by man’s will and wish alone. [. . .] The radical illusion was fostered that there is nothing in human society that is not derived from the volition of individuals and that could not, therefore, be removed again by their volition” (Great Transformation, 266).

Conclusion 1. T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 18. 2. Barthes, “Myth Today,” 131. 3. The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights, trans. Malcolm C. Lyons with Ursula Lyons, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 2008), passim.

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{ Index } abstraction of social relations, 42–49, 60–61, 63, 165n6, 173n59 style and, 140–141 Adams, John, 96, 172n55, 180n8 Addison, Joseph, 125–126 Adorno, Theodor, 8–9, 10, 20, 86, 197n63 adventure (narrative) novel and, 87–89, 91–97, 114, 130, 195n50 The Odyssey and, 5–10 romance and, 195n50, 196–197n62 speculation and, 73 advertising, 51–57, 132–134, 203n48 aesthetics captivation and, 89 classical, 91, 95, 101–103, 197n63 commodity, 86–87, 95, 101–103, 138, 190n2, 197n63 formal unity and, 7–9, 90, 114–115 morality and, 86, 101–103, 194n41 political subjectivity and, 173n61 sublime, 81–83 value judgments and, 84, 100–101, 114–115, 157n2, 175n76, 196–197n62 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 181n13 Alexander, John K., 175n82 Althusser, Louis, 199n76 American Indians, 45, 173–174n64, 176 American Revolution, 41, 47, 59, 84, 186n43 British trade and, 176n93 class and, 16, 17, 56, 162n43 Constitution and, 79, 164n51 French Revolution and, 17, 172n51 reading and, 174n71 slavery and, 163n46 social cohesion and, 164n51, 186–187n48, 199n74 Anderson, Perry, 136, 161n37 anthologies, 24–25, 58, 164–165n1, 175n74, 200n13 Anti-Federalists, 27, 29, 50. See also Federalists The Federalist and, 27, 37, 46–49, 52, 58 historiography and, 166n9 mode of argument of, 39, 174n67 radical politics and, 79 Appleby, Joyce, 142, 205n67 Arabian Nights (1,001 Nights), 8, 145, 147

Aravamudan, Srinivas, 135 Arch, Stephen Carl, 178n1 Aristotle on episodes, 1, 3, 10–11, 60, 88–90, 160n27, 186n44 on life narrative, 60, 85 tragedy and, 157n1 Arrighi, Giovanni, 168n29 Auerbach, Erich, 158n13, 198n72 Austen, Jane, 76–77, 186n42 bachelors, 118–119, 202n32 Badiou, Alain, 14–15, 16 Baker, Jennifer Jordan, 68 Bakhtin, M. M., 92, 97, 159n21, 164n57 Bal, Mieke, 161n32 Balibar, Étienne, 2 Balzac, Honoré de, 71 Barnes, Elizabeth, 191n6 Barthes, Roland on arthrology, 130 on bourgeois ex-nomination, 19–21, 36 on cardinal and catalytic functions, 11, 84–85, 89–90 on fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, 12 on readerly and writerly, 91 on reading, 36–37, 40, 170–171n48 on scenes in narrative, 161n61 Baucom, Ian, 32, 162n40 Beawes, Wyndham, 32–35, 53, 169n32 Bellion, Wendy, 162n44, 205n67 Benedict, Barbara, 200n13 Bennett, Tony, 190n5 Bible, reading of, 94–95, 123 Bildung, 63, 78, 83–85 Bildungsroman, 84–85 Blackburn, Robin, 163n46 Blair, Hugh, 89–90, 191n9 Blanck, Jacob, 121, 200n7 book (format), 33, 49–51, 65, 90–91, 116, 170n46 and The Federalist, 24–31, 57–59, 60, 116, 175n79 and Salmagundi, 116, 121–122, 200n7 bookkeeping, 53 Booth, Wayne, 3 Bourdieu, Pierre, 66

228 Index bourgeoisie.  See also capital, class, and ruling class American Revolution and, 16–21, 162–163nn43–44 disorientation of, 139 ideology and, 16–21, 36, 162–163n44, 164n55, 198n68, 204n59 polite letters and, 126 as ruling class, 16–21, 163–164n51, 173n59 Salmagundi and, 144 social mobility and, 176n95, 192n13 Bowden, Mary Weatherspoon, 200n14 Braudel, Fernand, 13–14, 16, 161n33, 176n95 Brecht, Bertolt, 2, 10, 23, 146 Breen, T. H., 56 Breitwieser, Mitchell, 68, 180n7 Brenner, Robert, 169n39 Brewer, Holly, 175n84, 184n29 Brooks, Peter, 5, 10, 12, 196n58, 199n75 Brown, Charles Brockden, 22, 88, 97–115, 190n2, 194n41, 194–195n45, 196n53, 196n56, 199n74 Brown, Richard D., 57 Brown, William Hill, 96 Brückner, Martin, 194n39 Bull, Malcolm, 95, 102, 197n63 Burgett, Bruce, 166n14 Burke, Edmund, 131 Burnham, Michelle, 199n74 Burroughs, Stephen, 85 Burstein, Andrew, 201n15 Bushman, Richard L., 56 Butler, James, 87–88 Bysshe, Edward, 123 Cahill, Edward, 194n41, 195n46 capital, 53, 177n98, 180n7 circuits of, 32, 168nn28–29 capitalism, 16, 20, 55, 57, 95, 102, 139, 176n95, 182n19 Caric, Ric Northrup, 184–185n35 Cato’s Letters (Trenchard and Gordon), 29 Cavallo, Guglielmo, 170n46, 174n66 Cervantes, Gabriel, 190n5 Cervantes, Miguel de, 49, 130 chain of reading, 31–35, 36, 57–59, 60–61, 116 Chambers, Ross, 160n27 Chandler, James, 161n33 chapters, 34–35, 90–91, 94 characterization in Franklin’s Autobiography, 60–85 in Brown’s Ormond, 107–111 Chartier, Roger, 174n66 Chatman, Seymour, 11, 140–141 Chauncy, Charles, 171n51

child as narrative position, 6, 9, 72–75, 158n12 political status of, 176n84, 183–184n29 as reader or listener, 94–95 Clark, T. J., 141, 146, 157n6, 162n43 class.  See bourgeoisie, capital, commerce, debtors, mercantile society, and poverty Clay, Jenny Strauss, 159n20 close reading, 146, 170–171n48 Cobbett, William, 96, 203n43 Cohen, Margaret, 157n2, 190n5 commerce, 31–39, 40, 49–57, 127, 168n28. See also commodities and mercantile society Commissioners Plan (New York), 142 commodities, 52–57, 86–87, 116–144, 174n75, 188n56. See also aesthetics competition (social), 17, 22, 61–63, 71–77, 82–83, 183n23 Connecticut Wits, 102 Connor, Rebecca Elisabeth, 91 Constitution, 15–21, 24–59, 60, 79, 116, 145, 191n6 Cornell, Saul, 39, 166n15, 168n27 Couégnas, Daniel, 195n50 Coverly, Nathaniel, 30 Cowie, Alexander, 100 Croce, Benedetto, 14, 161n34 crowd.  See mob Crowley, J. E., 168n28 Dannenberg, Hilary P., 160n30 Davidson, Cathy, 171–172n51, 193n22, 194n39, 196n56 de Man, Paul, 200n14 Debord, Guy, 188n56 debt, narrative logic of, 64–68, 71 debtors, 52–58 defamiliarization, 135–136 Defoe, Daniel, 90–91, 190n5 Dickie, Simon, 202n39 dictionaries, 33–34 didactic literature, 91–97, 99–101, 122–123, 196n56 discourse and story.  See story and discourse dispossession, 32, 57, 73, 177n98 Dobb, Maurice, 32, 182n19 Dobson, Joanne, 205n70 Dobson, Thomas, 30, 167n21 Doody, Margaret Anne, 197n62 Dowling, William C., 198n65 Doyle, Laura, 194n41 Drexler, Michael, 195n45 Eagleton, Terry, 14, 82, 127, 173n61 Eaton, Daniel Isaac, 131–133, 203n43 Edling, Max M., 178n100 Edwards, Jonathan, 171n51

Index  229 Eichenbaum, Boris, 131 Elkins, Stanley, 171n51 Emerson, Amanda, 195n49 empire, 17–18, 26, 29, 38, 42, 176n93 Encyclopaedia Britannica (Philadelphia, 1798), 30, 167n21 Engelsing, Rolf, 90, 192n13 English Civil War, 41, 165n5, 172n54, 183–184n29, 187n49 epic, 1–2, 5–10, 87–89, 91, 158–159nn11–21, 191n9. See also Homer episode.  See also episodic poetics and plot catharsis and, 1, 89, 91 digression and, 3, 10–11, 78–79, 85, 89, 111–112, 186n44 event and, 1, 11–12, 13–15, 16–17, 92, 99–100, 104, 106–107, 111–115 experience and, 5, 12, 65–66, 83–85 fragment and, 14, 44–49, 84, 116–120, 130–131, 160n27, 197n63 narrative theory and, 10–13 scene and, 13, 161n32 seriality and, 11, 90–91, 120–121, 167n22, 174n66 episodic poetics.  See also episode and plot contagion and, 24–59 error and, 60–85 hesitation and, 86–115 part-whole relation and, 3–4, 10–13, 16–17, 19–21, 26 readerly actualization and, 4–5 volubility and, 116–144 epistolary correspondence, 50–51, 99, 174n67, 199n74 Erkilla, Betsy, 84 fabula and sjužet.  See sjužet and fabula faction, 40–42, 44–49, 55, 57, 123 failure and success (social).  See success and failure (social) Farrand, Max, 179–180n4 Farrell, James, 180n8 Federalist Party, 117, 118, 142–144, 146–147 The Federalist (Hamilton, Jay, and Madison), 17–18, 24–59, 60, 77, 86–87 Franklin’s Autobiography and, 60–61, 66 Ormond and, 90, 110, 112, 115, Salmagundi and, 116–117, 120, 121, 124 Federalists, 57, 79, 163n50, 165n6, 166n9, 171n51. See also Anti-Federalists Feer, Robert, 173n59 Felson-Rubin, Nancy, 158–159n17 Ferguson, Robert A., 175n79 Fichte, J. G., 95, 186n42 Fielding, Henry, 167n22 Finkelberg, Margalit, 157n1

Fitch, John, 22, 73–76, 184–185n35 Fliegelman, Jay, 171n51, 174n71, 175n85, 178n1, 184n29 Forster, E. M., 11 Franklin, Abiah, 182–183n23 Franklin, Benjamin, 38, 44, 124, 181–182n18, 185n40 Autobiography, 17, 20–21, 60–85, 86–87, 90, 106–107, 115, 142–143, 146, 204n59 as compositor, 165n3 Franklin, James, 64, 68–77, 182n21 Franklin, Josiah, 67–73 French Revolution, 15, 17, 118, 161n34, 172n51, 178n100, 187n49, 198nn72–73, 200n3 Freud, Sigmund, 65–66, 180–181n11 Friedman, Lawrence, 184n29 Frye, Northrop, 160n27 Furet, François, 15 Furtwangler, Albert, 36, 170n43, 171n50 Gallagher, Catherine, 189n64 Gardner, Jared, 199n2, 201n20 gender, 171–172n51, 194n41, 205n70 narrative and, 8–9, 97, 111–113, 158n16, 158–159n17 reading and, 96–97, 115, 194n39 Genette, Gérard, 181n12 genre, 4, 23, 86–87, 88, 96, 121, 145–147 Gibbon, Edward, 191n10 Gilmore, William, 90, 96, 193n31 Glasse, Hannah, 129 Godwin, William, 98, 101, 195n49 Goodman, Dena, 174n67 Gordon, Thomas, 24, 165n3 Gothic novel, 101–102, 107 Gramsci, Antonio, 161n34 Great Awakening, 171n51 Green, James N., 180n4, 187n52, 202n30 Greimas, Algirdas Julien, 170n45 grid plans (orthogonal plans), 142–143, 205n69 Griswold, Rufus, 75, 185n37 Gross, Robert A., 173n59, 177n98 Grossman, Jay, 29 Gutjahr, Paul, 193n31 Haidu, Peter, 11 Hamilton, Alexander, 21, 24–59, 112, 116, 167n24, 169n32, 169n38, 177n98 Hedges, William, 124 Hegel, G. W. F., 21 hegemony, 20, 61, 87, 88, 115, 143, 147, 170n43 Herman, Luc, 161n32 Hewitt, Elizabeth, 174n67 Hill, Christopher, 184n29 historiography, 12–15, 16, 191n9

230 Index The History of Constantius and Pulchera, 88–97, 103, 104, 112, 114, 192n22 Hitchcock, Enos, 94, 101 Hobbes, Thomas, 27, 28, 165n5 Hobsbawm, Eric, 57, 177–178n100, 187n49 Hodge, Robert, 30, 167n20 Holton, Woody, 162n43, 173n59 Homer, 1–2, 6–7, 9, 87, 158n13 The Odyssey, 5–10, 158–159nn11–21 Horkheimer, Max, 10 Hrushovski, Benjamin, 158n10 Huggins, J. R. D., 132–134 ideologeme, 21, 164n57, 185n39 ideology, 36, 86, 90, 139, 177n99 economy and, 32 literary form and, 1–3, 16–21, 114–115, 145–147, 191n6, 199n76 incipit.  See narrative beginning The Independent Whig (Trenchard and Gordon), 24, 26, 29, 165n3 interruption, 8, 15, 50, 60, 62–63, 90–91, 113, 170n46 Irving, Washington, 20, 116–144, 199n2, 201n15, 201nn25–26, 202n32, 204n51, 204n54 Irving, William, 20, 116–144, 201n15 Jacobinism, 37–38, 79, 171n51 Jakobson, Roman, 158n10, 191n11 Jameson, Fredric, 10, 164n57, 185n39 Jay, John, 26, 39, 59 Jefferson, Thomas, 28–29, 136, 178n1 Johnson, Samuel, 33, 120, 126 Jones, Stephen, 128 Kames, Lord (Henry Home), 89–90, 115 Kant, Immanuel, 81–83 Katz, Marilyn, 158n16 Kazanjian, David, 163n46 Keimer, Samuel, 24, 65, 165n3 Kellogg, Robert, 92 Ketcham, Michael, 50 Kirkman, Francis, 85 Kornblith, Gary, 163–164n51 Koselleck, Reinhart, 16, 162n40 Kramnick, Isaac, 166n10 Kulikoff, Allan, 16, 17, 177n98 labor evasion of, 72–73, 103–104 formal subsumption of, 177n98 Lacan, Jacques, 181n11 LaCroix, Allison, 165n6 Lambert, John, 126–127, 201n21

lawyers, 55, 127 Lemay, J. A. Leo, 180n4, 181–182n18, 182n21 Leverenz, David, 205n70 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 12, 174n73 life narrative, 60–85. See also Benjamin Franklin and John Fitch literary history, 23, 88, 114, 145–147, 161n33 Locke, John, 171n51 Longworth, David, 121–122 Looby, Christopher, 18–19, 84, 125, 135, 172n51, 182n22, 186n43, 204n54 Loshe, Lillie Deming, 192–193n22 Lotman, Jurij, 92, 106, 111, 114 Loughran, Trish, 19, 165n4, 166n10 Lukács, Georg, 6–7, 34, 158n15, 169n41 Lukasik, Christopher J., 188n56 M’Lean, Archibald, 30–31, 167n24 M’Lean, James, 30–31 Machado de Assis, 139, 143 Macherey, Pierre, 12, 199n76 Madison, James, 24–59, 110, 112, 177n98 Maier, Pauline, 166n16, 173n59 Main, Jackson Turner, 176n90 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 191n11 Mandeville, Bernard, 36 Mann, Bruce H., 55 manuscript (format), 62, 73–74, 79, 83–84, 179–180n4, 188n56 market, 55–57, 174n73, 187n53, 188n56 book, 29–30 ideology of, 16–17, 18–19, 86–87 literary, 20–21, 86–87, 95, 100–103, 114–115, 116–144, 146–147, 190n2 Marx, Karl, 32, 57, 168n28, 173n62, 177n98 mathematical neutral, 39–49 Matthiessen, F. O., 142 McDonald, Forrest, 169n32 McGill, Meredith, 204n51 McKendrick, Neil, 176–177n95 McKeon, Michael, 197n62, 203n42 McKitrick, Eric, 171n51 medieval romance, 2, 11, 130 Melville, Herman, 102, 189n65, 202n32 mercantile society, 19, 31–38, 45, 49–57, 73, 121, 124, 134 Mercantilism, 168n28 Miall, David S., 160n26 Miller, D. A., 92, 140–141, 170n48, 177n99, 188n56, 192n18 miscellany, 116–144 mischief, 77–83, 106–107, 188n55 mob (mobile vulgus), 77–83 money, 31–35, 65–71, 77–78, 137–138, 168nn28–29, 180n7, 183n25

Index  231 Montesquieu, Baron de la Brède et de (Charles-Louis de Secondat), 18, 135–136 morality, 55, 81, 93–95, 100–103, 126–127 More, Hannah, 94–95, 193–194n33 Moretti, Franco, 2, 71, 84–85, 158n15, 159n25, 163n44, 204n52 mothers, 70–71, 182–183n23 Mulford, Carla, 179n4 Murrin, John, 163–164n51 narrative beginning (incipit), 10, 12, 26–27, 98–100, 102, 196nn55–56 narrative binding Benjamin Franklin and, 64–71, 74, 81, 83 plot and, 103, 113–114, 141–142, 199n75 narrative time adventure and, 92 money and, 71, 183n25 episodes and, 8–9, 48, 72, 74, 83, 109, 112 Nash, Gary B., 176n92 nationalism, 56–57, 57–59, 96–97, 116, 164n55, 178n100 Nelson, Dana, 29 Nemerov, Alexander, 100 Newman, Simon P., 176n90, 198n68 newspapers class character of, 50–59, 173n59 The Federalist and, 24–25, 28–29, 52–59, 66, 116, 175n79 James Franklin’s, 68, 182n21 reading of, 123, 170n46, 185n37, 191n10 novel, 86–115. See also Bildungsroman and colonization of subject, 188n56, 204n52 fragmentation in, 7, 139, 158n15 ideology and, 147 readers of, 20–21 and romance, 130, 196–197n62 social complexity and, 34–35, 71, 76–77, 169n41 and teleology of plot, 50 Nussbaum, Felicity, 178n1 The Odyssey.  See Homer oriental tale, 134–138 Otter, Samuel, 205n69 Ozouf, Mona, 15 Paine, Thomas, 55, 131, 173n62, 205n67 Parker, Patricia, 195n50 parts, printing in (number books), 29–31, 57–59, 121, 165n3, 166–167nn20–22, 202n30 Paulding, James Kirke, 116–144 Pavel, Thomas, 93 Penn-Holme Plan (Philadelphia), 142 Peradotto, John, 159n20 Peterson, Linda H., 194n33

Petter, Henri, 91 phatic function of language, 89–90, 97, 191n11 Phelan, James, 92, 160n28, picaresque, 2, 85, 93, 100, 130 Pitkin, Hannah, 40 plot.  See also episode and episodic poetics in narrative theory, 5, 10–13 part and whole in, 60, 77, 87–89, 91 periodical reading and, 49–53 prioritizing function of, 3–4, 20, 60, 92, 106, 114 and problem of plotting, 5, 103–115, 146 and world picture, 32–33, 92, 106 Polanyi, Karl, 18, 205n71 Pope, Alexander, 87, 89, 95, 127, 175n81, 201n23 Postlethwayt, Malachy, 34–35, 169n38 Postone, Moishe, 168n29 poverty, 51–52, 55, 103–104, 177n96, 198n68 Pred, Allan R., 174n68 Price, Leah, 175n74 pseudonyms, 39 Raffald, Elizabeth, 128–129 Rakove, Jack, 166n9, 172n56 Ramsay, David, 79 Raven, James, 30, Read, Deborah, 64, 68, 183n23 reading discontinuous, 33, 49–50, 90–91, 170n44, 174n66 as episode, 51 extensive and intensive, 90–91, 94–95, 123, 192n13 formalist and thematic, 10, 36–37, 39–40, 84, 96–97, 106, 110, 114–115, 170nn44–45 unreadability and, 57–59, 116 Reeve, Clara, 197n62 reference, 134–138, 200n14 Reinert, Thomas, 189n62 republicanism, 45, 142–144, 146–147, 171n51, 195n45, 205n67 revolution, 15–21, 17, 41–42, 46, 84, 111–113, 188–189n57 Reynolds, David S., 138 Rice, Grantland, 127, 128 Richardson, Samuel, 93–94, 99–100, 193n26, 196n56 Riesman, Janet A., 177n96 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 181n14 riot, 79–80, 187n51 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 94, 143, 183n27, 196n56 Rowson, Susannah, 91–97, 100, 193n27, 194n37 ruling class, 19–21, 56, 61, 147, 162–163n44, 163–164n51. See also bourgeoisie Rush, Benjamin, 163n50, 186–187n48, 190n1 Rust, Marion, 193n27, 194n37

232 Index Ruttenburg, Nancy, 171n51 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 160n31 Said, Edward, 196n55 Salmagundi (Irving, Irving, and Paulding), 20, 86, 102, 116–144 salmagundi (salad), 128–131 Sammelbände.  See anthologies satire, 116–144, 201n26 Menippean, 204n50 Schiller, Friedrich, 158n13, 186n42 Scholes, Robert, 92 Schueller, Malini Johar, 135 Schwarz, Roberto, 139, 141 Scott, Walter, 188n56 seduction, narrative and, 8, 111–113, 159n18 Sellers, Charles, 55 Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 143, 183n27 Shapiro, Stephen, 163n45, 191n6 Shays’s Rebellion, 40, 57, 173n59, 177n98 Shurr, William H., 182nn18–19 Simmel, Georg, 75, 185n39 sjužet and fabula, 12 Slauter, Eric, 165n5, 168n27, 205n68 slavery, 139, 163n46, 168n27, 186n40, 203n45 Smith, Adam, 34, 61, 169n39, 179n2 Smith, Billy G., 177n96, 184n30 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 173n59 Smollett, Tobias, 130, 202n39 The Spectator (Addison and Steele), 29, 50, 122, 125–126 St. Clair, William, 205n70 St. George, Robert Blair, 189n60 Stallybrass, Peter, 180n4, 187n52 Steele, Richard, 125 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 110 Stern, Julia, 97, 198n70 Stewart, Susan, 83 story and discourse, 12–13, 63, 67, 76, 88–90, 97–115, 181n12, 194–195n45 Strachan, John, 133–134, 203n48 structuration (literary), 4–5, 20–21, 25, 36, 66–67, 77, 119–120, 147 style, 116–144 defined, 117 sublime, 81–83 success and failure (social), 17, 53–57, 60–85, 127–128 Szatmary, David P., 173n59 Taws, Richard, 165n1 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 193n25

Thelwall, John, 131–132, 203n45 Thomas, Isaiah, 164–165n1, 182n21 Thompson, E. P., 80–81, 187n53, 203n43 Tilly, Charles, 80 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 172n54, 188–189n57 Todorov, Tzvetan, 11, 13 Tomashevsky, Boris, 11 Towne, Benjamin, 51 tragedy, 1, 34, 157n1 treason, 41, 173n61 Trenchard, John, 24, 165n3 Troup, Robert, 167n24 Upton, Dell, 142–143 value (form of), 31–35, 121, 124–125, 168n29, 173n59 Verhoeven, W. M., 195n49 Vervaeck, Bart, 161n32 Vickers, Daniel, 187n53 volubility, 116–144 defined, 139 Wagner, Richard, 197n63 Waldstreicher, David, 164n51, 185n40, 199n74 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 176n93 Warner, Michael, 29, 50, 189n64, 190n2, 202n32 Warner, William B., 193n32 Warren, Mercy Otis, 1, 15, 21, 38, 39 Washington, George, 29, 56, 102–103, 166n14 Watts, Steven, 102, 197–198n65 Weber, Max, 53, 81, 84, 182n19 Weems, Mason Locke, 102–103 Weinbrot, Howard, 204n50 Weintraub, Karl Joachim, 186n46 whim.  See volubility White, Ed, 195n45 White, Hayden, 12–13, 161n34 Wilentz, Sean, 205n67 Wiles, R. M., 30, 167n22 Wilkes Affair, 38, 79–81, 187–188n54 Williams, Raymond, 162–163n44, 172n54 Wittman, Reinhard, 192n13 Wollaston, William, 64 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 96, 171–172n51, 183n23 Woloch, Alex, 76–77 Wood, Gordon S., 172n52, 172n55 Wright, Lyle H., 190–191n6 Zagarell, Sandra A., 205n70 Ziff, Larzer, 186n45 Žižek, Slavoj, 15, 137, 204n54