Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday 1498562701, 9781498562706

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: Pursuing the Portable
I: Literary History after the Everyday
1 Portable Vision, Form,and Objects in Henry James
2 Fredric Jameson and Affect Theory
3 Novel Readings
II: Everyday Epistemologies
4 Filth and the Everyday
5 The Prosaic and the Phantasmagoric
6 “I had made it myself”
III: Everyday Readers
7 Domesticating Charlotte Corday
8 Thomas Wolfe andthe Domestication of Culture
9 Missing Books
Afterword: Portability Now
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

Portable Prose

Portable Prose The Novel and the Everyday Edited by Jarrad Cogle, N. Cyril Fischer, Lydia Saleh Rofail, and Vanessa Smith Afterword by John Plotz

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-1-4985-6269-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-6270-6 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction: Pursuing the Portable N. Cyril Fischer

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I: Literary History after the Everyday 1 Portable Vision, Form, and Objects in Henry James Zachary Tavlin and Bob Hodges 2 Fredric Jameson and Affect Theory: Realism and Everyday Experience Jarrad Cogle 3 Novel Readings: Mind- and Emotion-reading Devices in the Mid-twentieth Century and in Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Chris Rudge II: Everyday Epistemologies 4 Filth and the Everyday Hisup Shin 5 The Prosaic and the Phantasmagoric: Urban Bodies in Peter Carey’s The Tax Inspector Lydia Saleh Rofail 6 “I had made it myself”: Convergence of Past and Present Selves in Villette Jennifer Preston Wilson

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III: Everyday Readers 7 Domesticating Charlotte Corday: Helen Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne and Private Vengeance Stephanie Russo 8 Thomas Wolfe and the Domestication of Culture Jedidiah Evans 9 Missing Books Nicola Evans

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Afterword: Portability Now: Between Thing Theory and ObjectOriented Ontology John Plotz

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Index

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About the Contributors

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Introduction

Pursuing the Portable N. Cyril Fischer

It is tempting to begin an analysis of familiar things, such as the novel, the everyday, and the portable, with a definitional excursion that arrives, in disingenuous surprise, at the conclusion that sufficiently nimble critical consideration will reveal them to be altogether unfamiliar or uncanny or, at the very least, profitably defamiliarizable. It is equally tempting to go even further and question the very notion of the thing itself, which stands at the nexus of the novel, the everyday, and the portable. 1 But the novel, the everyday, and the portable are productive concepts in literary studies exactly because they are readily understandable, intuitively relatable, and even trivial. The act of reading translates these concepts into lived experience: the book in one’s hand, heavy or light, depending on its size and binding; the swathes of details always present albeit in different forms from Robinson Crusoe’s earthenware pot onwards; writing that gets carried away, in our minds, our bags, and on ereaders and phones. It is because we do not need to engage in a complex deconstruction of these concepts that they become the starting point for raising questions about the cultural relevance of the novel as a portable object. Novels are with us because they help us make sense of the everyday wherever we go. If portability does not pose a particular theoretical challenge since the book as a physical or epistemological object belongs to the moving subject, who possesses it, or moving subjectivity, which actualizes it, the novel and the everyday are conceptually recalcitrant. Although the everyday marks out the territory of the novel from its inception, it is Victorian realism in which the depiction of the everyday becomes the ontological condition of the novel. In the great realist novels, the everyday as such constructs the real as it authenticates and legitimates the means of literary realism. Yet, in spite of its crucial importance, the everyday rarely takes center stage in the novel. The vii

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everyday is the stuff of what Roland Barthes calls the “unavowed verisimilitude” of the modern novel; 2 unavowed because it defines itself as narratively and symbolically insignificant. Its function consists of filling in the background of the real. In Barthes’s analysis, the non-symbolic clutter of the everyday emerges as the symbolicity of the real itself, but as such it remains in the conceptual realm of the literal. In a structuralist theory of literature that hinges on the interpretation of the metaphorical complexity of signifiers, the literal is confined to the dullness of pure referentiality or, as Elaine Freedgood argues, the “nonliterary.” 3 With no metaphorical depth to plumb, literary analysis of the everyday flounders in the shallows of the literal. One can understand the various theorizations of the importance of the everyday in and of the novel as an attempt to subvert this attitude in providing different ways of finding depth or championing means of lateral rather than vertical analysis. Contrary to what one might expect, however, these theorizations do not depart from a unified understanding of the everyday; rather, they issue from the gap between two different ways of reading. In Marxist theory the everyday has had a privileged place from Marx and Engels’s discussion of “real individuals” onwards and finds one of its most decisive formulations in Georg Lukacs’s interrogation of bourgeois consciousness. 4 As a result of these engagements, scholarly approaches to the everyday have commonly used a framework of critique, and incorporated Marxist theories of alienation and reification. The everyday here becomes the locus of a dialectics in which its essence always slips out of the grasp of the literal. “The most extraordinary things are also the most everyday; the strangest things are often the most trivial,” writes Henri Lefebvre in his Critique of Everyday Life: Once separated from its context, i.e. from how it is interpreted and from the things which reinforce it while at the same time making it bearable—once presented in all its triviality, i.e. in all that makes it trivial, suffocating, oppressive—the trivial becomes extraordinary . . . separated from [its] everyday context, it becomes very difficult to articulate [it] in a way which will present [its] essential everyday quality. 5

If the defining feature of the everyday is the perpetual re-negotiation of its context, it is also that which eludes critical analysis. The critic must delve to a deeper level at which the flux of the everyday can be apprehended like the underside of a buoy floating far above one’s head, anchored to the ideological ground (or rock bottom) of more stable social, cultural, and historical relations. 6 In this regard, Lefebvre’s sense of the philosopher “as master and ruler of existence, witness and judge of life from the outside” often applies to the contemporary literary theorist. 7 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus identify such a conception of literary criticism as a “strenuous and heroic endeavor, one more akin to activism and

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labor than to leisure” in the tradition of symptomatic reading fostered by the hermeneutics of suspicion. 8 At stake here is the question to what extent a vertical conception of criticism meant to uncover ideological depth and metaphorical complexity actually demystifies the text. In the case of the everyday and the novel, the question arises if such readings do not deracinate the everyday which ultimately deprives it of its most vital energy, namely its ordinariness. In contrast, Best and Marcus and a range of other scholars have argued for a turn to the surface of the text and attention to notions of the domestic, the quotidian, and of social networks of association. 9 As such, recent discussions of the everyday in literary studies have sought to move away from the history of critique associated with the term. There are different ways to think about the surface of texts and bookobjects, but at its most basic the surface denotes something that “has length and breadth but no thickness.” In texts, the surface is “what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible.” 10 In other words, it recasts the literal as the literary. The literary no longer belongs exclusively to the realm of metaphor, but also to that of metonymy. In place of vertiginous acts of symptomatic critique, the surface reader moves horizontally, limning the text for things that do not stand in for other things, but denote only themselves. If this at first sounds like a return to a Barthesian conception of the everyday, it is helpful to recall Freedgood’s distinction between weak and strong metonymic reading. As purely superficial associations, metonymies do not enrich reading since they simply elaborate the obvious. In Great Expectations, for example, the reader will not gain much in noting that Magwitch’s predilection for Negro Head tobacco hints at his status as a slave to Compeyson. As febrile und unpredictable associative markers, however, metonymies open up the everyday to thick critical description. The mahogany furniture in Jane Eyre, for example, prompts an analysis of the depletion of this type of wood in Madeira and the Caribbean, the places in which the wealth in the novel is generated, as well as the ecologic and economic fallout of planting grapes and sugarcane in order to supplant the loss of revenue from the mahogany trade. In juxtaposing the “unpredictability of metonyms” with “the stability of metaphors,” 11 Freedgood charges lateral reading with vertical energy, a gesture that is often signaled by the adjective “thick” to describe accounts of what is considered evident. This is not to accuse surface or lateral readings with the impulse that sometimes drives literary criticism to turn to the familiar as the surprisingly unfamiliar—after all, if what is evident was really evident, one wouldn’t have to write about it at length—but to note that in the case of the everyday, no account, whether vertical or lateral, can escape the dialectics of contextualization and de-contextualization that force critics either to acknowledge their distance from the everyday or to turn to the means of analysis they initially eschew. Whether the everyday slips out of view of the depth critic or becomes continually more layered in the eyes of surface

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readers, the everyday derives its relevance from these tensions, which are most intense at the intersection of the novel, the everyday, and the portable. As portable objects, novels both contain and participate in the everyday. Their meaning resides less in themselves as in the relations established between the text, various contexts, and the subject that owns it as an object and the subjectivity that consumes it. John Plotz explores the fates of novels as fungible commodities that can accrue a transcendent, personal meaning in Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move, a key text in the study of portability to which many contributors refer to in this collection. He focuses on the dispersion of novels across the British Empire from the 1830s onwards, a historical period in which the word portable begins to have both a literal and abstract meaning, paving the way for thinking about the novel as objects we carry and texts whose meaning we carry with us. Plotz’s book was published in the wake of a series of major contributions to critical theory by Bill Brown. In works such as “Thing Theory” and A Sense of Things, Brown often concentrates on material that remains outside of the realm of the symbolic, in moments when objects no longer continue to function. Brown argues that theoretical discourse should involve a further consideration of the material, claiming, “If thinking the thing . . . feels like an exercise in belatedness, the feeling is provoked by our very capacity to imagine that thinking and thingness are distinct.” 12 Plotz builds on this work in considering how objects begin to operate in Victorian literature and culture, where notions of portability, empire, and sentiment become entwined. He states objects “are at once products of a cash market and, potentially, the rare fruits of a highly sentimentalized realm of value both domestic and spiritual, a realm defined by being anything but marketable. The best pieces of portable property can become, in effect, their own opposites.” 13 This dual notion of property is then placed in the framework of the British Empire, where the existence of Greater Britain . . . requires not just a notion of portable cultural objects, but also of asymmetry in portability, so that the flow of culturebearing objects from core to periphery is not counterbalanced or interrupted by a flow in the opposite direction. The capacity of an imperium to sustain that kind of asymmetry is a crucial component of its power. 14

As such, Portable Property highlights the extent to which everyday and domestic culture begins to move across national boundaries in the nineteenth century and the role that material objects play in this historical situation. Early in the text, Plotz notes the importance of the novel in this situation, occupying the position of portable property but also capable of providing a transferable and productive representational framework for the reader. In this capacity, Plotz’s work reads the objects that often appear on the surface of

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Victorian texts, in order to consider the intersections of history, culture and literary representation. In his recent The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson introduces novelistic form into the discussion of the everyday. He highlights how formal changes to the novel allow a greater focus on the quotidian, including increased attention to experiences of affect within commercial and bureaucratic spaces. Jameson sees this work as a turning away from earlier narratives that focus on “heroic deeds and ‘extreme situations.’” 15 While Jameson has often served as a representative of the depth-reading model, his work does not here aim to reveal the latent political meaning of these texts, but concentrates on the history of the realist novel and its focus on everyday life. In this fashion, the capacity of realism to map the intersection of minor affective states, the material world and the sprawl of social networks is highlighted. In particular, Jameson notes how formal developments in the works of authors such as George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, and Emile Zola allow the nineteenth-century novel to articulate changes to the everyday under capitalism and the turn towards affective experience and distraction. While suggesting a broader arc as these developments continue into the twentieth century, Jameson does not further plot out this historical tendency. Similarly, Plotz does not consider at length the wider implications of cultural portability in his work, instead remaining focused predominantly on nineteenth-century English culture. In this capacity, the broader implications of both works offer an opportunity for scholarship to develop and extend these ways of reading literature, the material world, and social relationships. For example, the extent to which the novel can be positioned as both portable property and a technology that enables culture’s portability is worthy of further discussion. Similarly, the extent to which Jameson’s theory of literary affect might influence a long history of readerly engagement remains to be articulated. Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday explores questions emerging around the confluence of novel studies and the analysis of the portable and the everyday, expanding the field of inquiry from Plotz’s interest in the Victorian period to a much broader, transnational literary-historical range. If the collection departs from Plotz’s work in this regard, it also returns to it in the last piece of this collection. In “Portability Now: Between Thing Theory and Object-Oriented Ontology,” Plotz considers the legacy of his monograph while placing it in the context of contemporary discussions of affective states and how Marxist analyses of commodity culture as “thing theory” and “object-oriented ontology” have continued to develop in the years since the publication of Portable Property. In a similar fashion, the collection will also engage with Jameson’s recent discussions of the everyday, affect and the formal development of the nineteenth-century realist novel, while focusing on a diverse body of literature.

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The essays examine the novel as a privileged site for representing the everyday as well as a physical object that occupies public and private spaces. The contributors interrogate the relationships between these differing aspects of the novel’s existence, negotiating the boundaries between the material world, subjective experience and strategies of representation. While mimetic qualities of prose remain an integral consideration for literary interpretation, this collection argues for more diverse frameworks—ones that see aesthetic components of the novel in close connection with reading practices, shared structures of feeling, and the corporeal. In this capacity, the volume will argue for readings of texts that consider the capacity for literary culture to move through the world, but also to make it or re-make it new. As Lefebvre’s voluminous discussion of the everyday suggests, the connection between surface and depth is not one of binary opposition, but of irrevocable entanglement. For Lefebvre, the subject “carries out in his own way, spontaneously, the critique of his everyday life. And this critique of the everyday plays an integral part in the everyday: it is achieved in and by leisure activities.” 16 The essays in this volume aim to read the everyday in such a fashion, where the present and the historical, the epic and quotidian, the regressive and the utopian are thoroughly entwined. They also maintain that the imaginary and the material have long had a symbiotic relationship. By keeping this in mind, this collection emphasizes the continued ability of the novel to represent, interrogate, and tear the fabric of the everyday. The essays in the collection cover novels from the eighteenth century up to the contemporary period, and offer subtle re-deployments of portability. They think through the portability of novel objects as both physical things and virtual hermeneutic devices that structure the experience of writing and reading in terms of a manipulation of objects in a text, as well as the self-fashioning of the text as a material and cultural artifact. By engaging directly with the manifestations of the prosaic and the everyday, Portable Prose acknowledges that creative texts and practices do not occur in a vacuum but are influenced by various cultural forces, concerns, and experiences. The first section, “Literary History after the Everyday,” seeks to articulate how recent theoretical discussions of affect, portability, and the everyday might adapt to different areas of literary history. The essays focus on diverse literary traditions ranging from nineteenth-century French and British realism, the proto-modernism of Henry James, to the science fiction of Phillip K. Dick. By applying notions of the portable to texts outside of the Victorian literary canon, for example, the contributors expand upon Plotz’s theoretical work, as well as furthering his historical account of the emergence of portability in the Western novel. As such, the essays in this section challenge the idea that the novel’s engagement with the surface of the everyday—the glittering array of commodified objects that begin to frame and dominate novels from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards—marks the beginning of

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the reification of the novel form. Instead, the contributors plot the continuing possibilities that critical theory and the novel have for charting historical change, even as they move away from a hermeneutics of suspicion. In their essay, “Portable Vision, Form, and Objects in Henry James,” Zachary Tavlin and Bob Hodges engage with the cosmopolitanism of James’s work and consider the increased portability of cultural objects in early modernism. In doing so they provide an additional articulation of portability as it relates to the early twentieth century. Tavlin and Hodges trace James’s initial hesitance towards portability in writing, photography and painting, as well as his ultimate integration of modern objects into his late novels and accompanying illustrations. The chapter considers the portability of high literature and the ability of James’s fiction to entreat the reader to “negotiate the intersecting imaginations and idealizations of a shared world.” Through this work, Tavlin and Hodges delineate the intersections between Marxist theories of reification with recent discussions of objects and things. By seeking to incorporate objects, literary representation of the material world, and contemporary literary theory, the chapter argues that portability influences both everyday life and broader historical developments. In his contribution, “Fredric Jameson and Affect Theory: Realism and Everyday Experience,” Jarrad Cogle discusses Jameson’s recent work on affect and nineteenth-century realism in relation to the broader field of affect theory. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson maps how, over the course of the nineteenth century, the realist novel increasingly focuses on representations of affect. In doing so, Jameson constructs a historical framework, one that ties the emergence of representations of affect to the increasingly reified everyday found under capitalism. For Cogle, this framework has the potential to add further nuance to the politically focused work of affect theorists such as Jonathan Flatley and Sianne Ngai. For these critics, collective affective experiences have the ability to subvert or modify dominant cultural structures. In delineating the relationships between Jameson and these scholars, Cogle argues that charting the historical emergence of affect may allow us to better theorize alternatives to the standardized everyday. In “Novel Readings: Mind- and Emotion-reading Devices in the MidTwentieth Century and in Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” Chris Rudge demonstrates how notions of portability begin to change in the early stages of postmodernity. Rudge reads Dick’s science fiction as a commentary on how the discourse and practice of psychiatry disperses through western culture. The chapter demonstrates how “Stigmata stages a complex and wide-reaching satirical drama of institutionalized mind control,” a drama whose particular affinities with the portable “are plotted through a reduction of psychiatry to a mobile, peripatetic device.” In this regard, the science fiction object of the “virtual suitcase psychiatrist” articulates how psychiatric discourse, treatment and drug technology provides a

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variety of hermeneutic devices that the subject is able to carry around. Rudge traces the intersections of subjectivity, cultural objects or devices, and broader cultural narratives related to psychological health. The second section, “Everyday Epistemologies,” recasts the realm of the everyday as a feature of novelistic knowing; that is, not as a background to the development of psychologically complex characters, but as constitutive of the inner life of characters. Everyday objects, ranging from beloved trinkets to the vast backdrop of urban filth, are read not simply as focal points that train the attention of characters’ observations and thoughts, but as crucial aspects of the epistemological frameworks novels offer their readers. The essays in this section demonstrate how seemingly innocuous and unrelated objects make up an epistemological field in which characters define themselves and, consequently, how this field of the everyday can be read as the psycho-geography of the novel in British, Australian, and American fiction. These essays focus on the importance of the urban environment for understanding the everyday. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach drawn from the fields of literary and cultural studies, Hisup Shin in his chapter “Filth and the Everyday” highlights the relationship between material objects and subjective experience in the realist novel, whereby “what appears eventless is not eventless, but imbued with a potential for dramatic storytelling, since it is organized by a conflicting network of material and human relations defining . . . domestic existence.” Within this framework, Shin explores not only the novelistic treatment of the everyday, but also utilizes filth as a novelistic figuration emphasizing the existence of deteriorated material in novels by Dickens, as well as the use of novelistic techniques in Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Poor of Great Britain (1842). Through this work, Shin considers how Lefebvre’s notion of a metalanguage might help to articulate the relationships between the epistemological space of Dickens’s socially minded novels and the way in which filth and decay echoes theories of technology and sanitation reform in these novels. In doing so, Shin highlights the importance of filth and sanitation to everyday perceptions of urban environments. Moving from the Dickensian world to a post-modern Australian context, Lydia Saleh Rofail’s essay on “The Prosaic and the Phantasmagoric: Urban Bodies in Peter Carey’s The Tax Inspector” likewise apprehends literary depictions of filth in urban as well as suburban topographies. The Tax Inspector is a novel about thwarted aspirations and the domestic traps of the everyday. Quotidian objects can include bodies as well as urban and suburban spaces and structures of meaning within everyday cultural spaces. They are defined as prosaic counterpoints to phantasmagoric and imaginative objects. This essay analyzes contrasts between desolate outer suburbs that frame opulent cities and the everyday dysfunctional lives haunted by historical trauma. Saleh Rofail reads these objects “As metonyms for Australian iden-

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tity . . . with their uneasy interplay of imaginary and prosaic.” This everyday with its attendant seemingly unrelated objects and domestic spaces, traces not only the complex, psychologically traumatized inner working of the characters, but also symbolizes the contradictions at the heart of modern Australian identity. This identity is conflicted, constrained and expansive, at once prosaic and imaginary, parochial and global. The third essay in the section interrogates the relationship between subjective experience and everyday epistemologies. In “‘I had made it myself’: Convergence of Past and Present Selves in Villette,” Jennifer Preston Wilson discusses how the symbolic and the everyday are combined throughout the novel, focusing on Lucy Snowe’s engagement with her items of portable property. The chapter demonstrates the liminal positions these items occupy, acting as both sentimentally marked material objects and symbolically loaded narrative devices. As Wilson notes of the scenes following Lucy’s collapse, “Brontë constructs [the] episode so that the readers share in the protagonist’s confusion, placing allegorical symbols and realistic details in overlapping dialogue with one another.” Throughout the novel, Lucy’s struggle to establish a sense of identity and place are reflected in her approach to varying objects and domestic spaces. Crucially, Lucy’s understanding of these objects as possessing a multitude of qualities emphasizes her growing ability to navigate the bourgeois world she inhabits. By the novel’s conclusion, Lucy is able not only to position herself as a working, middle-class subject, but also to establish a sense of identity outside of her working life and nineteenth-century consumer culture. In this capacity, the novel delineates the relationships between notions of self and the material world. The final section, “Everyday Readers,” takes a dual approach to the relation between the literary artifact and the reader. The first two contributions examine the influence of a non-academic reading public on the writing process and the tension between the popular appraisal of a text and its cultural status. In “Domesticating Charlotte Corday: Helen Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne and Private Vengeance,” Stephanie Russo discusses the eighteenthcentury text, in regard to the discrepancies between the real events that inspired the story and the fashion in which Craik reframes de Narbonne’s political convictions as emotion-based violence. Russo articulates the extent to which the private domestic realm is inscribed with the public and the political or, to be more precise, how the association between the domestic, the everyday, and women serves to depoliticize and trivialize Corday’s actions. At the same time, Russo recognizes that the novel becomes the privileged site for a remaking of these associations and for the transformation of the everyday into the sphere of the heroic and epic. In “Thomas Wolfe and the Domestication of Culture,” Jedidiah Evans charts the reception of Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (1929), from its initial and unlikely success to its current state of semi-obscurity. Evans fo-

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cuses on the popular engagement with the dense literary text, as well as its history of publication as an Armed Services Edition, distributed to United States soldiers in World War II. By concentrating on correspondence between readers and Wolfe, as well as the vision of America that Wolfe’s novel represented in popular culture, Evans considers the relationship between academic discussion, audience engagement, and broad cultural reception of literary works, and the failure of critical approaches to fully account for the impact of certain novels on the everyday lives of its readers. In “Missing Books,” Nicola Evans explores the notion of absence in textual reception, discussing lost or destroyed manuscripts, as well as previously read—but now absent—texts. The chapter notes how missing works often “collect associations of homelessness . . . whether it be the place of the manuscript in literary systems of value or the perception of the author as adrift from his place in the world.” This sense of precarious identity and authorship is reflective of a broader tendency towards the romantic in academic and popular accounts of lost texts. As Evans outlines, work on Walter Benjamin’s famous lost manuscript emphasizes heroic quests and secret graves, amongst other romantic elements. In these scenarios, the book as physical object takes on new valances typically ignored by scholarly interpretation. Building on Ina Ferris’s notion of the bibliographic romance, Evans also explores recent texts where authors provide bibliographical accounts of their reading lives. In these attempts to sketch identity by tracing histories of reading, the book as physical object again becomes the focus; the varying texts discuss shelf arrangements, searches for obscure novels, and mapping of books via the landscape of the page. Again, as Evans claims, the physical object of the text shifts in this absent state, even as it is reabsorbed by the literary imaginary. As the overview of the contents of this collection suggests, there are many ways to approach, evaluate, and energize the concepts of the novel, the everyday, and the portable. Some of our contributors plumb the depths lurking beneath the symbolic structures of the quotidian to reveal the rich ideological and formal underside of the seemingly ordinary. Others expand our understanding of the commonplace and conventional as rich surfaces for historical and stylistic analysis. It is clear that the everyday and all its extensions, both literal and figurative, cannot be contained within a singular tradition of criticism in order to be apprehended in its pervasiveness. Plotz notes in the conclusion to the afterword how fascinating a realm of inquiry the everyday remains. He points out that scholars have to find a place for the “impossible work of discerning what is an attribute of the material world, and what an attribute of the minds that turn their attention to that world.” As such, literary critics will have to find new ways to examine the line between physical and mental objects and will continue to interrogate the boundaries of portability. In an age in which the concept of the virtual soon will have to

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be regularly taken into account in textual analysis, arriving at a better understanding of the dual nature of portable objects and the nature and epistemology of the everyday is more pressing than ever. While this collection does not engage with virtuality, it does provide a better understanding of the novel, the everyday, and portability in a time when these concepts have become entwined with digital existence. Most importantly, it reminds us that we should always question the things we take for granted as readers, critics, and owners of books, and that following this line of inquiry is anything but a trivial pursuit. NOTES 1. This is not to suggest that such terminological discussions do not have merit. Consider, for example, Bill Brown’s distinction between things and objects in the introduction to his recent monograph, Other Things (2015). 2. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 148. 3. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 10. 4. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 42; Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1971), 83–149. 5. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 2014), 35–6. 6. Bruno Latour’s description of the movements constituting networks can also shed light on the problems of analyzing a phenomenon that eludes accounts grounded in a distinction between a macro- and micro-perspective (17). 7. Lefebvre, 5 (emphasis in original). 8. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108.1 (2009): 5–6. 9. Notable contributions to these varying interpretive strategies include the work of Sharon Marcus, Franco Moretti, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. See, Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007); Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (2013); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003). 10. Best and Marcus, 9. 11. Freedgood, 7. 12. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 16. 13. John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 2. 14. Ibid. 15. Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 109. 16. Lefebvre, 29.

WORKS CITED Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” In The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, 141–8. Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108.1 (2009): 1–21. Brown, Bill. Other Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. ———. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 1–22.

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Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. Latour, Bruno. “On Recalling ANT.” In Actor Network and After. Edited by John Law and John Hassard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, 15–25. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. London: Verso, 2014. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1971. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers, 1972. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013. Plotz, John. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

I

Literary History after the Everyday

Chapter One

Portable Vision, Form, and Objects in Henry James Zachary Tavlin and Bob Hodges

Henry James lived a mobile life, his childhood split between Albany, Washington Square, Paris, the English countryside, Geneva, Newport, and BostonCambridge, and his adult life situated on the edge of several cultures and nations. He would never fully come to terms with his abandonment of his home country and his split life between the metropolis and the country. His letters oft suggest a desire for somewhere else, rarely content in the refuge of a “Great Good Place” vital for the working artist. Coincident with his nearly endless reflections on the role of habitation, place, and travel, in the novelist’s worldview were anxieties about the necessity of producing a portable, moveable literature as an impatient, inattentive, and rapid modernity crept into his world. In the age of the Kodak camera and the snapshot, he wondered, how can one write a big, serious, and successful book? On the one hand, portable prose was alien to his theory of art in the novel, but when his relationship to photography came to a head after the turn of the twentieth century, his novels and prefaces became guides to portable seeing and thinking. As he came to see, think, and write diagrammatically, he was able to envision—if not fully achieve—a bridge between the initially immobile bourgeois subject that often populated his stories and the velocity of the increasingly alien world. This essay begins with an account of the “diagrammatic” relation between vision and text in James’s work, situating his theorization of the novel form in the context of the both threatening and potentially liberating technology of the portable camera. After this biographic and socio-aesthetic profile of James’s shifting praxis, the essay further considers perception, portability, form, and objects in James’s late fiction, especially the novella The Spoils of 3

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Poynton (1897). The second part pursues the formal and objectal implications of Fredric Jameson’s hermeneutics of reification and utopia, and the third concludes the essay’s analysis of perception and portability by examining Spoils and its objectworld in three literary currents of the 1890s: the decadent interest in the outré and communities of affinities, the fin de siècle surge in utopian fiction, and the English Arts and Crafts movement. MOBILIZING VISION John Plotz’s definition of Victorian culture as portable, its material production mimicking and supporting the newfound mobility of human life, helps to understand the context of James’s writerly anxiety. Plotz narrates the transition from fixed domesticity to the widening gyres of market circulation, with a newfound value invested in portable objects that can mediate and soften this transition, that contain qualities of both the local and global, and that are flexible enough to accompany the itinerant on their alienated way. Plotz’s analysis of Victorian culture “on the move” 1 says much about British empire, with the portability of English strawberries, tea, and cricket abroad establishing “Anglo-Indian dependence on the exportability of pure Englishness,” 2 as well as literary economies that reflect this sort of cultural circulation in several directions, as in Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone, whose eponymous treasure provides “a portable metonym for India itself.” 3 Adding James to this story, however, foregrounds another element of portability culture, less (explicitly) about the spread of commodities around the globe—James certainly detested most imperial projects, though he tended to remain quietist on global affairs beyond his own brand of “international tale”—than the mobility of serious literature in society. The portability of the camera, particularly the Eastman Kodak that exploded in popularity in the 1880s and 90s, was the rival of the sort of books—long, dense, difficult, multi-volumed, and physically heavy when in bound form—James was writing. The period of the Kodak’s ascendance corresponded in his career with his biggest disappointment, the failure of his play Guy Domville at St. James’s Theatre, a rather violent sign—given the uproar and comic rebuff from the galleries—that his style and approach would never attain mass popularity. He despaired at the sign of the times that exceeded the narrower boundaries of literary culture: The terms of contemporary journalism more and more impose themselves, announce themselves as, increasingly, irresistibly, the universal, the only terms, and exactly by the same law as that by which so many other modern conveniences have become indispensable, by which new machinery supersedes old, the Kodak displaces the camera. They represent the portable, and the portable now is everything.” 4

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Though he acknowledged, sadly, that he would (or could) never write a bestseller, and that he was never to feel at home as the new century dawned (referring on January 1, 1900 to “this dreadful gruesome New Year, so monstrously numbered” 5), he admits a desire to combine his ambition with the ascendant portable visual regime: “I want to see all of all this I can, to miss no possible impression—that is the very basis; but I can’t knock off pages of prose like a war-correspondent writing on his knee or his hat, and I want to do a really artistic and valuable book.” 6 Indeed, when he took to dictating his writing he found that the leash on his mobility was shortening, with the heavy typewriter standing in the way of travel and general movement, which had always necessarily accompanied his work. If James could not write like a war correspondent, he would have to open the work itself up to the contemporary world, re-conceiving his writing in “transmedial” terms. Jordan Brower calls a writer’s capacity to imagine the afterlives of their prose works at the moment of composition fiction’s “transmedial possibility.” 7 He sees this capacity developing in the decade after James’s New York Edition, when the extension of copyright protection to literary film adaptations produced an “acute awareness” of how one might prepare fiction for adaptation. 8 In James’s case, The Master revised his long-held aversion to visual illustration, his new awareness centered on the diagrammatic relationship between word and image inescapable in the Kodak era. James, for most of his career, resisted any accompanying illustration to his writing. He preferred serializing his fiction in Atlantic Monthly over Century Magazine, in part because the former lacked illustrations: “as a writer one hates ’em,” he complained, according to biographer Leon Edel, “and how their being as good as they are makes one hate ‘em more! What one writes suffers essentially, as literature, from going with them, and the two things ought to stand alone.” 9 Such was his sentiment in the mid-90s. By “stand[ing] alone,” James fought the mobility of word and image and perhaps policed class boundaries inherent within the most common pre-modernist media crossings. But the change of mind that led to his collaboration with photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, who took the frontispieces for James’s New York Edition, nevertheless accorded with his longheld intuition on the topic of the visual arts tout court. Though a sharp-eyed lover of painting, James could not conceal his general agitation after attending an 1876 Paul Durand-Ruel exhibition in Paris, claiming that the Impressionists on display were “absolute foes to arrangement, embellishment, selection, to the artist’s allowing himself . . . to be preoccupied with the idea of the beautiful.” 10 Yet he recognized that their system reconfigured conventional perspective by inventing a role for the mobility and subjectivity of the artist through attention to the fugitive moment: “the painter’s proper field is simply the actual, and to give a vivid impression of how a thing happens to look, at a particular moment, is the

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essence of his mission.” 11 The gamble for James was to “render the impression of an object may be a very fruitful effort, but it is not necessarily so; that will depend upon what, I won’t say the object, but the impression, may have been.” 12 Or, as Viola Hopkins Winner writes, “To James’s way of thinking, the painter who records a quick visual impression of a scene runs the risk of being shallow if his perceptions are limited. To achieve the highest result, the painter must take time to see deeply into his subject.” 13 James celebrated or at least recognized the power of the quickened impression while nevertheless castigating the process by which the Impressionist achieved it. Wendy Graham argues that James’s engagement with Coburn and modernist visual culture “helps us puzzle out the obvious paradoxes in James’s attitude towards Impressionism.” 14 Writing about John Singer Sargent, he praises “the artist who sees deep into his subject, undergoes it, absorbs it, discovers in it new things that were not on the surface, becomes patient with it, and almost reverent,” 15 and James struggled to “reconcile this fundamental requirement with the art of painting quickly” 16 (not to mention writing or Kodaking quickly). The impression—which initially appeared all surface to James—presents one end of the transformation, through the nineteenth century, of Albertian constructions of linear perspective into strategies of selective description. The pictorial world expanded beyond the purview of the studio artist who had unhinged the formal-visual pyramid from his body’s concrete confines to wield at large in pursuit of his subject, staging a stable scenic geometry within which the subject matter would be emplaced. Plein air impressionism—mobilized through technical advances like tin tubes that kept oil paint fresh and portable—could capture immediate and ephemeral atmospheric properties otherwise “imperceptible to photographers with their heavy, large-format cameras, slow-speed emulsions, and long exposure times.” 17 Eventually, when cameras attained a sufficient level of portability, artists could dispense with the first procedure of linear perspective—establishing the visual pyramid as an abstract container—for though the camera may be (initially) a tool of perfect perspective, the photographer is powerless to compose the entire scenario of his picture, especially when outside the controlled environment of his studio. Indeed, control is a significant concept for James. A critical commonplace holds that, despite his numerous discussions in the prefaces of the reader’s role in the reception of his fictions, he erects barriers to the reinterpretation of his oeuvre by making the supreme author and reader the same person: Henry James. To grant himself the authority he desires as re-reader of his own work, the purpose of the late career Edition’s prefaces, James acknowledges the contribution “the reader” makes to textual meaning, if only to foreclose the many bad readings in circulation. On this view, James arrogates all available critical territory in a deliberate act of intellectual imperialism (or managerial control) that supplements his original creation both by

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retelling the tale and by reinterpreting it from a later position. One of the more charitable deconstructive versions of this argument is Paul Armstrong’s reference to “doubled acts of attention” in the prefaces, where we encounter a “future reading or rereading through James’s reflections on the past” 18: James’s repeated recollections about the origins of a work or his aims in writing it claim to give definitive guidance about how it should be taken, and a large part of the authority that the prefaces have accrued as magisterial documents of James’s artistic intentions is a recognition of this ambition. But when critics turn to the prefaces to resolve an interpretive dispute, they typically find that James is silent or ambiguous on crucial matters. 19

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, perhaps, or maybe James’s desire to foreclose new interpretations is a monumental task. Either way, his prefaces chase their tails. Of all the prefaces, The Golden Bowl’s (one of the last written) focuses at most length on revision: “What has the affair [of revision] been at worst,” James asks, “but an earnest invitation to the reader to dream again in my company and in the interest of his own larger absorption of my sense?” 20 By this time, he seemed to think that new visual media provided a domain for the “larger absorption of his [literary] sense.” Without doubt, there were pangs of jealousy and anxiety for James: he refers to the great number of “plastic” 21 possibilities in the staging of his work, and wonders whether literature can be “pictorial enough” 22 by itself to generate the visceral images sought by the modern reader. But from the beginning of his career a rude dismisser of photography as an art form, James hired Coburn to provide the frontispieces to the New York Edition, even wandering the streets with him to look for “optical symbols or echoes” of and “connexions” to his texts. 23 With the rise of the avant-garde photo-secession movement at the beginning of the twentieth century as well as mainstream snapshot culture, photography in all forms provided the most literal access to the “renewed” visions James speaks about in his preface. 24 Perhaps soon his readers could find the sites of his stories in London, or Paris, or Venice, and maybe giving in to the budding connection between new visual media and literature was another way to forestall bad fan photographs (certainly James admired Coburn above almost all other practitioners and amateurs). He did tell Coburn to avoid the “pompous and obvious things that one everywhere sees photos of.” 25 But we also know that James admired his heroine Maggie Verver’s ability to reenvision her world from outside her experience’s frame, and the Master was more open than ever about doing so himself. As David McWhirter notes, he was also seeking images outside the frame of the original work: The photographs, typically of houses, streets, or landscapes, unpeopled scenes or images that indirectly evoke settings from James’s narratives, are striking in

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“The prefaces and the photographs, sister foyers for his fictions,” Anna Kornbluh posits in her architecturally minded analysis, “powerfully articulate the work of the novel chez James: myriad productions of unindexable social space.” 27 The illustrations unfix the novels’ social scenes for the reader’s eye, just as “the prefaces’ discussions of settings emphatically dislocate his works from recognizable geography.” 28 Before his death, James gave over to the possibility of ampliative transmedial rapport as a form of revision and adaptation, as a productive and portable echo of word in image and image in word. John Bender and Michael Marrinan use rapport to describe the portable, combinatorial relationality or correlation that characterizes a diagram’s use value. Their “culture of diagram” 29 is a culture of portability, in which images become user-friendly objects in the world rather than distanced reflections. They locate this culture’s origin in the Enlightenment, specifically in Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, constructed to promote epistemological relays between images and activities, profiles and tableaux. The virtual space interfaces correlated elements in the Encyclopédie, “provid[ing] support for the composite play of imagery and cognition that is the motorenergy of the diagram.” 30 The useful diagram—or the difference between a diagram and a mere image—augments or enhances the user’s ability to make worldly connections, to move forward with a task by transporting visual lineaments beyond the page and into the world. Thus a diagram is never merely illustrative; it is not secondary to a written text, nor designed to replace it, but integrated with it. James’s 1909 preface, by complaining of the “‘picture-book’ quality that contemporary English and American prose appears more and more destined, by conditions of publication, to consent, however grudgingly, to see imputed to it,” 31 speaks of images that dominate and replace—fighting the word for priority as in Lessing’s Laocoon—and thereby drain the language of its visual qualities. As he bemoans illustration’s supplementarity, he allows for a good kind of portability, one that does not “graft or ‘grow’ . . . a picture by another hand onto my own picture—this being always, to my sense, a lawless incident.” 32 James hoped to discover, by contrast, a lawful relation between linguistic and pictorial imagery, which would also be a law of portable seeing, heightening a reader’s ability to move from one visual register to the next in seamless sequence. Kendall Johnson writes that Coburn’s frontispieces “coordinate the pictures and text to avoid any unrestrained promiscuity.” 33 Yet a certain promiscuity abounds when writing on their process: as James and Coburn wandered

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the streets of London together, their “pleasure of exploration” turned the metropolis into “a field yielding a ripe harvest of treasure.” 34 Johnson elsewhere claims that James sought throughout his career to protect the aura of the traditional work of art, which is “not predicated on the original art object per se, but rather on a visual economy of representation and reproduction whose underlying network of social relations, courtesies and hierarchies in status and taste James glances backward to appreciate.” 35 But he was looking forward when wandering with Coburn, their visual “treasure” a glint from the future, not the past. Johnson’s reference to Walter Benjamin is nevertheless useful, as James’s visual modernism captures the former’s ambivalence. Benjamin first conceives the camera as epitome of the destructive, consumptive political economy of capitalism, dispelling the “aura” of things by reproducing them in a leveling, automatic, rationalized, portable form: “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. . . . To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.” 36 Yet it is also a potential agent for dialectical inversion, “the first truly revolutionary means of production,” a medium coeval with the rise of socialism and capable of revolutionizing art and the human sensorium. 37 James held such a desire for his art—revolutionizing the human sensorium—at least since “The Art of Fiction.” He aims at least to goad the sensorium, “not only to show things to the reader but to act upon him,” enjoining him to negotiate the intersecting imaginations and idealizations of a shared world. 38 Like his older brother, he champions writing from “experience,” which “is never limited and is never complete,” like a “kind of huge spiderweb, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.” 39 Jonathan Crary describes the counterpart of James’s “huge spider-web” in the near-contemporary visual arts in his analysis of the male figure’s pointing finger in Édouard Manet’s In the Conservatory (1879, five years before “The Art of Fiction”): the pointing finger, indicating a focus of attention that diverges from his already ambivalent glance . . . is one more confirmation of the impossibility of a direct perception, of an attention that was an immediate possession of its object, of a lost theological schema within which the pointing finger had once functioned to denote a plane of transcendence. The man’s hand (and to a lesser extent the woman’s umbrella) are key parts of a system of deflection, in which vision is bound up in a relational field within which every point of fixation is a deferral and relay to another one. 40

James’s sense of worldly visual rapport in his late writings, the seeds of which can perhaps be found in “The Art of Fiction” and accord with Crary’s reading of Manet’s belated position in the history of painting (no longer

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situated in a world of undivided attention and direct visual intuition), was, among other things, a response to growing feelings—and even contemporary theories, sciences, and technologies—of irreversible perceptual mobility. 41 His fiction, too, theorized portability, often grounding James’s deepest perceptual (and formal) concerns in representations of objects, circulating in the midst of whirlwind commodity exchange and a general economy of advancing reification. FIXITIES OF FORM AND OBJECTS Within the context of advanced reification and enhanced demand for portability from artworks and other objects, James’s dense late style offers multifaceted, refracted glimpses of the agonistic intertwinement of form and time. One of Fredric Jameson’s models, Northrop Frye, stresses Jamesian sentences’ temporal complexities—the aim for simultaneity over linearity in syntax—which Jameson elaborates on as “the ‘mannered’ quality of Henry James: those great pauses between meaningful half-sentences, the close-ups of small areas of objectivity in an attempt to infuse them with subjective intention, in the way a random word surrounded by a ‘pregnant’ silence becomes ominous with meaning.” 42 These descriptions of James’s style’s link it to photography with shared practices of close-ups, thematic infusions, and austerely arranged mise en scéne or mise en page. Like a photograph, the technology and technique of Jamesian style slices simultaneity into an image subjectively offered but seemingly objective. Jamesian novel-writing and photography arrest the ceaseless movement of historical and existential time, which technologies and intensifying rhythms of work and life under monopoly capital accelerate. 43 Form moves beyond (still vital) qualities of play, autonomy, or complexity and stands in vexed relation to both the social and temporal. One cannot ask for a better statement of form’s arbitrariness and autonomous ambitions—never fully escaping the oft excluded or unthought social—than the New York Edition preface (1907) to Roderick Hudson (1875): Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his [sic] own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. He is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity of things is the whole matter, for him, of comedy and tragedy; that this continuity is never, by the space of an instant or an inch, broken, and that, to do anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it. 44

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The passage prescribes an intense dialectic of inevitable failure. Form can never elude the possibility of falseness or arbitrariness as the artist creates the appearance of “continuity of things” sundered from “universal relations.” The aesthetic goal for the artful, even geometrical, appearance of continuous, relational harmony appears in an interesting moment in the novella The Spoils of Poynton. Protagonist Fleda Vetch confronts her friend and mentor Adela Gereth’s rearrangement of the eponymous spoils of Adela’s ancestral home (Poynton) in her new mother-in-law residence at Ricks. Fleda considers this a robbery of sorts yet admires Adela’s bold refusal of the spoils to her son Owen and his fiancée as well as her “genius for composition” to adapt the spoils to new, more restricted environs in a “harmony without a break.” 45 The unbroken harmony in form and arrangement of Adela’s collection collides with social forms of class expectations and inheritance structures that award the spoils to Owen. Beyond this formal conflict, Spoils exemplifies the interaction of portability and form in James. The novella’s aesthetics and objects-circulation occur in the early days of James’s late style. Indeed, it exhibits traces of James’s failed experiment with theater with prop-like objects, melodramatic conventions, and a narrative dominated by conversational scenes that emphasize spectators and participants. 46 A tension persists between form and portability, for form connotes fixity, frames, and isolation from circulation. 47 Two concepts simultaneously hermeneutical and formal—reification and utopia—share form’s static associations. Jameson observes the freezing qualities of reification, its arrest of social forms outside of history. Detractors caricature or critique utopias as fixed societies of isolationist, conformist, and authoritarian strictures, even as utopians attempt to imagine new political forms and even new aesthetic forms within these imagined societies. 48 To examine the play of portability and form within James’s Spoils requires a trace of how reification and utopian formal elements manifest in the novella and its object-world. The late style, as anatomized by Seymour Chatman, is a rich vein for the study of reification. 49 James’s late dense, circumlocutive syntax can signal the surrender of realist aspiration to capture the typical in and the totality of society, lost in a maze of perceptual and aesthetic specificity. Or, persistent ambiguity and the sense that any closure must be arbitrary may mark the late style’s refusal to accede to the advancing thingification of the world under monopoly capital. The late style reaches apogee of labyrinthine engagements with consciousness and frequent inaction in The Sacred Fount (1901) and The Golden Bowl (1904). Spoils is nigh-simultaneous with some of James’s most ambiguous short fictional portraits of art, death, and spectrality, including The Altar of the Dead (1895), The Figure in the Carpet (1896), The Turn of the Screw, and The Real Right Thing (1899). 50 Like Figure and Turn, critical debate on Spoils attempt to suss out Fleda’s reliability and an appro-

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priate ethical shade to attribute to the narrative resulting in a contradictory spectacle of ethically ambiguous melodrama. Reification is a keyword for Marxist literary critics and Thing Theorists (for whom perspective mediates between objectified subjects and subjectified objects). 51 Jameson establishes a dual hermeneutical imperative to read any text for different historical articulations of reification and utopia. One must attend to traces of the desire for a liberated, disalienated society whenever one sifts the flow of a text for examples of reified consciousness, commodified enjoyments, or social domination, and vice-versa. Such an argument demands not mere syntheses of critical concerns or blithe recognitions of multivalent complexities. Rather, a dialectical twist discerns utopian or collective potential in the degradations of experience and aesthetics under capital as well as reification’s and commodity fetishism’s cooptation and ideological channeling of utopian desires to make capital’s features bearable and even attractive. 52 Jameson does not minimize the toll of these features but challenges utopian politics to encompass not just abstraction and desire but recalcitrant, concrete negativity of the actually existing. Moreover, utopia and reification both carry tremendous perceptual implications. Jameson’s rhetoric, especially in conclusions, is saturated with science-fictional images of new organs and mutated sense, impossible in the present yet utterly necessary for the future. 53 Jameson’s focus on perceptual limitation under different modes of production, offers a utopian alternative to Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Man” (1734). Jameson’s James is a dialectical paradigm as a novelist cum theorist. As a novel theorist, his importance equals Aristotle’s for drama, yet AngloAmerican critical practice calcifies his work on point-of-view into mere prescriptions, so “Jamesian point of view, which comes into being as a protest and a defense against reification, ends up furnishing a powerful ideological instrument in the perpetuation of an increasingly subjectivized and psychologized world.” 54 Jameson’s account of James has a dialectical sense that is ironic or tragic: James’s strengths, over a long term of practice, reify. Jameson conceptualizes this freezing as rendering narrative and history imperceptible. A strategy necessitated by a historical moment—acute theoretical and novelistic cultivation of perception athwart increasing reifications of monopoly capital or an almost anti-American aesthetic autonomy—stagnates. Reification, especially of objects, conjures a debate between Marxist criticism and Thing Theory. 55 Victoria Coulson’s account of things in James’s oeuvre stages the encounter as harsh opposition. For her, both James and Thing Theory counter Marxist associations of reified things with vacancy and visual chauvinism against a richer, more variable sensorium of encounters between things and the body: politically negative, anthropocentric, and sensually limited Marxism combats positivist, anti-humanist Thing Theory’s exploration of the sensorial complexity of interrelated subjects and objects. 56

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Jameson’s comments on a reified James can follow this vein, but Jameson focalizes the interrelation of reified and utopian stirrings in James’s objectworld. The Jamesonian use of both reification and utopia for analytic axes provides a new, dialectical sense of the perceptual possibilities reification broaches and disrupts any curt political or methodological distinction between Marxism and Thing Theory. Both Marxists and Thing Theorists sense utopian potential of the reified and risk in reifying the utopian. Bill Brown on Spoils and Bowl sees reification of things as collectibles as a utopian strategy to remove things from commodification. He reads Adam Verver as an ironic figure, a resistor of commodification in his retired life, even as his profession as a titan of industry accelerated the process. 57 The collected thing does not circulate, at least not in the abstract and rapid manner of commodities. But, collecting still relies on a value scale, which stamps any particular thing with abstract value. Such value provides impetus for the collector to purchase a commodity to privatize control of and access to it as a now-collectible, even if collecting lacks the disposable consumption oft characteristic of the commodity. Indeed, Walter Benn Michaels’s dictum applies harshly here: whether one venerates commodified things or treats their exchange value as a mere social fact to be accounted for in collecting, it does not matter. There is no wrong way to use a commodity, whose purpose lies in exchange value. 58 Michaels’s point suggests a corrosive irony in the inveterate, implacable collecting of both Adela in Spoils and Adam in Bowl. While collecting reduces the vulgar sphere of commodification in the pursuit of an aesthetic, cultural, or (in Adam’s projected museum) pedagogic autonomy, both characters approach collecting with a ruthlessness on the open market that would be the envy of any capitalist. 59 Adela’s admissions of self-abnegation and almost bloodthirsty accumulation has scant distance in structure or subjective orientation from capital’s constant valorization: their [Adela’s and her husband’s] perfect accord and beautiful life together, twenty-six years of planning and seeking, a long, sunny harvest of taste and curiosity. . .. They had saved on lots of things in life, and there were lots of things they hadn’t had at all, but they had had in every corner of Europe their swing among the demons of Jews . . . this genuine English lady, fresh and fair, young in the fifties, admit with gaiety and conviction that she was herself the craftiest stalker who had ever tracked the big game. 60

Granted the passage’s imagery of a pleasant partnership of mutual aesthetic satisfaction in craft and cultivation (frequent antinomies to exchange), from phrases like “beautiful life” and “sunny harvest of taste,” appears distant from the agon of market struggle. But, such sunny satisfaction is difficult to detach from the passage’s careful, calculated self-abnegation, Fleda’s surprise at the unfeminine and un-English enthusiasm for the aggressive hunt,

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and the anti-Semitic linking of Jews, trade, and monstrosity. Yet, Adela’s incessant scouring and Michaels’s insistence on the commodity’s indifference cannot efface the intense aesthetic autonomy Adela’s and Adam’s collecting aims for despite entrapment in the value scale. Given the fin-de-siècle situation, it remains hard to imagine another, less accumulative, less calculative way to wrest things from market valorization into an autonomous sphere, whether private or museal. The reification and resistant negativity of Spoils and James’s late style is well-plumbed, but the following attempts to consider three aspects of the utopian verso to the recto of reification. CRAFT AND DECADENCE Beyond the context of Spoils in James’s late career and in late-century collecting, three 1890s literary currents’ traces in Spoils and its objectworld are worth examining: the fin de siècle surge in utopian fiction, the decadence movement, and the English Arts and Crafts movement. First, the novella has contemporaneity with a utopian fiction flowering, but James is seldom examined with Edward Bellamy, William Morris, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 61 Jameson and Terry Eagleton seize upon utopian resonances in James’s and others’ fictions to reorient or estrange communism. Persistent popular and historical imageries of mid-twentieth-century authoritarian bleakness clump to communism. Or, intimations of a communism-to-come suggest equally shared austerity in the ecocatastrophe. 62 Jameson seizes the leisurely social world of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) and Louis XIV’s court as privileged enclaves with participants freed from compulsion and exploring social intricacies, a “harem of genuinely human existence within the brutalities of baroque absolutism.” 63 Likewise, Eagleton considers utopian qualities in James, akin to Jameson’s models of Proust and Honoré de Balzac: “The point of communism, conceived in this classical way, is not only to escape scarcity but to forget the very possibility of it. One thinks of those American heiresses in Henry James who are so fabulously rich that they don’t need to think about money at all, in fact hardly have a clue what it is, as opposed to the bourgeois vulgarians who can think of nothing else.” 64 Eagleton and Jameson harken to communism as a shared abundance whose subjects forget privations and domination of the abundance’s prehistory. Freeing individuals from material anxiety and scarcity has self-evident justification, but a liberation from or grand reduction in necessity permits the imagination of surprising new voluntary, luxuriant, and queer associations formed from taste or affinity rather than exigencies. 65 Spoils offers a small foretaste of what such aesthetic community might feel like in the early days of Adela’s and Fleda’s friendship: “She perfectly understood how Mrs. Ger-

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eth felt—she had understood but meagerly before, and the two women embraced with tears, which on the younger one’s part were the natural and usual sign of her submission to perfect beauty.” 66 The overtones to the relationship between Adela and Fleda are numerous: friendship, mentorship, compatibility of sybaritic taste, Sapphic connotations, and/or a Girardian mediation of their mutual desires through Owen. Indeed, overtones of kinship recognized in feminine communion may feel most pressing given the passage’s emphasis on perfect understanding and a tearful embrace common to literary sentimentalism. However, rather than stress gender or biological essentials, more elective affinities are seizable, especially since the women’s friendship offers a failed possibility of conspiracy contra a third woman’s interests: Owen’s fiancée, Mona Brigstock. Given the 1890s context, we can see Adela and Fleda enact the second of our three literary currents, the decadent movement, as profiled by Matthew Potolsky: cosmopolitan community based on a shared taste beyond ties of blood, class, or interest. 67 Adela’s collecting stymies the reified instrumental aesthetic she fears Owen and Mona bring to Poynton, for they would “replace them by pieces answerable to some vulgar modern notion of the ‘handy,’” and her collecting expresses a particular taste, for “her taste was her life, though her life was somewhat the larger for it.” 68 Eagleton identifies the vices some contemporary readers might find in James: those who desire relatable characters overcoming adversity may recoil from superwealthy heroines in rarefied drawing rooms playing subtle, slow games of manipulation for microscopic stakes while disdaining political movements. 69 Many Jamesians will fall to the defense that Eagleton’s quip does not represent the class status or the dilemmas faced by his heroines. Isabel Archer, Pansy Osmond, Fleda, Kate Croy, and Charlotte Stant are from more-or-less obscure genteel poverty. The threats to/from these characters’ romantic relations or status (or attempts to achieve status) are not minor fluctuations of gossip and social favor implied by Eagleton and, in a minor theme, championed by Jameson as anticipating the art of the social under an achieved utopia. 70 Eagleton’s description more aptly catches characters like Catherine Sloper, Milly Theale, and Maggie. Eagleton recognized in his earlier work how the actions of Milly and Maggie involve positive renunciation. The first angle of this renunciation is their elite separateness from the world, from the need to earn a living. The second angle is their seizing on, even within the freedom of this elite separation, the necessity of sacrifice in order to achieve their ends and reshape their social, familial, and romantic milieus. 71 Milly’s surrendering romantic illusion, her premature death, and her apparent posthumous generosity to Kate and Merton Densher literalize the mortal overtones that attach to the Jamesian heroine’s act(s) of renunciation. 72 Likewise, Maggie sacrifices contact with her father to preserve their respective marriages and sacrifices the utopian possibility of the Ververs accepting the reality of

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their own relationship as well as the Prince’s and Charlotte’s longstanding affair. 73 Carolyn Porter argues that Maggie, at the beginning of The Golden Bowl’s second book, confronts reification as an observer, like the unnamed narrator in The Sacred Fount or James with respect to his art must confront her complicity in observation. By reshaping her social environment (as well as the commodified “human furniture” the Prince and Charlotte are reduced to in their marriages), Maggie acts as both artist and capitalist. 74 In Spoils, Fleda and Adela have a similar dilemma with potential to manipulate Owen, yet Fleda demurs. The reified perspective of these actors accounts for some deep ambiguity in many James narratives, hinging on the supreme ethical overcoming like Milly and Maggie manage. Or, impossible dilemmas may arise with the reifications of persons like Kate, the Prince, and Charlotte. All of which gives another sense for The Wings of the Dove’s cryptic final lines: “her headshake was now the end. ‘We shall never be again as we were!” 75 William Morris synthesized the first and the third of our three 1890s literary currents, utopianism and the English Arts and Crafts movement, for his utopian romance News from Nowhere (1890). Roger Whitson argues that Morris’s medieval futurist, plaguepunk, utopia presents ready-to-hand objects of everyday life as luxurious art objects, eschewing commodification with emphases on materiality, process, craft, and aesthetic or pleasing qualities. 76 Morris’s objects, simultaneously futural and past, expand what Elaine Freedgood calls “Victorian thing culture,” an extravagant, intense, and varied relation to objects preceding yet vestigial within commodity culture. 77 Although Victorian thing culture’s clutter and—to modern sensibilities perhaps—accumulation of trash may depart from Morris and James decisively rejecting mere accumulation in favor of intensely crafted object singularities. 78 In the sixth chapter of News, the narrator/visitor to the medievalist future and one of his guides visit a market in the repurposed, ghostly remains of London. This market lacks any concept of money and is run by children. A teenage girls enjoys dotingly waiting on the narrator and lavishes him with a new, fancifully designed tobacco bag and as much pipe tobacco as it holds: quantity (and attendant scarcity concerns) is only a question of container size and value only a question of qualities of the substance’s pleasure and the object’s craft. Utopian generosity lacks monetary valuation or weight-scaling and shocks the narrator. The girl returns with a big-bowled pipe in her hand, carved out of some hard wood very elaborately, and mounted in gold sprinkled with little gems. It was, in short, as pretty and gay a toy as I have ever seen; something like the best kind of Japanese work, but better. ‘Dear me!’ said I, when I set eyes on it, ‘this is altogether too grand for me, or for anybody but the Emperor of the World. Besides, I shall lose it: I always lose my pipes.’ The child seemed rather dashed, and said, ‘Don’t you like it, neighbor?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘of course I

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like it.’ ‘Well, then, take it,’ said she, ‘and don’t trouble about losing it. What will it matter if you do? Somebody is sure to find it, and he will use it, and you can get another.’ 79

A combination of use value and normative aesthetic sense eclipses exchange value. Prior to this exchange, the girl “disdain[s]” the narrator’s cotton (a commodity signaling drab industrial production and far edges of the British Empire) tobacco bag. 80 Liberation from exchange value gives craftworkers the freedom to shape objects for an economy of exuberant luxury—unknown to the common objects of commodity culture—and eminent disposability. One’s forgetting may be someone else’s gain. Indeed, depending on how seriously the residents of Nowhere take personal possession, it may not even require a forgetting to cease holding such an object. Morris’s art objects take on a freedom in circuits of use and exchange (shorn of interrelation with value) to be the envy of any well-traveled, capital-driven commodity. This free-circulation may seem antithetical to the immense, well-curated array of domestic spoils in Spoils, yet the spoils’ mobility and adaptability under Adela’s hand to either the longstanding history of Poynton or the more restricted purlieu of Ricks testifies to a varied potential that is malleable if maintained under a fine aesthetic eye. Moreover, Adela’s project presupposes her mortality for the spoils to enter Fleda’s care. Impermanence and death underlies the portability of the objects in both texts. Fittingly, both texts end with perspectival characters accepting involuntary divestment of their discovered fullness. The nowghostly narrator gradually fades from his new friends’ perception, out of Nowhere to his original time. Fleda hears of the burning of Poynton and its spoils and tries to clarify if Poynton is “gone,” only to be meet with another question: “What can you call it, miss, if it ain’t really saved?” 81 This portability (and eventual ephemerality) of objects participating in utopian desires speaks to James’s (non-)representations of objects and an overall conceptual perspective. Richard Godden seizes on the utility of the Jamesian and Morrisian objects: Leisure-class objects are good to think rather than to use, for . . .The prestige attendant upon an object intensifies in exact proportion to the number of discriminations sedimented within it. For example, Veblen's leisure class expends great energy breeding pedigree dogs, while the van der Luydens, first among Wharton’s New York families, tend orchids; the acme of each form is an exemplar that perishes almost as it is conceived: the perfect pug has a face so flat that an operation is required at birth to free its nasal passages, the finest orchid is but a brief flower. 82

Godden offers an image of objects raised to a level of nigh-evanescent formal perfection by limitation: scrunched breathing, fleeting life, forgetful, or

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even mortal, owners. Yet, the reified intertwinement of form and time intimates the possibility of leisure made universal, expanded to include Morris’s liberated futural peasants, not just Jamesian heroines born or determined enough (unlike Fleda) to marry into the rentier class. In James’s work, particularly Spoils, the novel and novella adapt to fin de siècle conditions, to the demand for portability driven by technological reproduction and consumer taste, to the challenges of participant-observers amidst growing reification, and to utopian and decadent perceptions of liberatory currents in the very effects of capital oft thought the most dehumanizing. The intense dialectical imperative of James’s art, on display in Spoils and given provisional, selfundermining presentation in the prefaces, runs the risk of supersubtlety. But, it offers resource for the recent returns in literary criticism and social theory to the question of form. 83 NOTES 1. Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: PUP, 2009), xiv. 2. ibid, 117. 3. ibid, 41. 4. James, “Edmond Rostand,” in Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama, ed. Peter Rawlings (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 524–5. 5. Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 501. 6. Philip Horne, Henry James: A Life in Letters (New York: Viking, 1999), 405–06. 7. Brower, “‘Written with the Movies in Mind’: Twentieth-Century American Literature and Transmedial Possibility,” Modern Language Quarterly 78.2 (2017): 248. 8. ibid, 258. 9. Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (New York: Avon, 1962), 156–7. 10. Henry James, “Parisian Festivity,” in Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama, ed. Peter Rawlings (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 164. 11. James, “Parisian Festivity,” Rawlings, 164–5. 12. James, The Painter's Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. John L. Sweeney (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1956), 217. 13. Viola Hopkins Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1970), 50. 14. Graham, “Pictures for Texts,” Henry James Review 24.1 (2003): 15. 15. James, “John S. Sargent,” Rawlings, 430. 16. Graham, “Pictures for Texts,” 16. 17. Rebekah Modrak and Bill Anthes. Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2011), 35. 18. Armstrong, “Reading James’s Prefaces and Reading James,” in Henry James’s York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, ed. McWhirter (Stanford: SUP, 1995), 131. 19. ibid, 133. 20. James, The Golden Bowl (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), lviii. 21. ibid, xlvi. 22. ibid, xlv. 23. ibid, xlvii. 24. ibid, lviii. 25. James, Letters, ed. Edel, 4 vols (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974–1984), 428 (vol. 4). 26. McWhirter, “‘The Whole Chain of Relation and Responsibility’: Henry James and the New York Edition,” McWhirter, 8. 27. Kornbluh, “The Realist Blueprint,” Henry James Review 36.3 (2015), 202.

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28. ibid, 202. 29. Bender and Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford: SUP, 2010), 13. 30. ibid, 23. 31. James, The Golden Bowl (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), xlv. 32. ibid, xlv. 33. Johnson, Henry James and the Visual (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), 5. 34. James, Golden Bowl, xlvii. 35. Johnson, “Visual Culture,” in Henry James in Context, ed. McWhirter (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), 371. 36. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (NY: Schocken Books, 1969), 221, 223. 37. ibid, 224. 38. Laurence Bedwell Holland, The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James (Princeton: PUP, 1964), x. 39. James, “The Art of Fiction,” in The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Roger Gard (New York: Penguin, 1987), 194. 40. Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT P, 1999), 113. 41. Charles Scott Sherrington’s work on the nervous system, just prior to James’s late phase, forever set the seeing subject in motion (a trend that had been picking up steam throughout the second half of the nineteenth century with optical science’s and visual culture’s progressive detachment from the classically immobile eye modeled on the camera obscura, as Crary argues at length in Techniques of the Observer). “Part of Sherrington’s task was to explain the human organism’s capacity to integrate in a functional and practical way the overwhelmingly complex amount of sensory information in a given milieu” (Crary 348). Sherrington linked human vision—already dispersed among “137 million separate ‘seeing’ elements spread out in the sheet of the retina”—intimately with motor behavior, with “wide tracts of musculature as a whole,” with the entire body’s movement through the world (Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System [NY: Scribner’s, 1906], 234). 42. Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: PUP, 1971), 267. 43. Catherine Gallagher discusses the relation of form to the time of narrative, whether as general pattern or analyzed instant of complex style, shorn of existential time (“Formalism and Time,” in Reading for Form, eds. Wolfson and Brown [Seattle: U of Washington P, 2006], 307, 311). 44. James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (NY: Scribner, 1962), 5. 45. James, The Spoils of Poynton (NY: Penguin, 1987), 85. 46. Incorporating stage conventions exemplifies the continuing novelistic accumulation of form, assimilation of other structures (Jameson, Marxism, 10). Peter Brooks discerns the use of objects in Spoils as props (The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess [New Haven: Yale UP, 1976], 96). 47. Raymond Williams, Caroline Levine, and Gallagher see form categorically divided among (im)materiality, shape/impulse, abstraction/particularity, (a)historicity, or narratology/ stylistics (Williams, Marxism and Literature [Oxford: OUP, 1977], 186–9991; Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Oxford: OUP, 2015), 2, 7, 9; Gallagher, 307). Levine stresses form’s portability among literary or social contexts and its recalcitrance and imposed limits. 48. Nowhere rebukes Popper’s, Orwell’s, and other liberals’ indictment (Waithe, Morris’s Utopia of Strangers [Woolbrdige: Brewer, 2006], ix–x). 49. Chatman, Late Style of James (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972). 50. Lodge, Introduction to Spoils of Poynton, 6; Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: New Left Books, 1976), 142–43. 51. Lukács’s account of reification builds on the commodity fetish and alienation, as reified objects and processes produced and/or sustained by labor dominate life and consciousness without reference to their social origin (History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Livingstone [Cambridge: MIT P, 1971]).

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52. Examples include the saccharinity and nostalgia of 1970s Hollywood blockbusters harkens to dreams of meaningful labor and U.S. national mobilization against fascism, Wal-Mart’s distributive dominance’s Leninist potential for democratic nationalization, or the U.S. military reimagined as a social form for universal employment and benefits (“Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” in Jameson Reader, eds. Hardt and Weeks [Oxford: Blackwell, 2000], 123–48; Valences of the Dialectic [London: Verso, 2010], 410–34; and “An American Utopia,” In An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Žižek [London: Verso, 2016], 1–96). 53. Jameson as dialectical fitness guru coaches “long-dormant parts of the mind, organs of political and historical and social imagination which have virtually atrophied for lack of use, muscles of praxis we have long since ceased exercising” or expresses the dilemma of “organisms of a certain life span . . . poorly placed as biological individuals to witness the more fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing only this or that incomplete moment . . . this peculiar existential and epistemological dilemma, comparable to the science-fictional one of beings inhabiting a cosmos they do not have organs to perceive or identify” (Valences, 434, 370). 54. Jameson, Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981), 221. 55. For Plotz, portable property mediates abstract commodity and autochthonous thing (17). 56. Coulson, “Things,” in James in Context, ed. McWhirter (Cambridge: CU P, 2010): 321–26. 57. Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), 157-58. Brown on reification’s liberatory verso aligns with Jameson’s work and Kevin Floyd staging reification’s potential for new, queer vista of totality (Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009], 17–25). 58. Michaels, The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015), 101. 59. Thomas Peyser, Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 141. 60. James, Spoils, 42. 61. Bowl is the James novel that has seen some contextualization with the fin de siècle utopian trend (Peyser and Bleich, Utopia: The Psychology of a Cultural Fantasy [Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1984]). 62. Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life after Capitalism (London: Verso, 2016). 63. Jameson, Marxism, 254. 64. Eagleton, “Communism: Lear on Gonzalo?,” in The Idea of Communism, eds. Douzinas and Žižek (NY: Verso, 2010), 102. 65. An anticipation: “It will be the aesthetic schools around which ‘parties’ will collect, that is, associations of temperaments, of tastes, and of moods” (Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Strunksy, ed. Keach [Chicago: Haymarket, 2005], 189.) 66. Spoils, 47. 67. Potolsky, The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013), 8–10. 68. Spoils, 45, 49. Adeline Tinter profiles the novella’s scant description of the spoils, the Maltese cross being a synecdoche for the collection as compared to Fleda’s and Adela’s detailed horror at Waterbath (Museum World of James [Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1986], 161–63). Brown observers Poynton’s aura declines delineated artifacts, unlike Balzac’s and Charles Dickens’s loving practice of exhaustive cataloging of things (147, 153). 69. Disdain especially present in 1880s political novels (The Portrait of a Lady [1881], The Bostonians [1886], and The Princess Casamassima [1886]). 70. Jameson, Marxism, 254 and passim Jameson. Comic overstatement and seriousness abide in Fleda’s sickened sense of “given everything and gotten nothing” (Spoils, 120). 71. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, 141–43 72. Jameson, Antinomies, 124.

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73. Žižek, “Kate’s Choice, or The Materialism of James,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Žižek (NY: Verso, 2006), 307. For a utopian read on renunciation, see Nersessian, Utopia, Ltd.: Romanticism and Adjustment (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015). 74. Porter, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1981), 41–42, 152. 75. James, Wings of the Dove 2nd ed., eds. Crowley and Hocks (NY: Norton, 2003), 407. Brown links human commodification to realignments of race and subjectivity after abolition (Brown 156; Blair, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation [Cambridge: CU P, 1996]; Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993]). Such reification links to U.S.’s late labor liberalism (Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, Law, and Liberal Development in the United States [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992]). 76. Whitson, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories (NY: Routledge, 2017), 19–20. 77. Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006), 8, 142–48. Freedgood and Plotz describe the same mania. She sees thing culture preceding and challenging commodification. 78. Lutchmansingh stresses this difference for Morris and his key intellectual influence, Ruskin (“Utopia and Art in Morris,” in Socialism and the Literary Artistry of Morris, eds. Boos and Silver [Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1990], 21). 79. Morris, News from Nowhere (London: Penguin, 1993), 72–74. 80. ibid, 73. 81. James, Spoils, 213. 82. Godden, “Some Slight Shifts in the Manner of the Novel of Manners,” in James: Fiction as History, ed. Bell (London: Vision, 1984), 157. 83. James, Art, 5. Levine stresses form as indispensable to literary or social analysis (2, 9). Michaels offers form and frame as resource for deadlocks in social structure. Kornbluh mobilizes James and Jameson to think realism as for imagining new social form (199–211). A rash of theory eschews anarchism, autonomism, or vitalism for social form; see Frase; Jameson “American”; Scarry On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: PU P, 2001); Dean, Crowds and Party (London: Verso, 2016); Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work (London: Verso, 2015).

WORKS CITED Armstrong, Paul B. “Reading James’s Prefaces and Reading James.” In Henry James’s New Edition: The Construction of Authorship, ed. David McWhirter, 125–37. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Bender, John, and Michael Marrinan. The Culture of Diagram. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 217–52. NY: Schocken Books, 1969. Blair, Sara. Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Bleich, David. Utopia: The Psychology of a Cultural Fantasy. Ann Arbor: UMI RP, 1984. Brettell, Richard. Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1890. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976. Brower, Jordan. “Written with the Movies in Mind”: Twentieth-Century American Literature and Transmedial Possibility.” Modern Language Quarterly 78.2 (2017): 243–73. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 2003. Chatman, Seymour. The Late Style of Henry James. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972. Coulson, Victoria. “Things.” In McWhirter, ed. James, 321–31.

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Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Dean, Jodi. Crowds and Party. London: Verso, 2016. Eagleton, Terry. “Communism: Lear on Gonzalo?.” In The Idea of Communism, eds. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, 101–09. NY: Verso, 2010. ———. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: New Left Books, 1976. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. NY: Harper and Row, 1985. ———. Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895. NY: Avon, 1962. Floyd, Kevin. The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Frase, Peter. Four Futures: Life after Capitalism. London: Verso, 2016. Jacobin Ser. Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. 1957. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Gallagher, Catherine. “Formalism and Time,” In Reading for Form, eds. Susan Wolfson and Marshall Brown. 305–27. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2006. Godden, Richard. “Some Slight Shifts in the Manner of the Novel of Manners.” In Henry James: Fiction as History, ed. Ian Bell, 156–83. London: Vision, 1984. Graham, Wendy. “Pictures for Texts.” Henry James Review 24.1 (2003): 1–26. Holland, Laurence Bedwell. The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964. Horne, Philip. Henry James: A Life in Letters. NY: Viking, 1999. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” 1884. In The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Roger Gard, 186–206. NY: Penguin, 1987. ———. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. NY: Scribner’s, 1962. ———. “Edmond Rostand.” 1901. In James, Essays, 516–37. ———. The Golden Bowl. 1904. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. ———. Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama, ed. Peter Rawlings, Aldershot: Scolar P, 1996. ———. Henry James Letters. Ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974–1984. ———. “John S. Sargent.” In James, Essays, 424–30. ———. The Painter's Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. John L. Sweeney. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1956. ———. “Parisian Festivity.” In James, Essays, 159–68. ———. The Spoils of Poynton. 1897. NY: Penguin, 1987. ———. The Wings of the Dove. 1902. 2nd ed. Eds. J. Crowley and Richard Hocks. NY: Norton, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. “An American Utopia.” In An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Žižek, 1–96. London: Verso, 2016. ———. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. ———. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. ———. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornel UP, 1981. ———. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” 1979. The Jameson Reader, eds. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, 123–48. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. ———. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 2010. Johnson, Kendall. Henry James and the Visual. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. ———. “Visual Culture.” In McWhirter, ed. James, 364–77. Kornbluh, Anna. “The Realist Blueprint.” In “Fredric Jameson, Henry James,” Susan Griffin, ed. Special issue, The Henry James Review 36, no. 3 (Fall 2015).199–211. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Lodge, David. Introduction to The Spoils of Poynton.

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Lutchmansingh, Lawrence. “Archaeological Socialism: Utopia and Art in Morris.” In Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris, eds. Florence Boos and Carole Silver, 7–25. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1990. Lukács, György. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. 1923. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT P, 1971. McWhirter, David. “‘The Whole Chain of Relation and Responsibility’: Henry James and the New York Edition.” In Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, ed. McWhirter, 1–19. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. ———, ed. Henry James in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015. Modrak, Rebekah, and Bill Anthes. Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 2011. Morris, William. News from Nowhere. 1890. London: Penguin, 1993. Nersessian, Anahid. Utopia, Ltd.: Romanticism and Adjustment. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015. Orren, Karen. Belated Feudalism: Labor, Law, and Liberal Development in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Peyser, Thomas. Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. New Americanists Ser. Plotz, John. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. Porter, Carolyn. Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1981. Potolsky, Matthew. The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. Rubin, James Henry. Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Sherrington, Charles Scott. The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. NY: Scribner’s, 1906. Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. London: Verso, 2015. Tintner, Adeline. The Museum World of Henry James. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1986. Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. 1925. Trans. Rose Strunksy. Ed. William Keach. Chicago: Haymarket, 2005. Waithe, Marcus. William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality. Woolbrdige: Brewer, 2006. Warren, Kenneth. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Whitson, Roger. Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories. NY: Routledge, 2017. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Marxist Intros Ser. Winner, Viola Hopkins. Henry James and the Visual Arts. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1970. Žižek, Slavoj. “Kate’s Choice, or The Materialism of Henry James.” Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Žižek, 288–311. NY: Verso, 2006.

Chapter Two

Fredric Jameson and Affect Theory Realism and Everyday Experience Jarrad Cogle

Throughout his career, Fredric Jameson has often deliberately sought to reframe scholarly debate. Most famously, his early essays on postmodernism argued for a shift in the discussion of post-war cultural material. With “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984) in particular, Jameson asserted the importance of economic and political contexts to discussions of postmodern aesthetics. 1 In his more recent publication The Antinomies of Realism (2013), Jameson focuses heavily on notions of affect within discussions of nineteenth-century realism. On the surface, the maneuver appears to have a similarly interventionist purpose. Across the last two decades, work integrating theories of affect has been highly prominent within literary studies. Jameson rarely engages with this area of study in The Antinomies of Realism, however, and he seeks to distance his discussion of affect from contemporary uses of the term. Additionally, Jameson does not directly respond to the criticisms of his work made by prominent affect theorists such as Lawrence Grossberg, Brian Massumi, Sianne Ngai and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. These scholars have commonly written against Jameson’s famous claim that postmodernity witnesses a “waning of affect,” 2 or have portrayed his interpretive practice as “paranoid.” 3 Despite the apparent discordance of these exchanges, Jameson’s work and this area of study nevertheless have several complementary aspects. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson claims “the nineteenth century . . . may be characterized as the era of the triumph of everyday life, and of the hegemony of its categories everywhere, over the rarer and more exceptional moments of heroic deeds and ‘extreme situations.’” 4 For Jameson, this historical narrative of the everyday sees representations of affect becoming increasingly prevalent in classical realism, at 25

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the same time as affect begins to dominate Western subjective experience. In this manner, Jameson’s text offers a new framework from which to consider important components of work by Jonathan Flatley and Ngai in particular. Both Flatley and Ngai argue that collective experiences of affect are able to work against certain hegemonic categories found in contemporary society. This chapter argues that through delineating the relationships between Jameson’s work and these theorists, a more complex notion of affect and the everyday might emerge. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson discusses “the two chronological end points of realism: its genealogy in storytelling and the tale, [and] its future dissolution in the literary representation of affect.” 5 Within this framework Jameson constructs a historical account of nineteenth-century literature, whereby changes to realist form increasingly allow authors to focus on representations of affect, as opposed to mechanizations of the plot or broader categories of emotion. Jameson offers certain parameters for his sense of affect—most concisely “nameless bodily states” as opposed to “named emotions”—but the term remains fluid throughout The Antinomies of Realism. 6 In the text’s second chapter, Jameson relates affect to several loose concepts, such as “intensities.” 7 Jameson’s sense of affect is further articulated in the text when he compares the work of Honoré de Balzac with that of Émile Zola. For Jameson, “In Balzac everything that looks like a physical sensation—a musty smell, a rancid taste, a greasy fabric—always means something, it is a sign or allegory of the moral or social status of a given character: decent poverty, squalor . . . the true nobility of the old aristocracy, and so on. In short, it is not really a sensation, it is already a meaning, an allegory.” 8 In contrast, Jameson cites extensive descriptive passages of markets and department stores found in Zola, in order to demonstrate their lack of deeper narrative function or content. Jameson discusses the experience of reading Zola in terms of a “bubbling pullulation in which the simplicity of words and names is unsettled to the point of an ecstatic dizziness by the visual multiplicity of the things themselves and the sensations that they press on the . . . observer. . . . The realm of the visual begins to separate from that of the verbal and conceptual and to float away in a new kind of autonomy. Precisely this autonomy will create the space for affect.” 9 In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson concentrates predominantly on the variations within narrative form that allow for this increased presence of affect. For instance, Jameson charts the diminished importance of primary protagonists to the realist novel, and he claims this formal modification distances realism from earlier storytelling traditions. The dense networks of secondary characters found in novels by George Eliot and Benito Pérez Galdós, for example, shift “the reader’s attention from the plotline to the immediacy of the characters’ encounters with each other.” 10 In this capacity Jameson reads the history of nineteenth-century literature as a turn away from “more exceptional moments of heroic deeds

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and ‘extreme situations’” towards the representation of everyday bourgeois experience. 11 We could understand Jameson’s recent usage of the term “affect” as characteristically shrewd. Jameson has often astutely timed his contributions to the field of critical theory. For example, in The Political Unconscious (1981), his argument engages with the poststructuralist theory that was then emergent in United States academia, in order to argue for the importance of Marxist approaches. The text has had a wide impact on the symptomatic reading practices that developed in the years following its publication. “Postmodernism,” meanwhile, significantly altered debates surrounding notions of the postmodern turn. In the essay, Jameson ties considerations of postmodern aesthetics to a discussion of late-capitalism’s cultural expansion, in a manner that continues to be highly influential. While Jameson's recent appropriation of affect appears to be similarly opportune, his engagement with the term is more complicated. For instance, Jameson’s references to affect theorists in The Antinomies of Realism remain brief. Jameson discusses affect as “a technical term which has been strongly associated with a number of recent theories which alternately appeal to Freud or to Deleuze.” 12 In a footnote that briefly surveys the area of study, Jameson cites Sedgwick, Ngai and Flatley. 13 He goes on to claim he doesn’t wish to engage with this body of work, however, stating, “I want to specify a very local and restricted practical use of the term ‘affect’ here.” 14 In the text, Jameson references Rei Terada and Teresa Brennan in a limited capacity, but largely works within his own rubric. Despite the imperative to contain his discussion, Jameson’s work implicitly involves the area of study. Throughout The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson reframes many of the theoretical assumptions that have arisen within affect theory, and offers a bold narrative framework that places affect at the center of nineteenth-century literary history. Jameson’s past engagement with affect adds another context to this more recent intervention. In an earlier essay—”The Realist Floor-Plan” (1985)— he reads the emergence of Flaubert’s realism using familiar parameters, with Jameson again seeing affect in relation to notions of middle-class subjectivity and the standardization of the everyday. Here, Jameson discusses the domestic space of nineteenth-century France in terms of immense structural change. He describes a new form of space, whose homogeneity abolishes the old heterogeneities of various forms of sacred space—transforming a whole world of qualities and libidinal intensities into the merely psychological experiences of what Descartes called “secondary sensations,” and setting in their place the grey world of quantity and extension, of the purely measurable—together with the substitution of the older forms of ritual, sacred or cyclical time by the new physical and measurable temporality of the clock and routine, of the working day. 15

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In the essay, Jameson engages with Roland Barthes’ famous piece “L’effet de réel” (1968) while providing a reading of Gustave Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart” (1877). Jameson concedes Barthes’ point regarding realism and Flaubert’s text, which describes the exterior and interior of a middle-class home. Jameson states, “The house itself is a pretext, and in that sense Barthes was not wrong to isolate a detail from this paragraph as his central illusion for what he calls ‘l’effet de réel,’ a purely connotative function in which a wealth of contingent details—without any symbolic meaning—emit the signal, ‘this is reality,’ or better still, ‘this is realism.’” 16 Jameson reads against Barthes, however, when he casts the opening paragraph of “A Simple Heart” as a portrayal of the reified world discussed above. For Jameson, Flaubert’s realism struggles to “recentre space, to stem the serial flight of infinite divisibility, to pull back the contents of the room into a genuine centered hierarchy.” 17 Within this depiction of inert everyday space, however, affect asserts itself, becoming evidence of a newly developing subjective experience of the everyday. Jameson notes the final sentence of the passage, which describes the musty smell of the room. He claims this is the only moment of perception evident in the description of the house, “the only concrete practice of perception still feebly surviving in a new odourless and qualityless universe. . . . This sudden . . . burst of ‘affect’ announces the fitful emergence of the subject in Flaubert’s text: the ‘musty smell’ inscribing . . . the place of subjectivity in a henceforth reified universe.” 18 This discussion of affect largely prefigures Jameson’s work in The Antinomies of Realism, but more overtly ties literary depictions of the everyday with a developing historical situation, whereby domestic spaces and affective experiences are closely related to processes of reification in modernity. Jameson also engages with notions of affect in “Postmodernism.” In the essay, Jameson discusses a more extreme situation of social or political inertia under postmodern capitalism, describing an experience of the everyday as an “eternal present.” 19 It is here that Jameson also famously coins the phrase “the waning of affect,” stating: “The end of the bourgeois ego . . . brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego—what I have been calling the waning of affect. . . . This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings— which it may be better . . . following J.-F. Lyotard, to call ‘intensities’—are now free-floating and impersonal.” 20 In contrast to Jameson’s limited comments on affect theory in The Antinomies of Realism, important affect scholars such as Massumi and Grossberg have commonly discussed this passage from “Postmodernism.” In his essay “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995), Massumi claims, “there seems to be a growing feeling within . . . theory that affect is central to an understanding of our . . . late-capitalist culture. . . . Fredric Jameson notwithstanding, belief has waned for many, but not affect. If anything, our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it. The problem is

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that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect.” 21 The essay actually adds to this problem of vocabulary, however, when Massumi blurs the categories of intensities and affects. Just prior to his mention of Jameson, Massumi asserts that within his own work, “for present purposes, intensity will be equated with affect.” 22 Nevertheless, he does not seek to contextualize Jameson’s terminology within the same rubric. This is especially misleading considering Jameson’s similar usage of “intensities” in “Postmodernism.” As with many passing mentions of Jameson’s famous phrase, Massumi also fails to engage with the specific context in which it is being employed. Importantly, Jameson’s notion of affect in “Postmodernism” appeals to a different set of cultural and subjective experiences than those commonly found in literary affect theory. In “Postmodernism,” Jameson’s primary textual illustration of affect is Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893). He reads the painting as “a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation . . . social fragmentation and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety. It will be here read as an embodiment . . . of the expression of that kind of affect.” 23 It should be noted that his claims about the waning of affect are made within a framework of affective investment in cultural material: in comparing Munch’s painting with that of Andy Warhol’s postmodern work, Jameson discusses the audience’s relationship to these texts, in conjunction with the “emotional groundtone” of everyday postmodern experience. 24 This conception of affect is very different to the work of Sedgwick, for example, which often concentrates on the complex interaction between physical sensation, cognitive and psychological processes, culturally marked understandings of emotional states, and the performance of identity. In her collection of essays Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003), Sedgwick discusses shame by building on the work of affect theorist Silvan Tompkins and child-development psychologist Michael Franz Basch. For Sedgwick, “shame is the affect that mantles the threshold between introversion and extroversion, between absorption and theatricality, between performativity and—performativity.” 25 She goes on to read Henry James's fiction and literary theory in terms of this affect. Through this work Sedgwick aims to “offer some psychological, phenomenological, thematic density and motivation to what I [describe] . . . as the ‘torsions’ or aberrances between reference and performativity, or indeed between queerness and other ways of experiencing identity and desire.” 26 This investigation of the space between interior affective states and wider cultural understandings of emotion and identity has been highly influential. For example, work by both Flatley and Ngai continues in this vein. Jameson’s much wider focus, as sketched above, does not figure affect in the same capacity.

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Sedgwick’s work on affect engages with Jameson on brief occasions. She implicitly criticizes his interpretive practice in another essay published in Touching Feeling, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” In the piece, Sedgwick criticizes varying reading strategies based on a “hermeneutics of suspicion”—of which Jameson’s symptomatic work stands as a paradigmatic example. She further claims that the phrase hermeneutics of suspicion “has taken on something of the sacred status as Fredric Jameson’s ‘Always historicize.’ . . . Always historicize? What could have less to do with historicizing than the commanding, atemporal verb ‘always’? . . . The imperative framing will do funny things to a hermeneutics of suspicion.” 27 Sedgwick then shifts her focus to Judith Butler and D. A. Miller, and she reads their interpretive practices through Tompkins’ notion of paranoia as a “theory of negative affects.” 28 In the course of this discussion, Sedgwick claims that the “strong” and contagious aspects of paranoia are problematic for critical work in certain ways: “As strong theory . . . paranoia is nothing if not teachable. The powerfully ranging and reductive force of strong theory can make tautological thinking hard to identify even as it makes it compelling and near inevitable; the result is that both writers and readers can damagingly misrecognize whether and where real conceptual work is getting done.” 29 Just as Sedgwick’s discussion of affect has been influential, so has her critical appraisal of the hermeneutics of suspicion. For example, Ngai’s work on paranoia in Ugly Feelings (2005) builds on this discussion, and concentrates more obviously on Jameson. For Ngai, Jameson’s readings of conspiracy films in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992) acquire the specifically male paranoia of their subject matter, whereby: “‘Conspiracy theory’ . . . becomes safeguarded through the genre of the political thriller as a distinctively male form of knowledge production. As Jameson himself suggests . . . the male conspiracy theorist seems to have become an exemplary model for the late twentieth-century theorist in general, and conspiracy theory a viable synecdoche for ‘theory’ itself.” 30 In this manner, the work of both Sedgwick and Ngai aligns itself with recent scholarly production that argues for the importance of “surface reading” and other elements of the neo-realist turn that seek a break from Jameson’s reading methods. 31 In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson subtly alters certain terminologies and interpretive frameworks, without explicitly acknowledging the criticisms of his work found in affect theory. For example, his reframing of postmodern experience—so that it concentrates on the temporal—also significantly modifies his earlier sense of affect: “the contemporary or postmodern ‘perpetual present’ is better characterized as a ‘reduction to the body,’ in as much as the body is all that remains in any tendential reduction of experience to the present as such. . . . The isolated body begins to know more global waves of generalized sensations, and it is these which . . . I will here call affect.” 32

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Despite this maneuver, Jameson’s emphasis on the temporal remains somewhat at odds with the affect theory he references. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson may discuss his sense of affect in terms of “unnamed emotion,” but he more frequently concentrates on complex structures of perception. 33 The scenes Jameson cites include depictions of overwhelming sensual stimuli in the marketplace in Zola, an overflowing of stray thoughts while in transit in Tolstoy, as well as the momentary perceptions of acquaintances engaging with each other in Galdós. In his chapter on Tolstoy, Jameson focuses on a sequence in War and Peace (1869), where Prince Andrew travels to Brünn and experiences a multitude of minor episodes and moods. Jameson claims: What is thus crucial here is the changeability of the affects, which in turn provides the registering apparatus, the legibility of the various states. . . . What the chapter in question demonstrates is the ceaseless variability from elation to hostility, from sympathy to generosity and then to suspicion, and finally to disappointment and indifference: there are in principle in Tolstoy no moments of the narrative which lack their dimension of affect, to the point at which one is tempted to say that these movements and variations are themselves the narrative. 34

In contrast with Sedgwick’s readings of shame, Jameson’s work does not focus on the structures of feeling that are one component of these representations of experience. Ultimately, in The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson is not discussing specific emotional states, but the ways in which they come into view in cultural material and everyday experience. In this regard, we might see Jameson’s work as supplementary to Sedgwick and the work influenced by her: Jameson’s interest in perception, temporality and questions of representation are implicit in these other projects but rarely become the predominant focus, in much the same way that the psychological and performative are given only cursory attention in Jameson. Despite these incongruities, Jameson’s emphasis on the historical visibility of affect impacts on the work of Flatley and Ngai in particular. Flatley and Ngai, alongside Sedgwick, have a political project inherent in their work. For example, in Affective Mapping (2008), Flatley reads affect in order to discuss how emotional and physical states are politically marked. Flatley is particularly interested in ways new kinds of collectivity or political action might emerge out of depressive or melancholy states. Through his readings of African American Sorrow Songs, W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and the Civil Rights movement, Flatley claims: “The disclosure of the historicity of subjective emotional life always beckons toward a potentially political effect. Through the articulation of a subjective experience of loss with a collective one, the affective map facilitates the transformation of a depressive disengagement into an . . . interest in . . . social and political

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histories.” 35 In this capacity, Flatley argues for the potential of affect to become productive. In Ugly Feelings, Ngai similarly discusses collective identity in her readings of envy and “bad exemplarity” in the film Single White Female (1992). 36 Ngai claims, “the film mobilizes envy to demonstrate the capacity of female subjects to form coalitions based on something other than ‘similar love for the same object,’ to emulate attributes without identifying with them, and to function as examples that do not properly exemplify, actively defining and redefining the category they would seem only to passively reflect.” 37 Ngai’s work reclaims everyday notions of envy in order to discuss a different model of collective identification and engagement, one that offers new strategies for political formation. In both examples, Flatley and Ngai demonstrate how minor and everyday experiences of culture and affect have the potential to be productive in otherwise hegemonic or reified contexts. We might position these readings in direct opposition to Jameson’s sense of affect as symptomatic of social limitations found in late capitalism and the reification of the everyday. In his later work, however, we find complimentary discussions of new models for understanding the collective. In “Symptoms of Theory, or Symptoms for Theory?” (2004), Jameson categorizes several stages of theoretical discourse and wishes to “forecast yet a fourth moment for theory, as yet on the other side of the horizon. This one has to do with the theorizing of collective subjectivities, although, because it does not yet theoretically exist, all the words I can find for it are still the old-fashioned and discredited ones, such as the project of a social psychology.” 38 For Jameson, new forms of collectivity are a major component of utopian thought in our current historical situation. In Archaeologies of the Future (2005), he states, “insofar as our own society has trained us to believe that true disalienation or authenticity only exists in the private or individual realm, it may well be this revelation of collective solidarity which is the freshest one and the most startlingly and overtly Utopian.” 39 Jameson’s work has also considered ways in which cultural information spreads through social groups and history, in a manner that speaks to Flatley’s discussions of affective mapping. In “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism” (1975), Jameson discusses the autonomy of cultural material in terms of the “essential portability of all literary language. So what we want to ask ourselves first and foremost is not whether the work of art is or is not autonomous, but rather, how it gets to be autonomous; how language . . . manages . . . to organize itself into relatively self-sufficient bodies of words which can then be grasped by groups and individuals.” 40 We could claim that the work of both Flatley and Ngai discussed above begins the project of theorizing “collective subjectivities” that Jameson has recently sketched. 41 These varying notions of portability, autonomy and collectivity all theorize elements of cultural change, and offer potential strategies for combating the

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inertia of late-capitalist space. As such, a more thorough discussion of the simultaneously utopian and limited possibilities of affect seem warranted. If an increase in affective representation and experience is a symptom of capitalist reification and standardization, how does it then become crucial to moments of change and subversion? Despite these potential connections, Jameson’s work in The Antinomies of Realism largely avoids engaging with the political. Just as he reframes his terminology surrounding notions of postmodern subjectivity without explicitly referencing criticisms of his notion of affect, Jameson also avoids providing deep or symptomatic readings in the text. Jameson only implicitly connects his readings of realist literature with wider notions of capitalist development, which is a major component of his critical work elsewhere. Ironically, these elements remain latent in discussions of everyday spaces in The Antinomies of Realism. The literary examples Jameson cites at length often describe the markets and bureaucracies of the nineteenth century, as well as domestic spaces that—as he claims in “The Realist Floor-Plan”— have lost traditional senses of meaning. “The Realist Floor-plan” offers additional connections between these varying aspects of Jameson’s work and the discussions of affect found in The Antinomies of Realism. As discussed above, Jameson sees the reified everyday space of Flaubert in terms of a capitalist or post-Enlightenment social transformation. He also argues that authors serve an important function in this change, “if we pause to interrogate the function of the writers and the artists of this transitional period. . . . The artists also are to be seen as ideologues . . . their service to ideology in the vastest sense of daily practices is . . . the production of a whole new world—on the level of the symbolic and imaginary.” 42 This social, cultural and political narrative might frame Jameson’s account of realism in The Antinomies of Realism, but it remains largely on the periphery. As such, the text does not take the opportunity to thoroughly link the formal changes found in nineteenth-century realism to a broader narrative of the reification of the everyday under modernization. The text also neglects to consider how the affective communities created by novels—and the utopian possibility generated by these communities—figure in that broader history of standardization and affect. Meanwhile, even as Flatley and Ngai both appeal to historical frameworks in their discussions of affect, they only intermittently develop this aspect of their projects. For example, in Ugly Feelings, Ngai reads texts as varied as Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857), Nella Larson’s Quicksand (1928) and the animated television show The PJs (1999–2001), but she situates them primarily in broad historical terms. Ngai claims that Ugly Feelings “presents a series of studies in the aesthetics of negative emotions, examining their politically ambiguous work in a range of cultural artifacts produced in . . . the fully ‘administered world’ of late modernity.” 43

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She only investigates the historical circumstances of these texts and their affects briefly, however, without fully articulating the relationship between the administered everyday and stifling or productive affective states. Flatley’s argument that affect can be a starting point for collective change also focuses less on determining historical factors. Flatley traces several decades of African American history, in his discussion of the Sorrow Song, mobilized by both W. E. B. Du Bois and the later Civil Rights movement: because the singers know the songs will be repeated and because they know they will leave their traces in the songs, the songs afford them the ability to see themselves from the point of view of collective remembrance. . . . The songs . . . provide a nugget of affective experience for the audience, and then tell the audience how and why that experience is valuable, interesting, historically and politically relevant. This is the moment of what I have been calling affective mapping. 44

Nevertheless, Flatley does not discuss historical possibility at length. He claims, “the political potential of the affective map can lie nascent and unrealized in . . . aesthetic practice, waiting for an audience to take it up. The affective map must be met by the right circumstances for it to have actual galvanizing, transformative, collectively experienced effects.” 45 There is, however, no extended reading of the changing historical conditions that enable the Civil Rights movement to build on Du Bois’ creation of affective communities. While the imperative to avoid an overly determinist sense of history is understandable here, it would seem that a more thorough account of the texts, their historical situation, and the possibility for political change would be worth pursuing. In this capacity, we might be able to further delineate the relationship between the reified everyday and socially productive affect. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson often refrains from tying his literary history of affect to wider cultural contexts—perhaps in an effort to distance his work from notions of symptomatic or paranoid reading practices. His earlier work in “The Realist Floor-Plan,” however, offers a model of broader historical change that we could further integrate with his sense of affective representation. These interrelated processes have the potential to expand the insular work of The Antinomies of Realism and the brief discussions of affect found in Jameson’s work elsewhere. Meanwhile, criticism that focuses on the cultural, performative and cognitive features of affective experience could usefully incorporate certain aspects of Jameson’s “local and restricted” accounts of affect. His work concentrates on structures of perception and the temporal conditions of consciousness, in a manner that could be supplementary to work that focuses on structures of feeling. Attempts to provide more complex and cohesive affective maps would benefit from a consideration of these facets of affective and cognitive experience. Similarly,

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a more thorough mapping of the emergence of affect—as discussed both in “The Realist Floor-Plan” and The Antinomies of Realism—would add a crucial nuance to the politically minded work of Flatley and Ngai. Jameson’s approach to contemporary criticism in The Antinomies of Realism is uncharacteristically hermetic. Despite efforts to distance his work from affect theory, however, it seems that a more extensive engagement between Jameson and these theorists offers several important opportunities for further study— even if modifications to terminology and interpretive practice across his career are in need of some unpacking at this point. Most crucially, Jameson’s work asks us to consider how affect relates to the standardization of everyday experience, and whether it has any real potential to combat this historical situation. NOTES 1. Hereafter “Postmodernism.” 2. For ease of reference I will refer to the version of the essay reprinted in Jameson’s book of the same name. See, Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 15. 3. For engagements with the phrase “waning of affect,” see Brian Massumi “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (Autumn 1995): 88. doi: 10.2307/1354446; Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 183–184. For work that frames Jameson’s reading practice as paranoid, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–52; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 298–331. 4. Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 109. 5. Ibid., 10. 6. Ibid., 32. 7. Ibid., 44. 8. Ibid., 33. 9. Ibid. 54–55. 10. Ibid., 98. 11. Ibid., 109. 12. Ibid., 28. 13. Ibid., 28n4. 14. Ibid., 28–29. 15. Fredric Jameson, “The Realist Floor-Plan” in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky, (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 374. 16. Ibid., 376. 17. Ibid., 379. 18. Ibid., 380. 19. Jameson, Postmodernism, 10. 20. Ibid., 15–16. 21. Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” 88. 22. Ibid. 23. Jameson, Postmodernism, 11. 24. Ibid., 6. 25. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 38. 26. Ibid., 62. 27. Ibid. Emphasis in original.

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28. Ibid., 145. 29. Ibid., 136. 30. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 299. Emphasis in original. 31. For an influential discussion of this shift, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 1–21, doi: 10.1525/ rep.2009.108.1.1. 32. Jameson, Antinomies, 28. 33. Ibid., 84–5. 34. Ibid., 84–5. 35. Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 106. 36. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 169. 37. Ibid., 168. 38. Fredric Jameson, “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory,” Critical Enquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 406. doi: 10.1086/421141. 39. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 230. 40. Page numbers refer to Jameson’s most recent reprinting of this essay, in the one-volume edition of The Ideologies of Theory. See, Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso, 2008), 415. Emphasis in Original. 41. Jameson, “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory,” 406. 42. Jameson, “Realist Floor-Plan,” 373–374. 43. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 1. 44. Flatley, Affective Mapping, 153. 45. Ibid., 106.

WORKS CITED Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108.1 (Fall 2009): 1–21. doi: 10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.1. Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Grossberg, Lawrence. Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. ———. The Ideologies of Theory. London: Verso, 2008. ———. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1991. ———. “The Realist Floor-Plan.” In On Signs, edited by Marshall Blonsky, 373–383. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. ———. “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory.” Critical Enquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 403–408. doi: 10.1086/421141. Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31 (Autumn 1995): 83–109. doi: 10.2307/1354446. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Chapter Three

Novel Readings Mind- and Emotion-reading Devices in the Mid-twentieth Century and in Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Chris Rudge

By 1964, the science fiction author Philip K. Dick had written at least two “anti-psychiatric novels,” to borrow an expression from Christopher Palmer. 1 Composed in the early months of that year, these novels—Clans of the Alphane Moon and Martian Time-Slip—launched varied critiques of psychiatry’s tendency to place humans into rudimentary categories. While the first novel satirizes psychiatric taxonomy by dividing the population into “clans” of Pares (paranoids) and Heebs (hebephrenics), the second makes light of psychiatry in a more complex way. Martian Time-Slip features characters with psychiatric disorders (autism, schizophrenia) marked by temporal disorientation and distortion—disorders that change their focalizations of the action. But rather than being intrinsic or localized, these time-distorting disorders are infectious, and move between characters in ways that seem to unsettle the orthodox psychiatric assumption that mental illnesses are “embodied.” 2 Though it may appear analogous to these novels, Dick’s 1965 novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (henceforth Stigmata), has not generally been read as antipsychiatric fiction. 3 In the paragraphs to follow, I want to suggest that this is an unfortunate critical oversight. After all, Stigmata represents not just another example of Dick’s antipsychiatric corpus, but a pivotal evolution of the genre—an evolution, that is, in the genre of antipsychiatric literature. Stigmata stages a complex and wide-reaching satirical drama of institutionalized mind control. But the novel also exhibits particular affinities with 37

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the portable, which are plotted through a reduction of psychiatry to a mobile and peripatetic device. The novel introduces a virtual suitcase psychiatrist named Dr Smile, a small machine resembling the modern-day laptop. As I will argue, the figure of Dr Smile seems at once to predict, critique, and reflect the rise of the “device paradigm” in psychiatry from the mid-twentieth century onward. 4 But Dr Smile is also a cousin of various other devices of the 1950s—devices that (so their inventors and operators alleged) could register and decode dynamic human emotions. Like those devices, Dr Smile purports to “read” his patients’ stress levels. However, in failing to do its job competently, this machine reflects not just the unreliability of psychiatric devices but Dick’s own distrustful opinion of emerging technopsychiatry in the 1960s. Implicit but central to the novel’s critique of the device paradigm is a speculative hypothesis: that “reading devices” such as Dr Smile might not just serve to objectively “read” their users’ minds, but also to shape and form their thoughts—and perhaps even to engender their psychopathologies. As I will claim, however, this representation of technology is not just dystopian but prototypically Dickian. Better put, the novel does not just exemplify the technophobia so commonplace in the canon of dystopian fiction, but expresses something more unique about its author’s experience—it reflects, that is, Dick’s personal history with psychiatrists and his strident views of their profession. PORTABILITY FROM PULP TO APP When Dick wrote Stigmata between January and March of 1964, he would not just thematize the notion of portability through the figure of Dr Smile; rather, portability would also become a crucial feature of the literary object Dick would ultimately publish. Indeed, by this time, Dick had already published more than two dozen science fiction paperbacks, an unrefined species of small books that Samuel R. Delany once described as “cheap and ugly objects”—slight volumes marked not just by their size but by their lurid cover art and low-cost. 5 And yet, portability had characterized popular literary culture long before the twentieth century. The compact dime novel, which first appeared in the late 1870s, preceded the appearance of pulp fiction magazines in around 1882; and, as the printing industry grew into the twentieth century, these small, inexpensive periodicals would give rise to a whole genre of serialized stories. 6 The portable book, however, was probably not apotheosized until 1939, when Pocket Books produced the “first successful pulp paperback line in the United States.” 7 Though popular for a time, by the mid-twentieth century, the attraction of these paperbacks had begun to wane. As publishers struggled to meet rising production costs, only large mainstream firms, such as hardcover house Doubleday, could embrace op-

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portunities to publish new lines of the genre and to capitalize on what remained of the market. 8 Yet, even in this strained context, tenacious authors such as Dick found opportunities to rewrite their short pulp stories as longer novels. Hence Stigmata, which Dick originally published as a short story, titled “The Days of Perky Pat,” in Amazing Stories in December, 1963, but then rewrote as a novel in the following year, delivering the manuscript to the Scott Meredith Agency in March, 1964. By December, Stigmata had been published by Doubleday. 9 And, as with many such pulp–novel crossovers of the time, Stigmata was first released as a bulky hardback with deckle-edged pages before being reproduced, from 1966, in compact trade paperbacks editions and sold at roughly half the cost. Like the pocket books of the 1940s and ’50s, the trade paperback’s small size allowed it to transgress boundaries; it could “move from inside the home to inside the pocket,” for instance, or “be pulled out at any free moment.” 10 As an object specifically designed for on-the-move consumption and produced in proliferating quantities, the trade paperback was, in more than one way, the “Model T of publishing.” 11 Portability’s effects on the psyche are multiple. The portable novel, in the twentieth century and even today, allows readers to carry stories around in their heads and hands, sometimes shocking them or exciting them during moments of an otherwise ordinary nature. 12 Of course, the pervasiveness of digital reading devices in today’s media ecology can make the public appearance of a novel or paperback seem something of a curiosity. But just as portable reading material of the late twentieth century was consumed by readers who were in transit, or during the conflicts of World War II, so too do many newer devices, such as smartphones, allow readers to consume narratives in places and times previously thought unamenable to reading. 13 Similarly again, portable devices that may take the place of the book in codex form—computerized devices featuring audiobook-reading applications, or even voice-activated personal assistants, for instance—might well be seen as having much in common with the paperback or hardbound novel. For one, these newer devices clearly offer readers an analogical (if not identical) form of gratification as the pocket book. They may be equally understood, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, to provide a means of escapism or “self-amputation”; but they may also be seen, as Jean Baudrillard suggested of texts, to be participating in the “ecstasy of communication” itself, where all “secrets, spaces and scenes [are] abolished” so as to exalt the “single dimension of information.” 14 Crucially, and in spite of their differences, each object’s portability means that its contents and associated affects can be called forth in an instant, in a way that privileges hypomnesis over anamnesis (living over dead memory) and valorizes immediacy over deferment. 15 Still, despite these similarities, the particular physical features of an object do seem constitutively to shape the ways in which it is consumed or understood. Just the same, the material conditions of authorship—the what,

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when, where, and why of an object’s creation—do seem to shape its formation and color its meanings. Indeed, those who wrote “pulp science fiction in the 1950s” found themselves performing a particularly lonely job. It was to engage, as Andrew P. Hoberek writes, in a form of “alienated labor,” which at once estranged the author from reality and disconnected them from themselves, engendering a sense of depersonalization or self-division. 16 In this regard, Dick’s sense of estrangement, even for a science fiction author, was exceptional. While writing Stigmata, Dick would awaken every day and promptly repair to a small shack he called “the hovel,” some 500 meters from his family home. There he would ingest, among other drugs, up to six 7.5milligram tablets of methamphetamine hydrochloride (the chemist’s “strongest dose”), and attempt to produce some “68 final page of copy a day.” 17 Almost as marked as the labor of Dick’s writing regimen, however, was the thematic of labor in his novels, which is so pronounced that it leads Hoberek to argue, of Time Out of Joint (1959), that Dick’s “pulp fiction” can never “imagine itself as ‘art’ pure and simple, divorced from the economic and the social,” but must “engage continually its own [process of] production through a form of labor with ties to other forms of labor.” 18 Hoberek’s assertion calls to mind the way in which Stigmata engages with many kinds of labor and laborers: it features potters, consultants, farmers, and capitalists, among many others. But what is most interesting about Stigmata’s representation of labor is its depiction of the labor of psychiatry. It has been said that the “emotional labour of medicine,” and particularly the work in which psychiatrists engage, can become so wearisome that (as the pop psychiatrist turned novelist Raj Persaud writes) tasks such as “smiling at your patients” may be rendered impossible, and require one to “fake emotions” and engage in “deep acting.” 19 In view of the largely understudied emotional labor performed by psychiatrists, however (today as in the last century), one of the interesting questions Dick’s novel poses is whether automation and artificial intelligence may allow psychiatric labor to be delegated to a machine. By introducing a psychiatric machine, the novel raises important questions about a world in which the psychiatrist’s exertions may be taken on by “something not unlike Dr Smile,” 20 a psychiatrist who never frowns. Whatever we might make of Dick’s view of psychiatry, the contemporaneous history of Stigmata suggests we should not consider Dick’s perspective in a vacuum. The so-called antipsychiatry movement had reached its peak in the early 1960s, a decade in which such figures as R. D. Laing and David Cooper (in England) and Thomas Szasz (in North America) promoted person-centered therapies while condemning impersonal and dangerous interventions such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). 21 Stigmata not only bears the influence of these thinkers but reflects the fact that, in that same decade, Dick’s longstanding resistance to psychotherapy had begun to harden into something more fierce—into a broader disavowal, that is, of any and

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all psychiatric intervention, at least insofar as he might himself be its subject. 22 Given the circumstances of Dick’s life at this time, it is possible to read Stigmata as roman à clef, and to bear in mind what Emmanel Carrère, one of Dick’s more inventive biographers, called the author’s abiding inclination “to throw sand in the eyes of any psychiatrist who crossed his path,” metaphorizing Dick’s tendency to defy and deceive. 23 Indeed, it is little wonder, when one considers Dick’s life, that Stigmata’s characterizations of the machinic psychiatrist, Dr Smile, appear to be just as defiant and ferocious as sand in the eyes. DR SMILE: IMPERSONAL MACHINE As early as in the novel’s opening paragraphs, a portable psychiatric machine makes its presence known. Barney Mayerson, a precognitive or “precog”— one who can see into the future—awakens to find himself in unfamiliar surrounds and in the company of an unknown “girl in the bed.” 24 Bewildered, Mayerson turns to Dr Smile, his portable psychiatrist, for advice. 25 The arresting ontological moment in which one awakens in a strange place— what Carlo Pagetti has called Dick’s trope of “laborious reawakening”—is something of a significant locus or figure in the Dickian ontological imaginary. In his Exegesis, Dick would write of the “very idea of ‘Wake up’” while describing the vision that inspired him to write Stigmata. This image of the eponymous Palmer Eldritch—an evil mechanical God who appeared “in the Sun”—was to be, Dick wrote, the “beginning of [his] seeing,” a vision that marked only the start of a spiritual expedition punctuated by a notorious metanoia almost exactly ten years later. 26 For Dick, the moment of waking up implied a movement away from “winter time and the slumbering during winter time of all life” and toward a new summer of insight and clarity. 27 In the novel’s introduction, then, it is no surprise that winter time is over: the Earth’s climate has become so intolerably hot that the U. N. has begun to draft people to Mars. There, so-called “colonists” live in dreary hovels—pits in which they “twist and cringe like worms in a paper bag, huddled away from the daylight.” 28 Mayerson is among those unlucky enough to have received a draft notice from the authorities requiring him to live on Mars. Now desperate to avoid deportation, he has recruited Dr Smile in the hope that the machine will validate his claim that he is legally unfit for the journey. One of the ways in which Stigmata ironizes the centrality of the psychiatric machine is to introduce it at this early point in the plot. When Mayerson awakens, it is neither the sun nor God that reacquaints him with the forgotten world but a smiling machine—a device that is clearly central to Mayerson’s life. Resembling a laptop computer, the suitcase hums away, its screen pro-

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jecting a plot of charts that register Mayerson’s stress levels. They are measured, we learn, in “Freuds.” 29 And yet, the portable suitcase itself is not really “Dr Smile.” That name properly refers to the supercomputer that is located (no doubt symbolically) in the basement of Mayerson’s New York “conapt,” and connected to the machine by “micro-relay.” 30 Thus, the suitcase is merely, as Mayerson calls it, a “portable extension” of this more powerful mainframe. Then again, the suitcase, through its mainframe, is also connected to other people—as well as to other suitcases just like it. Moreover, Dr Smile records its private consultations with Mayerson, and replays and reports on them to Mayerson’s boss, Leo Bulero, the chair of P. P. Layouts. 31 In the novel, the device is frequently described as a “suitcase full of Dr Smile” 32—as an object filled with retrievable information stored in a server. But then, the suitcase can also operate on its own; it can be disconnected from the network: “alive, but not connected with anything outside itself [. . .] what they call being on intrinsic.” 33 In 1964, still some decades before mainstream networked computing, and long before the Internet-connected mobile devices of the twenty-first century, these descriptions of Dr Smile’s capabilities may have seemed strange, or even incredulous. But modern computer networking has made these notions instantly recognizable. The version of Dr Smile that Mayerson sees upon awakening functions in much the same way as a modern-day web-connected application. Installed on a personal computer, the application is designed for those who seek mobile psychotherapy. It retrieves information from a software database server via something like the Internet, and thus connects itself to the “real” Dr Smile. It then presents this information to the patient in comprehensible sentences, operating as an intelligent voice-activated personal assistant, akin to such present-day equivalents as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. MIND-READING INSTRUMENTS OF THE MID-CENTURY Dick’s prescience in imagining such a device as Dr Smile is more explicable than might be immediately thought. Parodic machine psychiatrists comparable to Dr Smile had already appeared in the early 1960s, some of them in the very years in which Dick revised “The Days of Perky Pat.” In 1963, for instance, Joseph Wienzenbaum created ELIZA, a computer application described as a “mechanical parody” of a “nondirectional psychotherapist in an initial psychiatric interview.” 34 In the following years, more so-called chatterbots would appear, including PARRY, the computer simulation of a paranoid schizophrenic. 35 Far from therapeutic devices, these instruments were caricatures—spoofs of earlier devices that had purported to enable patients to overcome stress and anxiety disorders.

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Among the more influential of the alleged therapeutic devices was the electropsychometer, an instrument invented by a chiropractor named Volney G. Mathison in around 1950. The electropsychometer was Mathison’s version of an earlier device that had been named, rather bewilderingly, the “electroencephaloneuromentimograph” by its inventor, Bartlett Joshua (BJ) Palmer—another chiropractor, and a figure from whom Dick may have derived the name of the novel’s eponymous character, Palmer Eldritch. Also known as the timpograph, BJ Palmer’s instrument was similar to a number of other devices of the early twentieth century. In various ways, it resembled the neurocalamater, which purported to measure heat from the nerves, the psychogalvanometer, which measured galvanic resistance in the body (and about which the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung had enthused in an essay of 1907), and the electroencephalogram, which is still used today to measure the electrical activity of the brain. 36 Mathison was himself a pulp science fiction author who had, in the 1920s, written a science fiction story titled “A Phony Phone,” a short narrative in which a radiophone malfunctions and confounds the narrator with its “strange conversations.” 37 Such a story would augur Mathison’s own invention of the electropsychometer some three decades later. In his self-published manuscript Electropsychometry (1951), Mathison recalled his path to his invention: he had visited a psychoanalyst, “depressed” and suffering from “nervous tensions” after sales of a device he had developed in 1949 to assist film projectors, the “Motion Picture Projection Arc Monitor,” had dwindled. 38 Unhelped by psychotherapy, Mathison then decided to attend a “series of lectures being given by a very controversial figure.” 39 There he was inspired to believe that “what was needed . . . in psychotherapy, was an instrument that would ‘read the mind of the autonomic or central nervous system’ . . . [a] ‘psychic-x-ray’ type of instrument.” 40 The controversial lecturer, according to Omar V. Garrison, was L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. 41 Hubbard had given a series of lectures in California in August, 1950, following the appearance of an article in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction, which introduced the world to his “new science” of Dianetics. 42 Inspired by Hubbard’s ideas, Mathison set about developing the crucial psychic x-ray, and filed a patent for his invention, the Mathison Electropsychometer, on 1 August, 1951. 43 Using a variation on the Wheatstone bridge circuit developed a century earlier, the device was essentially an ohmmeter; more specifically, however, it was, according to Mathison’s patent application, a “novel bio-electronic instrument which registers human dynamic emotion in a more accurate and sensitive manner than has been possible with any previous device of comparable simplicity.” 44 Unlike other comparable technologies, it was also relatively portable. For some two years after he invented the device, Mathison worked in fruitful collaboration with Hubbard. The Scientology founder embraced

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Mathison’s invention, even dedicating one of the first Scientology manuals to his colleague. 45 “Mathison has built the way for Man to find his freedom,” Hubbard enthused in 1952, declaring that “The electropsychometer utterly dwarfs the invention of the microscope.” Hubbard even praised the instrument’s “nimble needle,” which “sees all [and] knows all,” and was even able to “detect with accuracy things which would have been hidden from Man forever.” 46 In the following years, however, Mathison and Hubbard’s partnership would dissolve, principally because Mathison “refused to surrender the patent to his invention” to an increasingly impatient Hubbard. 47 Before long, Hubbard discontinued the use of the electropsychometer, disavowing it in his book Dianetics 1955!. As it turned out, Hubbard wrote, this “mechanical gadget” had shown a “tendency to depersonalize the session.” 48 Meanwhile, Mathison would embrace hypnosis, and write various books on the subject after producing his own manual for a visualization-based form of therapy aided by his electropsychometric device called creative image therapy. In his book of that name, Mathison would go on to condemn “the faker who hypnotizes you out of your money” in what was not only an obvious allusion to Hubbard but a means of distinguishing his candid hypnotic therapy from Hubbard’s hypnosis by subterfuge. 49 In 1957, Hubbard conscripted two inventive Scientology members to produce a battery-operated version of the electropsychometer. When they finally succeeded in building the device, Hubbard would name it the Hubbard E-Meter, patenting the device himself in 1966. 50 But Mathison, now regarding Hubbard as a charlatan, and Scientology and the E-Meter as underhanded fraud, would dismiss this device soon thereafter, and “decry,” in a letter to satirical Scientology magazine The Aberree, “the doings of trivial fakers, such as scientologists . . . who glibly denounce hypnosis and then try to overtly use it in their phony systems.” 51 His slight seemed to invoke both the title and theme of his story of decades earlier, “A Phony Phone.” Dick was no doubt familiar with the E-meter and Hubbard’s Dianetics; he had, after all, collected and read the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction from 1933 onward, and is likely to have read Hubbard’s 1950 article on Dianetics when it first appeared. 52 In fact, Dick would explicitly mock Hubbard, the E-Meter, and Dianetics only a few years after Hubbard’s article was published in a short story lampooning Hubbard’s attempts to “clear” his followers’ minds using an instrument resembling the electropsychometer. In “The Turning Wheel,” a short story published in Science Fiction Stories in 1954, faithful “Bards” follow their leader, “Elron Hu,” and use scanners—or “turning wheels”—to see their futures, thus initiating a process that had long “guided man to clearness.” 53 Just as Dick suspected psychiatric machines of malevolence and chicanery, he held great distrust of the purportedly sacred instrument of Dianetics—a distrust patently obvious to readers of “The Turning Wheel.”

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But Stigmata’s Dr Smile, with his all-too-artificial intelligence, seems to satirize the hopeless encounter with mind-clearing machines even more ruthlessly than the scanners in “The Turning Wheel.” The suitcase exhibits, for instance, a paradoxical and essential defect at the level of its usefulness. Mayerson, we learn, has procured his extension of Dr Smile not to reduce or allay his stress levels but rather to intensify them. To avoid the draft—being “sent to the colonies” of “Chicken Pox Prospects” on Mars 54—Mayerson must prove he is incapable of handling stress and, to this end, he has conscripted Dr Smile. As the “girl in the bed” (Dr Smile has since informed Mayerson of her name, Roni Fugate) asks Mayerson, “Has it helped? Has he—” she gestures at the suitcase. “—Made you sick enough?” 55 The insight to be grasped here, as with many of the subtle ironies in Dick’s fiction, obtains in the mild paranomasia, specifically in the word “made.” Does the portable device actually cause the illness that Mayerson wishes to contract— does it make him sick—or does it merely detect the disorder, locating and diagnosing an existing sickness? For Fugate, the answer is obvious. The device—and the diagnosis it promises to validate—is merely an expedient means of avoiding some larger harm, in this case the harm of deportation. Dr Smile, then, is not a means of accessing therapy, much less of discovering the “truth” about one’s health. On the contrary, the device is a means by which Mayerson might lend evidentiary support to his fraudulent application for a statutory exemption under Terra’s deportation law. As Fugate asks Mayerson, “The only reason why you’d be carrying a psychiatrist around with you is that you must have gotten your draft notice. Right?” 56 THE HEGEMONY OF TECHNOPSYCHIATRY Dick’s portrayal of Dr Smile, and the potted history of portable mind-reading devices outlined above, raises broader questions about the potential of psychiatric devices, including online therapies, to cause harm. Contemporary philosophy of psychiatry has largely embraced online or electronic modalities of psychotherapy, since patients have in many cases proved “more willing to admit symptoms of certain psychiatric disorders to the computer than to the primary care physicians.” 57 However, in a study on technology and psychiatry, James Phillips criticizes those modes of psychiatry in which patients find themselves simply “talking to a robot” and clinicians driving “treatment to focus on the symptom” rather than integrating “symptom and meaning.” 58 In Stigmata, Dr Smile’s impersonal manner and obsession with measuring Freuds—never caring to interpret their contextual meanings— makes it precisely the kind of device against which Phillips cautions. 59 Far from providing an experiential, person-centered psychotherapy based on “promoting the health and well-being of the totality of the person,” the suit-

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case’s mobile readings merely register, and make a log of, Mayeron’s signs, with its narrow, instrumental focus seeming only to exacerbate—and so to reify—his malaise. 60 In Dick’s novel, then, psychiatric devices such as Dr Smile must be understood not as tools of therapy but as technologies of psychological testing. If these devices offer the test subject any information at all, they neither aid nor adversely affect them but merely give them some evidence that a reading, or a procedure, has been performed. As with all technics, the specific meaning of those data or the diagnosis they deliver must be left to who- or whatever operates the gadget. And yet, in Stigmata, the problem is not that Dr Smile is controlled or interpreted by some malevolent governing human—not, at least, by one we may readily identify. It is that the device is embedded in an overarching superstructure, a biopolitical economy in which distinctions between helpful and harmful machines, between malevolent or benevolent operators, are so obscure as to be scarcely perceptible. 61 Thus, at a later point in the narrative, when Mayerson finally decides to give himself up to “the draft board,” now reluctantly accepting his fate to be exiled to Mars, his mental examination is “administered by something not unlike Dr Smile.” 62 The similitude between this reading machine and the other—between this ersatz Dr Smile and the original robot—confirms the fact that, in the world of Stigmata, one cannot escape what Donald Mender has called the “hegemony of techno-psychiatry.” 63 The lesson of Dr Smile’s omnipresence, then, is that it hardly matters whether one gets deported to Mars or remains on Earth, for all paths lead to the same endpoint: an automated analysis, a machine-led mind-reading session. Later in the narrative, we discover that Dr Smile probably is the functionary of the novel’s eponymous villain, Palmer Eldritch—that he is a delegated agent in Eldritch’s elaborate conspiracy to drug, deceive, and control all humans. Indeed, Eldritch has plans to distribute Chew-Z, a new recreational drug, to the total human population of the Sol System (the solar system). More than this, Eldritch wants to supplant Leo Bulero, Sol’s arch-industrialist, as the solar system’s principal powerbroker. As things stand, Bulero’s company, P. P. Layouts, sells and manufactures miniature accessories (“mins”) that enhance the so-called translation experience, the hallucinogenic journey catalyzed by another drug named Can-D. That drug is used almost ubiquitously by colonists in Martian hovels: it allows them to enter into a “hypnogogic” and hallucinatory dream world, an “absolutely artificially induced pseudoenvironment” that invokes a cinematic, stereotypical romance holiday. 64 Users are granted access to this dream world through their use of dollhouse-style game boards called “layouts”; and it is enhanced by the “mins actually installed” on those boards. But the dreamworld only truly becomes available when the Can-D users enter into the bodies and personalities of two dolls, “Perky Pat” Christensen and Walt Essex. 65 While Can-D is

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technically illegal across the Sol System, the authorities tolerate Bulero’s production of the “minned” drug-related accessories in recognition of his “enormous yearly tribute” 66 to the UN Narcotics Control Bureau. Bulero later discovers that Eldritch, and perhaps even the mechanical Dr Smile, may have come under “Prox influence” 67—that they may have been manipulated by aliens from Proxima Centauri. As he discovers, not only are Eldritch and Dr Smile addicted to the new drug Chew-Z (and so rendered “choosers”) but they have transformed into hollow representatives, into mercenary sales vendors, for this new lichen-based substance. Faced with the prospect that this man and machine are now no more than unwitting “Manchurian candidates” for the Prox species (from whom Eldritch has in fact sourced the precursor to Chew-Z), Bulero begins to fear a covert alien invasion, one that is instantiated through the double subterfuge of this new hallucinogenic substance and a reprogrammed Dr Smile—a hacked or weaponized artificial intelligence. At first, Bulero finds the situation preposterous: “Who ever heard of a suitcase being dominated by minds from an alien starsystem?” 68 But later, though he regards Dr Smile as just an instrument by which his “own fears about Palmer Eldritch [are] being read back” to him, 69 Bulero comes to accept that Dr Smile really is implicated in the aliens’ plan. At that point, Dr Smile’s task, he concedes, is to gain “domination over [his] mind,” and to control him through a “form of what they used to call brainwashing.” 70 At one level of the diegesis, Stigmata’s narrative involves a paranoid and rivalrous conflict between two men, Eldritch and Bulero. Both men are the leaders of major companies that amass their profits, in ways variously direct and indirect, from drug sales. The narrative in this way constitutes a ruthless critique, and even an epic reimagining, of the emergent power of organized drug syndicates and of Big Pharma corporations in the modern, global economy. Thus, as Bulero begins to suspect that Eldritch is controlled by some higher alien power, the tormenting hallucinations he witnesses—these visions of Eldritch’s stigmata, comprising Eldritch’s artificial hand, his “luxvid” eyes, and his “giant stainless steel molars” 71—serve only as so many proofs that Chew-Z constitutes a grand conspiracy to control the human (or Terran) race—a conspiracy, to be sure, even more terrifying than Bulero’s own plan to amass profit at any cost. The structure of Bulero and Eldritch’s relationship might even be productively compared to that between Mathison and Hubbard, except that where the former pair wage their war over mindaltering drugs, the latter feud over contending mind-reading devices. In both cases, what is at stake is the power of objects not only to control those who use them, but to shape the actions of their creators—those who invent, promote, and sell them. The power of objects to govern as well as to supplement the minds of their users and makers alike suggests another (perhaps more minor) way in

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which Dick illustrates how even the most ordinary, innocuous objects—such as the Barbie doll—can mark out a space for technopsychological control. Dick was disturbed by the “Barbie-Doll craze” of the 1960s, and had experienced a particularly strong, even neurotic reaction to witnessing his children play with these “super-developed” toys. It was an image that conjured in him strange images: I had visions of Barbie coming into my bedroom at night and saying, “I need a mink coat.” Or, even worse, “Hey, big fellow . . . want to take a drive to Vegas in my Jaguar XKE?” I was afraid my wife would find me and Barbie together and my wife would shoot me. 72

The idea of a Barbie coming to life frightened Dick, it seems, because it would somehow lead to infidelity, and so put his marriage and even his life at risk. But the users of Can-D entertain no such fears. They are content to meet their dolls’ every seeming need, and to buy ever more of the layout board “mins,” if only they might have the chance to experience Can-D in its unadulterated totality. They yearn for the “near-sacred moment” of “translation,” for that process in which users reach “fusion” 73 with the dolls and enter into their idyllic Barbie world, feeling free and something like their former selves. In a way, this process of Barbie reincarnation by means of Can-D is a chance for the hovelists to once again experience the banal, sentimental normalcy of their lives on Earth. Alas, in reality, no such translation is possible. The “reality principle,” as Fredric Jameson argues (by way of “Freud and the Utopians”), ensures that the Can-D “fantasy [is] already tainted.” 74 The warming of the Earth, which is still apparent even in this dreamscape, always returns, like a repressed memory, to remind the dolls—and the users—that they are not so free as they seem. In one translation experience, the heat prevents the doll-characters Walt and Pat from taking a swim while on a beach getaway; a blip in the machine reveals its artifice. 75 To be sure, by entering into the bodies of these dolls (just as characters enter into the body and mind of John Malkovich in the film Being John Malkovich), the colonists experience an immersive and seamless “doll-inhabitation by means of the Can-D.” 76 However, it is also arguable that, by doing so, users are less restored to their “true selves” than consigned to the “artificial selves.” Thus, ultimately, this is a “cosmetic psychopharmacology” like any other: temporary, superficial, and revocable. 77 And yet, at the level of the symbol, this trip is also more virtualized; depending as it does on the fantastic, childlike valences of the doll metonym, the translation experience could hardly be any more counterfeit.

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READING THE MIND-READERS It may be true, as I have suggested, that Dick based parts of Stigmata’s narrative on the historical figures Volney Mathison and L. Ron Hubbard. However, many acts in Dick’s biography, or in what Jameson calls his “interpersonal world,” suggest other plausible sources for the novel’s content—for its derisive characterizations of psychiatric machines, its implicit contempt for psychiatrists, and its scorn for mind-altering drugs. In his early life, Dick had had traumatic experiences with therapists, nourishing an abiding skepticism of the profession’s diagnostic techniques. In one memory of a consultation, Dick recalls revealing a series of intimate thoughts to his psychiatrist, explaining how he had started to “wonder if our value system—what was right and what was wrong—were absolutely true or whether they were not merely culturally relativistic.” 78 When the psychiatrist dismissed his thoughts merely as “symptoms” of his “neurosis,” Dick became distressed, and set out to disprove the opinion. So I got ahold of a copy of the British Scientific journal “Nature,” which is the most reputable scientific journal in the world. And there was an article in it which said virtually all our values are derived essentially from the Bible and cannot be empirically verified, [and] therefore must fall into the category of the untestable and unprovable. . . . Here I was, a teenager in the ’40s, and here he was, a psychiatrist; now I look back and I see this man was cemented into a simplistic mode. I mean his brain was dead as far as I could determine. 79

If Dick sees psychiatrists as “braindead,” then Dr Smile exhibits this quality in droves. For not only is Dr Smile a machine; he is a computer—and thus an object already subject to “anthropomorphic projection” in the cultural imaginary. 80 As such, Dr Smile is not just a machine with a “nimble needle,” like the E-Meter, but an object about whom one can say, “It has a brain, but that brain may be dead.” Perhaps it is for this reason—because Dr Smile invites anthropomorphic projection—that Jameson has interpreted Dr Smile along different lines. Calling on the semiotic approaches of Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, Jameson describes the psychiatrist and his ilk as an “adjuvant” or “magical agent” whose narratorial function is simply to assist the novel’s protagonists. 81 Dr Smile, Jameson continues, is marked by an “essential selflessness,” a trait that can be “readily explained by their condition, which is either that of a machine or that of the dead.” 82 Indeed, the novel leaves us in no doubt that Dr Smile’s “condition” is “that of a machine,” for his responses are so comically mechanical that they conform to no human norms (and yet, curiously, Dr Smile is gendered as male). But less certain is whether the automaton’s nonhuman qualities can engender anything so noble as altruism or selflessness. Much of the time the robot’s defective mechanicity is regis-

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tered precisely as the cause and explanation for his utter inability to think or learn like a human. Dr Smile seems hardly capable of helping or empathizing with anyone, and repeatedly mispronounces his patients’ names, calling Barney Mayerson “Bayerson” 83 and mispronouncing “Bulero” when he diagnoses him, “getting the stress on the final syllable.” 84 With these mechanical defects ever on display, Dr Smile is—both in aesthetic terms and through the formalist prism of structural narratology—less an adjuvant than a mildly amusing, robotized example of what Roslynn D. Haynes calls the “impersonal scientist” archetype in twentieth-century fiction. 85 As a functionary who can do little more than its programming instructs, the unempathetic suitcase resembles the characters C-3PO and R2-D2 in the Star Wars franchises: he is a foil whose superficiality and tendency to malfunction draws attention only to the relative complexity and heroism of the text’s humans. Of Dick’s machines, Palmer argues that these “inventions and gizmos are offered frivolously or casually”; and yet, they are also attempts to resolve “the problems of narrative which [Dick] had set himself.” According to this model, Dr Smile is an exemplary machine. But that the suitcase is frivolous—a smiling, playful bon mot, prone to malfunction and error—obscures his narratological function. For Dr Smile is also a device in the truest sense: he is at once a tool that props up the malicious psychopolitical superstructure, a counter-intelligence operative, and a broker between two interplanetary powers. 86 Dick’s biographers have recounted the callous way in which, just before he began writing Stigmata, Dick had himself brokered a deal with a psychiatrist, arranging for his third wife Anne’s psychiatric commitment, and emotionally manipulating the situation so that she remained on Stelazine, a potent antipsychotic. 87 In this context, Dr Smile may be read not only as an expression of Dick’s disregard for psychiatrists, but also as a projection of his own guilt—a way, that is, not only of reducing psychiatry’s influence but of sublimating his own covert psychiatric power. NOTES Acknowledgment: I wish to acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, without which I would not have been able to produce this essay. 1. Christopher Palmer, Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and the Terror of the Postmodern (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003), 146; on antipsychiatry generally, see D. B. Double, “Historical Perspectives on Anti-Psychiatry,” in D. B. Double, ed., Critical Psychiatry: The Limits of Madness (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 19–40. 2. See Palmer, Philip K. Dick, 164–65. 3. Philip K. Dick, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, ed. Jonathan Lethem (New York: Library of America, 2007), 230–430. 4. On psychiatry’s “device paradigm,” see James Phillips, “Technology and Psychiatry,” in K.W.M. Fulford et al. eds., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 177–196.

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5. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1960–1965 (New York: Arbor House, 1988), 191; for a chronology of Dick’s novels, see Henri Wintz and David Hyde, Precious Artifacts: A Philip K. Dick Bibliography 1955–2012 (California: Wide Books, 2012), 138. 6. As Pamela Bedore notes, the first recorded use of “dime novel” was in Irwin P. Beadle’s series, Beadle’s Dime Novels: see Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 183n3; on pulp magazines, see Mike Ashley, The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950: The History of the Science-Fiction Magazine: Volume I (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 21. 7. Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 11, 32. 8. On the decline of pulp publishers, see Marcel Danesi, Popular Culture: Introductory Perspectives (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 73–74; on the history of Doubleday, see Louis Menand, “Pulp’s Big Moment,” The New Yorker, January 5, 2015, http://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/pulps-big-moment. 9. See the chronology and notes in Dick, Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, 807, 817. 10. Rabinowitz, American Pulp, 11. 11. Luey, “Modernity and Print III,” 376. 12. Rabinowitz, American Pulp, 33. 13. Luey, “Modernity and Print III,” 374. 14. Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Washington: Bay Press, 1983), 131. 15. On the technology of books and hypomnesis, see Bernard Stiegler, “Anamnesis and Hypomnesis: Plato as the First Thinker of the Proletarianisation,” Ars Industrialis, http:// arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis. 16. Andrew P. Hoberek, “The ‘Work’ of Science Fiction: Philip K. Dick and Occupational Masculinity in the Post-World War II United States,” Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 2 (1997): 374–75. 17. On Dick’s methamphetamine tablets, see Philip K. Dick to Terry and Carol Carr (October 1964), quoted in Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005), 119; on Dick’s voluminous output, see Uwe Anton and Werner Fuchs, “So I Don’t Write about Heroes: An Interview with Philip K. Dick,” SF Eye 14 (1996): 37–46, http://2010philipkdickfans.philipkdickfans.com/frank/anton.html. 18. Hoberek, “The ‘Work’ of Science Fiction,” 379. 19. Raj Persaud, “Faking It: The Emotional Labour of Medicine,” BMJ Careers, 28 August 2004, http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=394. 20. Dick, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, 334. 21. These figures’ opposition to ECT is widely acknowledged: see, for instance, Jonathan Sadowsky, Electroconvulsive Therapy in America: The Anatomy of a Medical Controversy (New York: Routledge, 2017), 108–121. 22. Anne R. Dick writes of the way in which Philip arranged for her psychiatric commitment in 1963, and projected his own illness onto her: see Anne R. Dick, The Search for Philip K. Dick (San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications, 2010); Kyle Arnold agrees with Anne’s account, The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 18, 73. 23. Emmanuel Carrère, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick, tr. Timothy Bent (New York: Picador, 2004), 133. 24. Dick, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, 235. 25. Dick coined the shortened term “precog” in his 1954 short story “A World of Talent,” Galaxy Science Fiction 9, no. 1 (1954): 6–46. 26. I refer to Dick’s well-known “2-3-74 experience,” variously interpreted as spiritual epiphany and psychotic break. See, for example, Arnold, The Divine Madness, 171.

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27. See Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, eds. Pamela Jackson et al. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 148–149. Notably, Carlo Pagetti has compared the opening of Stigmata to that in Martian Time-Slip, where a similar “wake up” moment occurs: “Dick and Meta-SF,” tr. Angela Minchella and Darko Suvin, Science Fiction Studies 2, no. 1 (1975): 26. 28. Dick, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, 273. 29. Ibid., 237. 30. Ibid, 235. 31. Ibid, 298. 32. Ibid, 310. 33. Ibid, 299. 34. See Joseph Wiezenbaum’s outline of the device in his Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1976), 6, 188. 35. Jay Epstein and W. D. Klinkenberg, “From ELIZA to Internet: A Brief History of Computerized Assessment,” Computers in Human Behavior 17 (2001): 296. 36. See Simon A. Senzon, “Chiropractic and Energy Medicine: A Shared History,” Journal of Chiropractic Humanities 15 (2008): 44; Frederick Peterson and C. G. Jung, “Psycho-Physical Investigations with the Galvonometer and Pneumograph in Normal and Insane Individuals,” Brain 30 (1907): 11. 37. Volney Mathison, “A Phony Phone,” Radio News 2, no. 7 (January 1921): 458, 497, http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Radio-News/20s/Radio-News-1921-01-R.pdf. 38. Volney Mathison, Electropsychometry (Los Angeles: Mathison Electropsychometers, 1953), 103, see https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/E-Meter/Electropsychometry.pdf; Motion-picture projection arc monitor, US Patent 2,487,024 A, filed December 3, 1948, and issued November 1, 1949. 39. Mathison, Electropsychometry, 103. 40. Ibid. 41. Omar V. Garrison, The Hidden Story of Scientology (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1974), 64. 42. L. Ron Hubbard, “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science,” Astounding Science Fiction 65, no. 3 (1950): 43–86. 43. Volney Mathison, Electropsychometer or bioelectronic instrument, US Patent 2,684,670 A, filed August 1, 1954, and issued July 27, 1954. 44. Ibid. 45. See L. Ron Hubbard, Electropsychometric Auditing: Operator’s Manual, Dianetics and Scientology (Phoenix, A: The Office of L. Ron Hubbard, 1952), 3, https://stss.nl/stss-materials/ English/Books%20Original%20PDF%20Scan%20OCR/ Electropsychometric%20Auditing%201952.pdf. 46. Ibid., 17, 51. 47. Bent Corydon et al., L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman? (New Jersey: Lyle Stuart Inc., 1987), 313. 48. L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics 1955! (The Hubbard Association of Scientologists International, 1955), 79. 49. Volney Mathison, Creative Image Therapy (Los Angeles: Mathison Electropsychometers, 1954), 81–84; Practical Self Hypnosis (Los Angeles: Mathison Electropsychometers, 1957). 50. L. Ron Hubbard, Device for measuring and indicating changes in resistance of a living body. US Patent 3,290,589 A, filed 7 June, 1965, and issued December 6, 1966. 51. Volney Mathison to the Editor, The Aberree 11, no. 3 (June 1964): 15, http://www. aberree.com/v11/n03p15.html. 52. In 1968, Dick had copies “back to October 1933:” see Philip K. Dick, “Notes Made Light at Night by a Weary SF Writer,” in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), 19.

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53. The story is full of such allusions to Scientology’s definition of a “Clear” as “an unaberrated person.” See Dick, “The Turning Wheel,” Science Fiction Stories 2 (1954): 41–88. 54. Dick, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, 238. 55. Ibid, 237. 56. Ibid. 57. See Kenneth A. Kobak et al., “A Computer-Administered Telephone Interview to Identify Mental Disorders,” Journal of the American Medical Association 278, no. 11 (1997): 910. 58. James Phillips, “Technology and Psychiatry,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, eds. K. W. M. Fulford et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 182. 59. See Karen Isminger et al., “Philosophical Considerations of an Internet-enabled Telephone and Computer Psychiatric Symptom Monitoring System,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Technology and Psychiatry, ed. James Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 215–30. 60. Juan E. Mezzich et al., “Introduction to Person-Centered Psychiatry,” in Person Centered Psychiatry, eds. Juan E. Mezzich et al. (London: Springer, 2016), 1. 61. On psychopolitics, see Peter Sedgwick, Psycho Politics (London: Pluto Press, 1982). 62. Dick, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, 334. 63. Donald Mender, “Toward a Post-technological Information Theory,” in Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Phillips, 135. 64. Dick, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, 311. 65. Ibid, 308. 66. Ibid, 246. 67. Ibid, 301. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid, 393. 72. Daniel J. H. Levack, et al., PKD: A Philip K. Dick Bibliography (California: Underwood-Miller, 1981), 88. 73. Dick, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, 263. 74. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 369. 75. Ibid. 76. Dick, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, 263. 77. On “cosmetic pharmacology,” see Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York: Viking, 2003). 78. Sutin, Divine Invasions, 50. 79. Ibid. 80. See N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 81. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 376. 82. Ibid. 83. Dick, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, 235, 298, 335. 84. Ibid, 29. 85. Roslynn D. Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994), 232. 86. Palmer, Philip K. Dick, 208–209. 87. Dick, The Search for Philip K. Dick, 93; Sutin, Divine Invasions, 124–26.

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WORKS CITED Anton, Uwe and Werner Fuchs. “So I Don’t Write about Heroes: An Interview with Philip K. Dick.” SF Eye 14 (1996): 37–46. http://2010philipkdickfans.philipkdickfans.com/frank/ anton.html. Arnold, Kyle. The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Ashley, Mike. The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950: The History of the Science-Fiction Magazine: Volume I. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Edited by Hal Foster. Washington: Bay Press, 1983. Bedore, Pamela. Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Carrère, Emmanuel. I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick. Translated by Timothy Bent. New York: Picador, 2004. Corydon, Bent and L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman? New Jersey: Lyle Stuart Inc., 1987. Danesi, Marcel. Popular Culture: Introductory Perspectives. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. Delany, Samuel R. The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1960–1965. New York: Arbor House, 1988. Dick, Anne R. The Search for Philip K. Dick. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications, 2010. Dick, Philip K. “Notes Made Late at Night by a Weary SF Writer,” in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin, 18–20. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995. ———. “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.” In Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s. Edited by Jonathan Lethem, 230–430. New York: Library of America, 2007. ———. “The Turning Wheel.” Science Fiction Stories 2 (1954): 41–88. ———. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Edited by Pamela Jackson, Jonathan Lethem, and Erik Davis. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. ———. “A World of Talent.” In Galaxy Science Fiction 9, no. 1 (1954): 6–46. Double, D. B., ed. Critical Psychiatry: The Limits of Madness. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Epstein, Jay and W. D. Klinkenberg. “From ELIZA to Internet: A Brief History of Computerized Assessment.” Computers in Human Behavior 17 (2001): 295–314. Garrison, Omar V. The Hidden Story of Scientology. Secaucus, N. J.: Citadel Press, 1974. Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Haynes, Roslynn D. From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994. Hoberek, Andrew P. “The ‘Work’ of Science Fiction: Philip K. Dick and Occupational Masculinity in the Post-World War II United States.” Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 2 (1997): 374–75. Hubbard, Lafayette Ron. “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science.” Astounding Science Fiction 65, no. 3 (1950): 43–86. ———. Dianetics 1955!. The Hubbard Association of Scientologists International, 1955. ———. Electropsychometric Auditing: Operator’s Manual, Dianetics and Scientology. Phoenix, Arizona: The Office of L. Ron Hubbard, 1952. https://stss.nl/stss-materials/English/ Books%20Original%20PDF%20Scan%20OCR/ Electropsychometric%20Auditing%201952.pdf. ———. Device for measuring and indicating changes in resistance of a living body. US Patent 3,290,589 A, filed 7 June, 1965, and issued December 6, 1966. Isminger, Karen and Dale Theobald. “Philosophical Considerations of an Internet-enabled Telephone and Computer Psychiatric Symptom Monitoring System.” In Philosophical Perspectives on Technology and Psychiatry, edited by James Phillips, 215–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Kobak, Kenneth A., Leslie VH Taylor and Susan L. Dottl, John H. Greist, James W. Jefferson, Diane Burroughs, Julie M. Mantle, David J. Katzelnick, Randal Norton, Henry J. Henk, Ronald C. Serlin. “A Computer-Administered Telephone Interview to Identify Mental Disorders.” Journal of the American Medical Association 278, no. 11 (1997): 905–910. Kramer, Peter D. Listening to Prozac. New York: Viking, 2003. Levack, Daniel J. H. and Steven Owen Godersky. PKD: A Philip K. Dick Bibliography. California: Underwood-Miller, 1981. Luey, Beth. “Modernity and Print III: The United States 1890–1970.” In A Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, 368–380. London: Blackwell, 2007. Mathison, Volney. “A Phony Phone,” Radio News 2, no. 7 (January 1921): 458, 497. http:// www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Radio-News/20s/Radio-News-1921-01-R.pdf. ———. “Dear Editor.” The Aberree 11, no. 3 (June 1964): 15. http://www.aberree.com/v11/ n03p15.html. ———. Creative Image Therapy. Los Angeles: Mathison Electropsychometers, 1954. ———. Electropsychometer or bioelectronic instrument. US Patent 2,684,670 A, filed August 1, 1954, and issued July 27, 1954. ———. Electropsychometry, Los Angeles: Mathison Electropsychometers, 1953. https://www. cs.cmu.edu/~dst/E-Meter/Electropsychometry.pdf. ———. Motion-picture projection arc monitor. US Patent 2,487,024 A, filed December 3, 1948, and issued November 1, 1949. ———. Practical Self Hypnosis. Los Angeles: Mathison Electropsychometers, 1957. Menand, Louis. “Pulp’s Big Moment.” The New Yorker, January 5, 2015. http:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/pulps-big-moment. Mender, Donald. “Toward a Post-technological Information Theory.” In Philosophical Perspectives on Philosophical Perspectives on Technology and Psychiatry, edited by James Phillips et al., 135–152. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Mezzich, Juan E., Michel Botbol, George N. Christodoulou, C. Robert Cloninger, and Ihsan M. Salloum. “Introduction to Person-Centered Psychiatry.” In Person Centered Psychiatry, edited by Juan E. Mezzich, Michel Botbol, George N. Christodoulou, C. Robert Cloninger, and Ihsan M. Salloum, 1–18. London: Springer, 2016. Pagetti, Carlo. “Dick and Meta-SF.” Translated by Angela Minchella and Darko Suvin. Science Fiction Studies 2, no. 1 (1975): 24–31. Palmer, Christopher. Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and the Terror of the Postmodern. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003. Persaud, Raj. “Faking It: The Emotional Labour of Medicine.” BMJ Careers, 28 August 2004. http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=394. Peterson, Frederick and C. J. Jung. “Psycho-Physical Investigations with the Galvonometer and Pneumograph in Normal and Insane Individuals.” Brain 30 (1907): 11–218. Phillips, James. “Technology and Psychiatry,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, edited by K. W. M. Fulford, Martin Davies, Richard G. T. Gipps, George Graham, John Z. Sadler, Giovanni Stanghellini, and Tim Thornton, 177–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Rabinowitz, Paula. American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Sadowsky, Jonathan. Electroconvulsive Therapy in America: The Anatomy of a Medical Controversy. New York: Routledge, 2017. Sedgwick, Peter. Psycho Politics. London: Pluto Press, 1982. Senzon, Simon A. “Chiropractic and Energy Medicine: A Shared History.” Journal of Chiropractic Humanities 15 (2008): 27–54. Stiegler, Bernard. “Anamnesis and Hypomnesis: Plato as the First Thinker of the Proletarianisation.” Ars Industrialis. http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis. Sutin, Lawrence. Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005.

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Wiezenbaum, Joseph. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation. New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1976. Wintz, Henri and Hyde, David. Precious Artifacts: A Philip K. Dick Bibliography 1955–2012. California: Wide Books, 2012.

II

Everyday Epistemologies

Chapter Four

Filth and the Everyday Hisup Shin

EVERYDAY LIFE STUDIES: A NOVELISTIC OVERVIEW The current vogue of “everyday life studies” offers an opportunity for students of the modern novel to broaden their view of the genre. In incorporating a variety of disciplines and critical theories, this arena of cultural studies allows them to examine the genre in shifting, interdisciplinary contexts. At the same time, it is also important to note how the novelistic treatment of the everyday can be seen as a major contribution to the studies in the everyday. In devising a range of narrative or stylistic moves, the underlying logic anticipates some of the major concerns addressed by theorists and scholars in the field. In order to assess this contribution, one has to begin by recognizing the fact that everyday life has always been part of the most defining characteristics of the novel in its steadfast commitment to realism. In a long history of stylistic shifts and variations in shaping the novel’s generic identity and symbolic roles in the modern world, the everyday emerges as a kind of perceptual backdrop in fostering a sense of verisimilitude. Standing in contrast to the mythical dominion of kings and heroes cast in the epic or romantic convention, this realist impression refers to a world of recognizable characteristics and assumptions common to all human experiences, one that is firmly based on the uniformity of time and space traversing all periods and regions. The sense of familiarity and empathy associated with the novelistic everyday thus suggests the empirical conviction that the world is basically a predictable place, spreading beyond the immediate range of individual experiences. In accommodating a myriad of different, often conflicting activities, the everyday strengthens the impression that they cohere into sharable patterns of regularity and unity, constituting our knowable world. 59

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Likewise, what characterizes modern in novelistic representation is the way in which the everyday is often included as an outlying region of perception, whose indistinctness nevertheless serves as the realist effect of extending horizon continuously and uniformly moving away from the main arena of narrative interest. Art historian Norman Bryson draws on a similar observation as an important point of parallels between Western painting and the novel in their development into the stage of modern realism: The technical development of Renaissance painting will take place largely in this “unmotivated” region of semantic inessentiality, as the painters learn to marshal more and more data on their canvases, information which because claimed by no textual function, and offered without ulterior motif, acquires the character of innocence. In just this fashion the realist novel, with its vast corpus of information concerning time-sequences and specific locations, subplots, half-noticed and instantly forgotten detail, will out of seeming inconsequentiality construct the lifelike appearance of the real and possible worlds. 1

In my view, the “unmotivated region of semantic inessentiality” characterizes the everyday as a unique field of modern representation, which is brought on by an epistemological need to cope with a phenomenal world that becomes increasingly complex. Within this frame of perception or storytelling, all the complicating aspects of modern life potentially cohere into a seamless web of repetitive, mundane daily operations and duties, which secures the realism of human experiences even in their most unusual moments and aberrations. It comes as no surprise that some of the most influential studies of the modern novel converge at the everyday as an occasion for clarifying and elaborating their different, sometimes mutually clashing points of view. It is important to account for this tension-ridden convergence, which anticipates, in my view, the contours of everyday life studies in all its theoretical complexity. 2 For Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács, everyday life is a symptom of the gradual decline of historical consciousness enacted by realist or naturalist writers emerging in post-revolutionary Europe. Bereft of “any serious historical background,” their social outlook spells out the condition of monotonous existence for “average men and women of bourgeois everyday life.” 3 The everyday here is no longer the viable backdrop of verisimilitude to novelistic representation, but a bad ideology of familiarity, whose narrative frame of predictable sameness obfuscates the dramatic potential of social conflicts lodged in historical events or momentum. As a result, there appears in the modern novel “the great objective contradictions of social life . . . in blunted form and often paled into unrecognizability.” 4 On the other hand, the outgrowth of the everyday displacing the historical time of social conflicts and contradictions can be seen as an occasion for narrative innovations, which stands as a decisive turning point in the devel-

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opment of European modern fiction. In Erich Auerbach’s influential study of Western literature, that defining moment is marked by the pursuit of realism informing a line of stylistic development from Stendhal through Balzac to Flaubert. Adopting different approaches to narrative components from personage to setting, this realist pursuit spells out an increasing degree to which all aspects of human experience appear woven into manifold social and material relations. For the critic, everyday life brings to light precisely the interrelated social fabric, in which all its trivial, repetitive rules and operations potentially reveal what is significant about modern experience, containing the germ for dramatic storytelling. Lukács’ strict distinction between historical time and clock time is no longer meaningful here, since the everyday is invested with all the nuances and implications of internal conflicts that can produce meaningful consequences. It is to this effect that Auerbach notes the shift in the treatment of the everyday from a range of classical styles including comical and satirical to “the entrance of existential and tragic seriousness into realism.” 5 One important consequence of this stylistic shift is the way in which narrative is elevated into a level of subtle observation in which “every event, if one is able to express it purely and completely, interprets itself and the persons involved in it far better and more completely than any opinion or judgment appended to it could.” 6 In referring to Flaubert’s style as the culmination of realist development, this passage suggests an ideal condition of writing in which language almost becomes a vehicle for accurate representation by eliminating symbolic or mythical characters. 7 Relevant to note is how this type of “pure realism” is effective in revealing the everyday in its most undisguised, natural state. In Flaubert, Auerbach claims, the everyday appears in monotonous, uninterrupted movements in which “life no longer surges and foams, it flows viscously and sluggishly.” 8 The “viscous and sluggish” texture of life is the realism of the everyday, which alludes to the way in which individuals in varying states of banal existence are all in fact inextricably linked to the web of material and social relations. Far from occasioning a Lukácsian denunciation, the everyday is then seen as an object of narrative investment, since the “viscous and sluggish” texture of life” unearths from the surface of familiar sameness, “another movement, almost imperceptible but universal and unceasing, so that the political, economic, and social subsoil appears comparatively stable and at the same time intolerably charged with tension.” 9 It is this dual aspect of the everyday in perceptual or experiential oscillation between two opposing states—between idleness and recognition or stability and tension—that fosters possibilities for creative expression and dramatic revelation. Consider briefly a passage from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) in which Emma Bovary’s loathing of her eventless provincial life with her husband is captured in a domestic setting:

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Chapter 4 But it was at meal-times, in particular, that she felt as though she were at the end of her tether, at meal-times in the little parlour on the ground-floor, with its smoky stove, its creaking door, its sweating walls and its damp flags. All the bitterness of existence lay heaped on her plate. With the steamy vapour of the meat stale gusts of dreariness rose from the depths of her heart. 10

While Emma is seen completely occupied by the sentiment of “bitterness,” the realist effect stems from the way in which the self-absorptive state of bitterness also engenders a space of neglect where a peculiar sense of everydayness unfolds. Extending beyond Emma’s neglectful, idle perception, her eventless life gains a “viscous and sluggish” texture by leaving its subtle imprints on each item of the domestic setting—“its smoky stove, its creaking door, its sweating walls and its damp flags.” When caught under the microscopic, unobtrusive narrative gaze, what appears eventless is not eventless, but imbued with a potential for dramatic storytelling, since it is organized by a conflicting network of material and human relations defining Emma’s domestic existence. Conceptually speaking, such a novelistic treatment reveals a dimension of the everyday far more complex than the frame of perceptual homogeneity that the earlier notion entails. In a way that challenges this facile view, the everyday now appears as a site fissured with an irresolvable sense of ambiguity, caught as it is between knowledge and experience or cliché and understanding. In elucidating the ambiguity of the everyday, the novelistic treatment can be thus seen as a prelude to the way in which critics and scholars validate everyday life as a distinct field of cultural investigation by referring to the same sense of ambiguity. At the outset of his introductory account of everyday life studies, Ben Highmore points out how “it explicitly and implicitly addresses the ‘everyday’ as a problematic, a contested and opaque terrain, where meanings are not to be found ready-made.” 11 On the other hand, in dealing with this “problematic dimension” everyday life studies proves quite effective in revealing how it triggers strategies of social management interweaving different ideas and technologies, which offers an engaging, multifaceted backdrop to the novelistic representation. Consider for instance more recent literary studies drawing their attention to the way in which the problematic everyday is governed by various narrative moves to an effect of ideological consolidation, while dealing with various issues from imperialism to nationalism. In Edward Said’s view, the imperialist operation of 19th-century English fiction includes among others a background narrative practice of layering Britain’s colonial ventures into what can be seen as a familiar perception of the nation’s position in the global world, “whose purpose is not to raise more questions, not to disturb or otherwise preoccupy attention, but to keep the empire more or less in place.” 12 In referring to the way in which the colonial pursuits led by fictional characters—“for relatively simple purposes such as immigration, fortune,

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or exile”—are reduced to a minor, forgettable event glimpsed at the margins of storytelling, this background practice is an ideological deployment of the everyday in minimizing its ambiguous perceptual dimension and repackaging it as a familiar, thus acceptable order of the world, “a slowly built up picture of England . . . at the center and a series of overseas territories connected to it as the peripheries.” 13 In Franco Moretti’s study of geographical settings as an important factor in informing stylistic variations in 19th-century European novels, such an ideological formulation spells out an increasing density of literary figuration from symbolism to metaphor by which whatever alien or unknowable settles into a sign of something familiar, occupied as it is by a network of linguistic associations and analogies. This rhetorical process of spatial familiarization—“an immediate semantic sketch of our surroundings,” in his own words—can be seen as the epistemology of the everyday in its metaphoric capacity for turning what is unknowable into an extension of the knowable world in all its familiar, forgettable images: “In a unknowing space, we need an immediate ‘semantic’ sketch’ of our surroundings . . . and only metaphors know how to do it. Only metaphors, I mean, can simultaneously express the unknown we must face, and yet also contain it.” 14 Moretti’s observation is then how this epistemological operation is central to the storytelling of crossing borders and mapping different localities ever so often carried out by modern novels—not necessarily limited to the imperialist frame of storytelling. In all its ideological implications, such a pattern of representation testifies to the fact that the generalizing, unambiguous feel of the everyday is just as viable an epistemological process as close observation in making sense of the world. Everyday life studies tells us how such types of ideological deployment are layered into a discursive frame of social control interweaving various technological rules and institutional imperatives. By the discursive frame, I am referring to what can be seen as a comprehensive process of European modernization in adopting and extending various technologies and discourses of social functions, by which individuals at all levels of experience are translated into patterns of knowledge and calculated formation. Ben Highmore describes how in major critical theories of modernity this sweeping operation converges at the everyday as the frontier of social mechanization subjugating human experiences at their most minute levels including daily routines and habits. Ranging from Lukacs’ theory of reification and Adorno’s culture industry to Althusser’s analysis of ISA and Foucault’s overarching governance of administrative technologies, these critical ideas all highlight different sites of micro-level management equipped with skills and technologies for physical or psychological adjustments. In referring to this frame of regulation, Highmore claims that “the everyday has been and is

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continually invaded by a certain scrutiny for the effective governance of social subjects.” 15 MANAGING FILTH IN EDWIN CHADWICK’S REPORT ON SANITARY CONDITIONS In the following, I want to consider a discursive field of representation in which the novelistic realism of the everyday organizes a set of narrative techniques and images bound up in contemporary views of medicine. Medicine in its typical attention to the patient’s body, habits, and symptoms facilitates concepts and metaphors that have “by far the closest and most longstanding association with the issues of mimesis and knowledge so crucial to critical conceptions of realism.” 16 At a time when industrial modernization occasioned the expansion of slums and ghettos across manufacturing towns and cities, the attention to “the organizations and functions of organic matter” 17 helped foster a culture of public health, one that is outlined by distinct patterns of concepts and metaphors in considering filth as a carrier of diseases. Before the advent of bacteriology, the theory of filth pointed the finger at the exposed decaying organic substance as the cause of some kind of micro-organic activity of infection (“miasmata”). While inaccurate, this view nevertheless set the stage for a number of public policies and activities organized by what is now referred to as the public health movement of mid-19thcentury Europe. 18 My purpose is then to examine the way in which the medical theory of filth complete with administrative views and technologies serves as a discursive backdrop that informs the modern novel in organizing the figuration of the everyday. It is quite relevant in this sense to return to the scene from Madam Bovary and note how the everyday disclosed by the narrator’s keen observation is also associated with ugliness and grime set in domestic objects—“its smoky stove, its creaking door, its sweating walls and its damp flags.” The “viscous and sluggish” texture of the everyday brought on by Emma’s involvement in complex relations as recounted earlier also alludes to as its temporal backdrop a kind of inherent negativity of time in its “realist” mode; a biological sense of duration overlaying the unstoppable process of decay. Filth and grim suggests how her mundane experience conceals within the empty passage of time that claims its jurisdiction by leaving marks of deterioration on everything it touches from objects to human relations. What is revealing is how the figuration of filth and grime effectively highlights the space of inattention or neglect, in which the everyday spells out disturbing, conflicting realities beyond our idle, familiar perception. It is of no coincidence that the figuration of filth and deterioration in modern realist arts serves as a field of sharpening perception in dealing with

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the everyday. If exaggerated by naturalist writers and artists to sensationalist proportions, the figuration of filth was intended as a radical gesture of, in Courbet’s words, “dragging art down into the gutter” and salvaging the real from the bourgeois ideology of respectability and cultural norm. 19 In Marx, the metaphor of filth is brought to highlight the shocking condition of the working classes—“the dangerous class, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society”—as the reality of the everyday subjugated by the exploitative structure of bourgeois economy; the reality that, the writer claims, would emerge as a radical social change, “swept into the movement by a proletariat revolution.” 20 For one recent critic, the figuration of filth carries a subversive strategy of turning the hierarchy of commodity value upside down: “To describe as anticommodities the literary images of useless or noxious things means referring them virtually. . .to excrement—to that which is least commercializable among discarded articles.” 21 To sum up, the figuration of filth and deterioration is a crucial ingredient in the making of realist representation in the sense that it offers the everyday in all its unglamorous details, which jar with, if not demythologize, certain assumptions of modern life cast in the familiarizing perception of the everyday. 22 Such a subversive potential of filth, on the other hand, unexpectedly entails a medical perspective in which “comprehending social totality, in the realistic novel, means defining that totality not only as a milieu (with the biological overtones that word implies), but as a pathological milieu.” Taken as a theoretically constituted field of representation informed by a set of medical theories and techniques, the “pathological milieu” alludes to a sense of duration in which “signs and symptoms will resolve into cases of diseases.” 23 Indeed, the sign of decay enveloping Emma’s daily existence in the quote above is pathologically conceived in the sense that it offers an etiological backdrop to her unusual mood swings and irritability, which are later diagnosed by an experienced doctor in Rouen as “a nervous ailment that needed change of air.” 24 The effect of the real here not only stems from Flaubert’s “adopting the point of view of a doctor. . .thinking in terms and with the diagnostic suppositions of a clinician,” 25 but is also tangibly sensed in the way such a narrative posture highlights the “viscous and sluggish” sense of the everyday that accompanies Emma’s deteriorating condition: “On some days she prattled with a sort of feverish gaiety. But these exalted moods would be suddenly succeeded by periods of languor when she sat motionless and silent.” 26 If the novel in its commitment to truthfulness underscores the banality of everyday life marked by disturbing realities of filth and neglect, it does so with a sense of anxiety directed at the possible erosion of humanity among those who are immersed in it. Nowhere is this pathological suggestion pursued as rigorously as in the mid-century sanitary movement in Britain, whose discourses and technolo-

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gies of public health extends into a comprehensive scope of analysis in dealing with the everyday as a major site of sanitary concerns. Consider Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Poor of Great Britain (1842), the first major documentary output of the sanitary movement. Dominant in this writing is the way in which terms of filth— “rotting places in the fields” (158), “stagnant ditches” (158), “fluid filth from ash pits or cesspools” (104), “offensive privies” (406), “neglected sewers” (406) and many others—lend themselves to a pathological backdrop that scrutinizes the ordinary run of daily activities and contacts. Interesting to note is how this critical scrutiny, in evoking fear of physical contact or breathing foul air, strikes a note of anxiety on the steady growth of the city, as it often alludes to the unknowability of urban multiplicity as the cause of threat. In referring to the link between contagion and filth, Dr. Speer gave an account of the diseases of lower classes in Dublin that spread uncontrollably: We cannot but wonder at the rapidity with which contagion often spreads. Both in and out of doors, it seems facilitated in every way; within doors every article of furniture and wearing apparel is disfigured with filth;. . ..Out of doors. . .our churchyards, slaughter-houses, and the masses of filth and offal with which our streets and lanes are disgraced, contribute no less to the propagation of contagion. 27

Here as in many other passages recounting elements of poor sanitation, the city is seen as a breeding ground of infection in which filth and rubbish takes on random trajectories, plugged as it is into the massive, random flows of people, animals, and objects. This apprehensive social outlook gave leverage to an emerging moraldisciplinary vision that considers the worsening conditions of the urban poor as a social as well as sanitary threat. Filth and poor hygiene was now held accountable for objectionable behaviors and habits. Ranging from “idleness” to “indulgence in ardent spirits,” 28 habits linked to the urban lower classes served as a dismal urban outlook of poor sanitation, which reinforced by contrast the reformist rationale for close inspection, “a move towards . . . being more closely observed and constituted by middle-class ideology.” 29 Relevant to note here is how this need for inspection projects a kind of spatial rationalization lodged in a series of administrative policies and technologies directed at different locales of everyday life. There is, first of all, Chadwick’s proposal for a comprehensive network of pipes and drains for constant supply of water and waste removal interweaving all the houses and streets: “From the river, in a constant running stream, it flowed into the taps and water-closets of each house. From these it flowed away, together with the house refuse into sewers, meeting another stream there from the street pipes which had swept the solid refuse off the road.” 30 Underlying this arterial disposal system is an administrative remapping of different localities and

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boundaries jumbled up in disputes between private landowners, builders and different public commissioners. In London, the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers refurbished in 1847 became the precursor of the London County Council, “which gave London, outside the City walls, for the first time, an administrative body with powers to pursue a range of public services.” 31 The systematic management of public services thus proposes a homogeneous spatial expansion not just to level off local differences, but also to translate all the daily events and movements into measurable, adjustable patterns. The important outcome of this is the way in which Chadwick’s accounts of daily patterns and activities produce men and objects all crisscrossing in varying degrees of abstraction. Such an abstract pattern constructs a familiarizing perception of the everyday by layering the world of multiplicity into an extending network of identifiable linguistic associations and analogs. In dealing with dehumanizing and abject elements, this linguistic feat of familiarization spells out a conceptual-technological process of reduction and substitution, by which whatever makes an individual or a thing distinct is erased and reconfigured as a measure of abstract value commensurable with each other. 32 Consider for instance how the arterial networks of pipes and drains also serve as a kind of value-creating system, in which filth, once conveyed safely to crop fields, is no longer the material bearer of sluggish temporality (“putrefaction generating miasmata”), but a valuable property (“the immense value of night-oil as manure”), “totally inoffensive, inodorous, and transportable.” 33 In a similar way, Chadwick argues how his sanitary system can also convert the laboring classes, once perceived as realities of moral degeneration, into a bearer of abstract value from improved work productivity to moral discipline: “I see no reason to doubt that by the removal of noxious agencies not essential to their trades; by sanitary measures affecting their dwellings, combined with improvements in their own habits, the period of ability for productive labour might be extended to the whole of the labouring class.” 34 At one point, he introduces the idea of “sweeping-machines drawn by horses” proposed by a civil engineer as an alternative to the troublesome, potentially “insurrectionary” swarms of rag pickers: In displacing those outdated sanitation workers, the mechanical device embodies an advanced degree of physical abstraction that would ensure “a smooth and firm surface for the carriageway.” 35 Within the broadening frame of abstraction and value creation facilitating such functionalist analogies and transpositions traversing individuals, objects, and places, the everyday emerges as a predictable pattern of administrative discourses and technological applications conquering different localities and experiences. As a result, what is familiar is the generalizing overview of the way in which sanitary technologies and their moral or ideological imperatives are layered into the fabric of daily experiences to their most minute or private moments: “In general it has appeared in the course of the

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present inquiry that the state of the [sanitary] conveniences gives . . . a very fair indication of the state of the habits of population, in respect to household, and even personal cleanliness.” 36 MANAGING FILTH IN CHARLES DICKENS’ URBAN STORYTELLING As suggested at the start of the previous section, I want to examine the pattern of novelistic account of the everyday shaping in complicity with those technological rules and institutional imperatives produced by the sanitary movement. Particular attention will be placed on the way in which the novelistic everyday is consolidated by a range of narrative or figural moves at the site of filth and decay, which alludes to as its condition of possibility the administrative fabric of perceptual familiarization. It is with this view in mind that I want to deal with a small selection of urban sketches and novels by Dickens where parallels between everyday life and filth can be observed. In my view, these parallels are not arbitrary, but constitute a distinct ground of representation that stands in kinship with the increasing degree of administrative management devised for public health. What is noticeable about Dickens, first of all, is the use of the flâneurnarrator in accounting for filth and the everyday. At first look, the inclusion of the strolling figure appears befitting, as it can broadly anticipate an aesthetic of shock that bears on the sense of asymmetry between knowledge and perception in urban experience. In the writings of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, the flâneur is firmly linked to the swift, often tensionridden change of urban outlook brought on by technological and social transformations. As a result, the figure embodies not so much leisurely strolls, but an uneven texture of creative, if unruly, consciousness wrought by constant alternations between a series of opposite physical and psychical states—idle leisure and frenzied motion, the connoisseur-like appreciation of classical beauty and an immoderate obsession with base objects, or detached observation and its reverse pull towards direct involvement. 37 Attuned to the conflicting dimension of urban experience, the flâneur is “the practice and epistemological premises of 19th-century realism . . . [as] it points towards the crisis of representation that is to be the mainspring of modernist innovation and the continuing preoccupation of postmodernist experiment.” 38 In contrast to the modernist aesthetic of shock, the flâneur can be also seen as a vehicle for meticulous documentation that sheds light on urban oddities and conflicts. This concept was brought on by the way in which researchers and investigators on foot emerged across different forms of writing, a stylistic shift that reflected an increasing demand for empirical realism in the nineteenth century when England was undergoing a series of modern-

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ization from politics to economy. 39 These figures capable of conveying candid observation permeated the broad spectrum of mid-century journalistic writings, which were concerned with various issues from urban sanitation to prison reform. It is thanks to their efforts in accounting for filthy environments in their reports and essays that “middle-class readers take up texts of unexpected and horrifying scenes and become increasingly able to endure the shocks entailed. It has become an act of moral good to read of working-class promiscuity and disease.” 40 Accompanying the flâneur’s empirical knowledge is what a recent critic calls “cultural and literary resonance,” one that stems from the way in which the urban stroller serves as a framework of storytelling “for making sense of urban problems and urban change, from the spread of disease to the growth of a suffering underclass, from the profusion of filth to the decline of religious observance.” 41 The storytelling “for making sense of urban problems and urban change” here alludes to an act of evoking cultural understanding, one that particularly captures the way in which the flâneur layers a distinct range of figurative or narrative moves into a familiarizing, often sympathetic fabric of urban perception. Dickens’ urban essays and novels are useful here, since at the core of his topographical imagination there are tireless strollers adding rich details of the everyday to London’s streets and communities: “The street-walking persona that Dickens habitually chose to organize his brilliant journalistic city miniatures literally ‘became’ the narrator of his novels.” 42 Consider, for instance, his Sketches by Boz (1839), a kind of vast inventory of London things and people skillfully assembled by Boz, an ubiquitous, street-roaming narrator: While viewed by critics as his journalistic achievement in showing London in all its bewildering multiplicity, the text also tends to give the city a topographical coherence by connecting its myriad elements into an extending web of relations. What is interesting is how Boz deploys images of filth and decay in order to bring to light the poorest districts associated with various social as well as sanitary challenges. In accounting for the maze of Seven Dials, a notorious urban slum, the narrator, first of all, bafflingly questions, “But what involutions can compare with those of Seven Dials? Where is there such another maze of streets, courts, lanes, and alleys?” 43 He relates how this sense of spatial disorientation is intensified by the way in which “the streets and courts. . .are lost in the unwholesome vapour which hangs over the housetops, and renders the dirty perspective uncertain and confined.” 44 Adding to this spectacle of confusion and unknowability, the slum inhabitants emerge virtually synonymous with dirt and grime. Far from reinforcing the sense of disorientation, however, these figures are strategically deployed in such a way that they facilitate “the unmotivated region of semantic inessentiality” to quote from Norman Bryson’s passage excerpted at the beginning of this essay. Treated as a stylized cue in veering the reader’s attention

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from the narrative focal point of conflicts and tensions, they are all idle, unoccupied characters, whose recurring appearance throughout tends to trigger a low-level awareness of filth. In Seven Dials, they “lounge at every corner . . . whose appearance and dwellings would fill any mind but a regular Londoner’s with astonishment.” 45 In Monmouth-street, similar individuals are “seen seated, in chairs on the pavement, smoking their pipes, or watching the gambols of their engaging children as they revel in the gutter, a happy troop of infantine scavengers.” 46 The writer eventually concludes that London has a “class of men . . . [who] appear to have no enjoyment beyond leaning against posts . . . for hours, with listless perseverance.” 47 Jarring with Dickens’ style of characterization imbued with distinct goals and outlooks, these figures hardly have any role, as “steadfastly refusing to become a point of view, a position from which meaning can be grasped or ascribed.” 48 In “refusing to become a point of view,” their vacant gaze thus indicates “the unmotivated region of semantic inessentiality,” in which all the sensuous details of unwholesome experiences slide into a homogenous blur of inattention. It is in this peripheral world of no particular significance that filth makes low-key appearances, sometimes emerging as part of the figures’ fleeting glance—“watching the gambols of their engaging children as they revel in the gutter, a happy troop of infantine scavengers” 49—or, at other times, physically merging with the abject-looking inhabitants themselves—“loung[ing] at every corner . . . whose appearance and dwellings would fill any mind but a regular Londoner’s with astonishment.” 50 Looming as a kind of obscure and generalizing impression, filth in this outlying field of perception serves as an important index to the familiar world of everyday life extending beyond the frame of attention. In this sense, filth caught in the glance of Dickens’ idle figures is an effective vehicle for offering a glimpse of the everyday in all its ordinary, repetitive uneventfulness. Equally important is how this perceptual deployment of filth is accompanied by the police installed in the same rubric of everydayness: These men linger listlessly past, looking as happy and animated as a policeman on duty. 51 An occasional policeman may alone be seen at the street-corners, listlessly gazing on the deserted prospect before him. 52 Half an acre of shoes have suddenly found feet to fit them . . . an object of astonishment to the good people of Monmouth-street, and of no slight suspicion to the policemen at the opposite street corner. 53

Permeating the broad expanse of activities in all its animating, often suspicious signs, the police are an overarching presence of constant surveillance.

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Their presence is, however, largely ordinary, as they effectively blend in with the everyday in different states of operation from keen observation to languid idleness. In mirroring those idle figures recounted above, Dickens’ police are thus figured not so much to attract the reader’s attention, but to remain unnoticed so to speak as part of a familiar view of the city in all its daily tasks and procedures. To no small extent, this typical cityscape hinges on the modernization of the police as part of an increasing reformist call in the mid19th century for the centralization of power vested in the State. The Metropolitan Police District was introduced to the City of London as early as 1829, covering “all the parishes of which any part was within twelve miles of Charing Cross or of which the whole was within fifteen miles of Charing Cross.” 54 In mirroring Chadwick’s system of technological applications and moral-ideological imperatives traversing different spaces, the pervasive operation of police also ensures a similar kind of spatial abstraction by which the filth-ridden everyday is rendered controlled so to speak. In his mature fiction increasingly driven by comprehensive, purposeful social outlooks attuned to a range of reformist ideas and practices, Dickens’ inclusion of “semantic inessentiality” peopled by idle figures becomes more telling in producing the sense of the everyday. In accompanying the everbroadening police surveillance, this narrative sidekick is summoned to deal with areas possibly exceeding its range of inspection, in which, according to D. A. Miller, “police apparatus functions somewhat analogously.” 55 In addition to what the critic suggests by the expression “analogous function,” 56 it also includes in my view the familiar, often idling, mode of police operation as recounted above. It is in this sense that Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (1853), a police detective who is often identified as an embodiment of law enforcement set in Dickens’ mature fiction, “pervades a vast number of houses and strolls about an infinity of streets; to outward appearance rather languishing for want of an object.” 57 The “languishing appearance” he assumes is clearly a strategy to blend in with the class of idle figures, whose lack of attentiveness renders his detective work undetected in the familiar world of the everyday. It is in this mode of anonymous invisibility he gains an abstract quality of omnipresence: “Time and place cannot bind Mr. Bucket. Like man in the abstract, he is here today and gone tomorrow—but, very unlike man indeed, he is here again the next day.” 58 One notable ramification of such an abstract management of the everyday is the way in which Dickens deploys filth as a currency of cultural empathy. What is basically a play of cultural signs in familiarizing London, Dicken’s move suggests that filth is no longer harmful or unknowable, but a familiar image of the city’s life that can be instantly recognizable by strangers and Londoners alike. Note for instance how Dickens’ flâneur-narrator often assumes a stranger’s position in relating his observation, which creates an impression that all the visual details are not just shocking, but also culturally

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informative, wed as they are into the narrator’s knowledge of the begrimed city. It is to this effect that Dickens suggests in his “Seven Dials” sketch how “the stranger who finds himself in ‘The Dials’ for the first time, and stands Belzoni-like, at the entrance of seven obscure passages, uncertain which to take, will see enough around him to keep his curiosity and attention awake for no inconsiderable time.” 59 At another London sketch, the writer’s flâneur-narrator similarly relates the city streets as a site of exciting contrasts to be enjoyed by those who visit London. The contrast is offered by the way in which “a dark, dull, murky winter’s night, when there is just enough damp gently stealing down to make the pavement greasy, without cleansing it of any of its impurities” serves as a kind of dramatic setting that makes “the gas-lamps look brighter, and the brilliantly-lighted shop windows more splendid,” its visual counterpart “in the very height of [its] glory.” 60 In Bleak House, the same casual image of filth is inserted, caught by Esther Summerson on her first day in London: I admired the long succession and varieties of streets, the quantity of people already going to and fro, the number of vehicles passing and repassing, the busy preparations in the setting forth of shop windows and the sweeping out of shops, and the extraordinary creatures in rags, secretly groping among the swept-out rubbish for pins and other refuse. 61

Once identified as a troublesome type of the urban population by Chadwick, these rag pickers are here seen as part of the everyday, getting on with their daily activities amongst “the swept-out rubbish.” The sense of extraordinariness bestowed on them by Esther is not anxious in kind, but a pleasurable one, bespeaking her tourist perception in familiarizing London. These findings suggest that filth can be seen as what Henri Lefebvre calls “metalanguage” in characterizing the modern representation of everyday life, in the sense that filth designates a fixed set of signs (signification) that controls human perception in a range of self-justifying knowledge and clichés. 62 The flâneur-narrator’s observation is an act of reading or consuming these cultural signs and implications about filth. Envisaged by this act is then not filth alone, but how filth is defined in relation to the city and its inhabitants through various cultural or artistic representations. The dust-ridden cityscape in all these representations affords an abstract image, one in which individuals or items are not named or identified, but rather arbitrarily jumbled together to form an anonymous concatenation of people, shops, and objects, which provides a gateway to the extending rubric of cultural homogeneity. Our inquiry has so far examined how the image of filth and decay in Dickens is deployed in a way that echoes theories and technologies of sanitary reform. Dickens’ use of filth as the index to cultural empathy to be

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circulated and exchanged in the city offers an intriguing parallel to Chadwick’s sanitary vision in translating filth into functionalist analogies and values. This parallel is important, since it alludes to the urban everyday as the frontier of representation in which signs of abjection or decay signal conflicting paths of realism in depicting modern life. In what is now a well-warranted view of modern literature as “the literary and cultural response to the rise of the city as an Enlightenment construct from the 18th century to the present,” 63 filth and decay surely constitutes a negative slant of imagination in which daily commerce and activities spell out metaphorically and literally a degenerative process mired in contagion and moral depravity. It is in forestalling this negative process that Dickens’ work also mirrors the extending network of sanitary or disciplinary services as the narrative basis of the city in depicting everyday life. NOTES 1. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983), 60. 2. As will be shown, the conceptual proximity of novelistic studies to cultural studies is obtained by the way in which they can be viewed as theories of representation and storytelling. A variety of concerns revolving around the everyday from patterns of perception and experience to institutional constraints can be said representational in the sense that they all deal with aspects of understanding and knowledge 3. Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 176. 4. Ibid. 5. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953), 481. 6. Ibid., 486. 7. According to Roland Barthes, the language of “pure expression”—“every event . . . translates itself”—signals a path of innovation in modernist literature moving inexorably towards what the critic refers to as “colorless writing”; an ideal condition of representation in which “the social or mythical characters of a language are abolished in favor of a neutral and inert state of form.” See his Writing Degree Zero (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 7–8. 8. Auerbach, Mimesis, 490. 9. Ibid., 491. 10. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Gerald Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 61. 11. Ben Highmore, “Introduction: Questioning Everyday Life,” in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore (London: Routledge, 2002), 1. 12. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 74. 13. Ibid. 14. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 47. 15. Ben Highmore, “Introduction,”11. 16. Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 12. 17. N. D. Jewson, “The Disappearance of the Sick-Man from Medical Cosmology, 1770–1870,” Sociology 10, no. 2 (1976): 235. 18. For a brief account of public health history in 19th-century Europe, see Erwin Ackerknecht, A Short History of Medicine (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982), 210-17.

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19. David Trotter, Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteen-Century Art and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 83. 20. Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Revolutions of 1848, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 77. 21. Francesco Orlando, Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination, trans. Gabriel Pihas and Daniel Seidel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 15. 22. In William Rathje and Cullen Murphy’s seminal work on garbage archaeology, rubbish is seen as the unostentatious materiality of everyday life that can offer an insight into modern life alternative to its “self-aggrandizing advertisements”; garbage “is not an assertion but a physical fact—and thus sometimes serve as a useful corrective.” See their Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 11–12. 23. Rothfield, Vital Signs, 148. 24. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 63. 25. Rothfield, Vital Signs, 39. 26. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 63. 27. Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965), 165–66. 28. Ibid., 142, 163. 29. Joseph W. Childers, “Observation and Representation: Mr. Chadwick Writes the Poor,” Victorian Studies 37, no. 3 (1994): 419. 30. S. E. Finer, The Life and Time of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London: Methuen, 1952), 224. 31. M.W. Flinn, introduction to Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, by Edwin Chadwick (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965), 71. 32. According to Thomas Keenan, abstract reasoning takes on a linguistic trope of reduction and substitution obtained by an intellectual effort to “cease to think of properties by which things are distinguished in order to think only of those qualities in which they agree.” Beyond the familiarizing frame of perception, critic views that this linguistic logic is the basis of enlightenment thinking. For instance, in theorizing the notion of human rights, the process of abstraction is crucial in conceptualizing the common denomination of humanity as a point of similitude to be applicable to humans beyond all distinctions. See his “The Point is to [Ex]change it: Reading Capital, Rhetorically,” in Fetishism as a Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 167. 33. Chadwick, Report, 123. 34. Ibid., 254. 35. Ibid., 132. 36. Ibid., 141. 37. If Baudelaire deplores an increasing loss of humanity in the technological-mechanical turn of the city, Benjamin also adds that the poet-flâneur is equally intrigued by the same urban symptom often manifested in jostling crowds, rag pickers, prostitutes, etc.: “Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of the shock, he calls this man ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness’” See Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana, 1973), 171. 38. John Rignall, “Benjamin’s Flâneur and the Problem of Realism,” in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989), 112. 39. Humphry House, The Dickens World (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), 133. 40. Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in 19th century British Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 164. 41. Michelle Allen, Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 16–17. 42. Michael Hollington, “Dickens the Flâneur,” The Dickensian 77 (1981): 85. 43. Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, ed. Dennis Walder (London: Penguin, 1995), 92. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 96. 47. Ibid., 93.

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48. David Trotter, “Dickens’ Idle Man,” in Dickens Refigured: Bodies, Desires, and Other Histories, ed. John Schad (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 203. 49. Dickens, Sketches, 96. 50. Ibid., 92. 51. Ibid., 80. 52. Ibid., 69. 53. Ibid., 98. 54. Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London: Penguin, 1968), 30. 55. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 3. 56. By the expression, D. A. Miller refers to “the operations of another informal, and extralegal principle of organization and control,” with which Dickens deals with areas where “the law does not cover or supervise.” Ibid. 57. Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Norman Page. (London: Penguin, 1971), 768. 58. Ibid., 769. 59. Dickens, Sketches, 92 60. Ibid., 74. 61. Dickens, Bleak House, 97. 62. Henri Lefebvre observes that everyday life in the modern world often fails to produce socially meaningful or creative occasions, and remains as a fixed network of signification— “the substitution of signs for symbols and symbolism.” Unable to represent the real world, the everyday approximates to the level of “metalanguage,” a group of signs (linguistic and visual clichés) constraining the perception of everydayness. Lefebvre argues that such a view of the everyday subscribes to what can be seen as a linguistic turn in modern representation in which the experience of art or cityscape is regarded as an act of consuming a particular set of signs that has its own idioms: “The sightseer in Venice does not absorb Venice but words about Venice, the written words of guide-books and the spoken words of lectures, loudspeakers, and records.” See his Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Continuum, 2002), 39, 127, 133. 63. Richard Lehan. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1.

WORKS CITED Ackerknecht, Erwin. A Short History of Medicine. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982. Allen, Michelle. Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968. Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Illuminations, 155–200. Edited by Hannah Arendt. London: Fontana, 1973. Briggs, Asa. Victorian Cities. London: Penguin, 1968. Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Chadwick, Edwin. Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965. Childers, Joseph W. “Observation and Representation: Mr. Chadwick Writes the Poor.” Victorian Studies 37, no 3 (1994): 405–31. Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz. Edited by Dennis Walder. London: Penguin, 1995. ——— . Bleak House. Edited by Norman Page. London: Penguin, 1971. Finer, S. E. The Life and Time of Sir Edwin Chadwick. London: Methuen, 1952.

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Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Translated by Gerald Hopkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Flinn, M.W. Introduction to Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, by Edwin Chadwick, 1–73. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965. Highmore, Ben. “Introduction: Questioning Everyday Life.” In The Everyday Life Reader, 1–36. Edited by Ben Highmore. London: Routledge, 2002. Hollington, Michael. “Dickens the Flâneur.” The Dickensian 77 (1981): 71–87. House, Humphry. The Dickens World. London: Oxford University Press, 1942. Jewson, N. D. “The Disappearance of the Sick-Man from Medical Cosmology, 1770-1870.” Sociology 10, no. 2 (1976): 225–44. Keenan, Thomas. “The Point is to [Ex]change it: Reading Capital, Rhetorically.” in Fetishism as a Cultural Discourse, 152–85. Edited by Emily Apter and William Pietz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch. London: Continuum, 2002. Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Logan, Peter Melville. Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in 19th century British Prose. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Lukács, Georg. Studies in European Realism. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964. Marx, Karl. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In The Revolutions of 1848, 62–98. Edited by David Fernbach. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. London: Verso, 1998. Orlando, Francesco. Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination. Translated by Gabriel Pihas and Daniel Seidel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Rathje, William and Cullen Murphy. Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. Rignall, John. “Benjamin’s Flâneur and the Problem of Realism.” In The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, 112–21. Edited by Andrew Benjamin. London: Routledge, 1989. Rothfield, Lawrence. Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Trotter, David. “Dickens’ Idle Man.” In Dickens Refigured: Bodies, Desires, and Other Histories, 200–17. Edited by John Schad. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. ——— . Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteen-Century Art and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Chapter Five

The Prosaic and the Phantasmagoric Urban Bodies in Peter Carey’s The Tax Inspector Lydia Saleh Rofail

Peter Carey’s novel The Tax Inspector (1991) 1 is a study in dialectics, where the realm of the everyday exists alongside the extraordinary, not merely as a setting, but as a marker of the complex inner lives of its characters. These contradictions between the everyday and fantastical can be read as metaphors for a paradoxical Australian identity, which is at once global yet at the same time parochial, attempting to be transnationally expansive, and yet riddled with historical trauma. Carey’s style is an amalgam of the prosaic and imaginary, utilizing “a surreal combination of scrupulously realistic details and joltingly nightmarish logic” which serves to defamiliarize contemporary social ‘reality.’ The result is a hauntingly discursive “diagnosis of the personal and social diseases that ravage late twentieth-century Australia.” 2 For Carey, “Australia is the utmost on his poetic agenda.” 3 He writes “not just with the material facts of the Australian condition in the twenty-first century but with the cultural themes and preoccupations that have arisen from them.” 4 Consequently, as with much of his work that wrangles with cultural fixations in contemporary Australia, The Tax Inspector is a blend of realism and fantasy, and merges the prosaic with the imaginary. The eruptions of fabulation in the novel contrast with the everyday lives of the characters, and magical thinking is utilized as a panacea for the degradations and historical traumas that mar their prosaic domestic lives. Desolate outer suburbs frame opulent cities, bodies transform from perverse and filthy to fantastical, sublime, and even magical. The novel is centered on everyday objects which constitute the residue and excesses of late capitalism. These objects seem innocuous and unrelated, but actually serve as a psychological framework for the inner turmoil of the 77

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characters, as well as for Australian identity at large. They include inanimate things and bodies, as well as urban and suburban spaces. These spaces may range from the cluttered, degraded, and filthy, to the opulent and expansive. Objects, which at the outset may seem prosaic and everyday at key points in the narrative, move into the realm of the phantasmagorical and magical. John Plotz’s Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (2009), foregrounds the way we think of objects, particularly Victorian objects. These include novels, diamonds, family heirlooms, “trinkets and ornaments [which] became the metonymic placeholders for geographically disaggregated social networks.” 5 For Plotz, “the transportable objects help mediate the seemingly opposed categories of the local and global” because they are detachable from their settings and flexible. 6 These objects served to make a distant world closer. They are tokens or signifiers of identity and place, metonymic extensions of domestic ties and country that “Victorians on the move had left behind.” 7 Plotz’s idea of the ‘portability’ of these objects is thus derived from Victorian England “and its global extensions” as a “new way of imaging community, national identity, and even liberal selfhood on the move.” 8 In Victorian England these objects were the “apogee of English capitalism, with London doubling as the world’s industrial engine and central bank.” 9 The objects in The Tax Inspector, on the other hand, are symbols of global excess, greed, and degradation in the West as a consequence of late capitalism in the twentieth century. This chapter explores the relationship between such objects and structures of meaning within the everyday suburban and urban cultural spaces. Plotz’s theory of portable property extends beyond tangible properties and objects, into cultural practices and attributes and includes symbolic entities. 10 With this in mind, I define objects not only as inanimate things but also as bodies and spaces—both urban and suburban. As the narrative develops, these objects transform as they move from the domestic everyday of the local sphere, to the more aspirational realms of the fantastical and transnational. Hence the expected move towards the global is displaced in the novel by the fantastical. A case in point being the construction of Benny Catchprice’s traumatized body and its symbiotic relationship with the city. As a portable object, Benny’s body transforms from domestic, to global, and finally moves into the realm of the imaginary. Theories that explore the body, constructions of the city, and Australian identity, reveal how Benny’s body possesses a portability or mobility that is shaped, inscribed, and impacted by its everyday suburban setting. In an attempt to transcend these oppressive surroundings, his body becomes an imaginative angelic being. Benny’s everyday suburban life in the desolate suburb of outer Franklin is a counterpoint to the glittering and opulent but fallen city of Sydney. At times these objects (bodies and spaces), are made portable or linked by a ‘portal’ where an alternate reality is glimpsed. Ultimately, this analysis of The Tax Inspector demonstrates Plotz’s notion of ‘portability’ in

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relation to narrative ‘portals’ which reach into contrasting realms. Portability thus, is not only a type of mobility but can also be utilized in terms of geography and temporality. By borrowing from Plotz’s explorations of portable objects in Victorian England and adapting them to a transnational postmodern late twentieth-century suburban and urban Australian context, I also hope to demonstrate the ‘portability’ of Plotz’s framework. As metonyms for Australian identity and extensions of domestic ties in the novel, these objects, with their uneasy interplay of the imaginary and prosaic, evince a complicated and conflicted Australian identity. This identity is at once international and parochial. It is traumatized and constrained by history and at the same time, attempts to expand globally into the future. Although living in New York, Carey “remains Australia’s most widely-recognized contemporary writer” and arguably one of its fiercest critics. 11 Thus when read in a critical context, the bodies and spaces in The Tax Inspector form a salient and caustic criticism of postmodern Australian identity in the latter years of the twentieth century. The connectedness between seemingly unrelated objects and what may lie beneath, reveals a tale of thwarted aspirations and what happens when people are trapped in their own failed dreams, as well as projected dreams and fantasies of others. Although the novel seems outwardly prosaic, presenting as a domestic drama, it unfolds into a nightmarish social tragedy of national and transnational scales. For the Catchprice family, the “four days in which their business is audited, and the family crisis develops . . . also includes the extended time span covered by the flashbacks,” as well as historical stories of how the events came to pass. 12 Carey’s characters themselves are fabulated, hyperbolic, almost fanciful imaginings or archetypes. Fabulation fuses the mythical with the fantastical and the everyday. It was a term popularized by Robert Scholes to include a growing milieu of predominantly twentiethcentury novels, which was stylistically similar to magic realism and its traditions, but not attesting to the novelistic conventions of realism or romance. 13 Bruce Bennet describes Carey as a “true fabulator” 14 due to his unique utilization of experimental fantasy that veers away from the “bush-realist ‘nationalist’ tradition in Australian fiction.” 15 This move away from what was thought to be somewhat barren and anecdotal realism of bush tradition, as part of a nationalist corpus of Australian literature, led to more experimental writing incorporating fantasy. A shift from the local to the international, in turn traces Australia’s transformation from an Anglo-Celtic dominated society to a more multicultural one. 16 This movement towards a multicultural depiction of Australian society is duly reflected in The Tax Inspector’s three narrative strands. In contrast to the Anglophone Catchprices, Carey gives a significant presence to non-Anglo-Celtic Australia through the various immigrant communities, such as those represented by the young Armenian man Sarkis and his

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mother as well as Maria, the child of Greek immigrant parents. 17 Excluding Maria, the world that Gran Catchprice and her family business is responsible for, portrays diverse yet displaced people living on the margins. 18 Full of ‘ferals’ and ‘[n]asties’ (9), these people inhabit “derelict wastelands of Franklin . . . emblematic of a fractured and disintegrating society.” 19 Many of these people are what Homi Bhabha calls “inbetween people,” living “the unhomely lives” of the post-colonial present. 20 Although The Tax Inspector is outwardly a domestic narrative, it displays such ‘unhomely’ and dysfunctional lives. Set in late 1980s to early 1990s Australia, the Catchprice family inhabit a gothic world, where the everyday is a counterpoint to the fantastical, and where domestic lives are replete with secrets and trauma, in particular that of an inter-generational incestuous curse. Three generations of the Catchprice family run Catchprice Motors, a crumbling and decaying General Motors dealership on the economically disadvantaged outskirts of western Sydney in Franklin. These outer-suburban lives of the family are cluttered with objects, rubbish and refuse which signify their trauma and dysfunction. For Richard Elder, the Catchprices are “a race of ramshackle titans, the Gods’ doomed predecessors. Monstrous, deformed, and often funny,” they threaten to “pull in anyone who comes near their collapsing universe.” 21 The family is doomed, each member dreaming of something just out of reach. Matriarch, eighty-six-year-old Frieda ‘Granny’ Catchprice, sulks and manipulates her family and carries explosives in her bag. She dreams of a flower farm instead of the life she has. Mort, her son, runs the automotive shop and dreams of a life away from Franklin. Daughter Cathy and her husband Howie manage the business side, yet want to be touring Country and Western performers even though they lack the decisive courage to leave. Mort’s son Vish has fled to join the Hare Krishnas, but keeps getting pulled back into dysfunctional family dramas. Benny, Mort’s younger son, perhaps the most beguiling and terrifying character, has a zealous and prophetic dream of transforming the dealership into a successful business using magical thinking and self-actualizing tapes as he transforms himself physically into a maniacal angel. Jack Catchprice, Frieda’s other son, is the only family member who has managed to escape and lives the opulent yet corrupt life of a property developer and art collector in Sydney. Into this domestic dysfunction enters the “thirtyish and beautiful, unmarried and [heavily] pregnant” tax collector Maria Takis, who “finds herself taking a rabbit-hole fall into the near-surreal world of the Catchprice family.” 22 This portal imagery is a significant motif that recurs throughout the narrative and demonstrates the connectedness and portability between objects that seem outwardly disparate. In the disturbing climax of the novel, Frieda blows up the dealership while Benny abducts Maria to take her into his object-filled, dank cellar in order to sexually abuse and torment her while

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in a psychotic state. He uses an object he has constructed from an old surfboard, which he has previously used to torture Sarkis as a trial run. The extreme stress induces an early labor for Maria, where Benny begrudgingly assists in the birth of her child, and is ultimately killed by Maria with a rusty bar, crushing his skull when he refuses to hand over the newborn. The novel ends with the child being suckled and held by Maria. Richard Eder reads the final conflict between Maria and Benny as a mythological one, possessing archetypal configurations, with “Maria as a type of struggling humanity, and Benny as humanity transformed by pride into the fallen angel, Lucifer. The end is grisly.” 23 It is within this framework of nightmare and fabulation however that “Carey digs back into Catchprice history, interlinking it with a wider social history,” intercutting the personal and national to give the book a cinematic quality. 24 This social history concerns the struggle for Australian identity. It is emblematic in the Catchprice’s lower-middle-class struggle for upward mobility, global Americanized aspirations, and transformation amid the prosaic and everyday reality which resides in the underside of the capitalist dream. The Catchprice’s lives are cluttered, not only with useless objects, but also with layers of historical trauma due to inter-generational incest. They remain trapped in their parochial and hellish nightmare while dreaming of a way out. THE BODY AS (PORTABLE) OBJECT The symbolic portability of the body in The Tax Inspector is evinced in its transformation, as it moves from the dirty, degraded, and traumatized realm of the everyday, into the realm of fabulation and fantasy. Benny Catchprice’s body encompasses this central dialectic of the everyday and the imaginative. These seemingly opposed attributes are at the same time symbiotically linked through a portal. The ‘angelic/psychopathic’ body of Benny Catchprice is phantasmagorical quasi-human and yet murderous and traumatized, existing in a filthy cellar, full of dirty and useless objects. Benny is both monster and angel, demonstrating the discrepancy between the imaginative and prosaic. This is symbolic of Australian identity, one that resides in the parochial ‘filth’ of historical trauma, yet attempts to reach outward towards a transformative, transnational way of being. This brings to mind Plotz’s notion of transportable objects which mediate between the seemingly antithetical realms of the local and global. For Benny Catchprice, global aspirations sit alongside local historical legacies of trauma. He espouses New Age American mantras of prosperity and magical thinking, which he hopes will help him transcend his debased, dysfunctional, and economically impoverished suburban Australian life. This coupling of monstrosity and capitalist excess is not new for Carey. “An interest in the bizarre, the grotesque, the

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monstrous” can be traced through much of his work to form his critique of the excesses of late capitalism and in particular American cultural imperialism. 25 Benny Catchprice resides at the underside of this late capitalist excess. Benny is part victim, part fabrication, and part psychopath. He is like the refuse discarded by the machinery of capitalism. Living in the economically disadvantaged outer suburb of Franklin, his room in the cellar of Catchprice Motors symbolizes his pathological mind (as a result of sexual abuse), and displacement at the ‘bottom of the social and capitalist hierarchy.’ Benny is an outcast occupying “junk status” 26 within his already marginal family, and society at large. He dwells in filth among industrial and domestic refuse. The cellar operates as “a visual expression of his self-loathing, with its claustrophobic suggestion of hell, entombment, the unconscious, and the dark desires of incest.” 27 We first encounter the severity of Benny’s filthy surroundings through his brother’s eyes, “It was worse than anything Vish could have imagined. The air was as thick as laundry” with “the concrete floor . . . half an inch deep in water,” crisscrossed with plants, “supported by broken housebricks.” There was a dilapidated and filthy sofa, Electric flex, things wrapped in Glad Wrap and plastic bags, old electric radiators and “a white fibreglass object, like a melted surfboard in the shape of a shallow ‘n.’” 28 Benny is an outsider’s outsider, because of his dislocation from society at large, and also within his already poor and socially marginal family. Carey makes the link between the objects in Benny’s cellar and his traumatized psychological state even more explicit when Vish apprehends what he at first thought was “wet floral wallpaper.” Upon further inspection, he realizes that it is Benny’s “handwriting, red, blue, green black, webs of it, layer on layer.” 29 We learn later that this includes names of biblical and historical angels, as well as positive affirmations and illegible scrawls. After Benny’s sudden transformation from a filthy Doc Martens and Judas Priest wearing teenager into an angel in a suit and silk shirt, his hands are so white and clean “they had been peeled of history.” 30 As the narrative unfolds, the reader is made aware of the painful Catchprice history from which Benny is attempting to extract himself. At the commencement of the novel, he is displaced from his own family, having been fired by his Aunt Cathy from Catchprice Motors. With a legacy of poverty, violence, neglect, and sexual abuse, Benny is poorly socialized, intellectually thwarted, and fails to make connections with people. In the aftermath of his sacking and propelled by New Age capitalist aspirations of wealth and magical thinking via self-actualization tapes, Benny transforms himself physically into an angel cleaning himself up, buying new clothes, waxing all his body hair, and bleaching the hair on his scalp. Carey depicts Benny’s transformation in the mythical language of metamorphosis and apotheosis, which contrasts sharply with the prosaic filth of his surroundings:

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He rose up through the cracked, oil-stained, concrete floor of the old lube bay and stood in the thick syrupy air . . . blinking at the light, his stomach full of butterflies. He was transformed. His rat-tailed hair was now a pure or poisonous white, cut spiky short . . . swept upwards with clear sculpted brush strokes, like atrophied angel wings. 31

The murkiness and filth of the setting hints at Benny’s status as a fallen angel, the last recipient of a family curse—the incest bequeathed by his forefathers. Sexually abused and objectified by his father Mort who in turn was abused by his father Cacka, Benny is doomed from infancy and marked by trauma all his life. When his mother saw him being abused by Mort as a three-year-old, she shot at them, missing Mort and marking Benny, the bullet leaving a scar on his arm, a symbolic mark of Cain. “Benny is the gleaming, driven end-product of his family heritage, zeal and perversity.” 32 Benny’s trauma is etched on him physically as well as psychologically. Roger Luckhurst points out, in addition to the physical symptoms, “trauma disrupts memory and therefore identity in peculiar ways.” 33 The transformation of Benny Catchprice’s body is therefore a symbolic representation of this disrupted self, as well as his status as both victim and perpetrator. Benny’s body is a battleground of warring identities and impulses. The body at its most basic level is a vessel through which one experiences the world. In The Logic of Practice, 34 Pierre Bourdieu cites the body as a locale where a person may experience power. Taking this line of reasoning, the ultimate symbolic power would therefore be working through the control of other people’s bodies. 35 Benny’s body is an object negatively marked by powerful forces. He is marked by his mother’s bullet, by his father’s sexual abuse, and he is made filthy and grimy by his environment in the cellar. Benny’s transformation into an angel is not only a search for an identity and place, but also an enactment of power over his body, his environment, and his fragmenting psyche. For Bronwyn Davies, environments and landscapes are coextensive with the body through the concept of inscription, where texts are written onto the surfaces of the body, “not in the sense of scarifying but in the sense of bringing the subject into being.” 36 This is particularly pertinent to the case of Benny’s body, as his angel wing tattoo, which Mort sees as “wings of ballpoint blue and crimson which seemed like luminous silk across its skin,” 37 is scarring but also metaphysically transforming. Carey presents his transformation in the fantastical language of the miraculous and numinous: “Benny could feel this power, physically, in his body, in his finger tips. He was so full of light, of Voodoo. He could feel it itching on the inside of his veins. If he opened his mouth it would just pour out of him.” 38 Benny’s transformation and his self-help tapes however, act as vehicles for his self-destruction. Graham Huggan claims that “Carey shows the destructive alliance between

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New Age individualism and capitalist free enterprise,” as well as demonstrating the appeal of the New Age magical thinking to those with psychological problems. 39 In fact, one could make the link that Carey’s view of the cult of global New Age philosophies, like the one Benny espouses, is little more than what Benny is himself, the underside of capitalism’s industrial wreckage. He is like “disposable consumer products, attractively packaged . . . but sadly lacking in weight or substance.” 40 Ultimately Benny’s transformation and self-actualization is a failure and his displacement is epitomized by the scrawled mantra on his cellar wall: “I cannot be what I am.” 41 This statement indicates that despite the attempts at the escape from history, Benny is doomed, as are other members in the Catchprice family. Even with the struggle to transform themselves, they are unable to escape “their meaningless jobs, predatory relationships, corrosive addictions, and exploitative social environments.” 42 THE IMAGINARY CITY AND AUSTRALIAN IDENTITY The discrepancy between the prosaic imaginary spaces in The Tax Inspector operates as an extended metaphor for Australian identity, the Australian dream, and the dystopia that lurks in the shadows of this global capitalist dream. The city of Sydney in the novel epitomizes this fallen and corrupt capitalist dream. These depictions of the city that embody fantastical notions, are part of a movement by many contemporary Australian writers after 1990, who deemed “naïve realism and that status of citation itself” as problematic, due to “Australia’s highly compromised legacy of racism and hypocrisy.” 43 Here the city, seemingly in contrast with the outer desolation of Franklin, is again connected through the fantastical portal of the hellish, degraded depiction, and the corruption that lies at its heart. This corruption is symbolically manifested in Franklin, in the filthy objects and industrial waste of Catchprice Motors, as well as the ugly beige stucco buildings that surround it. Like many Australians in the pursuit of the Australian Dream, the Catchprice family were originally a rural family who migrated to a more urban setting, on the outer fringes of Sydney in the western suburb of Franklin. Franklin, 20 miles from Sydney, forty-five minutes by car, was “almost in the city” due to the F4 freeway. Carey depicts Franklin as a gothic wasteland, with uniform featureless and oppressive asbestos sheet housing estates, 44 infested with “drug addiction and unemployment.” 45 It was a place that “was not safe at night” 46 and where smutty taxi drivers cruised for sex. 47 As the narrative develops, Franklin becomes a more hellish landscape. When old Frieda Catchprice meets Sarkis Alaverdian one night, jokingly telling him she was a ghost, he becomes aware of “homeless kids wandering around with beer cans full of petrol. They saw fiery worms and faces spewing blood.

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They did not know what they were doing.” 48 On this blighted landscape, Catchprice motors stood like a “badly tended family grave,” 49 a ramshackle and broke business. Likewise, the city of Sydney in the novel is also a fallen space that devolves into a hellish landscape as the narrative unfolds. This literary city includes depicted aspects of real places or what Gillian Tindall calls “cities of the mind,” a “topography transformed into psychological maps, private worlds,” 50 which include personal and sometimes allegorical life stories. The city therefore becomes a space that is discursively enacted and imagined. This phantasmagoric city, although opulent and glittering, is corrupt and run by shadowy organizations and shady gangsters, devolving into a hellish landscape. 51 Such fantastical constructions of literary cities are often concentrated and intensified fictional conjectures, rather than cultural roadmaps and can be read as allegories of conflicted national identity. As the narrative unfolds, Carey utilizes this trope of the corrupt city to paint a larger “vitriolic portrait of social decay and disintegration, the collapse of communal ethics, and the sheer rapacity of the business world consequent upon the global market economy of the late 1980s.” 52 The Tax Inspector is a narrative of exploitation and failed capitalist dreams, as imaginative transnational hopes are sullied by the prosaic elements of trauma, displacement, and xenophobia. “Acutely aware of Australia’s search for cultural identity . . . Carey’s novel plays with established myths and histories of his country.” 53 One of these established myths is the myth of an inclusive capitalism, as well as a globalized, international Sydney, and by extension, a transnational Australian identity. The Catchprice family epitomizes the failure of this myth, and its unattainability to those on the metaphoric and literal margins of the city. These global American aspirations and dreams are circumscribed by the parochial and dysfunctional, insular domestic world that holds them back. This world is one from which they can never escape. Carey positions these failures, entanglements, and ultimate entrapment of the Catchprice family within the framework of larger domestic and global corruptions. I concur with Huggan who asserts that that “Carey’s work often serves to reinforce entrapment . . . [and] . . . presents a country that is trapped in a past from which it vainly seeks deliverance . . . tied to the purse-strings of multinationals.” 54 The world of the novel therefore is one where “questions of family and social responsibility are articulated, representing decay of a paternalistic society, and its replacement by a vicious and uncaring ethic of competition, power, and money-making.” 55 These financial gains incurred past traumas and injustices which are not stated explicitly, but rather are alluded to by Maria as collective stories of trauma and corruption. Maria claims that “This is the only big city in the world that was established by convicts on one side and bent soldiers on the other.” 56 The hope in ubiquitous but greedy multinationals feature heavily in the migrant stories, particularly that of Maria’s

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parents, where the Greek men worked on low-paid production lines in British Motors, 57 and Greek women begged daily for piecemeal work at international sweatshops that produced brand name clothing. When this piecemeal work ran out, the women were reduced to begging for work from the corrupt greedy owners of Switch Electrics who often threw mop buckets filled with water at them in order to disperse the crowd. 58 Linked to the notion of exploitative capitalism in the city, is the conflation of commodification and desire. The commercial and the sexualized objects in the novel are linked through the central ideas of desire, regulation and inspection. The paradoxically sublime and grotesque body of Benny is both art and commodity, commercially and sexually desirable as mentioned earlier. Likewise, the city of Sydney is a place of sublime art and corruption, rapacious capitalism and sensuality. In concurrence with Tindall’s idea, is a reading of Carey’s city which borrows from Walter Benjamin. Benjamin articulated a city that was a phantasmagoria, a bombardment, and a plethora of commoditized cultural, intellectual, and material products. 59 Everything is for sale in the city in a seemingly glamorous, yet precarious and dangerous existence. On William Street after leaving the sanctuary of his ashram, Vish encounters “the hooker in the red bunny suit standing in the white light of the BMW showroom across the street.” 60 Mary and her friend Gia indulge in fine champagne and elaborate cocktails at The Blue Moon Brasserie alongside stockbrokers, property developers, and gangsters like Wally Fischer, who ultimately threatens Gia’s life after he overhears her criticisms of him over dinner. Although Sydney is not a poor desolate wasteland of crumbling stucco buildings like Franklin, it is a place that is corrupt to its core. Jack Catchprice, whose world includes beach houses, expensive international artwork, luxury cars, and lavish Rose Bay parties, compares the corrupt essence of Sydney with what was then thought to be the badly constructed haphazard Cahill Expressway, a metaphoric dead concrete heart of the city. Jack laments that “you can read a city. You can see who’s winning and who’s losing. In this city. . . the angels are not winning.” 61 The notion of a portal and connectivity between the private degradation of Franklin, and the public corruption of the city, is emphasized further by Jack himself. Although he has escaped the dysfunction of the Catchprice family to become a successful but corrupt property developer in Sydney, by entangling himself in the institutionalized public corruption of Sydney, it could be argued that he “has simply exchanged one entrapment for another.” 62 When Maria questions how Jack was able to stop the tax investigation into Catchprice Motors and free Maria of the emotional and ethical entanglements of the Catchprices, Jack thinks to himself, “I crawled down sewers. I shook hands with rats.” 63 Jack’s place in the metaphoric sewer positions him as a portal between the two levels of corruption, the private and the public/institutional, the outer desolate suburb of Franklin, and the opulent city of Sydney.

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As in his earlier novel Bliss, 64 Peter Carey “links together . . . rampant capitalism and child sexual abuse,” whereby “abuse in the family is seen in relation to wider failures of social responsibility manifest in the corrupt abuses of power and wealth in the business and criminal worlds of Sydney.” 65 Following this line of inquiry, sexual abuse and corruption thus become additional portals linking the city of Sydney with the outer suburbs of Franklin. The traumatized, subjugated, and eroticized body of Benny is thus linked with the body politic of Australia. The “account of three generations of incest in the Catchprice family . . . [is set] . . . against the account of public venality and corruption in Sydney,” 66 as if “private indecency was symptomatic of a wider social decay.” 67 Molested by his father and shot by his mother, Benny “personifies the corruption of the present generation by the past.” 68 For Robert Dixon the central problem with The Tax Inspector is that “sexual violence is a metaphor for public corruption,” 69 and they cannot be rightly taken as a metaphor for each other. 70 Rather, the link is more nuanced with “Different levels of corruption . . . not necessarily equal” or directly causal but still related, linked, and juxtaposed as part of an overarching mood of degradation. This in turn is “related to the cycles of exploitation and corruption revealed elsewhere in the Catchprice empire.” 71 Hence corruption is not linked to any one sector of society, but rather diffused throughout the various echelons. This is important to clarify as I read this corruption in both city and suburb as a metaphor for the historical traumas of Australian identity as a whole. CONCLUSION The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey epitomizes the disjunction between the imaginative and the prosaic, and a search for a contemporary Australian identity within a paradoxical globalized world. Contrasting depictions of phantasmagoric cities and bodies in the text appear alongside the gritty, corrupt reality of the corporatized city, and in turn are linked with the desolate economically oppressed outer suburb of Franklin. The juxtaposition of the imaginative and prosaic is particularly evident in Carey’s rendering of Benny Catchprice, a disenfranchised and disturbed (sub)urban dweller who lives in the shadow of the Australian dream. In The Tax Inspector, “Carey defamiliarises contemporary ‘social’ reality to intensify the existential anguish of its victims. The result is a haunting diagnosis of the personal and social diseases that ravage late twentieth-century Australia, and if the prognosis is seldom hopeful, the analysis is fiercely compelling, and the human spirit remains resilient to the end.” 72 Benny and his failed aspirations mirror Australia’s yearning for global transformation and the attempt to escape from the scarring legacies of its past. The birth of Maria’s baby at the conclusion

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of the novel however, attests to a defiantly optimistic human spirit, a new identity which may one day triumph and define itself separately from the haunting legacies of the past. NOTES 1. Peter Carey, The Tax Inspector (St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 1991). 2. Antony J. Hassall, Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction (St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 1994), 5. 3. Paul Kane, “Introduction” in Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey, ed. Andreas Gaile (Amsterdam and NY: Rodopi, 2005), xxii. 4. Nicholas Birns, Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead (Sydney, NSW: University of Sydney Press, 2015), 205. 5. John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), xiii. 6. Stanica Miruna, “John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move” in Modern Philology, no. 2 (November 2012): E115-E118. 7. John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move, xiii. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid, xiv. 10. Stanica Miruna, “John Plotz, Portable Property,” E115-E118. 11. Paul Kane, “Introduction” in Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey, ed. Andreas Gaile (Amsterdam and NY: Rodopi, 2005), xxiii. 12. Antony J. Hassall, Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction, 148. 13. See Robert Scholes The Fabulators (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); also expanded upon in Robert Scholes Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979). 14. Bruce Bennett cited in Paul Kane, “Introduction” in Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey, ed. Andreas Gaile (Amsterdam and NY: Rodopi, 2005), xx 15. Gelder and Salzman, New Diversity, 14, cited in Paul Kane, “Introduction” in Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey, ed. Andreas Gaile (Amsterdam and NY: Rodopi, 2005), xx 16. Paul Kane, “Introduction” in Fabulating Beauty, xx 17. Bruce Woodcock, Peter Carey (Manchester and New York: Palgrave, 2003) 97. 18. Ibid, 96. 19. Ibid. 20. Homi K. Bhabha in Bruce Woodcock, Peter Carey, 97. 21. Richard Eder, “Titans of the Junkyard: The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey,” The Los Angeles Times, 29 Dec. 1991: 3, accessed March, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/1991-12-29/ books/bk-1685_1_tax-inspector-carey. 22. Bettye Dew. “A Visit From the Tax Inspector,” St. Louis Dispatch, 12 Jan, 1992:5.C, accessed March, 2013, http:search.proquest.com.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/docview/ 303513625. 23. Richard Eder, “Titans of the Junkyard. 24. Bruce Woodcock, Peter Carey, 91. 25. Paul Kane, “Introduction” in Fabulating Beauty, xx–xxi. 26. Antony J. Hassall, Dancing on Hot Macadam, 154. 27. Ibid. 28. Peter Carey, The Tax Inspector, 101. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid, 132. 31. Ibid, 19. 32. Richard Eder, “Titans of the Junkyard.” 33. Roger, Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London & New York: Routledge, 2008), 1.

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34. Pierre Bourdieu. The Logic Of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (Oxford, UK: B. Blackwell, 1990). 35. Ibid, 69. 36. Bronwyn Davies, (In)scribing Body/Landscape Relations (California: Altamira Press, 2000), 11. 37. Peter Carey, The Tax Inspector, 152. 38. Ibid, 47. 39. Graham Huggan, Peter Carey (Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6. 40. Ibid. 41. Peter Carey, The Tax Inspector, 50. 42. Antony J. Hassall, Dancing on Hot Macadam, 2. 43. Nicholas Birns, Contemporary Australian Literature, 196. 44. Peter Carey, The Tax Inspector, 88. 45. Ibid, 6. 46. Ibid, 84. 47. Ibid, 85. 48. Ibid, 87. 49. Ibid, 167. 50. Gillian Tindall, Countries of the Mind: The Meaning of Place to Writers (London: Hogarth Press, 1991), 9. 51. The question of whether The Tax Inspector takes an anti-suburban stance is too vast for the purposes of this chapter. I do not argue that that the suburbs and the city are binaries, only that they offer different depictions and yet are linked in this novel by their hellish depictions and corruption. For more information on suburban depictions in The Tax Inspector and the place of suburbia and the bush in Australian literature, see Nathanael O’Reilly, Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel (Youngstown, NY: Teneo Press, 2012). 52. Bruce Woodcock, Peter Carey, 89. 53. Hermine Krassnitzer, Aspects of Narration in Peter Carey’s Novels. Deconstructing Colonialism (Wales: The Edwin Meller Press, 1995) 5. 54. Graham Huggan, Peter Carey, 4. 55. Bruce Woodcock, Peter Carey , 94–5. 56. Peter Carey, The Tax Inspector, 186. 57. Ibid, 33. 58. Ibid, 35. 59. See Walter Benjamin and phantasmagoria in relation to the arcades projects. Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (New York: Belknap Press, 2002). 60. Peter Carey, The Tax Inspector, 13. 61. Ibid, 202. 62. Antony J. Hassall, Dancing on Hot Macadam, 152. 63. Peter Carey, The Tax Inspector, 238. Emphasis in original. 64. Peter Carey, Bliss (London: Faber, 1981). 65. Bruce Woodcock, Peter Carey, 89. 66. Antony J. Hassall, Dancing on Hot Macadam, 145. 67. “Peter Carey Interview,” Ray Willbanks, Speaking Volumes: Australian Writers and their work (Ringwood: Penguin, 1992), in Antony J. Hassall, Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction, 145. Incest was and remains a very sensitive subject and much of the negative reaction received by Carey for The Tax Inspector, was its perceived suggested link between the private indecency and wider social decay. I briefly address this here but do not have the scope to fully explore this. 68. Robert Dixon, “The Logic of the Excluded Middle,” LINQ, Volume 18, No. 2, (James Cook University, Queensland, 1991), 140. 69. Ibid, 137. 70. Ibid, 140. 71. Bruce Woodcock, Peter Carey, 96.

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72. Antony J. Hassall, Dancing on Hot Macadam, 5.

WORKS CITED Birns, Nicholas. Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead. Sydney, NSW: University of Sydney Press, 2015. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice, translated by Richard Nice. Oxford, UK: B. Blackwell, 1990. Carey, Peter. Bliss. London: Faber, 1981. ———. The Tax Inspector. St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 1991. Davies, Bronwyn. (In)scribing Body/Landscape Relations. California: Altamira Press, 2000. Dew, Betty. “A Visit From the Tax Inspector,” St. Louis Dispatch, 12 Jan, 1992:5.C, accessed March, 2013, http:search.proquest.com.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/docview/303513625. Dixon, Robert. “The Logic of the Excluded Middle,” LINQ, Volume 18, No. 2. James Cook University, Queensland. 1991. Eder, Richard. “Titans of the Junkyard: The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey.” The Los Angeles Times, 29 Dec. 1991: 3, accessed March 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/1991-12-29/ books/bk-1685_1_tax-inspector-carey. Hassall, Anthony J. Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction. St. Lucia, QLD: Queensland University Press, 1994. Huggan, Graham. Peter Carey. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press, 1996. Kane, Paul. “Introduction” in Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey, ed. Andreas Gaile. Amsterdam and NY: Rodopi, 2005. Krassnitzer, Hermine. Aspects of Narration in Peter Carey’s Novels. Deconstructing Colonialism. Wales: The Edwin Meller Press, 1995. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Miruna, Stanica. “John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move” in Modern Philology, no. 2 (November 2012). O’Reilly, Nathanael. Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel. Youngstown, NY: Teneo Press, 2012. Tindall, Gillian. Countries of the Mind: The Meaning of Place to Writers. London: Hogarth Press, 1991. Walter, Benjamin. The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. New York: Belknap Press, 2002. Woodcock, Bruce. Peter Carey. Manchester and New York: Palgrave, 2003.

Chapter Six

“I had made it myself” Convergence of Past and Present Selves in Villette Jennifer Preston Wilson

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette begins with memories of Lucy Snowe’s childhood in Bretton, England, but quickly dislodges her from security, family, and country. After traveling abroad to Labassecour and finding employment as an English teacher, Lucy passively floats down the flow of time, allowing her new work to set the parameters of her existence. The narrative mirrors this quiescent mood; in the whole of the first volume Lucy only acts out of necessity. She becomes so defined by the boundaries and rituals of the pensionnat where she lives and teaches that the school’s long vacation brings her to a crisis and to the point of collapse. When she comes back to consciousness in an unknown environment, Lucy is shaken by an unexpected return of her past. She thinks she sees the furniture and decorations of the house at Bretton displaced in a new setting; greatly disturbed at the unexplained mystery, she nevertheless regards the familiar items as friends who give her a literal and figurative bolstering of self beyond her more reserved identity as expatriate Englishwoman. When she discovers that she is in her godmother’s new residence, Lucy understands these furnishings as both real things and metonyms for the particular version of home that she thought she had lost. John Plotz theorizes such portable property that provided new ways of imagining community for Victorians abroad as “moveable repositories of nonfiscal value.” 1 Specifically important to Lucy’s faltering self-concept are the items of her own making that her godmother has valued enough to transport to Villette. Seeing and touching these reminders of the work of her own hands prompts Lucy into a new phase of her existence where she fashions and collects a series of speaking objects ranging from letters to handcrafted gifts that hold value outside the economy of salaried labor, the making and 91

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gathering of which helps her to create a new version of herself as an independent English resident of Labassecour. Lucy’s reshaping of her reality through these speaking objects comes of necessity. Caught as she is between the dormancy of her past and dangerous emptiness of her future, Lucy ultimately finds a way to negotiate her limited choices by seeing her childhood handiwork afresh and cultivating an artisanal aesthetic in her daily existence. In developing and understanding this nascent artistic conscience, Lucy redefines what she regards as real and of value in her life: the transfiguration of time through creative endeavor and the beauty of design that suits purpose. This change in Lucy from passive worker to engaged artisan is neither quick nor straightforward, but begins when Lucy gradually awakens to the fact that Mrs. Bretton has indeed come to Villette along with her things, the “residue furniture . . . as she had thought fit to keep unsold.” 2 With the obscure use of “residue” as an adjective, the last such usage listed in the OED, Brontë describes these items as that which “remains” or “survives” and so places them in an ambiguous relationship to commodity culture. 3 As Plotz emphasizes in his analysis of “culturally resonant objects . . . withdrawn from the ordinary rules of commodity circulation,” these are domestic pieces that express “the inherent instability . . . of the opposition between fungible and relic object.” 4 After seeing these unsold articles, several of which are products of her own hands, Lucy reconnects to her earlier artisanal ethic while working at the pensionnat, thus reinvesting her present life with both past and future meaning, a new reality that supersedes her previously aimless life there. In this new mode of being, she devotes extensive time to crafting or assembling items that she gives or hides away, further complicating the tension between the fungible and the relic. Not constructed for sale or to advance her status, Lucy’s works cultivate her own “practical notion of art” and thus please her in their making. 5 While Eva Badowska argues that Lucy becomes a bourgeois subject through a nostalgic notion of lost interiority under the pressure of things, 6 I contend that Lucy’s pragmatic construction of handmade objects offers a compensatory practice that transforms her sense of time and purpose as the nearest approach to such interiority. Rather than submit to the external economy of commodification, she thus relocates the real inside her own consciousness and protects herself from being subsumed by the materialism of her surroundings. No such economic pressure informs the commencement of Lucy’s story, as Villette opens with the eerie simplicity of a fairy tale. The very first page portrays a strong, vivacious godmother who resides in a dwelling that equally resists the ravages of time. Lucy Snowe begins her first-person narrative by noting that “My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton.” 7 All seems secure and as it should be in this opening sketch. The godmother’s family name of Bretton is the same as that of the long-settled town itself, and Lucy’s syntax seals the charm with her

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approval: “When I was a girl I went to Bretton about twice a year, and well I liked the visit.” 8 Going “to Bretton” as a child thus meant the protection of both an orderly place and a caring godmother’s eye. Only in the fifth paragraph does the narration break from the spell of ritualized tale to admit the impermanence of the material world as Lucy turns to a particular moment in time, “in the autumn of the year ----.” 9 She is particularly glad of this visit to Bretton because of ambiguously foreshadowed negative “events coming” among her kinsfolk that are already intruding into her consciousness. 10 However, Lucy does not reveal any more than this hint about her family life, consciously reacting to the coming crisis by masking her presentation of self. She even takes a step backward from our notice as she assumes the role of observer-narrator who documents the arrival of the precocious Paulina Home and her interactions with Mrs. Bretton’s romping son, Graham. Chapter titles reinforce this sense of Lucy’s minor character status, progressing from “Bretton” to “Paulina” to “The Playmates,” seemingly making her a Nelly Dean-like storyteller: 11 in the house, but not quite of the house. Lucy’s self-effacement makes her emergence as the protagonist of the novel in the fourth chapter a surprise, also provoking reconsideration of her reliability as narrator. She refuses to describe her family members or what tragedy befalls them, referring only to an allegorical storm that lasted some time. This undefined life-changing event is further diminished with her pragmatic reflection: “Thus, there remained no possibility of dependence on others; to myself alone could I look.” 12 The course of Lucy’s life has clearly given her great sorrow and a tale of woe, and yet she sidesteps any recounting of the drama. Instead, she seems content to bury herself within the sick chamber of her new employer, Miss Marchmont, unresistingly allowing “All within me [to become] narrowed to my lot.” 13 Her efforts to escape from existence via the dulling servitude of life-in-death are ironically thwarted by the sudden stroke that ends Miss Marchmont’s suffering and Lucy’s employment. Yet, even as Lucy is then forced to think of “Fate” as the force pushing her forward through these unpredictable events, 14 that idea is repeatedly mocked by her. She sees herself from others’ eyes, at one point standing under the moving spectacle of the Aurora Borealis and experiencing a vision of her life’s path ahead, but realizing that others who observe her “staid manner” would laugh at the idea of her being “a dreamer and zealot.” 15 Major changes and transfigurative events occur in Lucy’s life, but she persistently and perversely evades the category of heroine. Kate E. Brown calls this fitful motion of the plot “strangely both developmental and regressive,” 16 and in Lucy’s reactions to these agitated events she proves strangely resistant to predictable choices, foreshadowing her later resistance to economic determinism. In this particular crisis, she turns aside from the heaven-

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ly display to contemplate her next immediate action, an attempt to remain calm with only £15 on which to make her way. Lucy’s need to work is portrayed as the central feature of her life, and once introduced into the pensionnat in the Rue Fossette, we see no signs of her emergence into the outside world until 100 pages later during “The Long Vacation.” Her responsibilities move slowly and steadily forward, from serving as nursery maid to presiding as teacher to acting in the school fête, but all advances occur because of necessity. Confronted with a shrinking purse and the expectations of her supervisor Mme. Beck and fellow teacher M. Paul, Lucy takes steps that she would not otherwise have pushed herself to take. While constantly working, Lucy focuses on reading the characters of the people who enter her life in this new environment. She studies them all, but gives the most attention to Mme. Beck and Dr. John, once again sinking into the silent observer role in her day to day life, immersing herself in the world of the pensionnat. “The Long Vacation” is the first respite from the forward movement of the school year, and yet Lucy has no desire for unoccupied time given the traumatized past that she would rather not ponder and the “dumb future” that cannot speak words of hope. 17 Her present is likewise drained of sustenance as she is left in charge of an unwanted pupil, a crétin who needs care, yet cannot commune with her in thought or feeling. Without other company, Lucy loses the will to live, acknowledging that “now that the prop of employment was withdrawn, [my spirits] went down fast.” 18 While Brown reads Lucy’s entombment in the school and city as a “Gothic confinement,” 19 I argue that Lucy’s dilemma is also symbolic of her fraught relationship to time: she arrives at the Rue Fossette in early March, making the timing of her movement to the classroom coincident with the onset of spring; likewise, once the last of the pupils, the poor crétin, is removed by a relative, Lucy is left at leisure with nowhere and no one to visit. Her “freedom” coincides with the arrival of the autumn equinoctial storms, and in her aloneness she is at once a modern, isolated individual, and also a symbol of the rebirth and losses that occur to all humans throughout each year. In a number of passages in the novel, she mentions this symbolic “company” she keeps with the rest of humanity, acknowledging that her fate is not that unusual. 20 It is during this vacation-time crisis of self, climaxing in Lucy’s unplanned experimentation with the Roman Catholic ritual of confession, that she collapses and beholds a very odd manifestation of her past. Many critics have commented on the chapter entitled “Auld Lang Syne” and its uncanny effects of regaining a sense of self amid the furniture of a place well known and loved. No sooner has Lucy come to consciousness after her swoon than she begins to survey where she is. She rules out the Rue Fossette as a possibility and decides “this was an unknown room in an unknown house,” but then the furniture seems to “grow familiar.” 21 Her description then picks

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up speed as it acknowledges “old acquaintance” with items in the room. 22 It is not just a visual homecoming, but a multi-sensory and imaginative connection, as she sees a pair of handscreens that remind her “stroke by stroke and touch by touch” of the movements of a “school-girl pencil held in these fingers.” 23 The lost routine of work that the pensionnat students gladly abandoned for their own vacations has somehow led Lucy back to this moment from her own schoolgirl years. Her glance down at her fingers illustrates the way her consciousness splits between the current time of Miss Lucy the English teacher in Villette and the past time of her girlhood in Bretton. Even though she eventually integrates the two identities and renews her relationship with the Brettons, this uncanny moment of confirming reality by interacting with representative objects begins a pattern that builds from this point in the text forward. After Volume One, Lucy goes on to become an adept artisan; she writes carefully constructed letters to Graham, makes a beautiful watch guard with gift box for M. Paul, and copies an “elaborate line engraving” for her own sake, apologetically explaining, “I thought pretty well of [such things] in those days.” 24 After awakening to view her early decorative arts at La Terrasse, Lucy is increasingly busy forming more creations after her own favored methods of careful precision and attentiveness to finish. In this way, her past, present, and future possess a continuity they did not share before, tied together by her ability to link interior self to the creative process. She also thus develops her own definition of work and of what will constitute her reality on her own terms. Before she progresses to a more purposeful interaction with the objects of her world, however, Lucy must recover from her alarm at the mixed known and unknown qualities of her chamber of convalescence. Brontë constructs this episode so that the readers share in the protagonist’s confusion, placing allegorical symbols and realistic details in overlapping dialogue with one another. When the nurse brings a cup of medicine to Lucy on her first night there, the item looms before Lucy’s face and we remember that only the night before in the Rue Fossette Lucy was visited by a terrible dream about just such a scene; Lucy recounts that in her nightmare, “a cup was forced to my lips, black, strong, strange, drawn from no well, but filled up seething from a bottomless and boundless sea . . . Amidst the horrors of that dream I think the worst lay here. Methought the well-loved dead, who had loved me well in life, met me elsewhere, alienated.” 25 The anxiety of this vision establishes Lucy’s feeling of complete unmooring from the people of her past whose relics now surround her. Severed from family and homeland in the dream, she relies on the belief that in death she will find union with the few people who once loved her, but in her sleeping eye even those few friends are “alienated” from her and deny connection. Her cry of “hail” to the furniture in her current haven, therefore, makes sense as she personifies the trappings of her once-unified life in Bretton as a substitute for the lost loved ones. The

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echoed nightmare cup image also foreshadows the drug-laced drink that Goton will later push to Lucy’s lips on the night of the celebration in the park to keep her distant from M. Paul. 26 Frightening dream imagery of the “bottomless and boundless sea” provides another recurrent motif; it both looks backward to the “storm” that has destroyed Lucy’s kinsfolk and forward to the tempest that drowns Paul at the end of the narrative. In her present moment, though, that sea assumes a more placid form in the sea-green walls of the sleeping cabinet where Lucy awakens at La Terrasse. The room is like a peaceful cove that shelters the salvaged items of her former life after the tumult has abated. The way the text volatizes its symbols—from malevolent to beneficent and back again—is characteristic of Lucy’s puzzling personality and also suggests her psychological struggles with her new identity. Critics often find that to describe these shifting effects of reading Villette, disparate elements can be reconciled with recourse to metaphor; their analysis has alternately likened the plot’s progression to a magic lantern show, the stalls at the Great Exhibition of 1851, or a flâneuse’s exploration of the urban environment, among many other comparisons. 27 Elaine Freedgood discusses this scholarly tendency to apply an overarching figuration to detail-filled nineteenth-century novels, analyzing how “objects become metaphorical (and meaningful) through a loss of many of their specific qualities.” 28 She instead suggests that criticism might usefully forestall this movement to homogenization and commodification by performing “a strong, literalizing, or materializing, metonymic reading.” 29 In some ways, Freedgood’s call is for a slower reaction to the text: Where did the things of the text come from? How were they made and transported? Who performed this labor, who put up the capital, and who benefited from the final product? The Brettons’ furniture that manifests before Lucy’s eyes means many things in terms of nation, economy, and self at once. Lucy, when in the midst of her own losses, mentions that the Brettons, too, had faced retrenchment and had moved to London; one imagines that with financial difficulties it was more cost effective to take favorite items from the large house in Bretton to their new quarters. The furniture is well made and substantial, and although the fabrications (damask, chintz, dimity) were originally entirely imported materials, mechanization of England’s textile industries meant that by the turn of the nineteenth century these were mostly domestic wares constructed from imported raw materials and produced in manufacturing centers such as those in Spitalfields, Norfolk, Lancashire, or Yorkshire. 30 When Graham decides to establish his medical practice in Villette (a move that suggests more economic hardship with oversupply of England’s own professional labor force), it makes sense that he would move his beloved mother with him and both would wish to preserve a sense of their history for sentimental reasons of memory and continuity. Their habitual modes of teasing and spoiling each other suggests that rituals of teatime and

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favorite keepsakes are an intertwined feature of lives past and present. This means that the Brettons’ furniture underwent a channel crossing just as Lucy and the Brettons themselves did. Dr. John’s practice is now thriving, and he might equip his country residence with new furniture if he wished, but nonmonetary reasons cause La Terrasse to look as it does. To engage with objects, albeit briefly, in this extended way allows us to better understand Lucy’s psychologically charged reaction to the materials from the Bretton house. These items are her fellow travelers; indeed, they are of the same class since Lucy is a “thing” of Bretton who is now of Villette. Once Mrs. Bretton and Graham identify her as Lucy Snowe, she is promptly expected to take her place in their household, and she does for some time fit into the patterns of their existence. As Badowska contends, Lucy resists being categorized as a meuble (a moveable thing); she acts so as to avoid becoming an unobtrusive piece of furniture at the same time that she realizes the commodified nature of her existence. 31 However, Tony Tanner argues for a more psychologically fraught reading, claiming that Lucy tends to “treat herself as others treat her. Thus, for example, she notes that the Doctor gives her the kind of attention one would to ‘unobtrusive articles of furniture’ and to a certain extent she does turn herself into a piece of furniture, becoming the kind of ‘neutral passive thing’ she is taken for.” 32 Whether she tends to resist or abet objectification (or some of both), Lucy problematizes her reality, staging it as a struggle between the necessities of her material existence (she has to work because she has no true home) and her sense of self (she has to work so she does not get classified as a meuble in a false home). Even to discuss the realism of Brontë’s portrayal of this identity crisis provokes contention between materialism and idealism. The term realism traditionally denoted ideal, Platonic forms until its nineteenth-century iteration when it came to signify concrete existence. However, the old meaning did not completely fade away. The familiar distinction Raymond Williams notes between “appearance and reality goes back, fundamentally, to the early use—‘the reality underlying appearances.’” 33 Thus, what is real could be something material or it could be an abstract quality lurking underneath exterior appearance. As Williams further observes, “it can be seen that there is almost endless play in the word.” 34 Lucy is real—a concrete object that takes up space—but she is also real in a way that appearances belie. Many people, Dr. John among others, judge Lucy superficially, sometimes in a commodifying way, applying oversimplified epithets to describe her while ignoring what is real about her despite appearances. Lucy resists this truncation of her self. She evades the easy slippage into past national and familial liaisons as she rejects the offered role of companion and reabsorption into the Bretton set. Instead, she draws upon her own storehouse of felt life experience to construct a reality that does not destroy her interiority. Notably, even though she acknowledges all the portable things of her past, “Above all” it is

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the pair of handscreens with “elaborate pencil-drawings” that rise to importance in her mind. 35 Lucy recalls the extensive flow of time she spent on making these elaborate screens, and that immersion in purposeful creation, not the things themselves, is what matters in her reality. Like the older definition of the real where “The idea exists outside the thinker and before the thing,” 36 Lucy’s reality does not prize possessions but the intricacies of design and process. To recuperate from collapse, Lucy must negotiate her uncertain identity amid these recovered connections to English people and things. Her first obstacle appears in the sea-green room during interaction with a key object from her formative childhood years, a watercolor sketch of young Graham Bretton’s head. This moment takes on quasi-religious meaning as the portrait is enshrined in the alcove where her bed is lodged, surrounded by looped-up curtains, and reverentially enclosed in a gilded frame. In her private niche, Lucy sees “a boy’s head, fresh, life-like, speaking, and animated.” 37 The artwork is static and displayed flat against the wall, and yet it “speak[s].” And Lucy responds. She feels that she would like a right to claim such a person’s affection and yet simultaneously disparages the thought, reflecting that “Any romantic little school-girl might almost have loved it.” 38 Despite her adult skepticism, Lucy did love the sketch as a schoolgirl, climbing up to the mantel to hold the image in her hands in her godmother’s breakfast-room. The features of the portrait, especially the eyes and lips, convey the range of responses its subject might bestow, ranging from love to a sneering “light esteem.” 39 In describing this moment from a later vantage, Lucy understands that Graham was a false idol for her as she comes to associate his golden image with the powerful yet vulnerable Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar. Before she reaches this insight, though, she gravitates to Graham. She acknowledges that she is drawn downstairs from her sea-cave room with the hopes of seeing the subject of the painting, and when she does so, the reader is in for a shock. The Graham she meets is the selfsame person as Dr. John. Only at this point does Lucy share that she had recognized the resemblance months before, a secrecy suggesting her yearning for reciprocal acknowledgment from him. This interpretation seems confirmed when, faced with return to the pensionnat and banishment from his presence, she wishes for the guillotine, framing her whole La Terrasse sojourn with the image of two heads, Graham’s in watercolor and Lucy’s in the executioner’s basket. 40 That Lucy has “lost her head” over Graham becomes more clear in her fetishized treatment of the first letter he sends her. She saves it all day, anticipating the pleasure she will imbibe when she can read it without interruption in private. Like the watercolor representation of her godbrother, his anticipated first letter looks outside of its frame to convey a sense of desired relationship with its viewer: the letter imparts “a conviction . . . that it had been poured out—not merely to content me—but to gratify himself.” 41 The

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subject matter of the missive is the recent time Lucy and Graham have spent together and the tone of his writing is that of his in-person voice, an unrushed, “bountiful cheerfulness” with a shared penchant for “nice details.” 42 In short, it is confidential and filled with choice information. Lucy puts checks on the happiness she feels at the moment of reading the letter, reminding herself that this may be the only such missive he sends. Part of the extreme blessing she feels upon herself in its receipt comes from the foreshadowing of future pain Graham will cause her, yet she does not allow these later events to color her narration of this “bubble” of bliss she feels upon receipt of his letter. 43 When the letters from Graham do eventually stop, Lucy finds consolation in designing the ideal form to displace them from her consciousness. Using the style of her pencil drawings which are elaborately worked to give the effect of line engravings, Lucy pursues a trompe l’oeil method here, too. She buries the letters to preserve them, a paradox that Brown calls a “disavowal”: “at once memorializing a lost love and denying its loss.” 44 In constructing a living tomb for the letters, Lucy voluntarily makes her most important portable property immoveable; she can remember their words at a distance and visit the site of their internment in the back allée, but chooses not to define herself on a day to day basis as the one-time recipient of their attentive observations. Besides the problems of self-definition they pose for Lucy, Graham’s letters are less stable than she wants them to be: they can be read and re-read, not only by the addressee, but by whoever can get their hands on them. They can also be lost, pilfered, or borrowed. Lucy thinks of them in liquid terms, calling them both an elixir and a river, but unfortunately one that dries up when Graham becomes transfixed by his rediscovered childhood admirer, Paulina Home de Bassompierre. In spite of the dearth of new correspondence, Lucy continues to invest the postal relics with value, and indeed, they are the only non-utilitarian material possession she has (the remainder of her worldly effects include the contents of her trunk and the three new dresses and cigar case she acquires in the course of the narrative). Much as she cherishes the missives she has poured over, Lucy mourns their end, and like a bereaved person, she wishes the memory of them secured and locked away so it does not cause her continual pain. As she walks through the city in search of a receptacle for the letters, she seeks an artistic form appropriate to her feelings. The stoppered bottle Lucy acquires serves her practical idea of preserved distance, but simultaneously honors her memories of the letters’ liquid sustenance through the romantic trope of bottled treasure maps or pleas for rescue that might be tossed out into the ocean currents. As she completes her plan under the crescent moon in the allée défendu, she does experience peace from the torment of emotions surrounding Graham Bretton. She comments that she is like an earlier version of herself, back in the English midlands looking up at and finding strength in the Aurora

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Borealis. Burying her letters and her grief seems to have reset Lucy to the point that the Brettons were not a factor in her life and she was about to embark on travel. Lucy’s interactions with the Brettons in Villette thus allow her to reconnect with her own history and attain greater self-knowledge about the person she wishes to be. Her recuperation at La Terrasse reestablishes her English past and gives her the attention of those who know of her childhood development and care for her continuing comfort. 45 The Brettons are not her family, though, and their attention waivers depending upon other events and people in their lives. Lucy’s progress from “monomania” at the receipt of Graham’s first letter 46 to burying his influence on her comprises the action of Volume Two. 47 In designing and making a place for the letters, Lucy proves herself to be more than a passive recipient of others’ attention; she also takes an active role in creatively adapting her written responses to Graham so that they satisfy the niceties of both her feelings and conscience. This attentiveness to the items she shares with others reflects her own knowledge of the importance that can accrue to everyday objects. She crafts her letters back to Graham so that they hide her excessive gratitude for his continuing friendship. Unbeknownst to her godbrother, Lucy writes two responses for every one letter he receives: the first, written in collusion with “Feeling,” instantly fills two pages with language of attachment and solicitude; the second occurs when “Reason” destroys the first and instead sends “a terse, curt missive of a page.” 48 Similar to the pattern of her interactions with the pampered schoolgirl Ginevra Fanshawe, Lucy here deems “right” what most chastens anything lax, and she goes to great length to disclaim any “warmer feelings” for Graham, 49 even though her readers know that these are artful answers. These sharp little responses, therefore, hardly constitute an open correspondence, merely giving the illusion of one so that additional letters might come to her—they are occasioned by his writing and act to perpetuate his writing, with the torn first drafts of her responses serving as a relief to her heart. Lucy’s method extends the exacting, intricate techniques of her drawings into letter format as she grows more confident about the effects she wishes to invoke in her life and her creative works. Lucy continues to refine her craftwork and to better understand its hallmarks: elaboration, preciseness, and self-effacement. All of these qualities appear in the watch guard she fashions for M. Paul on the occasion of his fête day. 50 This decorative item, worn by gentlemen through the mid-century (when a plainer chain came into style), 51 perfectly suits the passionate and performative professor. As with her crafted response to Graham, though, Lucy deploys a sleight of hand in her giving of the watch guard, implying that it is for someone else. The “bright little chainlet of silk and gold” 52 is dangled before M. Paul’s eyes the eve before his celebration, as Lucy confronts his chiding about her vanity by asking if a man would be vain to adorn

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himself with an item such as this? The next morning, Lucy rises early to finish her elaborate present, deeming that it would look best with a double length of silk and beads. Unlike the division of feeling and reason in sending a message to Graham, Lucy consults both in thinking what would be a useful and also a beautiful present for Paul. Her self-sacrifice, yielded in hours of work, the destruction of her only necklace to utilize its clasp, and the sufferance of Paul’s misplaced ire and vengeance in thinking she has forgotten the occasion, 53 all become known to him in the eventual giving of the present at the close of day. Part of Lucy’s pleasure in finally handing over the gift comes as well from its carefully chosen container. The box is composed of nacarat, a bright orange-red shell taken from the variety of mollusks that yield mother of pearl. This fiery, showy color indicative of internal rarity is set off with bright blue stones placed on top of the box; one imagines that to find such a decorative original, Lucy must have had recourse to the maze of shops in the same “old historical quarter of the town” where she discovered the stoppered bottle used to bury her packet of letters. 54 Her efforts ultimately find ample reward as Paul’s incredulous response to the gift—“This object is all mine?”—indicate how pleased he is in the wake of assuming rashly and angrily that Lucy was weaving precious gifts for the English doctor and completely forgetting his special day. 55 Lucy’s cultivation of her artistic sensibility moves closer to self-fashioning as the plot progresses. Early on, even though she would rather avoid personal display, Lucy obediently garbs herself according to the dictates of the matron of the house she represents—Rue Fossette or La Terrasse. For the school fete, she observes Mme. Beck’s rules of conformity and decency in selecting a gown of shadow, a dress made especially for the occasion from “a crape-like material of purple-gray.” 56 She even draws Madame’s special commendation for her choice (which involved the search of a dozen shops); Beck’s approval is not surprising, since the dress in all its ambiguity, crapelike but not crape and purple-gray but not entirely of either color, seems the ideal camouflage for surveillance, Beck’s favored tactic for managing the school. In a parallel incident, when resident at La Terrasse, Lucy one morning is measured for a new dress at the orders of her godmother, who announces, “I mean . . . to follow my own taste, and to have my own way in this little matter.” 57 Lucy’s resistance to the resulting pink dress is over-ruled, and she happily finds that her great fear of feeling shame or ridicule under the eyes of Graham does not come to pass. She wears the outfit to the evening’s concert and is appropriate to the formality of the occasion. M. Paul’s mockery of Lucy’s appearance at the event only provokes her to selfdefense of the choice. The purple-gray crape and the pink silk dresses are additions to Lucy’s wardrobe that are necessary and are dictated to her, one by professional requirements of her school and the other by the conventions of gift etiquette. When Lucy chooses for herself, however, she synthesizes all

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these experiences of comfort, suitability, display, and also factors in economy. She picks a pink printed cotton dress for summer wear, and once again endures the notice and momentary censure of M. Paul, before he ultimately interprets the garment as a compliment to the day’s expedition. Their discussion settles on the term “propreté” or neatness to describe the pleasing quality of the frock, 58 and this word also becomes an important qualifier for the charm of Lucy’s “cot” at the end of the storyline. “Neat” is how Lucy wishes to feel and be, indicating the primacy of exactitude and elegant design to her self-identity and artistic vantage. Having staged Lucy’s growth as a matter of how she defines her aesthetic values and expends time when creatively engaged, Brontë tests how well her protagonist might withstand tragedy at the end of the narrative. At first, the resolution seems headed toward a fairy-tale finish to match the idyllic start to Lucy’s story. The tiny school M. Paul has rented and equipped for her use has anticipated Lucy’s liking for neatness and reciprocates her attentiveness in the gift of the watch guard. He even supplies her with a work-box, indicating his awareness that Lucy’s life, while economically enabled by teaching, is spiritually supported by her artisanal work. 59 All that remains is to wait the three years until M. Paul’s return from Guadalupe and then he and Lucy can share the rest of their lives together. With this swerve toward developing good fortune, Brontë suggests how differently time can be experienced when hope lights the way. She has already portrayed the shutdown of hope when Lucy is left alone for the vacation without the support of family or friends. This set-up begs a final question: what will become of Lucy after M. Paul’s death at sea? Certainly the text is full of foreshadowings and flashbacks and visions and nightmares that provide portents of the future. When Graham soothes Lucy over the thought that she had lost his first letter, she reflects, If there are words and wrongs like knives, whose deep-inflicted lacerations never heal—cutting injuries and insults of serrated and poison-dripping edge—so, too, there are consolations of tone too fine for the ear not fondly and for ever to retain their echo-caressing kindnesses—loved, lingered over through a whole life, recalled with unfaded tenderness, and answering the call with undimmed shine, out of that raven cloud foreshadowing Death himself. 60

Lucy’s depiction of remembered language as either knife or caress suggests the importance of the new portable property that rests in her hands at the end of her narrative. Even though the plot’s resolution implies that Paul has died, Lucy still has Paul’s correspondence, its unswerving fidelity, and its consoling tones. Even though she must utter “never more” as she does over Graham’s letters in knowledge that her collection is closed, 61 in this case she can know that Paul did love her and would have continued to do so. Lucy also has the dream of her independent future made reality by Paul’s gift of the

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“cot” and by her own good fortune and management. She is a successful bourgeois businesswoman in the end, renting her doubled premises and leading a thriving pensionnat under no one’s oversight but her own. Monica F. Cohen cites this communitarian mode of sociability as a satisfying conclusion, one that enacts its principles upon the readers of the text in the refusal of a conventionally romantic ending. 62 Even though Lucy moves into bourgeois identity as a mode of protecting Paul’s investment in her well-being, Lucy’s narrative in many places chafes against bourgeois self-indulgence, 63 and on her own behalf she develops another definition of work, one that esteems handcrafted objects. Besides the gifts that Lucy has constructed for Mrs. Bretton, Graham, and Paul, she also engages in creative activity for herself. She copies elaborate line engravings, shading the finished product “to the finish of the original.” 64 Not only does Lucy occupy much of her time this way, but she takes “extreme pleasure in the labour.” 65 She deprecates the “art” involved, calling her creations “things about as valuable as so many achievements in worsted-work,” 66 but again reasserts their private worth to herself. 67 The aside revealing this information occurs late in the novel, helping to recast Lucy as engaged in independent activity outside of the realm of consumer value. The passage also recalls the decorated screens among her creations housed at La Terrasse, implying that she has cultivated this skill for at least a decade. Her subject matter, plate engraving, was a significant visual art in the Victorian Era before the emergence of photography, but Lucy does not create original pieces or offer them for sale. 68 In composing elaborate copies of engravings, Lucy invests much effort and vision in her work, and she calls the end effect “finical” which signifies objects that are “overscrupulously finished; excessively or affectedly fine or delicate in workmanship.” 69 Lucy is willing to strive for such effects because they give her pleasure, even though she is simultaneously aware of the world’s scant opinion of their value. Just as no one would put in time creating hand-wrought worsted-work once the industry has become mechanized, no one needs Lucy’s “facsimile” of a print when the original plate might be re-inked and an instantaneous copy generated. 70 Yet, even though unaffiliated with market value, the process of making such items involves the best aspects of Lucy’s mind. It takes great cultivation of the eye to assess the handiwork that went into the original and steadiness of the hand to re-create all the pencil strokes to amass the same total effect, not to mention the perseverance to see through to the totalization of the artwork. Because such artwork pleases her, we can read the novel’s ending with the life and resources left to Lucy Snowe as much more than a tragically forestalled romance. Moreover, through the validation of Lucy’s “finical” work we also can hear Charlotte Brontë’s defense of her own methods of constructing elaborate copies of life in her novels. As Deborah Lutz observes, “the term ‘craft’ links much of the Brontës’ aesthetic work, whether it refers

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to piecing together a poem, making a bead bag, or sketching a portrait of a family dog.” 71 In the course of Brontë’s Villette, Lucy Snowe changes drastically. She leaves her homeland, becomes bilingual, grows financially independent, distinguishes the better aspects from the selfish faults of her childhood idol, and comes to love a man who understands aspects of her being that no one else can see. The catalysts for these often difficult and painful transitions are material objects that metonymically represent aspects of Lucy or those who make up her hybrid French/English/Labassecourian world. As she becomes more at home in Villette, she becomes an adept navigator of its streets and neighborhoods, frequenting its many shops to find just the right item that suits her finical taste. Her sensibility evolves throughout the novel as she finds modes of creative expression that allow her to lose herself in time and space, and she increasingly turns to the reality of her artwork over the material world that surrounds her. In this way, a fairy tale effect does occur in the course of her story: a godmother’s portable property gives Lucy the key to an alternate world that she once could access at will. Lucy’s ensuing development from passive endurance to self-reliant creativity is situated as a renewal of old-world artisanship, as Lucy’s perceptiveness and sensitivity revolt against bourgeois superficiality, and yet her growth is equally informed by the continuing need to teach as the means to support herself. In the course of her narrative, Lucy undergoes moments of severe trial where she is able to redirect herself back to crossroads from earlier in her life and recommence her journey. With this capacity to revisit and build upon her past, Lucy will continue to experience growth and happiness in her life, even if they appear in the muted tones of a carefully executed line engraving. NOTES 1. John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), xiv. 2. Charlotte Brontë, Villette (New York: Penguin, 2004), 199. 3. “residue, adj..” OED Online. March 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www .oed.com.proxy006.nclive.org/view/Entry/163589?rskey=mbp3iV&result=2&isAdvanced =false (accessed April 19, 2018). 4. Plotz, xiv–xv. 5. Bronte, 442. 6. Eva Badowska, “Choseville: Brontë’s Villette and the Art of Bourgeois Interiority,” PMLA 120, no. 5 (2005): 1510. 7. Brontë, 7. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 8. 10. Ibid. 11. Terry Eagleton notes this resemblance to Wuthering Heights as well. Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power (London: Macmillan, 1975), 63. 12. Brontë, 40. 13. Ibid., 42.

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14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 49. 16. Kate E. Brown. “Catastrophe and the City: Charlotte Brontë as Urban Novelist.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 57, no. 3 (December 2002), 355. 17. Brontë, 173. 18. Ibid. 19. Brown, “Catastrophe,” 352. 20. This sense of Lucy’s fellowship with the non-elect of the world is cultivated throughout the novel, but is emphasized when her English friends cease interaction with her for seven weeks, when she buries the letters from Graham, and when the safety of M. Paul’s ship is in question (295, 401, 546). Tony Tanner emphasizes this concept within an existentialist framework. Tony Tanner, Introduction to Villette, ed. Mark Lilly (New York: Penguin, 1985), 11. 21. Brontë, 186. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 187. 24. Ibid., 442. 25. Ibid., 176. 26. Tony Tanner links these cup references to Lucy’s quest to find the stone basin in the park toward the end of the novel. In his analysis, her desire for liquid indicates her essential “lack” and thus “her longing to find a connection with some flowing energy and life which has been eliminated by the aridities and rigidities of the surface of contemporary life” (28). I read the cup symbolism as more ambiguous; drinks proffered therein may be curative, drugged, poison, with the emphasis on uncertainty. 27. Badowska; Diane Long Hoeveler, “Charlotte Brontë and the Anxious Imagination,” in Time, Space, and Place in Charlotte Brontë, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Deborah Denenholz Morse (New York: Routledge, 2017); Lucy Morrison, “Brontëan Reveries of Spaces and Places: Walking in Villette,” in Time, Space, and Place in Charlotte Brontë, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Deborah Denenholz Morse (New York: Routledge, 2017). 28. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 10. 29. Freedgood, 12. 30. Rosemary Crill documents the ban on chintz imports from 1721–1774 and the advancement of copperplate and roller printing techniques that allowed chintz to be produced in England (although it never returned to the height of its popularity it reached in the 17th and 18th centuries). Rosemary Crill, Chintz: Indian Textiles for the West (London: V&A Publishing 2008), 25–26. Also see British Textiles: 1700 to the Present (London: V&A Publishing, 2010), 180 for information on the ca. 1770 transition from furnishing silks to “wallpapers, printed cottons and fine worsteds” that were increasingly produced domestically. 31. Badowska, 1520. 32. Tanner, 20. 33. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 257–58. 34. Williams, Keywords, 258. 35. Brontë, 187. 36. George Levine. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 8. 37. Brontë, 190. 38. Ibid., 190–191. 39. Ibid., 191. 40. Brontë also calls attention to M. Paul’s head on two occasions: the first morning of her return to the school, Lucy weeps in the refectory and becomes aware of “a cap-tassel, a brow, two eyes” filling a pane of the window as M. Paul looks in on her (258). Later when Lucy relates what she knows of M. Paul’s history, we see in reaction only the expression of his mouth, as “He covered with his hand the upper part of his face” (449). The partiality of these glimpses at Paul forestall understanding of the complexities of his character and contrast Graham’s awareness and use of his good looks as social currency.

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41. Brontë, 272. 42. Ibid., 220. 43. Ibid, 272. This is one of many scenes in Villette where autobiographical elements abet psychological realism. Charlotte Bronte herself thrived on the exchange of intellectual letters. See Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (New York: Norton, 1995). 44. Kate E. Brown, “Beloved Objects: Mourning, Materiality, and Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Never-Ending Story,’” ELH 65, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 398. 45. Monica F. Cohen analyzes the material representation of Lucy’s reconnection with the Brettons: “the moment of recognition comes when she identifies her godmother’s monogram on a cushion, but pleated into her godmother’s name, Lucy’s own appellation betrays itself as parenthetical at the same time as it is central: Louisa Lucy Bretton. Thus recognition, so often a novelistic staple, appears in Villette as emplotted in self-discovery.” Monica F. Cohen, Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 53. 46. Brontë, 274. 47. Richard Bonfiglio describes this section of the plot as the separation of homeliness from Englishness. Richard Bonfiglio, “Cosmopolitan Realism: Portable Domesticity in Brontë’s Belgian Novels,” Victorian Literature and Culture 40 (2012): 602. 48. Brontë, 282. 49. Ibid. 50. Ever attentive to indicators of time, Brontë places M. Paul’s special day exactly one year after Lucy’s first day in London (373). 51. “Early and Mid Victorian Era: A Universal Uniform,” The Black Tie Guide: A Gentleman’s Guide to Evening Wear (Second Edition), last modified 2012, http:// www.blacktieguide.com/History/03-Victorian_Early,Mid.htm. 52. Brontë, 370. 53. Julie Donovan close-reads the tension between M. Paul and Lucy before the eventual giving of the gift, contending that “The watch-guard chapter thus presents Lucy’s ear and neck, erogenous zones, in exchanges of heightened passion where the word ‘wrought’ describes Lucy working on the chain, but also her feelings.” Julie Donovan, “Charlotte Brontë’s Renderings of Time,” in Time, Space, and Place in Charlotte Brontë, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Deborah Denenholz Morse (New York: Routledge, 2017), 16. 54. Brontë, 327. By this time in the plot, Lucy is adept at navigating the city and negotiating its shops to find the most fitting item to suit the occasion. Even though she does not have much currency to spend, her exactitude in searching out the ideal piece to fit the contexts of time, place and person puts her in the role of Walter Benjamin’s collector who “brings together what belongs together.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard: Belknap Press, 1999), 211. 55. Ibid, 384. 56. Ibid, 145. 57. Ibid. 231. 58. Ibid., 421. 59. Deborah Lutz analyzes the centrality of the work-box to the Brontës’ lives and to Victorian culture in general. Deborah Lutz, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 47-50. 60. Brontë, 275. 61. Ibid., 272. 62. Cohen, 68–69. 63. See Eagleton, 71–72 for further discussion of the novel’s sub-current of class resentment. 64. Brontë, 442. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Margot Peters reveals the autobiographical source of this practice: “Charlotte particularly labored for hours a day copying mezzotints, wearing out her eyes with the close scrutiny and meticulous duplicating of thousands and thousands of tiny strokes—a process not unlike the

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printing of the tiny manuscripts. Later she admitted ruefully that it had been useless labor; at the time, however, she evidently believed that copying was the way to learn a craft—or perhaps she lacked the confidence to paint freely.” Margot Peters, Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Brontë (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 41. 68. Although, if her productions were of excellent quality, they might fetch high prices as forgeries of the real thing. Antony Griffiths notes that “Line-for-line pen copies are a category of deception that can be surprisingly difficult to spot.” Moreover, “The profession of ‘facsimilist’ was well recognized in the book world, where there was a constant demand for drawn copies of printed pages to complete defective copies of books.” Anthony Griffiths, The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking, 1550–1820 (London: The British Museum 2016), 123–24. 69. OED, s.v., “finical,” accessed May, 2017, http://www.oed.com.proxy006.nclive.org/ view/Entry/70431?rskey=NndWGF&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid. 70. Richard T. Godfrey further documents the disappearing role of the engraver himself: “In the small plates used in [Annuals], grey tones were produced by means of ruling machines that could place lines close together with mechanical regularity.” Richard T. Godfrey, Printmaking in Britain: A General History from its Beginnings to the Present Day (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 100. 71. Lutz, 54.

WORKS CITED Badowska, Eva. “Choseville: Brontë’s Villette and the Art of Bourgeois Interiority.” PMLA 120, no. 5 (2005): 1509–23. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Harvard: Belknap Press, 1999. Bonfiglio, Richard. “Cosmopolitan Realism: Portable Domesticity in Brontë’s Belgian Novels.” Victorian Literature and Culture 40 (2012): 599–616. British Textiles: 1700 to the Present. London: V&A Publishing, 2010. Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. New York: Penguin, 2004. Brown, Kate E. “Beloved Objects: Mourning, Materiality, and Charlotte Brontë’s ‘NeverEnding Story.’” ELH 65, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 395–421. ———. “Catastrophe and the City: Charlotte Brontë as Urban Novelist.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 57, no. 3 (December 2002): 350–80. Cohen, Monica F. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Crill, Rosemary. Chintz: Indian Textiles for the West. London: V&A Publishing, 2008. Donovan, Julie. “Charlotte Brontë’s Renderings of Time.” In Time, Space, and Place in Charlotte Brontë, edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and Deborah Denenholz Morse, 13–29. New York: Routledge, 2017. Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power. London: Macmillan, 1975. “Early and Mid Victorian Era: A Universal Uniform.” The Black Tie Guide: A Gentleman’s Guide to Evening Wear (Second Edition). 2012. http://www.blacktieguide.com/History/03Victorian_Early,Mid.htm (accessed June 1, 2017). “finical, adj.” OED Online. May 2017. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed .com.proxy006.nclive.org/view/Entry/70431?rskey=IgVikV&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed June 1, 2017). Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago University of Chicago Press, 2006. Godfrey, Richard T. Printmaking in Britain: A General History from its Beginnings to the Present Day. New York: New York University Press, 1978. Gordon, Lyndall. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life. New York: Norton, 1995. Griffiths, Antony. The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking, 1550–1820. London: The British Museum, 2016.

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Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Charlotte Brontë and the Anxious Imagination.” In Time, Space, and Place in Charlotte Brontë, edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and Deborah Denenholz Morse, 85–102. New York: Routledge, 2017. Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Lutz, Deborah. The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015. Morrison, Lucy. “Brontëan Reveries of Spaces and Places: Walking in Villette.” In Time, Space, and Place in Charlotte Brontë, edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and Deborah Denenholz Morse, 184–96. New York: Routledge, 2017. Peters, Margot. Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Brontë. New York: Doubleday, 1975. Plotz, John. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Tanner, Tony. Introduction to Villette, edited by Mark Lilly, 7–51. New York: Penguin, 1985. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

III

Everyday Readers

Chapter Seven

Domesticating Charlotte Corday Helen Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne and Private Vengeance Stephanie Russo

On July 13, 1793, the twenty-four-year-old Charlotte Corday obtained entry to the house of the Jacobin leader, Jean-Paul Marat. There, she stabbed him as he lay in his bathtub. She was subsequently arrested and, four days later, executed after a very public trial. At her trial, she explained that her motivation was to preserve the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity: ideals that she felt the Jacobin leaders had roundly betrayed. As a woman who was willing to take that most violent of actions—murder—in order to defend the stability of the emergent French Republic, Charlotte Corday was a profoundly problematic figure for both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary alike. Helen Craik’s now little-known novel of 1800, Adelaide de Narbonne, is a novelistic reimagining or alternative history of the lives of key female French revolutionary celebrities, including that of Charlotte Corday, who is called Charlotte de Cordet in the novel. 1 By focusing on the everyday life, thoughts and feelings of a woman like Charlotte Corday, Craik invites her readers to engage sympathetically with one of the most notorious and most militant women of the age. The reader is thus constantly reassured that while de Cordet may hold some radical political beliefs, these beliefs are always tempered by reason. Further, Craik rewrites the murder of Marat so that de Cordet is motivated not by active political engagement, but by her affective ties to the eponymous heroine, Adelaide de Narbonne. In the process of “normalizing” Corday, Craik effectively strips Corday’s actions of any political significance, instead locating her motives in private vengeance and domestic entanglements. The novel, as a form that has long been associated 111

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with the domestic, becomes the means by which Corday’s crime can become explicable to her readers. By focusing on the imagined domestic motivations of de Cordet, rather than her intervention into political engagement, Craik can generate empathy for a female murderer. Craik transforms that most radical of stories into the prosaic story of the misguided Charlotte de Cordet, whose only fault is too much personal loyalty, or too much sensibility. The startling story of a female political assassin becomes the rather more everyday story of a woman who attempts to avenge a friend. The novel’s very capacity to center on the experiences of everyday, domestic, even prosaic, life allows Craik a way into unpicking the psychology of a woman who would dare to commit murder. Craik attempts to use the novel form to reduce Corday’s political act—and, indeed, the French Revolution more generally—into a depoliticized domestic drama; a drama of the everyday, and therefore an appropriate topic for the novel, rather than a drama of international radical politics. Craik thus attempts to use the form of the novel, a form traditionally associated with the domestic and with women, to rewrite a political tale as a domestic one. Ultimately, however, such an attempt cannot succeed. Craik cannot escape from the fact that her heroine is a woman who dared to enter a man’s house, approach him while he sat naked in the bath, and thrust a dagger to his heart. A close consideration of Craik’s contribution to debates about the capacity of women to act politically—that is, to take a role in the most vital political events of the time—reveals an irreconcilable tension in her writing between her conservatism and her need to domesticate figures such as Charlotte Corday, and her representation of “political” women. The novel might be the ideal means to consider the everyday motivations and emotions of a character as problematic as de Cordet, but Craik’s attempt to domesticate her story cannot completely account for the fact that she plans and carries out a political assassination. Craik’s work thus warrants closer critical engagement, as Adelaide de Narbonne, in particular, attempts to grapple with one of the most vexed questions of the late eighteenth century—can and should a woman engage in politics? For a woman to take it upon herself to intervene so violently in politics, to the point where she would willingly take up a knife and murder a man in cold blood, was obviously profoundly shocking to even the most enlightened man or woman of the eighteenth century. Even today, the figure of the female murderer exerts a powerful fascination over our imagination with the gendered body of the woman seemingly at odds with cultural understandings of what it is to be a murderer. Nina Corazzo and Catherine R. Montfort have shown that Charlotte Corday was routinely depicted as “a loathsome amalgam of the two sexes, the femme-homme, the ‘unnatural woman.’” 2 In fact, Charlotte Corday’s assassination of Marat has been seen as the catalyst for the spate of executions of notable women that followed her own in July 1793, including that of Marie Antoinette herself. Lynn Hunt, for example, has

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written that the rejection of Charlotte Corday’s “self-attributed political role soon extended to all women who wished to act politically, including the same Société de Républicaines Révolutionnaries which had been so prominent in the sacralization of Marat.” 3 Women’s clubs were dissolved by the Jacobins in October 1793 and political activity by women became even more tightly circumscribed. Charlotte Corday was not only a shocking political figure, as a murderess, but may also have inadvertently precipitated a large-scale backlash against women involved in political activity in France; women who involve themselves in the masculine world of politics were thought to become, like Charlotte Corday, dangerously unstable and unpredictable. As Joan Landes has written, too, as women were increasingly expelled from the public arena, “the more likely these faceless women could stand in for a range of political values and positions.” 4 The ability to inscribe value onto “faceless” women such as Charlotte Corday results in representations that seem curiously at odds with the historical reality of these women’s lives. Accordingly, in Adelaide de Narbonne, the radical Corday becomes a woman hostile to revolutionary ideologies and increasingly preoccupied by her ties to a close-knit group of royalists. While the historical Charlotte Corday’s political sympathies were wellknown, it was not unusual for her allegiance to radical revolutionary politics to be downplayed in subsequent representations of her actions, particularly by those with conservative political leanings. While ahistoric, this rewriting of Corday’s politics makes a strange sort of sense: Corday had, after all, removed the threat posed by one of the most notorious Jacobin leaders. Wendy Nielsen’s wide-ranging discussion of the representation of Corday in Romantic drama has highlighted how often Corday’s actions were attributed to personal vendetta or vengeance, thus de-emphasizing her politics. She writes that “French dramas frequently ascribe sexual motivations to Corday, especially when they aim to undermine her credibility as a political assassin.” 5 The French were not the only ones to rewrite Charlotte Corday’s motives for the murder of Marat. Edmund Eyre’s play The Maid of Normandy, which was first performed in 1794, located Corday’s motives in her belief that Marat was responsible for the death of her fiancé, thus prefiguring Craik’s account in which Charlotte de Cordet thinks Marat’s actions have led to the presumed death of Montague, her own fiancé. In fact, as Elizabeth Kingleberger has shown, many nineteenth-century writers and artists increasingly came to depict Corday as an icon of femininity or, at least, a figure through whom competing ideas about femininity could be represented. Revolutionaries, for example, might regard Corday as an embodiment of “revolutionary virtues: devotion to the republic, resolution, love of the people, compassion, self-sacrifice.” 6 Those more conservatively aligned, meanwhile, could read Corday’s actions as designed to motivate men to engage in resistance to the tyranny of the Jacobin leaders.

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The Scottish novelist Helen Craik is usually considered an anti-Jacobin writer, as she produced three largely conservative novels set during the Revolution with 1796’s Julia de St. Pierre and 1802’s Stella of the North bookending Adelaide de Narbonne’s publication. 7 Accordingly, Craik attempts to distance her fictional representative of Charlotte Corday in her 1800 novel, Adelaide de Narbonne, Charlotte de Cordet, from the historical Corday’s political beliefs. 8 Given that de Cordet is one of the two primary focalizers of the novel, and perhaps the more dominant of the two in terms of page count, Craik clearly wished readers who might have been hostile to the historic Corday to feel more comfortable with the fictional de Cordet. The association of the novel with the domestic also allowed Craik to give readers a (fictional) glimpse of the everyday life and affections of this infamous woman; a chance to see inside the prosaic real behind the dangerous glamour of the female assassin. From de Cordet’s first appearance in the novel, the reader is constantly reassured that while de Cordet’s beliefs may broadly coincide with those of the radical left, these beliefs are heavily tempered by reason. Craik describes de Cordet thus: Charlotte was a Republican, but a rational one; she wished for reforms in a Government which even the most sanguine advocate for Monarchy cannot deny wanted them; but she wished not for reforms that were only to serve as a cloak for partial and additional abuses, for actions whose atrocity disgraced human nature, and threw a stain on the French character, which ages to come would be unable to obliterate, or do away. 9

A few pages later, Craik again feels the need to justify de Cordet’s political beliefs, saying “Charlotte’s democratical creed was founded on the pure basis of equity; it required not the fashionable auxiliaries of anarchy and bloodshed for its support; she had once admired Marat as a patriot, and a great man, for such he had been represented to her; his sanguinary proceedings now only inspired her with detestation and horror.” 10 De Cordet’s intense enmity towards Marat, then, is immediately established, for of course the reader is well aware what is to come, and Craik is careful to distinguish Charlotte from the kind of republican politics embodied by Marat. These opening passages quickly establish the tone of the novel: whenever Craik feels called upon to gesture towards the historic Corday’s republicanism, she makes sure to immediately temper the ardor of these beliefs in de Cordet. De Cordet is, notably, the only sympathetic republican in the novel, and other characters are constantly depicted “forgiving” her for her political allegiances. De Cordet’s republicanism initially stands as a barrier to her relationship with the eponymous royalist heroine Adelaide, for example, but as it becomes increasingly clear that de Cordet is “rational,” she is excused for being the only republican amongst a cluster of aristocratic counter-revolutionaries.

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As the narrative progresses, de Cordet becomes increasingly disillusioned with the progress of revolution, to the point where the reader is rather inclined to forget her initial republican sympathies. Upon reading accounts of the increasing violence in revolutionary Paris, de Cordet is appalled, proclaiming that: I begin to blush for the cause my heart once so warmly espoused! Unhappy country! Wretched Frenchmen! Was it for this you submitted to the subversion of civil order, to the sacrifice of your dearest interests!—for this you have added through so many streams of reeking gore! For this at last!!!—What!—to crouch under the deadly despotism of an unprincipled villain, whose sole enjoyment seems concentrated in the promotion of every atrocious enormity! 11

De Cordet thus becomes increasingly sympathetic to the plight of the aristocracy, rather than the plight of the poor, to the point where her affective responses to events in France seem wholly reserved for those who have suffered under republicanism. Craik depicts de Cordet feeling sadness over the dissolution of the convents, fretting over the flight of the aristocratic Adelaide and the fictional royal niece Victorine, and becoming increasingly entangled with the fortunes of the Royalist army that surround the Castle of Narbonne. The form of the novel is here significant: because de Cordet is embedded within a group of royalists, she responds affectively to their individual suffering, just as the reader is simultaneously positioned to respond to the trials suffered by the characters. De Cordet even delivers a stirring defense of the merit of individual kings, arguing that Henry IV’s “single character, as a Monarch, is almost sufficient to atone for the errors often succeeding generations of crowned heads.” 12 The radical Charlotte Corday, prepared to murder Marat for the glory of the Revolutionary cause, here becomes a woman who finds her closest affinities with aristocratic monarchists. Further, while de Cordet professes herself to be a radical, she appears to be, at best, only ever a marginal believer in revolutionary ideologies. In a revealing moment, Charlotte upbraids Adelaide’s maid, Jacqueline, for donning Adelaide’s clothes in an attempt to gain entrance to the masquerade held on the grounds of Narbonne. Jacqueline has inadvertently exposed herself to attack from the Jacobins, who believe that she is Adelaide, and de Cordet uses this opportunity to deliver a speech condemning the desire for social mobility; a philosophy quite out of step with her professed belief in equality. De Cordet tells Jacqueline that, “at present I leave you to reflect on the folly and danger of stepping aside from the path Providence has assigned as your proper station; let the mischiefs you have now escaped be held in remembrance, and may they prove a lesson for your future conduct! 13 ” While Craik does not tease out the implications of this moment for de Cordet’s political ideology, to the modern reader it is rather striking that the novel’s only

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sympathetic republican is given one of the most conservative speeches of the novel. As M.O. Grenby has shown, one of the defining features of the antiJacobin novel at the end of the eighteenth century was a concern with the dangers of “leveling,” and any acts of beneficence towards the lower classes, such as allowing servants to wear the discarded clothes of their employers, had to be carefully managed so that they did not “disrupt society’s hierarchies by propelling any individual out of his or her allotted station.” 14 The radical Charlotte Corday, martyr to the cause of liberty, equality and fraternity, here becomes the rather conservative Charlotte de Cordet, who parrots one of the leading tropes of the anti-Jacobin novel. It is an illuminating moment in the text, and problematizes any easy association between Charlotte de Cordet and the revolutionary politics of her real-life counterpart. Craik also appears to be utilizing here the commonplace in anti-Jacobin writing that while the Jacobins might find revolutionary ideologies personally expedient, they have no real commitment to the causes they espouse. Kevin Gilmartin has described the portrayal of revolutionaries in anti-Jacobin fiction as an effort to “deny contemporary political protest any connection with coherent principle or a credible experience of injustice.” 15 Hence, the focus of the anti-Jacobin novelists was to expose the way the Jacobins manipulated these principles in practice; they were comparatively less interested in exploring and/or critiquing these ideals in and of themselves. While de Cordet here is not precisely manipulating these principles, she does inadvertently demonstrate that her professed ideologies are out of step with her actions. Later in the novel, de Cordet becomes the keeper of the secret of the Rock of Narbonne, a secret locale that has been used to shelter monarchs from uprisings and revolutions for generations, so clearly her republican sympathies are consistently undermined in the text to the point where any identification of de Cordet with republicanism is rather strained. Craik, then, has dealt with one problem: she has disassociated de Cordet from the discourse of radical revolution. However, another problem remains. The novel must conclude with de Cordet taking it upon herself to murder Marat. Craik’s attempt to balance these competing impulses is centered on her characterization of de Cordet as a woman with the conviction that she has the duty to act, no matter where her political sympathies lies. Despite Craik’s attempts to distance her heroine from the radical politics that characterized the historical Corday, then, she retains Corday’s commitment to political intervention in de Cordet. For all de Cordet’s increasing disillusionment with the Revolution, she is always very clear that she can and should become involved in political activity: further, she firmly believes that she has a moral duty to do so. Even as she is declaring her growing embarrassment over the actions of the revolution, she is also proclaiming that she feels “raised to the level of actions above the common reach of my sex.” 16 Later, we are told that “in times of public danger she thought the moral duties of active life of much

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greater importance to her fellow-creatures, than dozing through existence within the gloomy walls of a Convent.” 17 Craik must tread a dangerous line here: in attempting to downplay the political engagement of a woman who thrust herself so violently onto the public stage, she must create a fictional de Cordet who is both capable of the murder of Marat, and yet somehow paradoxically above the political. In stressing de Cordet’s muted, “rational” form of republicanism and what de Cordet clearly believes is a moral imperative to act in the public interest beyond the limitations inscribed by her gender, Craik attempts to reconcile her portrait of an increasingly apolitical de Cordet with her radical actions. However, this strategy is inherently problematic, as the reader is confronted with a de Cordet who becomes increasingly disillusioned with politics at the same time that she becomes convinced that it is her duty to act politically. This contradiction is at the heart of Craik’s characterization of Charlotte as somehow simultaneously apolitical and radically political. Like Edmund Eyre in The Maid of Normandy, Craik attempts to resituate Corday’s motivation for the murder of Marat within the domestic sphere, as if reconfiguring the motivations to the realm of the affective would render Corday understandable to her readers. While much is made over the course of the entire novel of de Cordet’s disdain for Marat, her motivations for her actions are inherently personal and rooted in her everyday experiences at Narbonne. The immediate cause lying behind de Cordet’s decision to murder Marat is her (mistaken) belief that he has murdered Adelaide. However, there is actually a complicated sequence of acts that propels de Cordet towards her decision. First, she discovers that her father has been imprisoned on the direct orders of Marat. This decision has an immediate, bodily impact upon the passions of de Cordet: No longer able to struggle with the complicated sensations of fatigue, disappointment, mental anguish, and indignation, rage, at times, almost swelled her heart to bursting, as she recollected the atrocious circumstances of this man’s former conduct to the Countess, compared them with what she now suffered herself on her father’s account, and listened to those details of his unparalleled villainy which reached her in timid whispers from every quarter. Her blood became inflamed; her head, her limbs were racked with the most excruciating pains; and before the second morning after her arrival, a delirium seized her brain, which, for a considerable period, totally absorbed every remembrance of the past or present cause that had reduced her to so distressing a situation. 18

Notably, de Cordet’s distress is framed in terms that stress her private sufferings, rather than any larger or more thoughtful concern for the stability of the nascent Republic. At no point in this passage does Charlotte move beyond her personal distress to broader political concerns. The delirium that de Cordet seems to fall into here, too, suggests that her very femininity has proven

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unequal to coping with such torment. Her supposedly susceptible feminine body gives way under the severity of her shock and grief. This pain is private and personal, and it engenders an affective, emotional response, rather than a careful evaluation of cause and effect. Craik is carefully establishing very personal (and fictional) motivations for de Cordet’s ever-increasing hatred of Marat. In doing so, Craik attempts to strip Charlotte of any larger allegiance to a political cause in order to domesticate her. When Charlotte is told that Marat has killed Adelaide and has probably caused the death of Montague, her fiancé, she is filled with an almost supernatural compulsion to take out personal vengeance on Marat: No complaint was heard—no exclamation of sorrow—no imprecated vengeance burst from her lips!—Her eyes, however, struck fire, and a settled expression of some feeling, too big for utterance, which evidently nerved every fiber with additional energy, was strongly portrayed on her animated countenance, and gave a sublimity to her whole appearance that conveyed the idea of a being more than mortal. 19

This Charlotte is not the impassioned revolutionary of history but, instead, a woman in a state of shock and desperation who acts out of overwhelming emotion. Craik thus attempts to transform the tale of one of the most notorious women of the French Revolution into a tale far more prosaic: a story about a woman who is unable to properly regulate her emotions. From the point at which de Cordet discovers Marat’s alleged crimes towards herself, events progress almost absurdly quickly, especially given the rather languorous pace of the rest of the novel. In only a few pages of text, de Cordet has resolved upon the murder, traveled to Paris, committed the crime, faced trial, and has been executed. After this acceleration in pace, Craik decelerates again to in order to attempt to exculpate her heroine, claiming that “no wonder if a mind like her’s, so actively benevolent, so generous, and so warm, perpetually entertained on one subject, should at last become solely engrossed by its magnitude, and gradually begin to meditate on a proper remedy for the evil.” 20 Here, Craik is stressing de Cordet’s sensibility, framing her as a woman called upon to act because of the sheer depths of her emotional engagement with others: she is simply a heroine of sensibility gone wrong. While Craik does allow de Cordet a moment of contemplation on the wider implications of her actions—“a deed no less calculated to revenge the injuries inflicted on the beings dearest to her heart, than destined to deliver her unhappy country from the galling yoke of a monster, who was equally a disgrace to mankind, and the nation to which he belonged” 21 —it is undoubtedly private suffering that impels her actions. That Marat will no longer prey on the people of France is simply a happy consequence of the execution. To further underline the personal motivations lying behind de Cordet’s actions, Craik has her proclaim Adelaide’s name at the very mo-

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ment she murders Marat, explicitly tying that affective bond to her actions. Charlotte de Cordet, then, is a woman moved by private, personal grievances, rather than the lofty political ideals embodied by the historic Charlotte Corday. This attempt to depoliticize her heroine is rather transparent; a rather strained attempt to make her more acceptable as a sympathetic figure to Craik’s readers. While a woman who murders for political reasons may be profoundly shocking to even the more liberal of readers, a woman who is driven to mindless revenge while in a state of shock over the supposed murder of her closest friend may at least be somewhat explicable to an eighteenth-century reader. Despite Craik’s careful positioning of de Cordet as a mostly apolitical assassin, the fact that her heroine is capable of, and actually carries out, a violent murder, renders it difficult to accept that de Cordet is simply a misguided heroine of sensibility. Adriana Craciun writes that Craik elevates Corday to a “divine avenger,” as “Corday’s sublimity, strength and energy are inextricable from her political violence, and…transform her into a new type of heroine, neither feminine nor masculine, but ‘more than mortal.’” 22 Craciun links Craik’s representation of Corday to that in Southey’s poem “July Thirteenth. Charlotte Corde Executed for Putting Marat to Death.” In this poem, Southey characterizes Corday as a pagan self-sacrificial goddess to be worshipped: Time was once When to the voluntary victim’s fame, The temple had been rais’d, the alter pil’d, When songs of adoration hymn’d to her Had kindl’d in the young and ardent heart Th’inebriate glow, the throb of that strange fear With which the startling mind first entertains High thoughts of per’lous deeds; and had I liv’d In these old days, methinks I could have knelt Before her altar, ev’n till I had known Imagination’s realizing pow’r, And seen her present Diety. Alas! 23

Southey’s Corday is nothing short of glorious; a heroine of the classical imagination who seems to have stepped out of the bounds of history to cleanse the present, and put to death because the contemporary moment cannot understand the modes of heroism of the past. Likewise, Craciun writes, Craik’s de Cordet sees herself as a sacrificial victim who will cleanse society of a monster. De Cordet’s motivations are thus tied up in her reading of history: she is influenced by the “examples of antiquity” because of her habit of assimilating “certain periods of ancient and modern history with those events daily passing before her.” 24 De Cordet thus inserts herself into a

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long history of acts of heroic self-sacrifice, staging herself as a heroine of Greco-Roman myth. However, while Craik’s de Cordet might conceptualize her actions within this narrative of classical heroism, Craik herself does not advocate this position. Instead, Craik carefully points out that de Cordet’s problem is that she has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of justice: Thus uniting what she deemed an act of private retribution with sentiments of disinterested patriotism and the purest philanthropy, Charlotte remembered not that the executive part of justice is not permitted to the injured individual, whose fiat, in that case, would sometimes be apt to overleap the magnitude of the offence, and in the wild ebullition of passion, confound all sense of strict rectitude and impartial judgment in one self-impelled decision; while the consequences resulting from the sentence of such a tribunal would natural prove destructive of personal safety, moral order, and the forms necessary for the preservation of civil society throughout the universe. 25

It is notable here that Craik again stresses that this is an act of “private retribution,” albeit one that is mixed with “disinterested patriotism” and the “purest philanthropy.” Craik describes Marat as one who “ought to have become a victim to public justice, and died, not in his closet, but on a common scaffold.” 26 De Cordet has thus effectively robbed the French nation of their right to hold Marat to public account for all his crimes against the nation; in exacting revenge for an individual crime, Marat has not been held accountable for the harm he has done his own people. Craik, then, does not endorse a vision of de Cordet as an avenging angel, motivated by a kind of quasi-divine righteousness, despite her self-representation as such. Instead, she suggests that de Cordet is simply a flawed woman who has taken to murder in a fit of blind passion, and has based her actions on a misunderstanding of the mechanisms of the justice system. What complicates de Cordet’s actions still further is the reader’s knowledge that neither Adelaide nor Montague are actually dead, and so de Cordet’s act of self-sacrifice is, tragically, both personally and politically misguided. Overwhelmingly, we are left with the impression that de Cordet has simply acted on primal instinct, and has badly miscalculated in doing so. De Cordet has confused domestic allegiance with political intervention. It is only after Charlotte de Cordet murders Marat that her characterization merges with that of the historic Charlotte Corday. Craik’s dramatization of the trial of de Cordet is largely lifted directly from the pages of Helen Maria Williams’s Letters from France, as Craik herself acknowledges in a footnote: “For most of the foregoing particulars of this affair, vide Miss Williams’s Letters.” 27 Like Williams, Craik emphasizes the modesty and femininity that de Cordet demonstrates at her trial, saying that, “there was so engaging a softness in her countenance, that it was difficult to conceive how

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she could have armed herself with sufficient intrepidity to execute the deed.” 28 As de Cordet is led to the scaffold, even hostile spectators are impressed by her heroism, and there is “such an air of chastened exultation thrown over her countenance, that she inspired sentiments of love rather than sentiments of pity.” 29 Craik here, in transposing Williams’s account of the real-life trial of Charlotte Corday, draws attention to the fact that she is fictionalizing very recent history, and stakes a claim for the authenticity of her portrait of Corday. However, by using the account of an eyewitness to put together her fictional representation of the historical trial scene, Craik distances the reader from de Cordet. We are no longer invited into her head to see events as she sees them, as we have for almost the entire novel thus far. The focalization shifts from Charlotte to an external focalize, as if the novel has lost the ability to access her consciousness once she has moved from the domestic to the national stage. The reader is simply invited to watch as Charlotte “heard her sentence with attention and composure, and left the Court with unaffected serenity.” 30 The distance that Craik here establishes may partly be a result of the inherent difficulty in convincingly capturing the emotion that the historic Corday might have felt as she awaited her execution; as Craik admits, “it is difficult to conceive the kind of heroism which she displayed in the way to execution.” 31 We are invited to admire de Cordet’s disembodied heroism, as she bravely stares down her own fate, but the distance that Craik establishes between the reader and de Cordet at this point in the novel suggests that her actions are fundamentally strange and unknowable. The historic Corday ultimately, then, eludes Craik, who appears to lose control of her character from the moment she plunges a dagger into Marat’s bosom. Camille Naish writes that the real Charlotte Corday “astounded many thronging the Salle Saint Louis by her calm resolve,” and likewise, in Craik’s novel, de Cordet’s resolve appears otherworldly, as if she has disappeared into what we would now call a dissociative state. 32 On the last page of the novel, Craik returns to the theme of individual versus collective justice, again demonstrating to the reader that de Cordet’s actions were profoundly ill-judged. She argues that “the practical part of immutable justice is not allowed to the arm of a single individual, whose private passions and prejudices, in that event, would unavoidably lead to innumerable evils in the execution of the laws.” 33 It is undoubtedly significant that Craik chooses to conclude this long, rambling novel with a meditation on the nature of justice, as it suggests that, even though we have been invited to sympathize with her throughout the novel, it is at this point that we need to step back and coolly appraise her actions. Craciun writes that Craik’s insistence that de Cordet has illegitimately stepped into the place of collective justice is a reference to the fact that “the symbolic influence afforded women in such allegorical representations (i.e., as Justice) in the public sphere was disproportionate to their actual political power.” 34 As Craciun

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perceptively suggests, de Cordet tries to take on the role of arbiter of justice, but the fact that she is a female means that not only does she have very little actual political power, but that in assuming that she does have a place within the justice system, she will only ever be seen as a monstrous aberration to her gender. The allegorical fails in the face of reality: Justice might be a woman, but a woman can never be the arbiter of justice. De Cordet, as a woman, should be removed from the processes of collective, institutionalized justice. If Marat had been properly tried for his crimes, de Cordet would not have been part of this process. Therefore, de Cordet’s intervention into the processes of law and order can only ever end in tragedy, because, as a woman, she has no proper or definable place within these processes. Craik’s domestication of Charlotte Corday is a problematic, unconvincing attempt to depoliticize a woman who came to public notoriety as the result of her politically motivated assassination of Marat. By inventing a backstory for Charlotte de Cordet that transform her motivations from public to private, Craik attempts to evoke sympathy for her, as well as suggest that any intervention into the political sphere by women can only ever result in tragedy. At the end of Adelaide de Narbonne, only the wholly fictional women are left standing, while the rest of the female characters have all met their deaths at the guillotine. Of course, Craik is somewhat bound by facts here: Marie Antoinette, Princess Elizabeth, and Charlotte Corday were all notorious victims of the guillotine, and Craik does not deviate from a basic historic framework. However, more importantly, the women who are executed over the course of the novel are all inherently political women. To varying degrees, they involve themselves in the politics of Revolution, whether through political activism (de Cordet, despite the veneer of private vengeance imposed upon her story), involvement in counter-revolutionary political plots (Bertha, Madeleine), or as an inevitable result of their membership in the royal family (Marie Antoinette, Elizabeth). While Victorine, Marie Antoinette’s fictional niece, is also a member of the royal family, she is able to bypass the fate of her aunt because so few people know of her existence, and because she steadfastly refuses to play any part in any political machinations, such as the plot to place her on the throne of France. As Adelaide says of Victorine, she “would equally revolt from a proposition so inimical to the interests and rights of her aunt’s children; and am, therefore, certain she would almost submit to any individual suffering, even the deprivation of life itself, rather than grant her consent to usurp the place of another.” 35 Victorine and Adelaide go to great lengths to deny any interest in the politics which surround them, despite the fact that both women are clearly royalists (or actually royal themselves) and deeply emotionally invested in the counter-revolutionary cause. As with Charlotte de Cordet, then, Craik’s representation of Victorine and Adelaide is thus deeply problematic and contradictory, as she simultaneously asks us to accept Victorine and Adelaide as apolitical at the same time

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that she gives Adelaide the role of quasi-protector of the monarchical cause, and suggests Victorine might be the salvation of the French monarchy. Craik’s ambivalent, complex portrait of Charlotte Corday suggests that while women may always have a stake in politics—all of the female characters in the novel have their own clearly articulated political allegiances, when they claim otherwise—they cannot act upon these beliefs. Those who do act upon political ideologies are liable to become either confused about the processes of justice or become distracted by domestic concerns, as de Cordet does. Further, women are almost always punished for what are seen as illegitimate interventions into the public sphere. It is no coincidence that the women in Adelaide de Narbonne who do demonstrate a willingness to enter into politics lose their heads: for a woman to expect to find a place for herself in the political arena is to lose one’s head both physically and metaphorically. Only the women who give up on politics altogether and confine themselves to the domestic arena can be saved. The world, Craik believes, simply cannot countenance the political women. Accordingly, she does her best to domesticate her version of Charlotte Corday through the medium of that most domestic of forms, the novel, in the process redrawing her as a woman disillusioned by her earlier beliefs and motivated by private affective ties. However, Craik’s efforts to depoliticize Charlotte Corday cannot be successful because Charlotte Corday, assassin of Marat, will always remain, stubbornly, radically political. NOTES 1. Adriana Craciun’s essay on the novel’s representation of Charlotte Corday remains the only extended attention the novel has hitherto received in the critical literature (Adriana Craciun, “The New Cordays: Helen Craik and British Representations of Charlotte Corday, 1793–1800,” in Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, edited by Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 193–232). Craciun’s work focuses on how Craik transforms Corday from a murderous figure into a chivalric figure, combining sensibility with the capacity to act. Craik is also briefly mentioned in M.O. Grenby’s work on the anti-Jacobin novelist, drawing attention to her depiction of Marat as the very embodiment of the kind of selfish monstrousness ascribed to the revolutionaries in anti-Jacobin fiction, her use of Princess Elizabeth as a surrogate Marie Antoinette figure, and Charlotte’s condemnation of Jacqueline’s attempt to disguise herself as Adelaide (M.O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 36–7, 39, 53, 106, 121, 144–5). 2. Nina Corazzo & Catherine R. Montfort, “Charlotte Corday: femme-homme,” in Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789, edited by Catherine R. Montfort (Birmingham: Summa, 1994), 34. 3. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 76. 4. Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 127. 5. Wendy C. Nielsen, Women Warriors in Romantic Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013), 9.

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6. Elizabeth R. Kindleberger, “Charlotte Corday in Text and Image: A Case Study in the French Revolution and Women’s History,” French Historical Studies 18, no. 4 (1994), 978. 7. However, Craik’s willingness to quote Mary Robinson’s explicitly politically radical novel Walsingham throughout Adelaide de Narbonne as chapter epigraphs, suggest that she is perhaps not as uncomplicatedly a conservative as might be supposed. 8. Interestingly, the only known review of Adelaide de Narbonne, published in The AntiJacobin Review, registers some confusion about the precise nature of Craik’s politics. The reviewer writes that, “she holds the scale of politics with so even a hand, as far as mere opinion reaches, that it were impossible to learn her own decided sentiments.” The reviewer goes on to say that “while her sentiments on the form of government are undiscoverable, those of obedience to the laws—of strict morality—of pure religion—are every where such as do credit to her heart.” Review of Adelaide de Narbonne, The Anti-Jacobin Review (January 1801), 59. 9. Helen Craik, Adelaide de Narbonne (London: Minerva Press, 1800), I.31. 10. Craik, I.53. 11. Ibid, I.69. 12. Ibid, II.51. 13. Ibid, I.219. 14. Grenby, 139. 15. Kevin Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 170. 16. Craik, I.70. 17. Ibid, I.96. 18. Ibid, IV.258. 19. Ibid, IV.276. 20. Ibid, IV.278. 21. Ibid, IV.278-9. 22. Craciun, 211. 23. Robert Southey, “July Thirteenth. Charlotte Corde Executed for Putting Marat to Death,” in Kenneth Curry, The Contributions of Robert Southey to the Morning Post (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 75 (lines 15–25). 24. Craik, IV.278. 25. Ibid, IV.279. 26. Ibid, IV.280. 27. Ibid, IV.282. 28. Ibid, IV.281. 29. Ibid, IV.282. 30. Ibid, IV.281. 31. Ibid, IV.282. 32. Camille Naish, Death Comes to the Maiden: Sex and Execution 1431–1933 (London: Routledge, 1991), 116. 33. Craik, IV.303. 34. Craciun, 216. 35. Craik, IV.25.

WORKS CITED Corazzo, Nina and Catherine R. Montfort. “Charlotte Corday: femme-homme.” In Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789, 33–54. Edited by Catherine R. Montfort. Birmingham: Summa, 1994. Craciun, Adriana. “The New Cordays: Helen Craik and British Representations of Charlotte Corday, 1793–1800.” In Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, 193–232. Edited by Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Craik, Helen. Adelaide de Narbonne. London: Minerva Press, 1800.

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Gilmartin, Kevin. Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Grenby, M.O. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Hunt, Lynn. The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Kindleberger, Elizabeth R. “Charlotte Corday in Text and Image: A Case Study in the French Revolution and Women’s History.” French Historical Studies 18, no. 4 (1994): 969–999. Landes, Joan B. Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in EighteenthCentury France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Naish, Camille. Death Comes to the Maiden: Sex and Execution 1431–1933. London: Routledge, 1991. Nielsen, Wendy C. Women Warriors in Romantic Drama. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013. Southey, Robert. “July Thirteenth. Charlotte Corde Executed for Putting Marat to Death.” In The Contributions of Robert Southey to the Morning Post, 75. Edited by Kenneth Curry. Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1984. Williams, Helen Maria. Letters from France. Eight Volumes in Two. Introduction by Janet Todd. Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1975.

Chapter Eight

Thomas Wolfe and the Domestication of Culture Jedidiah Evans

On October 18, 1929, Charles Scribner’s Sons released the first novel of an unknown, North Carolinian author named Thomas Wolfe. What the publisher could not have predicted was that just six days later, on the first of two “black” days, the New York stock market would experience its “most disastrous decline,” shortly followed by a total collapse, in what became the most severe and prolonged economic depression of the twentieth century. 1 Had the novel been more conventional in structure, more narrow in scope, populated with more orthodox characters—in short, more typical—its release may well have been entirely overshadowed by such adverse economic conditions. But Look Homeward, Angel (1929), was anything but typical: Wolfe’s first novel was acclaimed as a gargantuan, lyrical, sprawling novel that would ultimately turn Wolfe into a literary celebrity and generate an interest so intense that it is startling when compared to Wolfe’s current cultural status. Once regularly compared with three of his more familiar and enduring contemporaries— Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner—Wolfe has in recent years been relegated, as a Wall Street Journal editorial put it, to the “mostly forgotten and little read” pile. 2 As Mark McGurl notes in The Program Era (2009), “these days Wolfe is likely to be confused with his near-namesake Tom Wolfe, dapper New Journalist and popular novelist of a later generation, and is no more likely than the younger Wolfe to be found on any college syllabus [. . .]. Thomas Wolfe is well on his way to becoming a footnote to American literary history.” 3 The reasons for Wolfe’s critical decline have been well-rehearsed by both acolytes and apologists, but what is rarely—if ever—considered, is what Wolfe’s fiction actually achieved within his lifetime and how his work fits 127

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within the broader cultural history of the Depression era. 4 Taking my lead from McGurl’s suggestion that a book can be seen as an “experiential commodity whose value to its readers is a transvaluation of the authorial labor that went into its making,” this essay situates Wolfe’s work within an emerging culture market, arguing that the value of these novels, in McGurl’s words, “most often has little to do with the economic value of the pulp upon which it is pressed.” 5 Following Rita Felski’s entreaty in Uses of Literature (2008) to attend to the ways literature is used—”use” here meaning, in Felski’s words, an engagement that is “extraordinarily varied, complex, and often unpredictable in kind” 6—I read Wolfe’s work in light of both its centrality and peripherality to the culture wars of the 1930s. I argue that Wolfe is often overlooked in work on this period precisely because he achieved popular success, but failed to identify with either Agrarian or Marxist ideologies: critical investments that continue to generate interest for contemporary scholarship. Regarding this popular success, one of the most extraordinary aspects of Wolfe’s literary career was the value of the reading experience for fans of the novelist’s work, and while literary critics are often guilty of subordinating popular responses to novels in favor of reviews that appear in journals and newspapers—particularly when articulating an author’s critical importance—I argue that the letters from fans frequently express something of the significance that readers in this period attached to fiction, providing an invaluable glimpse into how Wolfe’s fiction was actually read. Moving beyond these discussions of Wolfe’s political ambivalence and popular success, this chapter ends with a consideration of Wolfe’s spectral presence after his death through the appropriation of the novelist as a voice for America, specifically as his work was shipped off with US soldiers and employed in the selling of war bonds. Thus, this essay traces how Wolfe’s work during the Depression period exemplifies the various ways in which literature is put to use: its ideological, popular, and political function. To begin, however, it is worth briefly considering Wolfe within the broader context of modernism’s technological impact on publishing during these interwar years, noting fiction’s pivotal role in moving discussions of culture into the homes (and hands) of the American population. CULTURE DOMESTICATED Wolfe’s novel arrived at a time in American history in which the very idea of culture—particularly a distinctly “American” culture—was being heavily contested, and where the technological organs of modernism—radio and print in particular—were enabling an unprecedented number of people to engage in these very debates. For the American philosopher John Dewey,

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there had never been “a more lively and more widespread interest in ideas, in critical discussion, in all that forms an intellectual life, than ever before.” 7 In Patterns for America (1993), Susan Hegeman explains that in the early part of the twentieth century, America had seen the development and broad dissemination of the idea of culture, a term that emerged and was “elaborated upon in a diversity of interesting sites” during this period. 8 Among such “sites” she includes “the social and aesthetic criticism of the modernist little magazines” as well as the work “emerging from the newly academicized disciplines of anthropology and sociology.” 9 What is most remarkable for Hegeman, however, was the extent to which the idea of culture in this period became newly accessible and interesting within a far broader public discourse, due primarily to those technologies that enabled this mass dissemination. Culture and technology enjoyed both a reciprocal and problematic relationship in the early twentieth century. As advances in radio, print, and film ensured that ideas could be transmitted beyond the elite forums where they emerged, anxieties surrounding the idea of “mass culture”—for instance the association of newly minted book clubs like Book-of-the-Month and the Literary Guild with economic imperatives—encouraged an increasing number of groups and individuals to develop and defend their own ideas of an American culture. Taking my lead from Warren I. Susman’s argument that in 1930s America saw the “idea of culture was domesticated,” I see the 1930s as the origin of a truly mass dissemination of the idea of culture in American homes. 10 And the novel was a crucial site in which the cultural idea was elaborated, inextricably linked as it was with the rising interest in culture and the development of mass printing technology. The idea of the “Great American Novel”—the search for which John William DeForest had famously initiated in the previous century—gained traction during this period of cultural debate, while for many people, particularly those looking for “the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence,” they needed to look no further than Thomas Wolfe. 11 In a more stagnant publishing atmosphere with fewer headlining novels— an atmosphere that might have been reasonably expected after a financial crisis—the extent of Wolfe’s popularity could be interpreted simply as a bright star in a dull literary environment. Indeed, writing on June 3, 1930, Maxwell Perkins admitted to Wolfe that he was glad that he “worked hard [. . .] to get out ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ before this collapse came.” 12 But Perkins’s anxiety was ultimately misplaced; in December 1929, only two months after the Crash, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran a report which suggested that the state of the novel industry was anything but stagnant: “A few years ago any book that achieved a sale of one hundred thousand in one year was the talk of the town [. . .]. Doesn’t it surprise you that fifteen books have sold over a hundred thousand copies this year?” 13 Though startling in retrospect, the success and desirability of books in the year of the Great

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Depression was taken for granted by the New York Times, which had run a feature-length article only three weeks before on “Books and Yet More Books for the Christmas Buyer,” declaring: “Those who came out of the recent stock market debacle with sufficient cash to admit that Christmas implies more than the filling of a stocking with striped candy and animal crackers will, of course, turn to the book.” 14 The popularity of the novel, even in the aftermath of an economic downturn, testifies to the cultural dominance of an art form that was in its heyday in the years following the First World War. According to Christopher Wilson, from the turn of the century, professional authors—“social novelists, muckraking magazine writers and newspaper reporters”—achieved a “widely recognized place in American social and even political life.” 15 Even in the midst of an economic crisis, books were still reliably bought and sold. Those who came out of the Crash with “sufficient cash” and looking to follow the advice of the New York Times could have chosen to stuff their overburdened Christmas stockings with “Wolfe’s novel of life in a small town of the South,” a much-discussed debut novel highlighted by The New York Times Book Review in an exhaustive list of notable novels and nonfiction. This same list, as read more than eight decades later, seems awry in omitting William Faulkner’s now-seminal The Sound and the Fury (1929), but at the time it was Wolfe whose novel was lauded. 16 While Look Homeward, Angel did not make it onto the Publisher’s Weekly bestseller list—that honor would come with the arrival of Wolfe’s second novel Of Time and the River (1935)—it achieved critical recognition and substantially outsold the 1,789 copies of Faulkner’s fourth novel that were printed and sold over the following year. When considering the sheer number of books sold during this period as reported by the Chicago Daily Tribune, it is important to recognize the role that book clubs played in ensuring such a wide readership: nine out of the fifteen books that the Tribune reported as selling over 100,000 copies were sold as a direct result of book club choices. 17 Mail-order book clubs emerged during the 1920s as a solution to the problems of distribution for American trade publishers, and they were spectacularly successful. The earliest two American clubs, the Book-of-the-Month Club (founded in 1926) and the Literary Guild (founded later that same year), understood that the U.S. Postal service could be adapted for literary dissemination; BOMC founder Harry Scherman identified the market potential of post offices, which at the time outnumbered traditional book outlets ten to one. 18 Particularly in their early years of operation, such clubs were panned by critics who bemoaned what they saw as their crass commercialism; Time magazine reported in 1946 that Harry Scherman had discovered the “ever-new old fact that Americans like to have culture sold to them.” 19 For a novel like Look Homeward, Angel, the commercial success earned through such populist recognition would have been met with critical suspicion, and it is telling that in Geoffrey Hellmann’s

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1929 review of Look Homeward, Angel in the modernist magazine The New Republic, Hellmann approvingly emphasized the absence of any such affiliation with Wolfe’s novel: “Unheralded, ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ will hardly remain unsung. Stamped with the approval of no book-of-the-moment club, lacking even the customary blurb-writer’s accolade, it is an extraordinarily fine novel, not to be mentioned in the same breath with all the forgotten blueribbon winners of the past few years.” 20 The publishing history of Look Homeward, Angel intersects with the emergence of some of the new innovations in the mass circulation of literature ushered in during the twentieth century. Investigating this history reveals how Wolfe’s maiden novel—and also American fiction more broadly—participated in the domesticating process of culture, both in America and across the Atlantic. The rapid process of cultural exchange saw William Heinemann publish a U.K. edition of Look Homeward, Angel within nine months of its U.S. release, trimming some sections to correspond to the publisher’s expectations of the British reading public. 21 By 1932, the first foreign edition, in German, had appeared, and in 1934 the Modern Library released an inexpensive Modern Library Giants edition. 22 This reprint of Look Homeward, Angel is especially significant given the growing cultural importance of masspublishing ventures like the Modern Library after World War I. Jay Satterfield, in The World’s Best Books: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library (2002), argues convincingly that the Modern Library symbolized the confluence of this growing sense of culture and the birth of mass-market dissemination in America during the 1930s. 23 The appeal of the novel in this period is exemplified in the success of the Modern Library, which managed, in the deepening Depression of 1930 alone, to sell over one million books. 24 Unlike the Book-of-the-Month-style clubs, which suffered from what Pierre Bourdieu has called a lack of “symbolic capital” due to their material success as “heteronomous cultural producers,” the Modern Library provided an important bridge between the growing mass cultural market while still retaining an aura of “high” literary culture. 25 Lauded as “an invaluable cultural enterprise,” it was avidly read by intellectuals, while writers themselves “feverishly desired to be a part” of it. 26 When Sherwood Anderson’s Poor White was republished by the Modern Library in 1926, for instance, he remarked that it felt “a little like a countryman going to live in a great modern sophisticated city.” 27 In a letter to his mother, Wolfe recounted his editor’s reasoning behind Scribner’s’s authorization of the Modern Library Giants reprint: Perkins thought it was a wise move to make for several reasons. First, because the Modern Library is a collection of famous works of famous writers, and he thinks the prestige of having the book printed in this edition will be valuable. Also, although the royalty is much smaller, the chance of having a considerable sale now is much greater in this low-priced edition. Another thing that

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Over the course of the next decade or so, this particular edition of Look Homeward, Angel would sell over 100,000 copies. 29 THE CRISIS OF CULTURE Before considering the popular reception of Wolfe’s earliest novel, along with its relevance within the broader history of the development of culture in America, it is worth turning to those “little magazines” to which Hegeman refers, whose emergence coincided with this growth of the mass dissemination of culture. These magazines were small-circulation publications that established a vociferous group of critics who saw themselves as the arbiters of the nation’s taste, and who would have an increasingly significant impact on critical attitudes towards a national literature and culture over the following decades. These “little magazines,” together with their editorial teams, helped establish several important academic journals—The Southern Review (first series 1935–42), The Kenyon Review (first series 1939–70), The Sewanee Review (1892–), and, to a lesser extent, The Virginia Quarterly Review (1925–)—that were instrumental in the ascendancy of New Criticism during the 1940s, a critical movement that dramatically altered the academic literary culture of America. 30 Importantly, all of these publications included early criticism on Wolfe’s fiction, with the Virginia Quarterly Review also publishing Wolfe’s story “Old Catawba” in April 1935, and Robert Penn Warren having asked Wolfe to contribute a story to the inaugural issue of The Southern Review. When Wolfe did not send in a submission (the letter had arrived while he was in Europe), The Southern Review instead chose to run John Donald Wade’s scathing review of Wolfe’s Of Time and the River (1935), an action that pre-empted the wider denunciation by these journals of Wolfe’s fiction in the years following his death. 31 Significantly, all of these literary magazines, with the exception of The Virginia Quarterly Review, were run by former Southern Agrarians, those “Twelve Southerners” who had contributed essays to the “agrarian” manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930), including Robert Penn Warren at The Southern Review, John Crowe Ransom as founding editor of The Kenyon Review, and Allen Tate and Andrew Lytle at The Sewanee Review. 32 New Criticism, in its focus on formalism over contextual analysis, might appear fundamentally apolitical in nature, but John Duvall suggests that this very apoliticism functioned as a “bulwark against readings that would introduce social, historical, and materialist contexts,” pointing out that New Criticism provided “an effective rationale for keeping Marxism out of Depart-

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ments of English.” 33 This underlying motivation is particularly significant when considering both the decade of Wolfe’s prominence, the ‘long 1930s’—stretching from the Crash to Pearl Harbor—and the popular assumption that it was the Left that had a powerful and unprecedented impact on U.S. culture during this decade. Michael Denning, in The Cultural Front (1996), offers a more nuanced reading of this ostensibly left-leaning decade, identifying in this period a “laboring of American culture,” in which the “communisms of the depression triggered a deep and lasting transformation of American modernism and mass culture.” 34 Addressing the question of why the Left had such a profound impact on American culture, Denning asserts: “For most critics and historians, the answer is embodied in the image of the ‘fellow traveler,’ the individual artist or intellectual attracted to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union in the face of a collapsing economy and rising fascism.” 35 Just two years after the Agrarians released I’ll Take My Stand, the leftist pamphlet Culture and the Crisis (1932) was published by “fellow travelers,” outlining the views of another dominant group of voices in the culture debate. Described by its authors as “an open letter to the writers, artists, teachers, physicians, engineers, scientists and other professional workers of America,” Culture and the Crisis was in many ways a response to the same concerns of the twelve Southern writers of I’ll Take My Stand, rehearsing a later antagonism that would develop between the school of New Criticism and Marxism in literary studies. 36 Written by such “fellow travelers” as John Dos Passos, Malcolm Cowley, and Edmund Wilson, Culture and the Crisis was a call to support the “frankly revolutionary Communist Party,” the only party that could “wring genuine concessions from the ruling classes.” 37 The study located both a social and an economic problem, pointing toward the failure of capitalism and the perceived lack of improvement in the three years since the Crash: “Call it hard times, unemployment, the farm problem, the world crisis, or call it simply hunger—whatever name we use, the issue is the same.” 38 Significantly—and with particular resonance for our own political moment—the authors tied these social and economic problems to problems of culture, provocatively suggesting that “a stench still rises in Washington and elsewhere from many a half-revealed swamp of corruption. The marriage of highly placed speculators with a vicious underworld of bootleggers and bandits has brought forth a degenerate spawn that rots the fiber of our culture, and stultifies large sections of our people.” 39 Though the Agrarians were conservative and anticommunist, their critique of industrialism was shared, at least in part, with the critique of capitalism in Culture and Crisis. Industrialism, according to the introduction of I’ll Take My Stand, was the “economic organization of the collective American society,” as well as being the cause of alienation in the individual whose labor “is hard, its tempo fierce, and his employment is insecure.” 40 In Culture and Crisis, the unemployment of 1,500,000 workers

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was similarly ascribed to “the accelerated introduction of labor-saving devices,” which left “no other bond between man and man” other than “crude self-interest.” 41 Despite Wolfe’s interest in chronicling the Depression years, he did not identify as a fellow traveler, and his fiction is rarely considered alongside the likes of Dos Passos in terms of its sociological nuance or critique. Although J. B. Priestley has claimed that “fifty sociological treatises on the recent American scene would not tell us as much about the place and the people as Wolfe does,” the more common assertion by writers associated with the “fellow travelers” of this period was the problem of what Malcolm Cowley has characterized as Wolfe’s “inordinate preoccupation with himself.” 42 Significantly, it was not Parisian cafes but Munich beer halls that drew Wolfe in, and though he was not promoting German fascism as an alternative to Communism in this period, his proximity to Germany in an historical moment of leftist literary activism was highly unusual. Cowley met Wolfe only once in New York in 1937, recalling in a letter that Wolfe appeared to be “in a somewhat radical phase,” talking “against the Nazis,” evidence of the novelist’s late shift towards a more informed—or at least more critical—political mindset. 43 While Culture and Crisis and I’ll Take My Stand both highlighted the exploitative potential of capitalism, they turned their attention to different solutions. Culture and the Crisis called for “a truly human society where all forms of exploitation have been abolished,” via “the revolutionary struggle against capitalism under the leadership of the Communist Party.” 44 I’ll Take My Stand’s solution was to return to a predominately agrarian society, in which “the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.” 45 Wolfe’s apparent failure to adapt to either the Agrarian or Communist project has seen him side-lined in discussions concerned with situating these movements within broader cultural contexts. The culture debate between Agrarians and “fellow travelers” during Wolfe’s period of writing invariably raises the question of Wolfe’s own ideological affiliation, along with the unstated political implication of any such affiliation. It is not difficult to see the interplay of Communism and a kind of fascism in these two competing pamphlets, or indeed to discern an important regional variation, within which the South was conflated with fascism. Indeed, the racial politics of the Jim Crow South, the Southern identification with Europe, and the romanticization of an Agrarian identity, all invite comparisons with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, as Robert Brinkmeyer Jr. persuasively argues in his The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930–1950 (2009). 46 In Thomas Wolfe and the Politics of Modernism (2001), Shawn Holliday perpetuates the popular view that Wolfe “saw the dangers of adhering to a specific political ideology too closely,” taking his lead from Wolfe’s own assertion in a diary entry that he was neither Republi-

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can, Democrat, Communist, or Fascist. 47 While Holliday attempts to argue for Wolfe’s relevance to the tenets of literary modernism, in reality Wolfe embodies multiple and sometimes conflicting cultural and political allegiances. WOLFE’S POPULAR RECEPTION Within the context of 1930s cultural debates, Wolfe’s lack of allegiance with either the Southern Agrarians or the “fellow travelers” had important political implications for his legacy. It has long been the contention of Wolfe scholars that the author’s self-imposed separation from the Agrarians—in a letter to Dixon Wecter, Wolfe claimed that he had done everything with this particular collective, “except become a Southern Agrarian” 48—led to his eventual exclusion from the American canon in the post-war years dominated by New Criticism. 49 Similarly, Wolfe’s failure as a radical, leftist intellectual—revealed in his lack of affiliation with the Communist party—has meant that his work has been routinely passed over in historical studies of the literary climate in the years preceding World War II, which are often concerned with the activism and involvement of writers in a climate of social revolution. What these studies overlook, however, is the extent to which Wolfe’s political immaturity at the time of writing Look Homeward, Angel, did not hamper contemporary considerations of his cultural relevance. The error of many critics when faced with Wolfe’s lack of clear allegiance to these literary or cultural movements of the 1930s is to assume an inevitable lack of political engagement on Wolfe’s part, and to construe a minor historical significance, treating these affiliations as evidence of an author’s relevance. This particular interpretive orientation has endured for many decades, ultimately functioning to cordon off his work from critical consideration. What is truly astonishing is the extent with which Wolfe’s work was not only deeply involved with the “domestication of culture” in the 1930s, but also how much his fiction expressed the sentiments of a generation of young readers struggling with alienation and separation in 1930s America. The convergence of social, political, and economic breakdown with the dissatisfaction and alienation of the individual within an increasingly modernizing America has prompted cultural historians like Hegeman and Susman to suggest that ideas of culture in this decade were not merely contested in limited-run, “intellectual” publications, but were increasingly relevant to the broader American populace. As Hegeman argues: The vision of “culture” that enabled this estranged perception of collective identity is a complexly modernist one, related to other estrangements of context and perception that so influenced the more experimental artistic movements of the period [. . .] older conceptions of history and temporality had

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Chapter 8 begun to seem, for various reasons, no longer adequate to explaining the specific experiences of alienation and difference Americans felt from others in their communities, their nation, the world. More specifically, “culture” offered an important conceptual framework for articulating the often uneasy and uneven experience of the achievement of modernity. Thus, the period of the thirties is the moment of “culture’s” domestication precisely because it is also when the problem of uneven modernity—then being aggressively addressed by the antipoverty and infrastructural development programs of the New Deal—was a topic of such intense social and political concern. 50

Just as “culture” offered an important conceptual framework for a populace dealing with both rapid industrialization and financial collapse, as well as with the more nebulous “experience of modernity,” fiction helped provide a vision of culture that aided readers in understanding and overcoming such experiences of alienation and fragmentation. Despite his exclusion from critical discussion, Wolfe was deeply concerned with the impact of economic Depression and its effects on the individual consciousness, with Sean Cashman rightly pointing out that Wolfe wrote about the structural flaws of “an economic system that tolerated exploitation” and suggesting that Wolfe’s descriptions of the “abyss of human wretchedness and misery” in New York were designed to show that “the extent of widespread unemployment and pitiful destitution could surely not survive indefinitely.” 51 Ultimately, the popular reception of Look Homeward, Angel speaks to anxieties around the Depression and the New Deal, as well as generational sense of alienation, loss, and yearning. While critics were debating the particular authors to which Wolfe could be compared —Melville, Whitman, and Joyce were popular contenders—the reading public was responding to Wolfe’s novel as a quasi-religious revelation. When Leo Gurko wrote his social and literary account of the long 1930s in The Angry Decade (1947), he described the release of Look Homeward, Angel as “the nearest thing to a literary thunderbolt in the twentieth century,” a pronouncement that seems all the more superlative in light of Wolfe’s recent obscurity. 52 But Gurko’s claim finds support in the popular response to Wolfe’s novel: hundreds of letters from the general public contain statements reinforcing the claim that Wolfe was a veritable cultural prophet. In a letter dated January 29, 1934, one fan declares that her missives were “little prayers of thanksgiving to a living god,” a sentiment of reverent praise that is representative of many letters Wolfe received. 53 One reader gushed that Look Homeward, Angel had gone “deeper than anything I know” in explaining the “pitiful sordidness and confusion, the beauty and ugliness of our muddled, mysterious lives.” 54 Wolfe’s prophetic status is regularly invoked: one fan described Look Homeward, Angel as the “greatest sermon that has been delivered since the Sermon on the Mount,” while another adds, “I must tell you how I love Look Homeward, Angel, and of how much it has meant to me.

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I read it almost every day, pick it up and open it and read, just as I do the Bible.” 55 For one particularly devoted couple Wolfe’s fiction even stood in the place of a regular dialogue, with the letter writer claiming that “tho’ [we] couldn’t speak [we] shared everything,” and that Wolfe’s books “said it for us—we used to think ‘this is how I feel’ or ‘this is how we feel.’” 56 In her essay “Main Street Reading Main Street” (2008), Amy Blair offers a caution in reading fan mail about books “everyone is talking about,” noting the complicated slippages that occur between the private response, and public disclosure: “even the most self-revelatory fan letter was, at least partially, a performance of reader reception.” 57 Beyond mere adulation, however, such letters contain important insights into how Wolfe’s fiction was initially read—or indeed how readers wanted Wolfe to perceive they were read— particularly in terms of a younger generation of readers. Speaking on behalf of an entire generation, a Mexican reader of Look Homeward, Angel emphatically asserted that “the hunger of Eugene Gant is the eternal hunger of all of us who are still young.” 58 Another letter from Nancy Tubiash—a reader for a Boston publisher—made a similar claim: Dear Mr. Wolfe, to say that Look Homeward, Angel is the greatest book written since 1900 is not enough. To me it is more important that your book represents the present generation—the quintessence of the men and women in their early twenties. It speaks to us and of us and finds a profound and swelling echo within us. To me, Look Homeward, Angel means so much, that I’m frankly afraid to read Of Time and the River [. . .] I don’t dare to suppose that it will be to me what the first was, but I am looking forward to it as to something approximating a religious rite. 59

This “quintessence” of youth was repeated in Doris Lessing’s 1958 essay on Wolfe, in which she writes that returning to Wolfe is less like reading about adolescence, than it is a “re-experience [of] adolescence,” suggesting that his gift lay in writing from within that youthful generation. 60 No writer and acolyte of Wolfe represents this youthful obsession more clearly than Jack Kerouac, whose own novel, On the Road (1957), would inspire a subsequent generation of young readers, enthralled as they were by Kerouac’s unrelenting road-trip across the American continent. While Kerouac never wrote fan mail to Wolfe such as those letters discussed above, his journals and letters similarly testify to the profound impact that Wolfe’s novels had on him: a member of the generation of readers Wolfe first influenced. In a 1940 entry from his journal, Kerouac suggested an extraordinarily close correspondence between himself and Wolfe: “Thomas Wolfe lived and died. He is said to be one of greatest writers. His different ideas are strikingly correspondent with mine. (Often, I foresee the next paragraph.) My mind, I think, is a small prototype of his. He found out; I shall benefit by his experience. He is my God (I shall use his philosophy).” 61

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BOOKS AS WEAPONS In the years following Wolfe’s death in 1938, the cultural significance of books—particularly as a means by which ideas of culture could be disseminated in the first half of the twentieth century—was reaffirmed in one particular aspect of the American war effort. In 1944, Look Homeward, Angel was released in a trim volume of 512 pages as an Armed Services Edition. (In American Pulp [2014], Paula Rabinowicz recounts a letter between Leo Meltzer—a serviceman—and Philip Van Doren Stern—historian, editor, and general manager in charge of distributing the Armed Services Editions—in which Meltzer had apparently requested Look Homeward, Angel on the basis that not enough “literary” books were circulating among the forces. 62) Historians credit the Armed Services Editions with introducing books to soldiers who had previously read very little, and also for helping fuel the paperback boom in the post-war years). 63 The Armed Services Editions represented “the greatest mass publishing enterprise of all history,” with nearly 123 million copies of 1,322 titles being distributed to defense force personnel. 64 John B. Hench notes that “like the landing of the troops on D-Day, this invasion of books was intended to effect a liberation, in this case, the unfettering of people’s minds.” 65 This mass publication of books during a period of unprecedented censorship gave a political dimension to the supply of books, highlighting the cultural significance that books had attained by the middle of the twentieth century. The Council on Books in Wartime (CBW), a non-profit organization founded by publishers, booksellers, librarians, and authors, adopted the W. W. Norton slogan (later given wide circulation by Roosevelt): “Books are weapons in the war of ideas.” 66 Though this publication added very little profit to Wolfe’s estate, it is highly significant that Wolfe’s novel, then over fifteen years old, was embedded within a political program that emphatically promoted the moral value of reading. Look Homeward, Angel—together with as the rest of Wolfe’s oeuvre—had attained symbolic significance as embodying the romantic myth of America. This transformation of Wolfe into the voice of America is routinely overlooked today, but such a position is vital in understanding the author’s place in American literary history. As early as 1939—one year after Wolfe’s death—his fiction was excised, altered, amended, and reconfigured to serve as a symbol for America—a job Wolfe himself facilitated through the project of taking the “billion forms, the million names, the huge, single, and incomparable substance of America” and making it the substance of his art. 67 In 1939 the Literary Guild of America published a collection of his most “poetical passages” grandly titled The Face of a Nation (1939). John Hall Wheelock wrote in the introduction to The Face of a Nation that Wolfe’s major achievement lay in articulating the “American spirit and the American earth of our day.” 68 Radio producers, sensitive to this poetic power of articulation,

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also helped to propagate this version of Thomas Wolfe; within six months of his death, CBS—which would broadcast a number of dramatized versions of Wolfe’s writing over the following years—contacted Maxwell Perkins for permission to broadcast Wolfe’s final letter written to Perkins, within in a segment called “Words Without Music.” 69 Even before Look Homeward, Angel had assisted the war effort via its Armed Services Editions reprinting, Wolfe’s vision of America had been co-opted by the U.S. Treasury for the purpose of selling war bonds, sponsoring a radio play adaptation of Wolfe’s writing on America titled “The Face of America” in 1942. What all these adaptations have in common was the collation of those scattered paeans to America strewn throughout Wolfe’s work, such as declamatory passages like the following from Of Time and the River (1935), which was used prominently in this example of the Treasury’s campaign for war bonds: It is the place of the howling winds, the hurrying of the leaves in old October, the hard clean falling to the earth of acorns. The place of the storm-tossed moaning of the wintry mountainside, where the young men cry out in their throats and feel the savage vigor, the rude strong energies; the place also where the trains cross rivers. It is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the one place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time. 70

Through both print media and radio, Wolfe’s artistic portrayal of America was disseminated to the broader population after his death, in the belief that his romantic vision represented a nation that was worth fighting for. His novels, full of yearning and ecstatic nationalism, were valorized for their nostalgic power in a period dominated by economic crisis, as though the America they expressed was fragile and in need of protection. This propagandizing of Wolfe’s fiction is only one instance of his spectral presence lingering after his death, and it is my contention that Wolfe’s work has profound implications for understanding the development of American literature during this period, particularly in understanding the uses of literature during a moment of both economic and cultural disruption. The opening of the radio play “The Face of America” offers an insight into how Wolfe’s writing had come to be understood chiefly in terms of the vision of America it promoted: a final iteration of a literary object that had been employed as evidence of ideological failure, bore the hallmarks of modernism’s tools of cultural dissemination, enjoyed popular adoration, and finally, was repurposed as a tool for nationalism: Ladies and gentlemen—it is with a sense of reverence that we turn to the pages of one of America’s greatest writers. He was known as a novelist—but often he wrote as a poet, and spoke with the poet’s burning vision and gift of

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Chapter 8 prophecy. Thomas Wolfe wrote about America; and tonight . . . he speaks to us of America! 71

NOTES 1. “Worst Stock Crash Stemmed by Banks,” New York Times, October 25, 1929, 1. 2. Jeffrey Meyers, “Hemingway’s Achievement,” The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303714704576386102863132610. 3. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 79. 4. For two brief mentions of Wolfe in studies of Depression fiction see Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Twenties and Thirties: The Olympian Age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: New York University, 1989), 120–123 and William Solomon, Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 244n34, 248n29. 5. McGurl, The Program Era, 15. 6. Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 8. 7. John Dewey, “Individualism, Old and New. Part 5: The Crisis in Culture,” New Republic 62 (March 19, 1930): 123. 8. Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3. For further discussion of the development of ideas of culture in America during this period, also see Patricia Bradley, Making American Culture: A Social History, 1900–1920 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 9. Ibid. 10. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 154. 11. John William DeForest, “The Great American Novel,” The Nation January 9, 1868. 12. Perkins to Wolfe, 3 June 1930 in Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, ed. John Hall Wheelock (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 68. 13. Fanny Butcher, “Best Sellers of Year Reported by Publishers,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 21, 1929, 14. Emphasis added. 14. “Books and Yet More Books for the Christmas Buyer: A List of Suggestions for Those Who Will Solve the Holiday Problem in the Good Old Way,” New York Times Book Review, December1, 1929, 7. 15. Christopher P. Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 2. 16. Published on October 7, only eleven days prior to Look Homeward, Angel, Faulkner’s fourth novel would require no more than its initial printing of 1,789 copies to satisfy demand for more than a year. When Time magazine ran its article “ALL-TIME 100 Novels” (now regularly cited on book covers of classic reissues), Faulkner’s novel made the list for 1929 but not Look Homeward, Angel. For these sales figures see Gail M. Morrison, “The Composition of The Sound and the Fury” in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2008), 14. For the Time article see James Kelly, Lev Grossman, and Richard Lacayo, “Time’s List of the 100 Best Novels (1923–2005),” Time, October 16, 2005, accessed June 15, 2013, http://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/. 17. Fanny Butcher, “Best Sellers of Year Reported by Publishers,” 14. 18. James L. W. West III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace Since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 124. 19. “PUBLISHING: Mass-Produced Culture,” Time 47, no. 11 (March 18, 1946): 80. 20. Geoffrey T. Hellman, Review of Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, New Republic 61 (December 18, 1929): 122. 21. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life (London: Heinemann, 1930).

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22. Thomas Wolfe, Schau heimwärts, Engel!: eine Geschichte vom begrabnen Leben, trans. Hans Schiebelhuth (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1932); Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life (New York: Modern Library, 1934). 23. Jay Satterfield, The World’s Best Books: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). 24. Satterfield, The World’s Best Books, 2. 25. “The literary or artistic field is at all times the site of a struggle between the two principles of hierarchization: the heteronomous principle, favourable to those who dominate the field economically and politically (e.g. ‘bourgeois art’) and the autonomous principle (e.g. ‘art for art’s sake’), which those of its advocates who are least endowed with specific capital tend to identify with degree of independence from the economy, seeing temporal failure as a sign of election and success as a sign of compromise.” Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 40. 26. Satterfield, The World’s Best Books, 137. 27. Ibid, 126. Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) was also released in a Modern Library edition in 1922. 28. Thomas Wolfe to Julia Wolfe, 8 March 1934 in The Letters of Thomas Wolfe to His Mother, ed. C. Hugh Holman and Sue Fields Ross (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 223. 29. Carol Johnston, Thomas Wolfe: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987, 11. For further discussion of the American literary marketplace in the first part of the twentieth century, see James L. W. West III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900. 30. John N. Duvall, “New Criticism’s Major Journals” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North America 1894–1960, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 928–929. 31. A virtually identical letter from Warren was sent out to Sherwood Anderson the following day. See Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren: Volume Two, The Southern Review Years 1935–1942, ed. William Bedford Clark (Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 32. For Wade’s review of Of Time and the River see John Donald Wade, “Prodigal,” Southern Review 1 (July 1935): 192–198. 32. The Virginia Quarterly Review was significant in the development of New Criticism inasmuch as it published the work of Brooks, Ransom, and Tate, between 1935 and 1938. See John N. Duvall, “New Criticism’s Major Journals,” 929. The aforementioned reviewer, John Donald Wade, was also a Southern Agrarian. 33. Ibid. 34. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: New York: Verso, 1996), xvi. 35. Ibid, xvii. 36. League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford, Culture and the Crisis (New York: Workers Library, 1932), 1. 37. Ibid, 3. 38. Ibid, 5. 39. Ibid, 14. 40. Twelve Southerners, introduction to I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930; repr. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), xliv. 41. Culture and the Crisis, 7, 30. 42. J. B. Priestley, introduction to The Web and the Rock, by Thomas Wolfe (London: William Heinemann, 1947), xi; Malcolm Cowley, “Thomas Wolfe’s Legacy,” New Republic 99, no. 1285 (19 July 1939): 311. 43. Malcolm Cowley to Richard Kennedy, 28 December 1950. Richard S. Kennedy Papers on Thomas Wolfe (CW2.5), North Carolina Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 44. Culture and the Crisis, 30. 45. I’ll Take My Stand, li.

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46. Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism 1930–1950 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009). 47. Shawn Holliday, Thomas Wolfe and the Politics of Modernism (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 79. 48. Thomas Wolfe to Dixon Wecter, 5 March 1937 in The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, ed. Elizabeth Nowell (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956), 613. 49. This argument is reiterated so frequently that nearly all the criticism available on Wolfe from the post-war years could be included as supporting material. See particularly Thomas Wolfe: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Leslie A. Field (New York: New York University Press, 1968), Holman, The Loneliness at the Core : Studies in Thomas Wolfe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), Shawn Holliday, Thomas Wolfe and the Politics of Modernism, and Zebulon S. Baker, “Tradition Against the Individual Talent: Thomas Wolfe and the Exclusionary Politics of the New Critical Canon-building,” Thomas Wolfe Review 26, no. 1 (2002): 52–67. 50. Hegeman, Patterns for America, 4. 51. Cashman, America in the Twenties and Thirties, 123. 52. Leo Gurko, The Angry Decade (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947), 29. 53. Miss Stella F. Brewster to Thomas Wolfe, 29 January 1934, bMS Am 1883.1 (729), William B. Wisdom Collection of Thomas Wolfe, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 54. Mrs Dorothy C. Carroll to Thomas Wolfe, 8 September 1935, bMS Am 1883.1 (729), William B. Wisdom Collection of Thomas Wolfe, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 55. William Cooke to Thomas Wolfe, undated, bMS Am 1883.1 (729), William B. Wisdom Collection of Thomas Wolfe, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Jemima Saiz to Thomas Wolfe, 26 July 1933, bMS Am 1883.1 (729), William B. Wisdom Collection of Thomas Wolfe, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 56. Lily Anne Hough to Thomas Wolfe, 5 July 1936, bMS Am 1883.1 (729), William B. Wisdom Collection of Thomas Wolfe, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 57. Amy L. Blair, “Main Street Reading Main Street” in New Directions in American Reception Study, eds. Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 145. 58. Luiz Calero to Thomas Wolfe, 20 May 1945, bMS Am 1883.1 (730), William B. Wisdom Collection of Thomas Wolfe, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 59. Nancy Tubiash to Thomas Wolfe, 16 March 1935, bMS Am 1883.1 (729), William B. Wisdom Collection of Thomas Wolfe, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 60. Doris Lessing, “Thomas Wolfe, myth-maker,” The Manchester Guardian, October 3, 1958, 9. 61. Jack Kerouac, journal entry, Holograph notebook “1940” (53.1), Jack Kerouac Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. 62. Paula Rabinowicz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 128. 63. For this discussion see Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984) and John Y Cole, ed., Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions (Washington: The Library of Congress, 1984). 64. John B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 52. 65. Ibid, 2. 66. Ibid, 4–5. 67. Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in his Youth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), 859. 68. John Hall Wheelock, introduction to The Face of a Nation: Poetical Passages from the Writings of Thomas Wolfe, ed. John Hall Wheelock (New York: The Literary Guild of America, 1939), v. 69. CBS to Maxwell Perkins, 16 May 1939, bMS Am 1883.12, William B. Wisdom Collection of Thomas Wolfe, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 70. Wolfe, Of Time and the River, 155.

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71. Thomas Wolfe, “The Face of America” in The Treasury Star Parade, ed. William A. Bacher (New York: Farrar and Reinhart, 1942), 143.

WORKS CITED Blair, Amy L. “Main Street Reading Main Street.” In New Directions in American Reception Study, 139–158. Edited by Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Brinkmeyer, Jr., Robert H. The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930–1950. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. Cowley, Malcolm. “Thomas Wolfe’s Legacy.” New Republic, 99, no 1285 (July 19, 1939): 311. DeForest, John William. “The Great American Novel.” The Nation, January 9, 1868. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1996. Dewey, John. “Individualism, Old and New. Part 5: The Crisis in Culture.” New Republic 62 (March 19, 1930): 123–26. Duvall, John N. “New Criticism’s Major Journals.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North America 1894–1960, 928–943. Edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Felski, Rita Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Gurko, Leo. The Angry Decade. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947. Hegeman, Susan. Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Hellman, Geoffrey T. Review of Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe. New Republic 61, no. 785 (December 18, 1929): 122. Hench, John B. Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Holliday, Shawn. Thomas Wolfe and the Politics of Modernism. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Johnston, Carol Ingalls. Thomas Wolfe: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987. League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford. Culture and the Crisis. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1932. Lessing, Doris. “Thomas Wolfe, myth-maker.” The Manchester Guardian, October 3, 1958: 9. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Perkins, Maxwell. Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins. Edited by John Hall Wheelock. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950. Rabinowicz, Paula. American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Satterfield, Jay. The World’s Best Books: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Twelve Southerners. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. 1930. Reprint, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976. West III, James L. W. American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Wilson, Christopher P. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Wolfe, Thomas. “The Face of America.” In The Treasury Star Parade, 139–150. Edited by William A. Bacher. New York: Farrar and Reinhart, 1942.

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———. The Face of a Nation: Poetical Passages from the Writings of Thomas Wolfe. Edited by John Hall Wheelock. New York: The Literary Guild of America, 1939. ———. The Letters of Thomas Wolfe. Edited by Elizabeth Nowell. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956. ———. The Letters of Thomas Wolfe to His Mother. Edited by C. Hugh Holman and Sue Fields Ross. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. ———. Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life. London: Heinemann, 1930. ———. Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in his Youth. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935. ———. The Web and the Rock, 1939. Reprint, London: William Heinemann, 1947.

Chapter Nine

Missing Books Nicola Evans

At the beginning of The Perverse Library, the poet and scholar Craig Dworkin visits a friend’s apartment, which has the most comprehensive collection of avant-garde poetry that Dworkin has ever seen. 1 The walls are lined with books from floor to ceiling. He spies books he has only ever heard of. “At the top of one shelf,” he writes, “I thought I caught a glimpse of Robert Grenier’s infamous ‘Chinese box’ bound set of cards, Sentences.” 2 But when Dworkin compliments his friend on his library, he discovers he has missed the point. Or rather the book, because there is one notable omission from this collection: “I don’t have any Leslie Scalapino,” his friend declares proudly, referring to the well-known American language poet, “she’s a total fraud.” 3 Immediately, Dworkin is possessed of a vivid memory of Scalapino’s books: “the laid lines texturing the cover stock of her first book, O [Berkeley: Sand Dollar, 1976] and the oblong formats of her early books of permutated narratives . . . came . . . to mind—I could almost feel them in my hands.” 4 Dworkin’s anecdote suggests that libraries are defined in part by the books they exclude. For Dworkin, those missing books “exert a palpable pressure—a phantom shelf in the sense that one might speak of a phantom limb.” 5 I begin with Dworkin, because his notion of the phantom shelf emphasizes that to be missing is not simply to be absent. The omission of Leslie Scalapino has made her central, not just to the way his friend understands his collection, but also to Dworkin’s essay on the perverse library. Scalapino has made what Mallarme called a “resonant disappearance.” 6 Her presence in Dworkin’s own text is further impressed on us through the tactile memories of her work that Dworkin summons and his descriptions remind us that a book has not one material life but many. The technical precision of “laid lines” 7 and “cover stock” 8 draw attention to the life of a book as a publication. But the allusion to Grenier’s book Sentences (1972 -77) evokes the life 145

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that a book has both before and after publication. Sentences consists of a box covered in dark blue cloth and closed with ivory clasps. It opens to reveal 500 index cards, each containing a poem that the reader can shuffle into any order. It is in fact expensive to produce and is more often exhibited in galleries. 9 While its form suggests the book prior to publication—the note cards out of which we often make books—the box with its ivory clasps suggests what many books become after dissemination. A book is often turned into a container for other things, sometimes housing other texts, as the commonplace book once did, sometimes pressed flowers, sometimes the photos and ticket stubs and other detritus of everyday life. The scrapbook is a significant part of book history, and the clasp was once a popular form of bookbinding, invented originally to stop pages from expanding in the humidity. 10 Today websites such as foundinbooks.wordpress.com and forgottenbookmarks.com acknowledge the way books disgorge ephemera, as though books were a miniature archive in which readers may go trolling for treasure. The contrast between Grenier’s Sentences that is almost present in this text, but not quite (he “thought he caught a glimpse”), almost present in the world of publications, but not quite—and Scalapino’s books, that are definitely missing, but so tangibly present—enacts the beginnings of a typology of the ways in which books can be absent, and the ways in which, as a consequence, they can come to matter. Paul Stephens places The Perverse Library in a category of conceptual writing that foregrounds the protocols we develop for classifying and storing information as the unlikely ingredients for the creation of poetry. 11 But Dworkin’s account of missing books and phantom limbs has a specific magic that for me evokes other affinities. Doing a little re-shelving of my own, I claim Dworkin for the genre of the “bibliographic romance.” The phrase was used by Ina Ferris for “those minor genres of book love” in the nineteenth century that emphasize the appeal of the book’s material form. 12 I borrow the name here to encompass more broadly the way in which the material book in its many and varied forms becomes the subject of narrative fantasy. The first part of this essay focuses on one of these forms, the book in its unbound, manuscript form. A particularly compelling set of narratives emerge around manuscripts that go missing or are separated from their authors. Such stories would include the first draft of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom that was stolen from Reading railway station—or in another account, burnt by its author—and that was reputed to contain valuable information about the author’s complicated relationship with Arab leaders. Stories about missing manuscripts usually sit somewhere between truth, fiction and urban legend. The tale that Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary critic smoked his manuscript on German literature when he ran out of cigarette paper during the German invasion of Russia in World War II is still the subject of dispute among his literary biographers. 13 Equally, I could find no

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substantive evidence for a story circulating in County Wicklow, Ireland about a farmer who discovered a bundle of Wittgenstein’s papers plugging a hole in the ceiling of the farmhouse where Wittgenstein once lived. 14 What is interesting about these stories is not their accuracy, but the recurrence of certain key elements revealing the meaning we assign to the book’s material existence. In particular, the manuscript that is so difficult to hold onto in these accounts seems to dislocate the author, as though unbound, the book begins to unravel the author’s control of their identity. In analyzing these stories I explore the way the treatment of the missing manuscript recalls a trope popularized in the chivalric Romance in which a lost manuscript introduces a rival set of narrative possibilities that destabilize the master narrative. I discuss the function of this trope in a reading of an extended version of the missing manuscript story that appears in Michael Taussig’s essay on Walter Benjamin and the manuscript that was lost during Benjamin’s attempted flight from the Nazis. If the first part of this essay is about stories of books that are literally missing, the second part focuses on another form of “missing books,” namely the nostalgic tributes to the print book that many authors have already begun to craft in the face of its perceived, imminent demise in the digital era. To be clear the print book is not dead, or even dying. A 2016 Gallup poll reported that 73 percent of American readers still choose print books compared to only 19 percent reading e-books. 15 Sales of print books are rising in many countries worldwide 16 and in May 2017 Amazon opened its seventh bricks and mortar bookstore. 17 Despite this, the perception of a looming death has produced a flush of titles expressing a yearning for the material books that from childhood on, shape readers into people. Titles such as A Life with Books by Julian Barnes, The Child that Books Built by Francis Spufford, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books by Wendy Lesser, This is Not the End of the Book; by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere and finally My Life with BOB: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues by Pamela Paul fashion new versions of the bibliographic romance as they delve into the significance of the book as a physical artifact. As the rise of the e-book endows the print book with new interest and value, the second part of this essay looks at how such narratives uncover new dimensions of our relationship to the physical form of the book. As I hope to show, these stories about how books create people invite us to think about what books are and do in the aggregate, rather than individually, uses that are indelibly tied to the books’ material presence in the lives of their readers.

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KAFKA’S REMAINS, AND BENJAMIN’S BRIEFCASE The reference to “Kafka’s remains” is from an essay by Judith Butler published in the London Review of Books on the 3 March 2011, entitled “Who Owns Kafka.” 18 The essay discusses the fantastic soap opera surrounding Kafka’s papers—the manuscripts that he asked his literary executor, Max Brod to burn and that Brod instead packed into a suitcase and took to Israel. 19 While Brod published some of Kafka’s manuscripts, including The Castle, The Trial, and Amerika, the rest of his papers were lost to public view when Brod bequeathed them to his secretary, Esther Hoffe, who locked them up in a vault. When Esther died she left Kafka’s papers to her two daughters, a will challenged by the National Library of Israel who felt that Kafka’s papers belonged to the Jewish people. In the trial that ensued, the daughters said that if they won, they would allow the value of the manuscripts to be auctioned off based not on their content, but on their weight, so much for a kg of Kafka, as though they were selling extremely valuable cheese. A number of institutions were predicted to be lining up to buy them on those terms. If the death of an author exposes the fragility of the manuscript, its propensity to collapse back into mundane objecthood, where it may be assessed by its weight—or, in the case of Bakhtin and Wittgenstein, its value in rolling tobacco and stopping up leaks—the story of the manuscript in turn exposes the precarious identity of the author, and the ease with which death can snap the bonds of belonging that were carefully built up in life. It is striking how often tales of missing manuscripts are bound up with both figurative and literal stories of cultural dislocation. The story of Bakhtin’s missing manuscript is a story about a Russian’s controversial sortie into German literature, one that was ironically answered by the part played by the German invasion in its destruction. 20 The legal battle over the ownership of Kafka’s manuscripts was a battle over whether Kafka belonged to German literature or to Jewish culture; the German Literature Archive in Marbach was the main competitor with the National Library of Israel for his papers. Butler’s use of the phrase “Kafka’s remains” is precise—the term “remains” refers to both the body of someone deceased and the unpublished work of a dead author, both corpse and corpus, and it points up how such manuscripts become surrogates for the loosening of the ties of identity. Just as Albert Camus’s unfinished manuscript, thrown from the car when he died in an accident, rekindled the “unfinished business” of Camus’s ideological affiliations to French settlers or Algerian dissidents, 21 so T. E. Lawrence’s missing manuscript from Reading station continues to hold open the question of his erotic relations with Arab culture. Andrew Piper suggests that with the coming of the print book, the manuscript acquired associations of “fragility” and “losability” as against print’s supposed durability—although many medieval manuscripts have outlasted

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print books. 22 In the case of manuscripts that are lost or separated from the author, we can also add the way they collect associations of homelessness, of a loss of place, whether it be the place of the manuscript in literary systems of value, or the perception of the author as adrift from his place in the world. Manuscripts, unlike print books, can only be in one place; like a painting they must belong somewhere. There is something dangerously unmoored about a missing manuscript that seems to put meaning and identity up for auction. This process is especially on display in the story of Walter Benjamin’s missing manuscript, as told by Michael Taussig. 23 In his attempt to escape the Nazis across the French border into Spain, Walter Benjamin had as his guide a woman called Lisa Fittko. Fittko claimed that during the whole trip over the Pyrenees, Benjamin was lugging a heavy black briefcase that he said he could not risk losing: “It is the manuscript that must be saved. It is more important than I am.” 24 No one has seen the manuscript since. The story is recounted in Michael Taussig’s essay entitled “Walter Benjamin’s Grave” and the first mystery is why this story is told there at all. As the title of the essay indicates, Taussig’s subject is the journey he took to visit Benjamin’s grave in the town of Port Bou, on the border between France and Spain. Taussig’s motive in making the trip is presented as an attempt to rescue the identity of Walter Benjamin from the clutches of Gershom Scholem, whose 1975 memoir of Benjamin claimed that grave was a fake, one built by graveyard workers hoping for tips from the many tourists who came to Port Bou looking for the scholar’s last resting place. Scholem tried to “wrest control of the narratives of Benjamin’s death” 25 constructing a tale that, in Taussig’s view, humiliates the scholar, turning Benjamin into a “loser, his grave the plaything of men seeking a tip. . . . It is as if he [Scholem] deliberately strives to avoid monumentalizing Benjamin, choosing instead to end on the most prosaic of notes; skullduggery in the graveyard.” 26 Taussig’s story will restore dignity. It will be a tale of how graves attempt to secure the connection between words and things—between the name on the gravestone and the body underneath. The fate of Benjamin whose death was recorded wrongly as the death of a Roman Catholic by the name of Benjamin Walter and whose body cannot be found will be made emblematic of how “names and bodies [can] drift apart pulling at the moorings of language,” 27 a fate shared, as Taussig observes, by the many refugees and prisoners who vanished during the rule of Franco into mass graves hidden in the forests of Spain. And it will be a tale of the amazing monument built for Benjamin a little outside the cemetery, a giant iron triangle carved into the mountain, whose door opens to reveal steps—87 steps, Taussig tells us—down to another glass door that frames the passage to the sea and on which is carved an enigmatic inscription.

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With his sights set on seizing back control over the narrative of Benjamin’s death, it is unclear at first why references to the missing manuscript keep occurring. Even Taussig after a while begins to be annoyed at the persistent intrusion of the manuscript for which he is not searching. When Taussig calls Lisa Fittko to speak with her, she immediately assumes that he must be looking for the briefcase containing Benjamin’s last work. “My heart sank,” Taussig writes “didn’t she realize that one might have perfectly innocent reasons for wanting to talk with her and that lost treasure would only get in the way?” 28 Despite his best efforts to suppress interest, the manuscript continues to infiltrate Taussig’s language; Benjamin’s life is “a book whose last page was missing” 29 and the story of his death and missing body is Benjamin’s “final essay.” 30 Once in Port Bou, Taussig cannot resist telling us how the editor of Benjamin’s completed works searched high and low for the manuscript—“if memory serves me they even went down into some catacombs under the town, but perhaps that’s memory playing tricks with buried pasts.” 31 If Taussig is concerned to resist the siren call of that missing manuscript, which had become, he writes, “a stupendous relic made all the more potent by its disappearance” 32—why does he keep mentioning it? His final reference to what he now calls that “mysterious and irritating briefcase” speculates that it is “circulating lost in some mysterious mistake of memory or in an underground archive.” 33 Once more in his imagination he buries it, and perhaps he is right to see an archive as a place to lose that manuscript more thoroughly than the catacombs. But then the entire essay oscillates to a rhythm of things opening and closing. The chapel in the cemetery that is locked up tight is balanced by Benjamin’s monument before the gates of the cemetery, built to remain permanently open to the sea and the sky. The town of Port Bou that he describes as “uptight” and nasty is countered by news reports that those mass graves are being opened to disinter the remains that, as the newspaper reports and Taussig quotes “have been sixty years awaiting this moment.” 34 “‘Sixty years waiting’ what a curious expression!” Taussig remarks and then immediately offers a stranger one: “Dead bodies like the princess in the fairy tale awaiting the kiss of the prince.” 35 The rescue fantasy sits rather oddly with the revelation of mass graves, but it caps the romantic edifice that Taussig has crafted in this tale of quests for secret graves and missing manuscripts, of a journey to a town that is closed and enigmatic, the revelation of a tunnel into a mountain, 87 steps down to glass doors covered with mysterious inscriptions. What happens if we take up the invitation implied by those sleeping princesses and read this story of a missing manuscript as a chivalric romance? The study of the book as a physical object has not traditionally provoked much interest from literary critics. Leah Price suggests that such critics have been trained not to see the book, to filter out such mundane matters as the look, feel, and smell of a page. In a special issue of PMLA on book history,

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Price suggested it was time to challenge this state of affairs. “What if,” she writes, “instead of asking what book history can do for literary criticism, we asked what literary theory can do for book history?” 36 What literary critics know about the chivalric romance is the crucial part played by the topos of the found manuscript. In the French and Castilian romances of the sixteenth century it was customary to claim that the story being told is a translation of an original manuscript recently recovered. Favorite places for discovery of the manuscript included the archives beneath the monastery, and graves. 37 An exemplary case is the chivalric romance Amadis de Gaula (1508). The author, Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo claims in the preface that he is merely the translator of the fourth book of this tale, never before seen until “very fortunately it came to light in a stone tomb discovered underground beneath a hermitage near Constantinople and was brought to this part of Spain by a Hungarian merchant.” 38 The device of the found manuscript is famously parodied by Cervantes in the ninth book of Don Quixote, when the Don’s exciting battle with the Biscayan is interrupted by the revelation that we are reading a translation of a manuscript written originally in Arabic by a Moorish historian, Cedi Hamete Benengeli—and that unfortunately parts of this original manuscript are missing. It might seem that this essay has also interrupted its narrative in beginning to talk of “found” manuscripts rather than missing ones, but in reality, the found manuscript has only a virtual presence in the text. Essentially the device of the found manuscript made readers aware that there was an original one that was missing from the text, one to which they are denied access and must content themselves with the translation. Carroll Johnson suggests that a better name for this fictional topos of the found manuscript is the “phantom pretext,” calling attention to the way it haunts the narrative of Cervantes’ novel, sometimes hijacking the story altogether and turning “his text into a discursive battleground” between fictional and real authors. 39 Johnson’s analysis points to the way juxtaposing these two manuscripts—the fictional original written by a Moorish historian and the translated one written by the Christian narrator—allowed Cervantes to incorporate the contemporary interethnic rivalries between the “Moriscos” of Granada (Muslims who had been forcibly converted to Christianity) and the old Christian elite. Johnson’s observation of the power of the phantom pretext echoes Craig Dworkin’s “phantom shelves,” his recognition of the way the books that are absent can shape and define the identity of a library. The powerful allure of the unseen manuscript that becomes the staging ground for competing cultural identities may equally recall the battle to claim Kafka for German or Jewish literature catalyzed by the existence of “Kafka’s remains.” But Johnson’s account of the way the story of a virtual manuscript can interrupt and take control of the narrative will also, I hope, remind you of a briefcase that keeps reappearing to upstage Michael Taussig’s story of Walter Benjamin’s

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grave. Here, too, in Taussig’s essay we might see a struggle for discursive control. For the missing manuscript is Lisa Fittko’s story, Benjamin’s guide over the mountains. It is Fittko’s testimony that establishes its existence, and it is gradually through her eyes that we begin to see Benjamin, and to see beyond him as well. Fittko was not entirely impressed with Benjamin. He seemed to her to lack street smarts. Taussig recounts how she told an interviewer that Benjamin “was the sort of guy who as she put it, even needed instruction on how to hold a hot cup of tea . . . I think he could only take a hot cup in his hand when he had first developed an appropriate theory.” 40 In pondering the mystery of the manuscript, Taussig lists the items in Benjamin’s personal effects: a pair of glasses with nickel frames, six photographs, a passport—no manuscript, but many of the everyday objects that any refugee might have been carrying. Gradually Benjamin turns from intellectual icon into one of the many artists and writers who fled France, many of whom also committed suicide. Almost as though we were retracing the literary passage from the exemplary figures of the chivalric romance to the prosaic everyman of the novel, Benjamin becomes increasingly more ordinary, as Taussig bit by bit cedes his story to Fittko. From an essay that began by emphasizing Benjamin’s status as “the most important critic of the twentieth century” 41 and that desired to rescue the scholar from the humiliating accounts of his death, Taussig allows his essay to be pulled off course by the gravitational force of the missing manuscript standing in for those whose names are missing in reality, those anonymous dead of wartime thrown into communal graves. Benjamin starts to disappear, as though the essay had become, quite literally, Walter Benjamin’s grave. Now other figures come into view—like Fittko’s silent husband Hans, who helped her in the heroic effort to ferry refugees across the border. Hans used to sit on a ledge on the mountain looking out to sea after completing the dangerous trip helping refugees escape, and it is with Hans that Taussig’s essay closes, evoking that moment of repose, “that is a memorial too, a type of monument, to slow down and think.” 42 Tracking stories about missing manuscripts from sixteenth-century chivalric romances to legendary tales of authors and lost works, to a formal academic essay about a scholar and the disappearance of a briefcase, demonstrates how far such tropes travel across genres and centuries. In each case, the trope of the missing manuscript works to disturb the official narrative with intimations of another, rival perspective, another story to be told. It is a powerful illustration of the fantasies we weave around the different parts of the material book and how they become part of the literary imagination. If the manuscript became associated with associations of “losability” in the shadow of the print book, what identity does the print book take on in the shadow of the e-book? In what follows I look at memoirs of reading print

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books in a time when the print book seems on the verge of vanishing. When contemporary authors write nostalgically about the ways in which print books have shaped their lives, what is it about the material form of the book that they value? How do such stories begin to reshape what we see and appreciate in the book as a physical object? A LIFE IN BOOKS Wendy Lesser’s exploration of Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books focuses on the form and content of fiction for the most part, but it has an afterword on “the book as a physical object” in which she tells us two anecdotes to illustrate the “dangers and rewards” of a preference for print. 43 In the first, she buys an edition of Alexander Herzen’s autobiography My Past and Thoughts, only to discover that it is an abridged edition that leaves out some of the parts that she most wants to read. With some difficulty, Lesser tracks down the full edition through a transaction with the Friends of Webster Groves Public Library, involving the efforts of a generous librarian and the circumventing of a public holiday to enter and find the edition in the book storage area of the library. In the second story, Lesser finds that her copy of Conrad’s Nostromo is falling apart. The purchase of a handsome, hard copy leads to another discovery: unwrapping the original book jacket and its “Plasti-Kleen Quik-Fold cover that was concealing its inner surface,” 44 Lesser finds a relic of the 1950s, an advertisement for the Modern Library’s collection of the world’s best books: “a fragile thin parchment colored sheet containing seven finely printed columns. The headline above this hidden treasure said ‘Which of these 352 outstanding books do you want to read?’” 45 Both of Lesser’s stories echo what Andrew Piper calls the “lost-andfoundness” of print books. 46 The seductive striptease that delights in relating the wholly unnecessary, fascinating details of each specific layer that must be removed from the hard copy of Nostromo, or the protracted quest for the lost parts of Herzen’s autobiography in a library storage area closed for Memorial Day vividly evoke a treasure hunt in which the hunt is as important and sometimes more important than its successful conclusion. Contemporary tributes to the material book are full of such quests. Julian Barnes’ essay on A Life With Books offers numerous anecdotes about the first editions he looked for and never found, the collections of an author’s work that he failed to complete, the occasional “thrilling discoveries” as he drove around the country to small independent bookstores, “getting into back rooms and locked warehouses and store sheds whenever I could.” 47 Nowadays, he notes, the Internet has made locating particular books incredibly easy, and besides all the independent stores he used to visit have gone.

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While Julian Barnes’s story of his life with books calls attention to those book pleasures that the Internet is killing off, Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere reveal how the Internet is reshaping our sense of what pleasures physical books still have to offer in their 2012 publication entitled This is Not the End of the Book;. It may not be the end of the book, but the conversation between these two scholars and ardent book collectors is packed with stories about the elusiveness and vulnerability of the physical book—stories of books that have been destroyed, burned in a library conflagration, left on an airplane, books printed in so limited a run they cannot be found, books they have never seen, books surviving only in the précis that an Iranian bookbinder was moved to write. The two men in contrast see the Internet as a deluge of unwanted detail, an “infinite overwhelm” 48 and wistfully imagine a virus capable of causing a worldwide information blackout. Umberto Eco’s description of culture as a mechanism for filtering out material, a “graveyard for books and other lost objects,” seems to respond directly to his perception of the Internet as too much “gross information,” as something that “gives us everything and forces us to filter it . . . with our own brains.” 49 Even the description of this conversation between the two men on the title page as something that was “curated” rather than “edited” by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac is bound to a conception of the Internet as overflowing. According to The New York Times, the verb “curate” that once referred chiefly to the selection of works for a museum or art gallery has become popular on the Web as a way of describing anyone from fashion editors to news aggregators who could claim to be cutting through the “clutter” of the Internet to provide a sense of order. 50 Of course the idea that the Internet doesn’t filter out or let any information go is an illusion; things go missing all the time on the Internet with some studies suggesting that the average lifespan of a webpage may be as short as 100 days. 51 But in an era when the Internet is widely perceived to make everything available, to be the realm of “infinite overwhelm,” the value of the physical book may be newly appreciated as something that that can be missed because it goes missing. Only if books can continue to be lost and found again can we hope to experience the pleasure, in Carriere’s words, of “resuscitat[ing] the unjustly forgotten dead.” 52 But there is another feature of the book that runs through these narratives and that is alluded to in the title of Eco and Carriere’s book. Placed on the front cover, the words “This is not the end of the book;” are first of all a joke, which exploits the ambiguity of the word “this.” If “this” refers to the front cover, then this is clearly not the end of the book. Alternatively, “this” could refer to “this book” or even “this title,” in the manner of Magritte’s famous words “this is not a pipe” captioning his painting of a pipe in Le Trahison des Images, 1929. Perhaps the title refers to the longevity of language games that will continue whatever happens to the physical book. Then again “this” might mean “this moment in western culture” making the title a rebuttal to

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the many current prophecies of the book’s demise. Yet the addition of a semicolon to the title undercuts our certainty with its implication that there is more to come in this statement, maybe another phrase that will qualify the assertion “this is not the end of the book.” Deictic words like “this” “here” and “now” are also called “shifters,” because their meaning is so intimately tied to the speaker that they are impossible to interpret without knowledge of the speaker’s context, and impossible to fix, as their meaning will change the moment that context shifts. As I hope to show, the nostalgic stories of a life shaped by books share a tendency to invest books with a deictic function, turning books into something like a photograph album that marks the passage of the subject through time and space. Francis Spufford wrote The Child That Books Built to tell us how his particular history “ended up making me into the reader I am today,” 53 a selfdescribed fiction addict. To this end, Spufford went back and reread “the sequence of books that carried me from babyhood to the age of nineteen.” 54 As he reread those books, he “tried to become again the reader I had been when I encountered each for the first time.” 55 Spufford describes the book that results as his “inward autobiography” 56 and his investigation is clearly premised on an idea that Andrew Piper argues has been fundamental to western humanism since the late eighteenth century: that the individual is the summation of the books that they have read. One reason that debates about reading always return to childhood, Piper argues, is that in talking about reading we are “talking about the future and the past, who we once were and who we want to be.” 57 Or as Spufford puts it, “fiction is a tool of growth” and part of the “primary fashioning of a self.” 58 Wendy Lesser’s Why I Read opens on a lovely evocation of this idea as she confesses that, like Spufford, her relationship to books is an addictive one, something she does not quite understand and can only partially explain, “partial coverage—a flashlight shining into a dark room, briefly illuminating what sits on the row of shelves—is all I can realistically aim for.” 59 Only in a thoroughly bibliographic culture would the inner recesses of the self be imagined as a bookcase. The recent Internet craze for the “shelfie,” a photograph of a bookshelf used as a self-portrait, stands testament to the currency of the idea that our most presentable selves are formed out of the books we have read. 60 Spufford’s look back at his reading history reinforces the idea that books in the aggregate can mean something different to books taken one by one. Although Spufford mentions individual books, he rarely delves into them— indeed, he sees the act of fixing on a single book as pathological, as “the kind of obsessive reading that lone gunmen seem so fond of,” 61 referencing Mark Chapman and John Hinckley’s obsession with Catcher in the Rye. Spufford does make room for the transforming experience that one particular book may trigger, “like a seed crystal, dropped into our minds when they were

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exactly ready for it, like a supersaturated solution, and suddenly we changed,” 62 but, the closest he comes to finding an example of this in his own life is in detailing the revelatory pleasures of Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, and his pleasure is in discovering a type of science fiction, not a particular book. As Spufford says himself, “for me the promise of books lay in them being multiple.” 63 The title “The Child that Books Built” furthers the sense that the significance of the books he read consists of the pattern they created in combination with one another, in the particular sequence in which he read them. The title recalls a famous nursery rhyme “This is the house that Jack built,” an example of a cumulative tale dating back to the sixteenth century that was often used as a type of memory game. The rhyme builds a longer and longer sentence out of a chain of events: “This is the cat that worried the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built” and so on. No narrative logic drives the addition of elements; it works more like a list or a chain in which no one element has more importance than the other, but every element must be remembered for the final sentence to make sense. The long chain of books that carry Spufford towards adulthood similarly have a deictic meaning that derives from their place in the chain, the personal meaning they have in Spufford’s own biography. Significantly when Spufford does address the content of fiction he does so in terms that echo Roland Barthes’ description of the ordinary photograph as a type of deixis: “The photograph is never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look,’ ‘See,’ ‘Here it is’; it points a finger at certain vis-à-vis, and cannot escape this pure deictic language.” 64 Spufford, commenting on his refusal to engage in any depth with the content of the books, argues that we cherish books for their capacity to point to things— Jane Austen’s character, Miss Bates may evoke irritation from the reader, “but those are reactions. The business of the book is the creation of the figure we react to. It points her out. Look: Miss Bates, over there.” 65 The subject of Pamela Paul’s account of her life in books is an actual list. My Life with BOB: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues is about a list that Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review, has been keeping since adolescence of all the books she has read in the order she read them. It is an unvarnished list containing simply the title of the book and the date she finished it, without any further annotation or evaluation. Like the sequences of books that Spufford sees as having shaped his identity, Paul sees her list as making up a “version of myself that I recognized and that represented me.” 66 Like Spufford, Paul focuses not on the insides of books, although reference to the content is sometimes made and not on the material outsides of the book either, although there are memories of the strong feelings commanded by a specific yellow jacketed edition of the Nancy Drew series. Instead the books on her list are valued for their capacity to “offer immediate access to where I’ve been psychologically and geographically at

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any given moment in my life.” 67 Kafka’s The Trial triggers memories of grumpy adolescence and a trip to France, while Jung Chang’s Three Wild Swans evokes for Paul a trip to Thailand and an experiment with a threeweek long fast. Pamela Paul’s claim that the books on her list are capable of tunneling through time to bring the past fully into the present is no less a fantasy than Spufford’s plan to reread his childhood books and turn himself into the reader he was when he first encountered them. Neither author ever acknowledges or discusses the fantasies that underpin their projects. But such fantasies are worth considering for what they disclose about the desires that mediate our relationship to books. In these narratives, books are associated with a sense of order and structure. This comes out in the way each author describes the spaces where they read in childhood. Spufford remembers the children’s section of the library as a space of “ordered abundance . . . running the whole length of the right-hand wall on metal shelves arranged in big U-shaped bays. Every book had its dust wrapper sealed onto the cover . . . every book bore a yellow Dewey Decimal code number on a stick on the spine.” 68 For Pamela Paul, the children’s shelves in the library were a place where she knew exactly where each of her favorite characters were to be found: “I knew where my friends Ginny and Geneva awaited and where the slightly naughtier Klickitat gang hung out at the end of the front row. The mean kids from Deenie and Blubber looked down from the high shelf.” 69 That sense of order is not just a feature of childhood relationships with books. Wendy Lesser favors print books over e-books because print books provide better footholds for memory, “someone who remembers specific passages in the spatial way I do—as in ‘I think it was on the left-hand side of the page, not more than two or three pages before a chapter break’—becomes lost in the amorphous ever varying sea of the digital page.” 70 Books supply a cozy sense of stability both in their memories of childhood and in the imagination of the self. “Imagine,” Spufford writes, “feeling your mind sleekly stocked with all the reading there is, like a cupboard of perfectly folded linen. You’d be ready for anything.” 71 Books not only order the spaces of interior selves, they also regulate our relation to time. Spufford recalls Puffin, the famous publisher of children’s books, “and their astonishingly precise recommendation to ‘girls of eleven and above, and sensitive boys.’ It was as if Puffin were . . . the department of the welfare state responsible for the distribution of narrative.” 72 Even the commonplace transgressions described by Paul—the memory of reading a book from the adult section or being denied access to a book that was too old for her—reinforce the impression of boundaries that are clear enough to make the transgression recognizable and meaningful. To the degree that stories about missing manuscripts associate the unbound book with fractured identities and disturbances in the official narrative, the nostalgic stories told

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about the print book imagine it in quite opposing terms as supplying a sturdy well-organized infrastructure for the self. At the same time, both Spufford and Paul make it clear that their lists of books constitute a personal trajectory that often flouts convention. At the age of thirteen, Francis Spufford was fully aware that one typical pathway into adult books wound through the thickets of the Victorian novel and then onto Jane Austen, as prescribed in countless school curricula, but he instead took a left-hand turn to science fiction and Ursula Le Guin. Pamela Paul, meanwhile, describes the “Kidlit” book club she helped to found for adults like herself who like reading and discussing children’s literature. “We still count time in books,” Andrew Piper observes, but we do not all measure time the same way, or with the same books. 73 The consciousness of being “late” in coming to a book—or early—is a commonplace one; as with any deictic tool, one must know the person and their context in order to understand how the books on their list stake out territory in time or in space. In that sense perhaps all our libraries, physical or mental are perverse, carrying within them the traces of personal trajectories that avoided the prescribed routes as often as they followed them. Books in these tales share many of the attributes of the souvenir, as conceptualized by Susan Stewart. 74 The souvenir “is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia,” 75 insatiable because at the core of nostalgia is a yearning to access the past without mediation, like Paul’s claim that books offer her “immediate access to where I’ve been both psychologically and geographically at any given moment in my life.” 76 Objects that qualify as souvenirs often have a material connection to the past experience, like a pressed flower saved from a bouquet, 77 but they are necessarily partial and incomplete, unable to return to us the full experience of the romantic evening, indeed “if it could recoup the experience, it would erase its own partiality, that partiality which is the very source of its power.” 78 There is always something missing about the souvenir object; it expresses both the presence and the loss of the past simultaneously. And precisely because the souvenir is incomplete, it “will not function without [a] supplementary narrative discourse that . . . attaches it to its origins.” 79 This narrative discourse is what The Child that Books Built or My Life with BOB offer as they turn their collection of books into a narrative of the self. Interestingly, Stewart argued that print books could never serve as souvenirs in this sense. Although she noted how souvenirs often take the form of a book—as in photo albums, baby books and scrapbooks, “these souvenirs absolutely deny the book’s mode of mechanical reproduction. . . . The original will always supplant the copy in a way that is not open to the products of mechanical reproduction.” 80 We might read this assertion as a sign of how much the collective narrative about the print book has altered. Stewart’s work was published in 1984, on the cusp of the widespread diffusion of the

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personal computer and well before the rise of e-books. In the intervening years of the digitization of everything, admirers of the print book have worked diligently to reposition the physical book as a precious remnant of the past, one that preserves within it the traces of past readings, the scribbled marginalia, lost ticket stubs and other “forgotten bookmarks.” This essay has added to that repertoire by showing how the bound book in the aggregate is imagined as a way to grasp the individual unfolding in linear fashion through time. As the lost or missing manuscript becomes a virtual presence that shakes and unravels the identity of the author, the book in its bound form, in its collective form becomes, in contrast, imagined as supplying a sturdy infrastructure to hold onto identity in the face of the “amorphous ever varying sea of the digital page.” 81 What both kinds of narratives about missing books teach us is that the importance of books in the fantasies and affections of readers is sometimes not about what lies between the covers. NOTES 1. Craig Dworkin, The Perverse Library (Information as Material, 2010). 2. Ibid., 11. 3. Ibid., 11. 4. Ibid.,11. 5. Ibid., 13. 6. Jean-Paul Sartre’s translation of Mallarme’s “disparition vibratoire,” quoted in Peter Schwenger, “Agrippa or the Apocalyptic Book,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture,” ed. Mark Dery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994) 65. 7. “Laid lines” refers to a type of paper finish that reproduces the ribbed lines left by premodern forms of papermaking that used molds. 8. A reference to a thicker, heavier type of paper. 9. The discovery of a cache of lost copies of Grenier’s Sentences were priced at $1000 apiece: Al Filreis “Twenty-six copies of Grenier’s Sentences Found,” Jacket 2, accessed July 1, 2017.https://jacket2.org/commentary/twenty-six-boxes-containing-greniers-sentencesdiscovered 10. Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) 11. 11. Paul Stephens, “From the Personal to the Proprietary: Conceptual Writing’s Critique of Metadata,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 6,2 (2012): 1. 12. Ina Ferris, “Bibliographic Romance: Bibliophilia and the Book-Object,” Romantic Libraries: Praxis Series—Romantic Circles. https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/libraries/ferris/ferris.html. 13. The story has been told by Michael Holquist in several places including in his biography of Bakhtin co-authored with Katerina Clark: Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984):273. More recent evidence casts doubt on the truth of this story, as discussed by Karine Zbinden in Bakhtin between East and West: Cross Cultural Transmission, (London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2006),8 note 3. 14. Personal communication, Catherine Rogers, June 6, 2015. 15. Art Wift and Steve Ander, “Rumors of the Demise of Books Greatly Exaggerated,” January 6, 2017 http://www.gallup.com/poll/201644/rumors-demise-books-greatlyexaggerated.aspx

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16. Marianna Spring and Cath Levett, “The Fall and Rise of Physical Book Sales Worldwide—in Data” The Guardian 18 March 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/datablog/ 2017/mar/18/the-fall-and-rise-of-physical-book-sales-worldwide-in-data 17. “Amazon’s newest bricks and mortar store opens in New York,” BBC business news, 25 May, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40051886 accessed June 2017. 18. Judith Butler, “Who Owns Kafka?” London Review of Books 3 March, 2011, Accessed 2 July 2017, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/judith-butler/who-owns-kafka 19. Judith Butler, “Who Owns Kafka?” 20. As narrators usually mention the only other copy of the manuscript resided in a Russian publishing house that was bombed by the Germans. 21. Emily Apter, “Out of Character: Camus’s French Algerian Subjects,” MLN, 112, 4 (Sept., 1997):499–516. 22. Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) 20. 23. Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 24. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 9. 25. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 6. 26. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 4. 27. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 23 28. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 9. 29. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 4. 30. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 25. 31. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 9. 32. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 9. 33. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 26. 34. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 29. 35. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 29. 36. Leah Price, “Introduction: Reading Matter,” PMLA 121,1 (January 2006):10. 37. Francois Delpech, “El Hallazgo del Escrito Oculto en la Literatura Espanola del Siglo de Oro: Elementos para una mitologia del Libro,” Revista de Dialectologia y Tradiciones Populares, 53,1 (1998):5–38. 38. Garci R. de Montalvo, Amadis of Gaul, Translated by Herbert Behm, John E. Keller and Edwin Place (University of Kentucky 2015) 28. 39. Carrol B. Johnson, “Phantom Pre-texts and Fictional Authors: Sidi Hamid Benengeli, Don Quijote and the Metafictional Conventions of Chivalric Romances,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 27.1 (Spring 2008):186. 40. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 20. 41. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 3. 42. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 29. 43. Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 192. 44. Lesser, Why I Read, 204. 45. Lesser, Why I Read, 204. 46. Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012),20. 47. Julian Barnes, A Life With Books (London: Vintage 2012), 14. 48. Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere, This is Not the End of the Book; Translated by Polly McLean (London: Vintage 2012), 315. 49. Eco and Carriere, This is Not the End, 82. 50. Alex Williams, “On the Tip of Creative Tongues,” The New York Times October 2, 2009,http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/fashion/04curate.html 51. Adrian Brown, Archiving Websites: A Practical Guide for Information Management Professionals, (Facet Publishing, 2006), 25. 52. Eco and Carriere, This is Not the End, 85. 53. Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 21.

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54. Spufford, The Child that Books Built, 21. 55. Spufford, The Child that Books Built, 21. 56. Spufford, The Child that Books Built, 21. 57. Piper, Book was There, xiii. 58. Spufford, The Child that Books Built, 9. 59. Lesser, Why I Read, 3. 60. “Forget selfies, we want to see your shelfies,” The Guardian 18 December, 2013,https:// www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/dec/17/forget-selfies-we-want-to-see-yourshelfies 61. Spufford, The Child, 200. 62. Spufford, The Child, 9. 63. Spufford, The Child, 202. 64. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 5. 65. Spufford, The Child, 8. 66. Pamela Paul, My Life with BOB: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues (New York: Henry Holt, 2017), 4. 67. Paul, My Life with BOB, 4. 68. Spufford, The Child, 78–79 69. Paul, My Life with BOB, 41–42. 70. Lesser, Why I Read, 189. 71. Spufford, The Child, 5–6. 72. Spufford, The Child, 20. 73. Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009),5. 74. Ina Ferris also makes this comparison between Stewart’s theory of the souvenir and the book, although she uses it for a different purpose. See note 12. Susan Stewart, On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1984), 132–169. 75. Stewart, On Longing, 135. 76. Paul, My Life with BOB, 4. 77. Stewart, On Longing, 136. 78. Stewart, On Longing, 136, emphasis in the original. 79. Stewart, On Longing, 136. 80. Stewart, On Longing, 139. 81. Lesser, Why I Read, 189.

WORKS CITED Apter, Emily, “Out of Character: Camus’s French Algerian Subjects.” MLN, 112.4 (1997):499–516. Barnes, Julian. A Life With Books. London: Vintage, 2012. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Brown, Adrian. Archiving Websites: A Practical Guide for Information Management Professionals. Facet Publishing, 2006. Butler, Judith. “Who Owns Kafka?” London Review of Books, March 3, 2011. Accessed 2 July 2017. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/judith-butler/who-owns-kafka Cohen, Rachel, “Can You Forgive Him?” New Yorker, November 8, 2004, 48. Delpech, Francois. “El Hallazgo del Escrito Oculto en la Literatura Espanola del Siglo de Oro: Elementos para una mitologia del Libro,” Revista de Dialectologia y Tradiciones Populares, 53.1 (1998):5–38. Dworkin, Craig. The Perverse Library. Information as Material, 2010. Eco, Umberto and Carriere, Jean-Claude. This is Not the End of the Book; Translated by Polly McLean, London: Vintage 2012.

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Ferris, Ina, “Bibliographic Romance: Bibliophilia and the Book-Object.” Romantic Libraries:Praxis Series-Romantic Circles. https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/libraries/ferris/ferris.html. Filreis, Al, “Twenty-six copies of Grenier’s Sentences Found,” Jacket 2, accessed July 1, 2017. https://jacket2.org/commentary/twenty-six-boxes-containing-greniers-sentences-discovered Holquist, Michael, and Clark, Katerina. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984. Johnson, Carrol B. “Phantom Pre-texts and Fictional Authors: Sidi Hamid Benengeli, Don Quijote and the Metafictional Conventions of Chivalric Romances,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 27.1 (Spring 2008):186. Lerer, Seth, “Falling Asleep over the History of the book.” PMLA, 121.1 (2006):229–234. Lesser, Wendy. Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Paul, Pamela. My Life with BOB: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues. New York: Henry Holt, 2017. Piper, Andrew. Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Price, Leah. “Introduction: Reading Matter.” PMLA 121.1 (2006):9–16. Schwenger, Peter. “Agrippa or the Apocalyptic Book.” In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Spring, Marianna and Levett, Cath. “The Fall and Rise of Physical Book Sales Worldwide— in Data.” The Guardian 18 March, 2017. Spufford, Francis The Child that Books Built. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Stephens, Paul. “From the Personal to the Proprietary: Conceptual Writing’s Critique of Metadata.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, 6.2 (2012): 1–30. Susan Stewart. On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1984. Taussig, Michael. Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Wift, Art and Ander, Steve. “Rumors of the Demise of Books Greatly Exaggerated,” January 6, 2017 http://www.gallup.com/poll/201644/rumors-demise-books-greatly-exaggerated.aspx Williams, Alex. “On the Tip of Creative Tongues,” The New York Times October 2, 2009, http:/ /www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/fashion/04curate.html

Afterword

Portability Now Between Thing Theory and Object-Oriented Ontology John Plotz

WORLD WITHOUT US In 2008, these were a few of my favorite things: Shakespeare’s complete plays; an Indian pearl necklace sold to buy a copy of Samuel Johnson’s Works; some unlabeled beetles bound for the British Museum; a monogrammed silver teapot; an Indian diamond with a “moony glow;” a Kashmiri shawl; a grandfather’s chest of documents in various languages; a ruby ring with its provenance carved on it in Farsi; an embroidered handkerchief in a silver box. In the English novel between 1830 and 1870, I saw objects simultaneously endowed with sentimental and fiscal value become representational crux-points—something that occurred in part because novels were themselves endowed with both a fiscal and a transcendent value. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move accordingly set out to explore the novel’s own status as an exemplary portable property. The most enduring thing theory from the Victorian era itself begins by asserting that when we try to make sense of any object in the shared social world its tangible and measurable attributes tell only half the story. Karl Marx was certain that beneath the surface of our social life lurked one master-material: human labor. The account of significance-laden commodities offered in his 1867 Capital is at once the era’s most straightforward—because preceding from shared premises of liberal economics theory of stored labor-value—and most subtle, because it pursues those liberal precepts to the limit of their implications.

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Afterword A commodity . . . not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was . . . A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply . . . because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. 1

When is a table not a table? When it is the product of tens of invisible manhours, the concealed social relation between oblivious buyer and neverglimpsed maker. Because Marx refuses to take the commodity’s material instantiation as a complete account of its reality, he devises a theory, not just a history or a story, of the commodity-as-thing. 2 However, in describing novels and comparable artworks as tucked between two rival paradigms, I soon found myself caught up in a conversation with other interlocutors as well—famous and forgotten, living and dead. What made the project both challenging and endlessly fascinating was the babel of voices, past and present, arguing with Marx or spurning him—a regular Harold Pinter play of non-sequiturs and dialogues of the deaf. Wherever I turned I confronted rival accounts not just of value and the mobility of capital, but of virtually every salient term. 3 I arrived at a preliminary conclusion back then—one that this article attempts to reassess in light of what has happened in the field since. 4 I concluded that the rival paradigms that strove to make sense of the ways material artifacts operated within cultures (and also tantalizingly without them) could be schematized as a “battle of the books” between (certain) anthropologists and (certain) philosophers. The former approached “things” via the signifying system that humans used to class them: they wanted to capture the ways in which material attributes shaped human efforts at meaning-making. The latter (at least those drawn to “object-oriented ontology”) sought to understand things above, beyond, or apart from the human investment in and apprehension of them: not just Virginia Woolf’s “Think of a kitchen table . . . when you’re not there” but something more pointed and more anti-human: think of the world without us. 5 A genealogy of the pitfalls and the promises of Victorian “thing theory” might begin with the transformation wrought in theorizing things (and materiality generally) by the publication of Arjun Appadurai’s edited collection the Social Life of Things, which prompted scholars to notice the shifting valences of objects that they had too blithely assumed were simply interchangeable. 6 This strain of anthropological work primarily understands the “object” as saying nothing that the ambient culture has not instilled: its stress ultimately falls on social life, rather than on things endowed with a distinc-

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tive materiality that itself has the potential to shape, alter or otherwise historicize what is presumed to be an underlying cultural logic. Such approaches are not well positioned to reflect on failures of meaning, or on the slippages that occur between the intended meaning and the actual properties of the stuff of life. The anthropological approach runs the risk of being an anthropocentric one, unable to see beyond hypostatized social totality. That anthropological approach had its mirror, eventually, in the newly energized field of “object-oriented philosophy,” which aims to analyze or make sense of the world understood as extra- or pre- or even inhuman. This work sidesteps the Kantian insistence that the world’s nature, in all its variegated materiality, can be known to humans only phenomenologically, by the evidence of our reason and our sense, looking beyond to a “world without us.” For the “speculative realist” philosopher Graham Harman, for example, “the real has an inner struggle of its own quite apart from the human encounter with it.” 7 Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things similarly explores the unparsable materiality of the universe, which persists in having a meaning while nonetheless resisting the paraphrase and sensemaking that is the usual Kantian procedure for arriving at successful comprehension of the world. 8 Those who advocate for one paradigm or another meet and tussle over certain crucial items, whether those are labeled as objects, affordances, commodities, or even texts. But they bring to the debate presuppositions and political visions that are distinctively shaped by their own disciplinary presumptions. How can we take a step back from that quarrel to consider what exactly is at stake when we argue about things, eloquent matter, or even the not-quite-alterity of the non-human? SCIENCE FICTION AS RORSCHACH BLOT Things and thing theories have evolved since Portable Property—yet I am not sure if the fundamental contours of the debates have changed. It strikes me that one way to gain some valuable intellectual breathing-room is to elucidate the attributes that are present not in the “thing” itself but in the thought-processes these dueling scholars bring to bear. Such a sideways look at each side’s axioms and their entailments, though, requires a move away from the frontlines of the battle. Perhaps that explains my turn, in recent years, to a genre with a very different set of assumptions about the attributes of non- or in- or extra-human world: science fiction. As Frederic Jameson has recently argued, this is a genre that in the twentieth century did for conceptions of cosmic temporality what Scott’s novels in the nineteenth century did for conceptions of historical time. In our own day, science fiction seems to me to offer a distinctive standpoint from which to assess the sorts of

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claims that thing theorists and object-oriented ontologists make about the nonhuman world—and all the portable or non-portable property within it. A classroom incident recently illuminated for me what science fiction teaches us about both anthropocentric models of truth and the contrary impulse (foundational to object-oriented ontology) to hypostatize a non-human something legible beyond the reaches of the human, and the phenomenal. I was teaching a pair of “first contact” narratives: moments when humans first encounter truly alien life. Stanislaw Lem’s Star Diaries (1957) are about the perpetually bemused galaxy-trotting nebbish Ilon Tichy, a cross between Jaroslav Hasek’s Good Soldier Svejk and Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In “The 8th Voyage,” Tichy represents Earth at the United Planet’s meeting to discuss humanity’s admission into the cosmic Federation. He begins by trying to buy a soda: “This was the first interplanetary incident in the history of human diplomacy on the galactic level, since what I had taken for a soft drink vending machine turned out to be the deputy chairman of the Rhoch delegation in full regalia.” Then, attempting to atone for his mistake, he rushes to demonstrate that humanity has truly has achieved Federation-worthy sentience: [I informed the Rhochan ambassador proudly that] “We consider man should be the measure of all things . . .” He placed a heavy claw on my knee. “Why man?” 9 As in many of the other Tichy tales, the underlying point is a critique of the anthropocentric bias of mankind: hey pal, don’t think you’re the center of universe—or the galaxy, or the solar system or even the planet. Lem is consistently witty, but he is also on well-trod ground: remember Swift’s Houyhnhnms and Yahoos? The other text in the class that day was Roadside Picnic (1971), by the Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Zamiatin’s truest heirs. It is about an Earth that has been visited, (or punctured, or somehow altered) in six places: the Zones. Each is teeming with mysterious extraterrestrial objects, with some evident and other occulted properties. Ordinary lowlife criminals and smugglers go into those zones to turn a profit on contraband, and Roadside Picnic is framed as a noir thriller about one of those “stalkers.” Yet the novel is also clearly meant as a satire of futile terrestrial efforts to discern not simply the potency of the alien objects, but also the meaning of the visitation. 10 The most poignant reminder of the inevitable failure of that undertaking hangs at the heavily guarded entrance to the zone— “an immense banner, already faded: Welcome To Earth, Dear Aliens!” Profits are easy; answers are hard. At the novel’s heart is a late-night bar-room conversation that is essentially an effort to keep that faded banner’s message alive—to make the Zones not just powerful but meaningful. Competing accounts of “the Visit” are aired. Some scientists theorize “that the Visit hasn’t happened yet, that the real Visit is yet to come. Some higher intelligence came to Earth and left us

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containers with samples of their material culture. They expect us to study these samples and make a technological leap, enabling us to send back a signal indicating we’re truly ready for contact.” Others propose more cabalistically that “The Visit did take place, but it is by no means over. We’re actually in contact as we speak, we just don’t know it. The aliens are holed up in the Zones and are carefully studying us, simultaneously preparing us for the ‘time of cruel miracles.’” 11 However, there is also a grimmer alternative: the aliens never even noticed their visit to earth, it was just a soon-forgotten pit-stop. “A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about . . . A roadside picnic.” 12 The book’s title may be a hint of where the Strugatsky brothers’ sympathies lie, but the novel never actually decides between these various interpretations that the Zone allows. The point of Roadside Picnic is that when faced with a mystery, we humans Rorschach blot it. That is, we conjure up a rich set of subjective possibilities (they are “dear aliens”; the real visit is yet to come; they live among us now unrecognized, etc). As with the original Rorschach blots, every such effort is guided by a mirror logic that turns us back into our own semantic system, our own repertoire of signs. Find the wealth of the Indies, but only by leaving home with the wealth of the Indies. The class reaction to this pair of texts was fascinating. They started out praising Lem as a satirist of anthropocentrism, hilariously subversive in displacing our seeming centrality (the absurdity of “man” as the measure of all things!). Then one undergrad offered an unsettling suggestion: is it possible that readers like the Lem story so much because it decenters human beings— only without displacing anything about our ways of knowing and judging? Ilon Tichy gets rebuked (at a “United Planets” that is as clearly the United Nations as the Federation in Star Trek is a glorified USA) for his inability to realize the sentience of a soda machine. But we readers don’t make the same mistake—we don’t even have to be on humanity’s side, we can sneer at homo sapiens along with the alien ambassadors. In Roadside Picnic, by contrast, readers have nothing to turn to, no higher perspective to ascend. If everything did indeed happen as a cosmic accident, the details of which we will never know (maybe all human life takes place within a Zone), then our own rules for making sense of the snafu cannot possibly apply. That student perceived that the satirical impulse in Lem ends up reinscribing the very ground-rules it putatively rebuts (score one for the critics who emphasize the conservative premises of Swiftian satire). Lem comforts us by reassuring us that we can leave our local conditions (even our humanity) behind and still understand the rules of the universe. What she also noticed, though, was that Roadside Picnic offers no foothold in the abyss: our local

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rules are laughable, but any other ones are beyond our ken. We create mysterious gods (or in the case of the Strugatskys, we create aliens) in order to prove that beyond the limit of the human is a mystery. Then, ironically, the fact that we created those Gods (or aliens) lulls us into believing that we actually understand the mystery that they represent. 13 And so it is with object-oriented ontology: gazing into the sheer face of an intellectual barrier we ourselves have built, we see our own reflections, as if they were a thing outside us (Welcome To Earth, Dear Aliens!). We might call this the “cry in darkness” hypothesis, after a line from Samuel Beckett: “You cried for night–it falls. Now cry in darkness.” 14 Which is to say, that we are disposed to yearn for the absent, and having reached it, to make it part of our same old presence, to make it speak our language. 15 I admire how open Rooadside Picnic is about that impulse. Unfortunately, later theoretical moves that attempt to speak for a “world without us” have not always been so lucid or forthcoming when it comes to admitting their speaker-for-thedead aspirations. We yearn for understanding that arises from grasping the limits of our knowledge. This is reasonable only if we admit that what we understand is the limits of our understanding, not what lies beyond them. The desire to find homology or analogy beyond that limit, or a form of void that can be given attributes with reference to this side of the limit may be unquenchable—but it ought not fool us into ontological claims about the world that is actually out there. By a curious irony that very hypostatization of “higher” meaning where none is to be found, is precisely the fate that befell Roadside Picnic itself in 1979, when Tarkovsky turned it into a movie: Stalker. In Tarkovsky’s version, Red the stalker has two sidekicks, a scientist and a writer. Using reason and the imagination, respectively, their efforts to conquer the Zone are ultimately defeated because they lack what Red has, the faith that moves mountains (in the movie’s final scene his daughter, the Monkey, uses psychokinesis to slide a glass across a table). Tarkovsky’s concluding gesture of offering up faith as the answer makes a mockery of the novel’s idea of the Zone as an inviting vacuum, an endlessly interpretable blot. INTERPRETATION IN THE MIDDLE If thing theory is right to point to epistemic limits to our capacity to grasp world beyond human agency—think of a table when you’re not there and what you come up with is . . . your (culture’s) idea of a table—then we ought to be suspicious of any claim that hears beyond the roar on the other side of silence a human voice. I like the implicit ethical admonition built into Lem’s satirical squibs: not only is man not the measure of the universe, man ain’t

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even the measure of man. Lem achieves the comic by unashamedly making the cognitive barrier into a mirror—beyond it, there are planetary legations squabbling just as we squabble, but also an ultra-rationality to bring all that ordinary irrationality to heel; Tarkovsky proffers faith as the universal solvent, which can supply a sort of understanding that does not require knowledge. What we still need, though, is more Strugatsky-style discernment in finding a path between satire as mirror and faith as endless vista. 16 Accordingly, my encounter with Lem, the Strugatskys and my canny student led me to formulate a pair of axioms to shape future thing theory. First, beware hypostatizing entities in the hope of establishing a legible beyond (no whistling in place of talking). The fact of graspable limits to our comprehension has plenty of meaning, without our needing to map our own ethical or epistemological presumptions onto that beyond. Such hypostatization is woven into most current forms of object-oriented ontology: the best way for the extra-human universe to teach you ethical lessons is for you to start out with those lessons already tucked into your backpack. Second, the mirror image of that kind of hypostatization of the autonomous object is an explicitly anthropocentric theory of things that presumes the meaning of objects hangs together socially, the perfect extension of an equally perfect ideological totality. On the one hand, then, making mystery itself into a knowable parsable quantity produces the “Welcome to Earth Dear Aliens” fallacy—treating the nonhuman world as if it were at once alien and yet also run according to our own ethics and epistemology. 17 Equally unworkable is a totalizing account of “the role of things” as encompassable totally within a sociological or anthropological semiotics. I also found some reason to hope. Although we still lack a general theory for how the presence of particular sorts of objects offers distinctive scope for action or for cogitation, there are some recent advances worth celebrating. Recent work on “affordances” and on various disruptive encounters between objects and persons—especially Lamboros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement—offers new ways to get at that peculiarity of what things mean to us, and what they mean by virtue of us. In other words, to make meaning of objects it’s necessary to grapple with that it means that it is us making that meaning. Similarly, Peter Gordon’s new work on how existentialism may have shaped Adorno’s critique of idealism and his turn towards an object-oriented materialism usefully highlights Adorno’s sense of the impossibility of ever removing our experience from our understanding of the world around us. Both Gordon’s work and Malafouris’s highlight the need to continue exploring that fascinating site where human perception and conceptualization come up against a world that is only as alien as we ourselves make it out to be. Finally, thing theory, and more generally materialist and theoretical accounts of the portability of objects, could benefit by taking a page out of Rita

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Felski’s recent jeremiad, The Ideology of Critique: specifically, page 64. There Felski offers a way to navigate away both from the hermeneutics of suspicion and from surface reading: interpretation. Rather than accepting that critique metonymically exemplifies the entire logic of critical enterprise, she highlights a distinction that John Frow puts elegantly in his recent Character and Person: when it comes to making sense of others’ beliefs, there is a difference between explaining and explaining away. 18 Interpretation is not always critique. Felski’s argument lines up nicely with that memorable distinction Oscar Wilde makes between a cynic (“who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”) and a sentimentalist (“who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing”). The cynic is, like Felski’s critiquer, capable of seeing only a system beneath the skin of things; beneath every particular she sees only Freudian drives or a capitalist system, clothed in a thousand ways but omnipresently the same. That is a solipsistic position because it allows whatever object is under review to say simply what the critic him or herself wants it to say. On the other side is what Wide calls Sentimentalism: attributing immense value to every object without knowing its price; that is without acknowledging its implication or entanglement in an extant system. This is akin to forgetting one’s own work in creating gods (or aliens): gazing at a mirrored surface, you see your own face and think you’ve made a new friend. Apply the Wilde test, and objectoriented ontology stands revealed not just as sentimental but as Romantic. That is, their Pantheism projects their own vision on the edges of the universe and then pretends to see, in that purported alterity, a beyond. But only a beyond that they themselves have put there. Felski’s skepticism about a depthless world where every surface can be deciphered reveals the limitations both the cynical predetermination of ideology critique and the sentimental attribution of meaning to the objects itself. Depth-reading of the “critique” variety turns out to be another sort of surface reading—because what it finds in each “new” object of investigation is only a rigid pre-printed template, a portable dogma. And surface reading turns out to conceal another sort of depth—the attribution of meaning to the object, either as a describable surface or as existing beyond language, is actually an invitation for the pathetic fallacy to go to work. Only by recognizing the ongoing complexity of the relationship between surface and depth can prior forms of understanding be reshaped by novel encounters. Seemingly caught between Wilde’s cynics and sentimentalists, Felski turns—via George Steiner, no less—to a defense not of critique but rather of interpretation. She borrows from Steiner a “fourfold structure of interpretation: a leap into the unknown, followed by the “tacit aggression” of “the invasive and extractive element of interpretation” that makes sense of a text by “translating it into our own categories”; this may however be followed by

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“a reorientation” that may “disconcert or disorient us,” in which “we are altered by what we have ingested.” Finally, such interpretation returns to “reciprocity and rest.” 19 In short, Felski proposes we see interpretation as something that potentially throws categories into flux and demands a process of hypothesis and verification that relies on a sort of judgment that may change on the basis of each new encounter. 20 A decade after Portable Property, I remain fascinated by the challenge of finding a place (a pu sto, like the one Archimedes sought) from which to begin the almost impossible work of discerning what is an attribute of the material world, and what is an attribute of the minds that turn their attention to that world. If interpretation is not a stable “out of this world” platform, at least it provides a place from which to swing the lever that connects subject and object, allowing the one to apply pressure on the other. And vice-versa. NOTES 1. Karl Marx, Capital, Oxford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 42. 2. Think of him as trying to explain to residents of Edwin Abbot’s Flatland that what happens to manifest itself within their two-dimensional world as nothing more than a circle is actually a sphere (with labor supplying that ineffable third dimension). 3. Though Portable Property mentions her only briefly, it is actually shaped by Hannah Arendt’s provocative notion (most fully unpacked in the “Work” section of The Human Condition) that reification is best understood as the invaluable but also horrifying moment when an artist takes the living evanescence of thought and action in the world and freezes it. Reification simultaneously means solidifying the world into a durable record of that quicksilver motion— and a betrayal of its living qualities. To become portable is to betray. 4. I went on to consider thing theory and object-oriented ontology in various book reviews, as well as in “Can the Sofa Speak?” (2005), “Materiality in Theory: What to Make of Victorian Things, Objects, and Commodities” (2016) and most recently in chapter 6 of Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience Since Dickens (2017). 5. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005), 23. 6. Behind Appadurai’s intervention was a rich tradition of anthropological work mostly stemming from or quarreling with Marcel Mauss’s seminal The Gift (1924). Such scholarship includes Malinowski’s influential work on kula in Pacific Island cultures, but also more recent work by Maurice Godelier, Annette Weiner, Nicholas Thomas, and Marilyn Strathern on “inalienable possessions.” 7. Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism,” New Literary History, 43 (2012): 193. 8. This interest in matter’s “recalcitrance” also bears an interesting relationship to the rise in “animal studies” which seeks—more after Derrida than Peter Singer—a non-subject-centered way of approaching the animal, understood as a larger, encompassing category that subsumes the human within it, rather than standing outside as the human’s antithesis. The scholar becomes a lorax, speaking not just for the trees but for the object world generally. 9. Stanisław Lem, The Star Diaries (Continuum Book. New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 19, 22. 10. The most recent SF novel that bears strong traces of the influence of The Roadside Picnic is Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy: his zone is southern Florida. 11. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic. Translated by Olena Bormashenko. (Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press, 2012), 131. 12. Strugatsky, 131.

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13. Zeus is omnipotent and omniscient and omnitemporal—and he chases Europa. Narrowing the pantheon down to one, with no sexual desire for any individual, the Hebrew prophets nonetheless anthropomorphize in another vein: the Lord your God is a jealous God. 14. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 83. 15. That impulse towards explanation runs through Things that Talk, an influential history of science collections edited by Lorraine Daston. Its authors strive to make legible the work done by objects operating as their makers intended. 16. Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet (which argues that the “world without us” be approached by way of the notion of the planetary) and Kate Marshall’s “The Old Weird” are valuable recent contributions to this debate. 17. SF offers various ways of conceptualizing that paradox of comprehensible incomprehensibility: In Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem (2006) the alien civilization sends only one open transmission to the human race: “You are bugs.” 18. John Frow, Character and Person (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), Chapter 1, infra. 19. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 64–5. Does Felski get Steiner—specifically the chapter on “the hermeneutic motion” in his 1975 After Babel—right? Yes, despite some tonal differences—Steiner talks about “appropriative rapture,” and “dialectically enigmatic residue” (300) which are phrases and perhaps even concepts that need some translation of their own into 2015 terms—Steiner shares with Felski a commitment to distinguishing between critique and interpretation tout court. 20. This account of what Felski can do for our sense of interpretations relies on Arendt’s account of Kantian judgment, with its inevitable movement between particular cases arrived at via empirical observation and the reasoned concepts that allow every particular to be tested against general rules.

WORKS CITED Abbott, Edwin, Flatland: An Edition with Notes and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 1st American ed. New York: Harmony Books, 1980. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1959. ———. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Daston, Lorraine, ed. Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books, 2004. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. Frow, John. Character and Person. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Geisel, Theodore. The Lorax. New York: Random House, 1971. Godelier, Maurice. The Enigma of the Gift. Translated by Nora Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Gordon, Peter Eli. Adorno and Existence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. Harman, Graham. “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism.” New Literary History, 43 (2012): 183–203. Lem, Stanisław. The Star Diaries. Continuum Book. New York: Seabury Press, 1976. Liu, Cixin. The Three-Body Problem. Translated by Ken Liu. New York: Tor Books, 2014. Malafouris, Lambros. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Kate Marshall. “The Old Weird.” Modernism/Modernity, Modernism/modernity 23, no. 3 (2016): 631–49. Marx, Karl. Capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

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Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge, 2002. Moi, Toril. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Plotz, John. “Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory.” Criticism 47, no. 1 (2005): 109–18. ———. “Materiality in Theory: What to Make of Victorian Things.” In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture. Edited by Juliet John. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 522–538. ———. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. ———. “The Semi-Detached Experience Provincial Novel.” Victorian Studies 53, no. 3 (2011): 405–16. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Strathern, Marilyn. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone Press, 1999. Strugat︠ s︡ ky, Arkady and Boris Strugat︠ s︡ ky. Roadside Picnic. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2012. Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet. Ropley: Zero, 2011. Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. VanderMeer, Jeff. Annihilation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. ———. Authority. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. ———. Acceptance. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Weiner, Annette B. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Wilde, Oscar. Lady Windermere’s Fan; Salome; A Woman of No Importance; An Ideal Husband; The Importance of Being Earnest. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Index

Adelaide de Narbonne , xv, 111, 112, 121, 123. See also Craik, Helen; Corday, Charlotte; Cordet, Charlotte de Adorno, Theodor W., 63, 169 affect, xi, xii, xiii, 25–27, 28–35, 39, 111, 115, 117, 118, 119, 123 agrarian, 132, 133, 134, 135 Alberti, Leon Batista, 6 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 8 alienation, viii, 12, 19n51, 32, 40, 95, 133, 135, 136 Althusser, Louis, 63 Anderson, Sherwood, 131 anthropocentrism, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171 anti-Jacobin. See Jacobin Antoinette, Marie, 112, 122, 123n1 Appadurai, Arjun, 164, 171 archetype, 50, 79, 81 Armstrong, Paul, 6 artisan, 91, 92, 94, 102, 104 Astounding Science Fiction, 43, 44 Atlantic Monthly, 5 Auerbach, Erich, 60 Australian, 77, 79, 80, 84; identity, xiv–xv, 78, 79, 81, 84, 85, 87 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 146, 148 Balzac, Honoré de, 14, 20n68, 26, 61 Barnes, Julian, 147, 153 Barthes, Roland, viii, ix, 28, 73n7, 156

Baudelaire, Charles, 68, 74n37 Baudrillard, Jean, 39 Beckett, Samuel, 168 Bellamy, Edward, 14 Bender, John, 8 Benjamin, Walter, xvi, 9, 68, 74n37, 86, 106n54, 147, 149, 150, 151–152 Bennett, Jane, 165 Best, Stephen, viii, 36n31 bibliographic romance, xvi, 146, 147 biopolitics, 46 Blair, Amy, 137 book history, 150, 155 Book-of-the-Month Club, 128, 130, 131 Bourdieu, Pierre, 131, 141n25; The Logic of Practice , 83 Brennan, Teresa, 27 British Empire, x, 4, 17, 43 Brod, Max, 148 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, ix; Villette, xv, 91–104 Brower, Jordan, 5 Brown, Bill, x, xviin1, 13, 20n57, 21n75 Bryson, Norman, 60, 69 Butler, Judith, 30, 148 Camus, Albert, 148 capitalism, xi, xiii, 8, 13, 16, 25, 27, 28, 32–33, 77–78, 81, 82, 84, 85–86, 87 Carey, Peter, xiv; The Tax Inspector, 77–87; fabulation, 77, 79, 81 175

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Index

Carrère, Emmanel, 40 Carriere, Jean-Claude, 147, 154 Cashman, Sean, 136 Century Magazine, 5 Cervantes, Miguel de, 151 Chadwick, Edwin, xiv, 64–67, 72 Chatman, Seymour, 11 chivalric romance, 146, 150, 152 city, 65–66, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74n37, 75n62, 78, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89n51. See also Baudelaire, Charles; Benjamin, Walter; Dickens, Charles; urban Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 5, 6, 7, 8–9 Cohen, Monica F., 103, 106n45 Collins, Wilkie, 4 commodity, x, xi, xiii, 4, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19n51, 20n55, 21n75, 65, 86, 92, 97, 163, 164, 165. See also Marx, Karl communism, 14, 133–134 Conrad, Joseph, 153 Cooper, David, 40 Corazzo, Nina, 112 Corday, Charlotte, 111, 112, 113, 119, 123n1 Cordet, Charlotte de, 115, 116, 117, 118–119, 119, 120, 122 Coulson, Victoria, 12 Council of Books in Wartime (CBW), 138 Courbet, Gustave, 65 Cowley, Malcolm, 133–134 Craciun, Adriana, 119, 121, 123n1 Craik, Helen, 114, 123n1; See also Adelaide de Narbonne Crary, Jonathan, 9, 19n41 Crill, Rosemary, 105n30 Culture and the Crisis, 133, 134 DeForest, John William, 129 Delany, Samuel R., 38 Deleuze, Gilles, 27 Denning, Michael, 133 Design, 91, 97 Dewey, John, 128–129 diagram, 3, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12 dialectic, viii, ix, 8, 11, 12, 13, 17 dianetics. See Hubbard, L. Ron Dick, Philip K., xii, xiii, 37, 40, 41, 44, 49, 50; Clans of the Alphane Moon, 37; “The Days of Perky Pat,” 42; Exegesis,

41; Martian Time-Slip, 37; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 37–50; Time Out of Joint, 39; “The Turning Wheel,” 44 Dickens, Charles, xiv, 68–72; Bleak House, 71–72; Great Expectations, ix; ‘Seven Dials’, 71; Sketches of Boz, 69 Diderot, Denis, 8 displacement, 80, 82, 84, 85, 91, 99 domestic, viii, x, xiv, xv, 4, 17, 27, 28, 33, 61, 62, 64, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 85, 92, 96, 105n30, 112, 114, 117, 118, 120, 122–123, 128, 131, 135, 136 Donovan, Julie, 106n53 Dos Passos, John, 133–134 drugs, 39, 46–47, 48, 50 Du Bois, W. E. B., 31, 34 Durand-Ruel, Paul, 5 Duvall, John, 132 Dworkin, Craig, 145–146, 151 Eagleton, Terry, 14, 15, 104n11 e-book, vii, 147, 152, 157, 158 Eco, Umberto, 147, 154 Edel, Leon, 5 Eliot, George, xi, 26 Encyclopédie , 8 English Arts and Crafts movement, 3, 14, 16 estrangement, 39, 135. See also alienation Eyre, Edmund, 113, 117 fantasy, 77, 78–80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 146, 148, 150, 152, 157, 159 Felski, Rita, 128, 169–171 female assassin, 111, 112, 113, 119 Ferris, Ina, xvi, 146, 161n74 filth, xiv, 64–65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74n22, 75n62, 77, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84. See also Dickens, Charles Fittko, Lisa, 149, 151 Flatley, Jonathan, xiii, 26–27, 29, 31–32, 33–35 Flaubert, Gustav, 27, 28, 33, 60–62, 64, 65 Foucault, Michel, 63 found manuscript trope. See chivalric romance; Cervantes Franz Basch, Michael, 29 Freedgood, Elaine, ix, 16, 21n77, 96

Index Freud, Sigmund, 27, 42, 45, 48, 170 Frow, John, 170 Frye, Northrop, 10 Galdós, Benito Pérez, 26, 31 Garrison, Omar V., 43 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 14 Gilmartin, Kevin, 116 global, xv, 4, 30, 47, 62, 77, 78–79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 87 Godfrey, Richard T., 107n70 Gordon, Peter, 169 Graham, Wendy, 6 Grenby, M. O., 116 Grenier, Robert, 145–146, 159n9 Grossberg, Lawrence, 25, 28 Gurko, Leo, 136 Haynes, Roslynn D., 50 Hegeman, Susan, 128, 132, 135 Heinemann, William, 131 hermeneutics, xii, xiv, 4, 12; of suspicion, viii, xiii, 30, 170, 172 Herzen, Alexander, 153 Highmore, Ben, 62, 63–64 Hoberek, Andrew P., 39 Holliday, Shawn, 134 Hubbard, L. Ron, 43–44, 47, 49 Huggan, Graham, 83–84, 85 Hunt, Lynn, 112 imaginary, xv, xvi, 33, 77, 78, 79, 84 incest, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 89n67 industrial, 17, 46, 64, 78, 82, 84, 133, 135 Jacobin, 111, 113–114, 115–116, 123n1 James, Henry, xii, xiii, 3–17, 29; prefaces, 7, 8; The Altar of the Dead, 11; “The Art of Fiction,” 9; The Figure in the Carpet, 11; The Golden Bowl, 7, 11, 13, 15; Guy Domville, 4; New York Edition, 7, 10; The Real Right Thing, 11; Roderick Hudson, 10; The Sacred Fount, 11, 15; The Turn of the Screw, 11; The Wings of the Dove, 15 Jameson, Fredric, xi, xiii, 4, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 20n53, 21n83, 25–33, 34, 48, 49 Johnson, Carroll, 151 Johnson, Kendall, 8

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Jung, Carl Gustav, 43 Kafka, Franz, 148, 151, 157 Kerouac, Jack, 137 Kingleberger, Elizabeth, 113 Kodak, Eastman, 3, 4–5, 6 Kornbluh, Anna, 8, 21n83 Laing, R. D., 40 Landes, Joan, 113 Larson, Nella, 33 Lawrence, T. E., 146 Lefebvre, Henri, viii, xii, xiv, 72, 75n62 Lem, Stanislaw, 166, 167 Lesser, Wendy, 147, 153, 155, 157 Lessing, Doris, 137 liminal, xv Literary Guild of America, 128, 130, 138 London County Council. See city Luckhurst, Roger, 83 Lukács, Georg, viii, 19n51, 60, 60–61, 63 Lyotard, Jean-François, 28 magical thinking, 77, 80, 81, 82, 84 Malafouris, Lamboros, 169 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 145 Manet, Édouard, 9 manuscript, 145, 146, 148, 152. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail; Benjamin, Walter; Kafka, Franz; Lawrence, T. E. Marat, Jean-Paul, 111, 112, 116 Marcus, Sharon, viii, 36n31 Marrinan, Michael, 8 Marx, Karl, viii, xi, xiii, 64, 163–164 Marxism, 12, 12–13, 132 Massumi, Brian, 25, 28–29 Mathison, Volney G., 43, 44, 49; Electropsychometry, 43. See also Hubbard, L. Ron McGurl, Mark, 127 McLuhan, Marshall, 39 McWhirter, David, 7 Melville, Herman, 33 Mender, Donald, 46 metonym, 4, 48, 91, 96, 104 Metropolitan Commission of Sewers. See city Michaels, Walter Benn, 13, 14 Miller, D. A., 30, 71

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Index

mobility, 4, 5, 6, 10, 17, 78, 79, 80, 115, 164 modernism, xii, 8, 128, 133, 134, 135, 139 Modern Library, 131 Montfort, Catherine R., 112 Moretti, Franco, 63 Morris, William, 14, 16; News from Nowhere, 16 Munch, Edvard, 29 Ngai, Sianne, xiii, 25–27, 29–30, 31–32, 33–34, 34–35 Naish, Camille, 120 New Criticism, 132–133, 135, 141n32 New Deal, 136 Nielsen, Wendy, 113 non-human, 164, 165, 169 object-oriented ontology, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169. See also anthropocentrism; non-human Pagetti, Carlo, 41 painting, 5, 6 Palmer, Christopher, 37, 50 paperback, 38, 39 parochial, xv, 21n77, 77, 79, 81, 85 Paul, Pamela, 147, 156 Perkins, Maxwell, 129 Persaud, Raj, 40 Peters, Margot, 106n67 The Perverse Library, 145 phantasmagoric, 77, 78, 81, 85, 86, 87 Phillips, James, 45 Photography, 3, 5, 7, 10. See also Coburn, Alvin Langdon; Kodak, Eastman Piper, Andrew, 148, 153, 155, 158 The PJs, 33 Plotz, John, x–xi, xii, xvi, 4, 20n55, 78–79, 81, 91, 92 popular, xv, xvi, 4, 14, 38, 105n30, 127, 129, 132, 134, 136, 139, 145, 147, 154 postmodernity, xiii, 25, 27, 28–29, 30, 33, 49, 79 Price, Leah, 150 print book, 145, 146, 147, 152, 153, 153–154, 155, 156–157, 158. See also manuscript; bibliographic romance; chivalric romance; paperback

Propp, Vladimir, 49 Proust, Marcel, 14 psychiatry, xiii–xiv, 37, 39, 40, 43–44, 46. See also Dick, Philip K.; Mathison, Volney G. psychotherapy, 45 reading, xv, xvi; Metonymic, ix; surface, ix, 170; symptomatic, viii, 27, 33, 35n3, 170 realism, vii–viii, xii, xiii, 28, 59, 60, 61, 77, 79, 84, 97, 106n43. See also Auerbach; everyday life; Flaubert reification, viii, xiii, 3, 9, 11–13, 14, 16, 18, 19n51, 21n75, 28, 32–33, 63, 171 Said, Edward, 62 Sargent, John Singer, 6 Satterfield, Jay, 131 Scalapino, Leslie, 145 Scherman, Harry, 130 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 25, 27, 29–30, 31 sexual abuse, 80, 82, 83, 87 Single White Female , 32 Société de Républicaines Révolutionnaries, 112 Southey, Robert, 119 Spufford, Francis, 155–158 standardization, 27, 33, 35 Stewart, Susan, 158 structuralism, viii, 27 Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, 166–167 subjectivity, vii, xii, xv, 5, 21n75, 27, 28, 33 suburban, xiv, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84, 86, 87, 89n51 Susman, Warren I., 129 Szasz, Thomas, 40 Tanner, Tony, 97, 105n20, 105n26 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 168 Taussig, Michael, 147, 149–150, 151–152 technology, xi, xiv, 10, 18, 38, 43, 45, 46, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 71, 72, 74n37, 128, 129, 167 Terrada, Rei, 27 thing theory, x, xi, 12, 12–13, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169

Index Tolstoy, Leo, xi, 31 Tompkins, Silvan, 29–30 transnational, xi, 77, 78, 79, 85 trauma, xv, 49, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 94 urban, xiv, 66, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74n37, 77, 78, 79, 84, 87, 96, 146 utopia, xii, 3, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 32–33 Victorian, x, xi, xii, 4, 16, 78, 79, 91, 103, 158, 164 Wade, John Donald, 132 Warhol, Andy, 29

179

Warren, Robert Penn, 132 Wheelock, John Hall, 138 Wienzenbaum, Joseph, 42 Wilde, Oscar, 170 Williams, Helen Maria, 120 Williams, Raymond, 97 Wilson, Christopher, 130 Wilson, Edmund, 133 Winner, Viola Hopkins, 5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 146, 148 Wolfe, Thomas, xv; Look Homeward, Angel , 131, 132, 136, 138; Of Time and the River, 132, 138 Zola, Émile, xi, 26, 31

About the Contributors

Jarrad Cogle recently completed his PhD at the University of Sydney. He has published essays on critical theory in Textual Practice and New Scholar. He has also published on contemporary cinema in Filming the City: Urban Documents, Design Practices and Social Criticism through the Lens (Intellect, 2016). During his PhD candidature, Jarrad was a Teaching Fellow in the English department at the University of Sydney and taught in the Media Studies department at the University of Notre Dame. He currently works at Monash University. Jedidiah Evans is a sessional lecturer in English and Communications at Australian Catholic University. His doctoral dissertation, “Look Overseas, Angel: Concentric Circles of Sehnsucht in the Work of Thomas Wolfe,” reimagined Wolfe’s career-long preoccupation with longing within a broader transatlantic exchange of ideas, and is presently under review as a revised manuscript with LSU Press for the Southern Literary Studies series. He has been published in The Thomas Wolfe Review, Inklings Forever, and The Australasian Journal of American Studies. Nicola Evans, formerly postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and Assistant Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, currently lectures in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She has published essays on literature, film and cultural identity in a range of journals including Screen, Discourse, Culture, Theory, Critique, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Text and Performance Quarterly, Continuum and Life Writing. She is co-editor of The Literary Career in the Modern Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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About the Contributors

N. Cyril Fischer is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Sydney. His work reconfigures the literary-historical trajectory of E.M. Forster’s career in broad comparative analysis including George Meredith, Virginia Woolf, E.L. Doctorow, J.M. Coetzee, and Alan Hollinghurst. Bob Hodges was the 2015-2016 Kollar Endowed Fellow in the Humanities & a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington. He specializes in C19 U.S. literature & critical theory. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in ESQ, Poe Review, & Clues. He has presented at multiple conferences in the U.S. & Canada. Siobhan Lyons is currently a PhD candidate and tutor in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, researching literary celebrity from Romanticism to the twenty-first century. She is also an associate member of the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University. Siobhan has been published in a number of journals and magazines, including The Conversation, The Washington Post, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Celebrity Studies, PopMatters, Philosophy Now, and various others. She has presented at a number of international conferences including Derrida Today, Celebrity Studies, and the Crossroads Cultural Studies conference. John Plotz is a Professor and Chair of English at Brandeis University. He is the author of The Crowd (Berkeley: California, 2000) and Portable Property (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), and his current project is entitled “Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Partial Absorption.” He recently published his first children’s book, Time and the Tapestry: A William Morris Adventure (Bunker Hill, 2014). Lydia Saleh Rofail is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Sydney, Australia. She holds a Master of Arts in English and a Master of Philosophy in English from the University of Sydney. Lydia’s current research project examines urbanity in relation to subjectivity in contemporary Australian Literature. She has presented at multiple conferences in Europe and Australia. Lydia has also published various essays and book chapters in the field of postcolonial Anglophone texts by Indian women and the postcolonial Gothic. She has a chapter in A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott (Camden House/Bodell & Brewer, 2016) published in the United States. Chris Rudge was conferred his PhD in English in 2015, and holds degrees in Arts and Law. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sydney, where he works on The Australian Neurolaw Database (www.neurolaw.edu.au), an online repository of Australian legal cases in-

About the Contributors

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volving neuroscience evidence. Chris is also managing editor of the postgraduate journal Philament, and a fellow of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Chris’ abiding research interest is in the relations of literature and psychiatry. Recently, however, Chris’ research has focused on the adjudication of psychiatric and biological disorders at law, particularly chronic pain disorders and somatic symptom disorders. He is currently working on his first monograph, a psychobiography of Aldous Huxley. Stephanie Russo is an early career fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney. She is the author of Women in Revolutionary Debate: Female Novelists from Burney to Austen (2012) and one of the co-editors of The French Revolution and the British Novel in the Romantic Period (2011). She has published widely on women's novels of the long 18th century, revolution, politics and fashion. She is currently working on a monograph on the novels of Mary Robinson, to be published by Brill in 2017. Hisup Shin earned PhD in literature from Essex University (UK) after completing a thesis entitled Experiencing the Unlikely City: The Figuration of Dickens’ Street Writing (2001). He was a 2001/2002 Korea Institute PostDoctoral Fellow at Harvard, conducting a comparative study of Korean modern urban fiction. His teaching career began at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He currently teaches at Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, South Korea. His research interests stretch across various topics of modernity and literature/culture, including urbanization, bodily figuration, and visualities. His publications include “Tarrying with Sensuous Materiality: A Study of the Interplay between Objects and the Human Body in Dickens” (Rhizomes, 2002), “Uncovering Chonggyechon: The Ruins of Modernization and Everyday Life” (Korean Studies, 2005), “A Study of Bodily Figures in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year” (British & American Fiction, 2007), “Technologies of Vision in Radcliffe’s The Italian” (British & American Fiction, 2010). Vanessa Smith is Professor of English literature and Director of Research (Humanities) at the University of Sydney. She is author or editor of five books focusing on different aspects of intercultural contact in the Oceania of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and has published widely on the British and American novel. Her current book project, Toy Stories, investigates the literary antecedents of object relations psychology. She is convenor of the Novel Network at the University of Sydney, and is engaged in a number of projects investigating the capacities of the novel genre not merely to reflect but to anticipate shifts in the collective Unconscious.

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About the Contributors

Zachary Tavlin is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Washington. His areas of research include the history of philosophy, critical theory, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. Publications include essays and book chapters on Augustine and Lacan, Marx and Dickens, the poetry of John Ashbery, the fiction of Don DeLillo, and the film of David Lynch. Jennifer Preston Wilson, Associate Professor of English at Appalachian State University, is Co-Editor, with Elizabeth Kraft, of Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Henry Fielding (2015). Her recent work includes “On Honor and Consequences: The Duel in The Small House at Allington” in Dickens Studies Annual (2012), “‘We know only names, so far’: Samuel Richardson, Shirley Jackson, and Exploration of the Precarious Self” in Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences (2016), and “‘I have you in my eye, sir’: The Spectacle of Kingship in The Madness of King George” in The Cinematic Eighteenth Century: History, Culture, and Adaptation (2017).