Knowing Books. Christina Lupton
author of a manuscript of uncertain future, to being that of a book already bound and in circulation.
Books, Hume and Hanway imply, have not only the ability to describe their own physical presence, but also the gadget-like ability to register and stay ahead of their readers. Charlotte Summers anticipates its real reader in this way by having Miss Arabella Dimple, lying naked in bed, call her maid to fetch “the first volume of the Parish Girl I was reading in the afternoon.” When Polly returns and sits down with the copy of Charlotte Summers, the sixth chapter of the novel procedes with a description of Arabella searching for the place she left off, which turns out—of course—to be the sixth chapter (1:67). In one sense, this scene simply carries on with a vein of humor introduced in Don Quixote, where the fictional world of the novel’s second part includes the presence of the first part, but it also pushes the joke to the surface of the page. As Arabella chastises her maid for imagining that she might have turned down a corner of the page as a marker, the copy of Charlotte Summers in the reader’s hand seems to become alert, not only to its own existence, but also to its physical condition.
The culture in which such a possibility seemed entertaining is one in which Tristram Shandy was affably at home, native to a context where authors were playing with the idea that paper could be conscious of what was written on it, and of how that writing was to be received in the imagined future of its material life. Tristram Shandy is well known as a book about a man trying to tell the story of his own genesis. But it can just as well be described from the perspective of the 1750s and ’60s as the story of a book—a book that makes its physical extension an integral part of the world of which the narrator claims to be conscious, recalling its genesis and circulation and announcing its cognitive superiority over the reader who is hostage to its technology. This is a good description of many of the jokes that have made Tristram Shandy seem so modern. Like the narrator of Charlotte Summers, Tristram illogically claims experience of his book as a material entity: he knows when the marble page is coming up and he deploys previous pages and volumes as a presence to which readers can be referred. At one point, excusing the bookbinder from charges of carelessness, Tristram mentions that he has torn out a chapter of his narrative (282). As we saw in the Introduction, he inserts a chapter offering his dedication for sale to the highest bidder, pledging to remove this advertisement in his next edition and to update the dedication according to the wishes of the winning bidder. At another point, he introduces Dr. Slop just as Trim is about to start speaking: ’Tis not two-pence matter—the corporal shall go on in the next chapter, let who will come in” (360). In each of these cases, Tristram draws attention to the materiality of his occupation and the process of communication that will follow from his publication. The effect of his doing so is that he inflates the knowledge an author can plausibly claim to have of the writing process at hand by extending it to take account of the book as an object already in print.
At times Tristram is also physically identified, like Hume, with the pages he is writing. For instance, he accuses his reviewers of having “cut and slash[ed] my jerkin,” offering a gloss on the image that suggests a literally bookish body, with his leather bound surface connected to his “rumpled” interior—“A Man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining;—rumple the one—you rumple the other” (144). Within the logic of his own life story it makes sense that Tristram should strive for the limited kind of transcendence associated with the inanimate consciousness of a book. His father, Walter Shandy, has tried to breathe life into books with little success, scratching meaning out of the pages of Slawkenbergius and pouring meaning fruitlessly into his Tristrapedia rather than into his son’s body. He handles Euclid with reverence, turning over the leaves of its initial chapter while displaying his knowledge of its contents, correcting its translation, and shutting it “slowly; his thumb resting, when he had done it, upon the upper-side of the cover, as his three fingers supported the lower-side of it, without the least compressive violence” (355). By transforming himself into a book cognizant of its own handling and reception, Tristram becomes the object that Walter fantasizes about keeping company with, a superior version of his own textual siblings, able to respond to the reader’s avid attentions in ways that Walter’s books so pointedly cannot.
Tristram’s figurative father, Yorick, is also honored in the possibility of Tristram Shandy as a book that stays awake to its own circulation. Yorick is, of course, dead at the time Tristram Shandy is supposedly being written, but his presence is palpable through the documents he has left behind. The fate of these documents, which include the sermon that has been lost, sold, misused, and finally made its way—as commodity, rather than legacy—into Tristram’s and now the reader’s hands, suggests that the promiscuous life Yorick leads as a literary character circulating on the market keeps him uncannily alive and present. In Yorick, Tristram has a model for the metemphychosis of papers as objects to whom superficial consumers as well as readers supply volition. The afterlife of Yorick’s writings provides evidence that the posterity of character is facilitated by the market. But in creating an equivalent life form for himself, Tristram also trumps Yorick, whose papers circulate with a logic alien to their original, whimsical sprit of composition. The intimacy Tristram claims with his reader at the moments where he “tugs” her through a chapter, promising that “the book shall not be opened again this twelve-month” or referring him to the title page for evidence of his own name, thus converges with the vertiginous claim a variety of self-conscious novels make on the present in which they are read; on the “now” in which this very moment can be invoked through the sentient presence of the paper (364). By making his model of a paper self an improved one, where circulation and misappropriation are anticipated, and into which self-consciousness is built, Tristram continues in the tradition of the self-conscious, mid-century narrators who may revile the commercial transactions propelling them toward uncreative situations, but who count on the impression of their novels coming to life in the reader’s hands.
Novels as Coaches
In the last decades, eighteenth-century culture has been described as experimenting with the simulation of life in forms that included automata, popular displays of lifelike machines and clockwork mechanisms, newly complicated networks of commerce, and expedited forms of transport.36 It is tempting to assume that books were simply part of this setting: axes of material autonomy generated as technological developments pointed generally but objectively in the direction of a material world straying away from control and understanding. But the novels I have discussed so far belong more convincingly to another history—that of an imaginative investment in the artificial intelligence of the medium of entertainment. They complicate the idea of authors registering at the level of their thematic concern the developments of material culture, and show instead the specific ways novels refract and work this interest into their formal and material properties. Books that are strenuously aligned with the material world under these conditions conceal, as Latour argues of many of the phenomena on which we bestow objectivity, their real intractability from the field of human creation.
I have already suggested some of the cases in which narrative intrusions were used to propagate the effect of books being beyond human control. I turn now to a different source of evidence for the ways the authors of novels cultivated the fiction of books being more powerful than the people who made them: the analogy between reading and coach travel that was built up after the publication of Joseph Andrews. This analogy was used by novelists to suggest that certain episodes of fictional action involved a reader’s surrender to an objectively given technology. Novels delivered experience, they proposed, in the same way that journeys did, as a compound of scenery, company, and physical progress and limitation. During the 1750s and ’60s, Goodall, Shebbeare, Toldervy, and Sterne, along with Susan Smythies, who perfected this ruse of the novel as journey in The Stage-Coach (1753), delight in imagining their readers as passengers in claustrophobic narrative machines that consist of paper and pages as well as generic conventions. They set up thematic excursions within their novels that use this comparison to emphasize the objective technology of a book. Toldervy, for instance, compares the pacing of his novel to the pacing of a horse, suggesting that drivers and passengers are in a similar position of having to obey the limits of technology. His narrator becomes a horseman who must manage his steed carefully by reining in the story, as if it were likely