Knowing Books. Christina Lupton
renouncing control over the things we have made. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, for instance, describe the simultaneous awareness and forgetting that modern audiences experience through what they term “remediation,” a process that calls one medium to mind as a human construction while insinuating another as the purely technological venue for this reminder.42 This framework offers one way to describe how books representing aspects of writing, such as manuscript production or the economic struggles of authors, accomplish a certain invisibility for themselves as human productions. Gitelman’s description of the development of a twentieth-century “tendency to naturalize or essentialize media—in short, to cede to them a history that is more powerfully theirs than ours” also turns out to be relevant to an earlier period.43 Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (2006), focuses on the phonograph and the worldwide web at their inaugural moments because, Gitelman argues, it is when a medium is new that it is negotiated and contested, thereby providing a site for the “the ongoing and vernacular experience of representation as such.”44 Once people are won over to a new medium, they accept its authority as an instrument for the collection and storage of data, and this initial moment of consciousness about representation dies down into discussions of content that, regardless of tone, grant authority to the medium. This analysis is helpful in pinpointing what is happening in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, where the culture of self-consciousness worked-up through literary production targets the means, rather than the content, of print representation, but quickly helps characterize these means as unavoidable.
In a different vein, I have found inspiration in Bruno Latour’s insistence on the false distinction between nature and society, subject and object. For Latour, the human tendency to attribute objectivity to certain phenomena while defining others as purely social characterizes all modern, social scientific enterprise. With forms of critique and indignation premised on the idea of nature and society falsely encroaching on each other, he argues that we are impeded in recognizing the quasi-objects that are in fact constitutive of our existence, entities that have a life of their own although they originate in the social, or that rely on collective human practice even though they originate in objective reality. Latour includes as such objects IBM, the laws of gravity, global warming, and the computer. These things are our own doing and yet they feed, though our own desire to separate the natural from the social, either into our experience of a world that is beyond our control, or into our belief in there being a purely social dimension. In this separation, their quasi-objectivity is lost to us.
The books in this study can be seen as earlier versions of such quasi-objects. Discursive constructions that loom over their readers and authors as evidence of print and its circulation being outside their control, material objects compromised in their autonomy by the discourses to which they refer and on which they rely for their existence, their being makes it inappropriate to describe them either as social constructions or as autonomous objects. As paper and print, they do have a physical constitution, but this life is not nearly so distinct from their intentionality as their authors would have us believe. Lloyd’s “Powers of the Pen,” which bemoans the way inscription technology drives modern literary production, is typical of the literary climate we must describe. Rather than taking Lloyd’s description of literary production at face value, the challenge is to consider the way the poem projects forward a wry understanding of itself as printed product, thereby helping to create the sovereignty for writing, and the disenfranchisement of the writer, of which it appears most critical.
CHAPTER 1
Powerlessness as Entertainment
Intrusive Narration
In the years before and immediately after Tristram Shandy appeared, a significant number of lesser-known but equally self-conscious novels were published. Most of these contain only moderately interestingly romances, adventures, and life narratives. But they are framed and delivered by well-characterized narrators possessed of the disarming power to describe the flaws of novel writing and to reprimand and banter with fictional readers. The narrator of one of the more successful fictions of the period, the anonymous History of Charlotte Summers, the Fortunate Parish Girl (1750), comments in this spirit on the interpretive activities of those reading the novel. His intrusions include addresses to “Miss Censorious,” who is told not “to run too quick upon a malicious Scent,” and to readers who are permitted to “yawn a little” while the narrator rests to “smoak a serious Pipe.”1 In the second volume, the “numerous Tribe of Criticks, who may find materials sufficient in this work to employ their malicious talents” is hailed as a force from which the author must be saved (2:52). Charlotte is introduced as a character to be “dressed and presented” and installed within the papery mansion of the book, where readers are invited to visit her (1:13).
As such gestures illustrate, the entity that fictions like Charlotte Summers appear to know best is a reader whose mood oscillates between boredom and frustration. “You are much obliged to me,” claims the narrator of The Temple Beau or the Town Coquets (1753) in justification of an abridgement, “if I cure you of that impatience, which many Readers are seized with, to know the End of a Story.”2 More specifically, these fictions anticipate a reader in the physical throes of reading or of mishandling a text. The brazen narrator of Edward Long’s The Anti-Gallican; or, The History and Adventures of Harry Cobham, Esquire (1757) flags the hardship of reading a bad novel by advising that “if, after traveling through half a dozen Pages, you find your senses gradually declining into a heavy Torpitude, halt directly, and advance no further without the repelling Aid of Tea or Coffee.”3 In John Kidgell’s The Card (1755), the narrator claims to have included an illustration of the ten of clubs, on which a message is written, in order to increase the chances of his novel being rescued from its fate as waste paper by a child’s seeing the illustration:
as probably the labourious compilers of the History of the Present Times may adjudge Incidents of this sort too low to deserve a place in their immortal Register, this elaborate Representation of a Message is devoted to the Perusal of the curious. By this artifice doth the Author ingeniously project a message to preserve himself from total oblivion; humbly conceiving, that when this neglected Treatise under the character of waste-paper, shall be doomed to share the Fate of it, some little Master or Miss may be kindly advertised of the picture of that harmless Card which adorns one happy leaf of it, and which began about the year one thousand Seven hundred and Fifty, to be universally respected as a high Messenger of Honour.4
The inclusion of an illustrated page works here as occasion to flaunt the author’s perception of novels being fashionable items, quickly cast aside and reduced to paper. In a similar spirit, William Toldervy includes songs that he hopes will catch the eye in a novel his narrator otherwise admits is thin on remarkable events.5
Other authors describe more broadly the mood of their disgruntled audience and their possible reactions to the page. Readers of William Goodall’s Adventures of Capt. Greenland (1752) are invited to “indulge their spleen” by tearing out digressive passages they don’t like or “if it should better please them, by throwing the Whole Book into the consuming flames,” and Shebbeare’s Lydia, or Filial Piety: a novel (1755) challenges readers discontent with a chapter to “write a better themselves.”6 The cocky narrator of The Marriage Act (1754) encourages readers to leave off reading and head down to the club to bet on the events to come in the novel—“Now in this very Place, if an Author could lay Wagers with his Readers, Thousands of Pounds might be won; but as he cannot, it may serve a Bet a White’s, where the Lives of men are play’d at Chuck-Farthing.”7 In return for their assumed animosity toward the novels being written, readers are cast in these asides as distractible gamblers, volatile and impatient.
Until recently, these novels have been discussed very little by critics. In the 1950s, Wayne Booth reviewed them as part of the fashion in intrusive narration that began in England with Fielding and culminated with Sterne. Booth imagines the mounting tension readers felt as they saw devices used by Fielding—the chapter headings, intrusions, prefatory material—implanted in the works of lesser authors “with almost complete disregard for their artistic function.”8 For Booth, these intrusions register