Bodies and Books. Gillian Silverman
modern urban life. Clifford and Hepzibah marvel at the idea that
there were fifty human beings in close relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its grasp.… New people continually entered. Old acquaintances … continually departed. Here and there, amid the rumble and the tumult, sat one asleep. Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life itself!35
At once part of and symbolic of the drive toward human progress—the “inevitable movement onward”—the train is, in Hawthorne’s estimation, a powerful and ineluctable force. (Indeed, when Clifford and Hepzibah finally disembark, exhausted, it is with the knowledge that they are leaving behind the modern world, choosing their ghostly past and their decaying house over “life itself.”) The train’s connection to the phenomenon of reading is evident in Hawthorne’s text as well. Clifford and Hepzibah’s fellow passengers include those who have “plunged into the English scenery and adventures of pamphlet-novels, and were keeping company with dukes and earls.”36 The “plunge” into fiction here, and the sudden exposure to the new and the foreign that reading engenders, are, of course, an analogue to railway life itself. Both, in other words, involve immersion in strange “scenery,” novel “adventures,” and unknown “company.”
While Hawthorne’s vision of accelerated modernity is, at least in this particular scene, fairly optimistic, for many writers the pace of modern life and its effects on reading augured something far more dire. Edwin Hubbell Chapin mixes awe with dystopic prognostications in his account of the electric speed of book consumption. “A woman takes up her pen to delineate a great social wrong,” he writes, perhaps in reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe, “and the story becomes as the lightning that shines from one end of the heaven to the other. … The press cannot send it out fast enough. From hand to hand, from land to land, it leaps like sparks of electricity.”37 He continues more ominously:
No organ of intellectual and moral influence … is in our day more prominent than the Press … whether its form be that of book or journal.… Sending its influence far beyond the reach of the human voice, and into the most private hours, it gathers to itself all the facilities of the age. Its productions, fast as steam can make and carry them, go abroad through all the land, silent as snow-flakes, but potent as thunder.38
Here, books garner both the force of techno-industrialism (“the facilities of the age”) and the power of the natural world (“silent as snow-flakes, but potent as thunder”), becoming in the process an unstoppable supramortal force. They send their “influence far beyond the reach of the human voice,” thereby upending traditional social ties and face-to-face communication. Still worse, the accelerated industrial speed at which they travel transgresses on sacred time or “the most private hours.” Chapin concludes by asking “what … great evil is blended with this wonderful agency?”39 His account anticipates the anxieties articulated by modern theorists of temporality. Reinhart Koselleck, for example, has commented that the hallmark of modernity is an accelerated temporality and, with it, a sense of the future as dark and unknown, because stripped of its constancy.40 For Brian Massumi the modern subject is the “falling” subject, “defined by the condition of groundlessness,” brought on by the ever-increasing velocity and instability of bourgeois consumer culture.41 While these contemporary theorists blame more advanced forms of technology for this decline, Chapin and other nineteenth-century cultural custodians placed books and periodicals at the center of their apocalyptic vision. In warning of the “headlong speed with which mere knowledge is now pursued all round us,”42 these commentators imagined reading as spiraling and ungrounded, rapidly steering society toward cataclysm.
Social commentators warned that this frenzied state had dire implications for the physical health of readers, particularly women, for whom fast reading could result in accelerated maturation. In his medical treatise, On Diseases Peculiar to Women, Dr. Hugh Lenox Hodge warns that too much reading of “novels, romances, plays,” can cause “undue excitation” and thus “hasten the development of the nervous system and the phenomena of puberty.” These same “excitants,” he adds, can do damage to the older woman as well. If not carefully regulated, they “will often break down the powers of life, and thus give rise to the whole tribe of dyspeptic and irritable disorders.” Chief among these is “irritable uterus,” which can be exacerbated with “any exertion, even of the upper extremities, in holding a book.”43 While women were the primary targets of these physiological assessments, men, too, were imagined as suffering bodily for their reading practices. One American commentator linked excessive reading in men with “mental imbecility” while another questioned how many “full grown men” have grown “enervated, dwarfish, deformed, or crippled” through the practice.44
Anxieties about the physiologically debilitating effects of reading were tied to a larger discourse in which cultural commentators invoked the body to register a reader’s negative engagement with books. This is especially apparent in the metaphor of ingestion, which likened inappropriate reading to “swallowing” or “devouring” texts.45 Edwin Chapin, for example, rails against the “book-worm, who feasts upon libraries … who shuts himself up only to read, read, read … [He] is, perhaps, one of the most useless men in the world. His head is stored with a mass of crude and undigested knowledge, which does no good to himself nor to any one else.”46 Chapin presents us with the familiar paradox of the modern reader at once diligent and underemployed, whose efforts at continual study (“read, read, read”) are merely a register of his idleness (“most useless”). His propensity toward wasteful and nonproductive activity is articulated effectively through metaphors of the body—he gluttonously “feasts upon libraries” only to amass “crude and undigested knowledge.” Such a reader is guilty of sacrificing rational enjoyment for crass sensual pleasure. He has, in Kelly Mays’s formulation, “confused the proper hierarchical relation between body and mind.”47
Janice Radway has written that metaphors of reading-as-eating have the effect of imagining readers (and especially female readers, for whom these metaphors were most often in place) as passive consumers of mass culture rather than active, sense-making agents. Such rhetoric, she claims, “was marshalled to characterize this process by which large numbers of users bought, in a dual sense, the ideas of others.”48 More recently, critics have challenged Radway’s position as a denial of biology. By understanding reading only in terms of perception, comprehension, and sense-making, they argue, she has deprived the practice of its sensual aspects and in the process denied her historical readers their materiality. Retaining or resuscitating the eating metaphor is thus crucial for rounding out our understanding of the noncognitive or sensual aspects of reading, and thus for rematerializing the abstracted body of the reader.49
The problem with this intervention, however, is that it fails to account for the variable meaning of the ingestion metaphor for the different populations who mobilized it. While everyday readers may have invoked this metaphor as a way of commenting on the physical delights of book consumption, cultural authorities rarely deployed it in the same way. For them, “devouring” books was indeed a statement about the cognitive failure of readers. “Injudicious reading is just as likely to produce mental debility as indiscriminate loading of the stomach is likely to produce dyspepsia,” wrote one; “and let us never forget that a healthy and vigorous mind, though its fare be scanty and homely, is far preferable to a pampered and sickly one.”50 It is difficult to understand this as a celebratory statement about the physicality of reading, since references to the body serve only to reinforce the “mental debility” that is the writer’s primary concern. The eating metaphor was usually deployed in conduct manuals precisely as a way of talking about the necessity to read mindfully, that is, to read in a way that eliminated the body and its associations with passion, carnality, and desire. Even when writers spoke of “wholesome” and “healthy” reading, it was with an eye toward emphasizing the perceptive acuity that accompanies such a diet. Moreover, the reading-as-eating metaphor was a way of denigrating not only bad readers but also the mass-produced texts they “consumed,” since images of uncontrolled ingestion were usually paired with admonitions