all being moves toward, corresponds with itself outside of itself.… We love, in other words, inaccurate replications of ourselves.… This is not the envy of narcissistic enclosure.… It is rather an expression of the security humans can feel when they embrace difference as the supplemental benefit of a universal replication and solidarity of being.72
Following Bersani’s logic, I am suggesting that reading, like love, is an activity “in which the individuating boundaries that separate subjects … are erased.”73 The aspiration for many readers, both in the nineteenth century and today, is to overcome identitarian differences—not “to read as a woman” or “to read as an African American” but rather to read as a human in intimate and self-diffusing touch with another subjectivity and with the object-world.
In what follows, I examine the book’s status as a technology of intimacy, able to affirm the ideal of oneness for a large cross-section of nineteenth-century subjects. Chapter 1 attempts to situate this understanding of the book in relation to antebellum urban-industrial changes, particularly those of the railroad. If trains ushered in a new emphasis on velocity and efficiency, they also inspired a particular approach to reading, likewise characterized by productivity and time management. These values are especially apparent in the conduct manuals on reading that were published in vast quantities throughout the nineteenth century. Here reading emerges as an instrumentalist activity, bound to market temporality and bourgeois notions of self-improvement. Alongside this model, however, appears an alternative account of reading, one expressed in diaries, letters, and literary works, but also occasionally in the conduct manuals themselves. In these reports, reading takes on a wayward quality, important for the way it thwarts imperatives for utility and progress. For wayward readers, the aim of reading is not self-improvement, and the time of reading is not evenly paced and future bound. Such atemporality reconfigures a reader’s sense of the world and her relations within it. In particular, it makes possible new intimacies with the author, who is no longer imagined as chronologically and spatially removed.
The nature of this author-reader intimacy is the subject of Chapter 2. Here I take issue with those book historians who claim that “friendship” constituted the dominant metaphor of nineteenth-century book possession. Such a metaphor situates the book as compensation for real social relations. In the absence of face-to-face dynamics, the logic goes, readers created companionship out of “cold type.” I argue against this critical assessment by insisting that readers did not model their relations with books on real-life social interactions. Rather, insofar as reading could produce a mutual ensoulment with an author who was inaccessible and most likely dead, it belonged to the realm of the paranormal. Indeed, descriptions of reading as ecstatic communion were part of a larger metaphysical tradition, one that privileged the intuitive powers of the mind and theories of correspondence or harmony between disunited peoples. The reports of these readers, I conclude, allow us to rethink the critical assumptions that govern contemporary studies in reception. Specifically, they suggest that the “death of the author” is important not for its theoretical implications about the reader’s liberation, but as a tragic reality that could be countermanded by the practice of reading and the sensual forms of oneness it inspired.
Having established that the “death of the author” is greatly exaggerated (at least in theoretical terms), I turn to three prominent authors in Chapters 3–5 in order to probe the fantasy of author-reader communion from another vantage point. I have chosen to highlight Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, and Susan Warner in these chapters for a number of interrelated reasons. First, all of these writers were also prodigious readers, whose letters and journals explicitly theorize the activity of reading. Moreover, their literary works contain scenes of authorship and reading that function as mises en abyme. First coined by André Gide in 1893, the mise en abyme is a figure of internal duplication that serves to comment on the greater narrative, and particularly on its production and reception.74 Thus Melville’s descriptions of his eponymous protagonist’s authorial attempts in Pierre (1852) work as a way of reflecting on Melville’s own vexed relation to writing and to the literary marketplace. Likewise, Warner’s descriptions of the reading habits of Ellen Montgomery in The Wide, Wide World (1850) partially reveal Warner’s vision of reception for her own novels. When positioned in dialogue with other cultural texts, these mises en abyme provide greater insight into the different forms that fantasies of readerly communion could take.75 Finally, Melville, Douglass, and Warner are at the center of this study because they envisioned their own textual practices as avenues for pursuing intimacies and experiences not readily available to them in the physical world. Melville, I will argue, organized his intense feelings for Hawthorne around the dynamics of writing for each other and reading one another’s work; Douglass envisioned communion in literacy as a means of achieving an otherwise elusive cross-racial bond; and Warner found sensuous gratification through her books, thereby circumventing social prescriptions on proper female etiquette. While I do not mean to suggest that these writers abandoned face-to-face relations in favor of virtual ones (on the contrary, social interactions continued to be key, especially for the abolitionist project of Frederick Douglass), I argue that the imagined world of textual relations was an important sphere for negotiating experiences of loss and for pursuing illicit or extranormative associations.
Positing reading and authorship as fundamentally fusional enterprises means rethinking the relationship between nineteenth-century literary culture and individualism. If, in other words, writers like Melville and Douglass valued reading as a means toward achieving decentered intercorporeal experience, then we need to reassess the critical and political traditions that have aligned them—along with the very practices of authorship and reading they engaged in—with notions of privacy, autonomy, and selfhood. This seems particularly pressing at the moment, since much of the public discourse around electronic communication augurs the disappearance of the private self as we know it. According to this logic, the Internet has spawned a culture of rapid skimming and frenzied sharing that threatens to eradicate profound thinking and even interiority itself. But what if the idea of the isolated deep reader was itself a fiction belied by the reader’s search for oneness? The epilogue of this study takes up this question. It suggests that digital technologies have transformed the physical experience of reading, while sustaining the fantasy of connectedness that is the legacy of nineteenth-century book practices. Rather than bemoaning the current moment for its tendency to destroy the individual, then, we might see it as part of a longer tradition in which reading was valued precisely for its ability to undo the self, to replace, however briefly, the acquisitive project of identity formation with a vision of the self permeated with and inseparable from its objects.
Chapter 1
Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading
On 15 September 1841, Julia A. Parker, twenty-three years old and a prolific reader and diarist, inscribed her journal with the following:
Read “Stephens’s Travels in Central America.” How happy I am while reading a book like this. I have lived to-day only with the past. I envy the author the terrible dangers he passed; for what comparison do they bear with the satisfaction and interest one must feel in exploring the time-worn monuments of a people who have ceased to exist, and who have no place on the page of history.1
Parker’s