Slantwise Moves. Douglas A. Guerra

While the rhetoric of “invention” has attained the valence of a dead metaphor (a replacement for “creative” or “imaginative”), tactically critical and locally embedded use was staged by way of both formal and material mechanisms in nineteenth-century games, and often, as I argue, in literature as well. This project continues the work called for in the conclusion of Bercovitch’s Rites of Assent, where he contends, “We will never properly understand [American writers’] force of enterprise, speculation, and invention until we set this firmly within a history of American enterprise, speculation, and invention in the nineteenth century.”⁶² Supplementing the local comparative work done by individual chapters, Slantwise Moves situates major authors of the mid-nineteenth century within a history of invention by looking at procedural amusements as an interface between the representational and the mechanical, refusing to see writing and reading as immaterial practices. If Bercovitch’s imperative carries at least the faint suggestion of an impossible or purely metaphorical span between the abstract figural inventions of “writing” and the physical inventions of “history”—history as a forensic “context” emanating explanations for the literary—then one aim of my book is to trouble that distance and do the work of tracing the intermediaries native to writing, bodies, and things. The goal is not homology (or not only homology) but a flattened look at the conditions through which certain social practices, social habits, and social bodies are produced around and with media.

      Examining the figures and forms of mid-nineteenth-century games in the United States allows us to understand literature in conversation with a complex and evolving commercial marketplace of things, a conversation that facilitates one of literature’s core functions as historical repository. To find meaning in literary objects, critical scholarship must reconstruct the social environments that allow(ed) them to signify; yet it has often proven difficult to track a set of associations that are based on motion and spatiality and operational possibility using what are assumed to be nonprocedural forms (that is, novels, poems, autobiographies). As a result, critical methodologies fixate on the immobile, the institutional, and a historiography of increasingly obliterated time. These perspectives are crucial, and yet they risk leaving out the temporal local activities of daily life that are enacted and reiterated by gameplay and reading. Here timing, movement, and sociality were always, and often explicitly, at issue. For those seeking a deeper understanding of the interactive medial shift that was occurring across the nineteenth century—corresponding to a shift in the possibilities of the literary—games offer models of emerging procedural grammars, drawing attention to the increasingly algorithmic structures enabling the civic agencies that have been represented by American literary studies. The consequence of pairing games and literature allows us (to repurpose a phrase used by Gerry Canavan and Priscilla Wald) “to track both a shift in the formative terms of an ideology and the means by which that shift occurs.”⁶³ In short, it allows us to create new ways of reading and to imagine old ways of playing that have important bearing on literary history, as well as literary critical practice and pedagogy.

      CHAPTER 1

      Both In and Out of the Game

      Reform Games and Avatar Selves

      Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

      Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,

      Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,

      Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next,

      Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.

      —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1855)

      In the summer of 1860, as the owner of the only lithographic press in western Massachusetts, Milton Bradley undertook creating a standard reproducible image of Abraham Lincoln. Bradley was a capable draftsman who previously had made a living by sketching detailed patent drawings for the early inventors of the American industrial boom. Now he saw an opportunity to turn his political passion for Lincoln into a profit: working from a photograph, he sketched a painstaking likeness of the candidate’s distinctive, clean-shaven face and pressed enough copies to populate every home in New England. For a time they sold incredibly well—but Lincoln’s beard changed all that. Biographer James Shea writes, “Bradley could not believe it. But … no one wanted a lithograph of a beardless Lincoln. Some even wanted their money back.”¹ Frustrated but not defeated, Bradley turned his disappointment with the scheme into a renewed energy to produce and sell a game he had invented just a few months earlier, The Checkered Game of Life (Figure 4).²

      On the colorful game board, Bradley created a likeness of nineteenth-century American life—conspicuously, adult male life, though the players were assumed to span a wider demographic—that placed new emphasis on timing and decision rather than the traditional ideals of place and avocation. Play consisted in accumulating points by moving around a freeform sixty-four-square checkerboard, encouraging “a frequent choice of moves involving the exercise of judgment.”³ More than a roll of the dice, character in Life was framed as a position from which to make public and materially registered decisions; it was something you acted out as well as watched. In an urban society composed of interactions among relative strangers, publicly visible decisions—from fashion and conduct to the pointing out of sites, objects, and newspaper articles—were quickly becoming the foundation of social selfhood.⁴ And indeed Life’s capacity to stage a complex “exercise of judgment” on the cognitive space of a single “page” of pasteboard may account for the game’s immense popularity. When Bradley first traveled to New York City to determine interest in the game, his supply of merchandise lasted only two days; within a few months he had sold forty thousand copies.⁵ Clearly, this kinetic mixture of bright red ink, brass dials, and layered decision making presented a model of life that the public was eager to practice.

Figure 4. Milton Bradley. Social Game. U.S. Patent 53,561. 3 April 1866. Source: United States Patent and Trademark Office.

      To understand the dimensions of Bradley’s precipitous success, and what this success can tell us about American media history (not to mention literary history), it is essential to pause for a moment and reflect on what we can learn from the punctuated emergence of new commercial games like The Checkered Game of Life—in contrast to more traditional staples of amusement. Though he may have inaugurated a new era in integrated game design, theory, and branding, Bradley certainly did not invent American play. Sketching the anthropological edges of traditional play practices, anthologies such as The Boy’s Treasury of Sports, Pastimes, and Recreations (1847) and The Boy’s Book of Sports and Games (1851) pillaged liberally from London native William Clarke’s nostalgic reflections and codifications in The Boy’s Own Book (1828/1829).⁶ In isolation, Clarke’s compendium of childhood entertainments—republished by the Boston firm of Munroe and Francis nearly every year for twenty-five years and selling in this period, by one account, eighty thousand copies in the United States⁷—offers a broad introduction to texture of everyday play in the nineteenth century, which included checkers, marbles, wordplay games, puzzles, and playground standards like Blind Man’s Buff. Clarke’s books and their many echoes documented ubiquitous games and modes of amusement that most would have known or might be expected to know. Advertised and (if inscriptions in extant copies suggests common practice) largely bestowed during the domestic leisure of the Christmas season, Boy’s Own books were touchstones in social calibration: equal parts reference book and usage guide for a set of discrete playful protocols that could aid in the attainment of a shared sociophysical language. And just as a dictionary does not invent words, and an encyclopedia does not invent topics, these books did not invent new games; instead they cataloged a cultural topography of leisure time associations and pleasures with a tone of romantic universality and completeness. Indeed, there is only