Hack 2005

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Hack, Daniel. The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Print.

  • come back to Deronda chapter

Intro

  • useful as a sane definition of materiality and the problems with the term
  • 1 [the problem with materiality] ...the currency of materiality-talk in literary and cultural studies today reflects less a shared understanding or object of interest than a widespread contest for ownership of this terminology; we are all "materialists" now.
  • ...this study seeks to keep distinct the four primary, contemporary referents of materiality— economic, physical, linguistic, and corporeal— while at the same time keeping them all in play, precisely in order to keep [2] open the question of their relationships to one another. My approach is historical and critical rather than theoretical: instead of attempting to decide what should count as "material,” I examine how the conditions, components, and consequences of writing now conjured by that term were put into discourse in the mid-C19.
  • 2 The investigation and mobilization of writing’s putative materialities proves central to efforts to establish the boundaries and relations between textual and extratextual phenomena— the word and the world— and to determine in turn the ethical purchase of the novel as a genre and the literary and cultural authority of its producers.
  • Shakespeare’s sonnet 111 about "difficulties of abstracting oneself from some material realm"
    • I’m unclear again: "linguistic materiality" as the poem’s formality? A little more clear in the quote on 4: "language ‘prevents individual humans from being able to present their thoughts as the inner content of their bodies to others in apprehensible form...because it has a body of its own. If it didn’t have a body...it wouldn’t be perceptible or legible at all. Having a body, it, like material objects, has a perceptively and opacity of its own that continually exceeds its representative function."
      • from Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime
  • 5 citing Thomas Carlyle talking about the constraints of Shakespeare having to work for the Globe ("no man works save under conditions"): "Yet where Shakespeare emphasizes the economically driven institutional nature of the constraints under which he operates, Carlyle identifies these constraints as more broadly social, or even ontological."
  • 6 C19 writers are interested...in exploring the relations among what Carlyle himself might agree to call writing’s multiple material conditions [economic, physical, and linguistic]
  • 7 method: I explore this project by reading the Victorian discourse on authorship and a series of novels...as sustained, reflexive investigations into the meaning and multiple relevance of the physicality of the written or printed word, the exchange of texts for money, the workings and slippages of signification, and the corporealities of character, writer, and reader.
  • l/u Bodenheimer, "Knowing and Telling in Dickens’s Retrospects"
  • 9 We shall see that although authors and texts "suggest" in myriad ways their constitutive and contingent materiality, such suggestions are themselves loaded, even functioning at times as covert claims for the very detachment they seem to abjure.

1 Paratexts and Periwigs (Henry Esmond)

  • good on the interpretive significance or cultural work of the triple decker vs serial
  • 12 original triple decker Smith, Elder ed of Esmond in 1852: wide margins, heavy leading, typeface with long s and ligatures, referring to C18 printing practices from when the memoir was ostensibly written— a "double antiquation" (13)
  • 14 his argument reads against a simple reinforcement of linguistic codes by bibliographic ones because the novel doesn’t uniformly purport to be C18: "...while the first edition’s departures from bibliographic norms encourage us to attend to the bibliographic text and find it significant, the novel does not simply establish a relationship between linguistic and bibliographic text but instead raises the question of this relationship and invites readers to consider its significance.... Thus, if the "graphic realization is inseparable from the literary intention" in the first edition of The History of Henry Esmond, as Genette claims, then this is so not in the sense he intends but rather because the work both puts into play and reflects on the relationship between graphic realizations and literary intentions, the physical materiality of texts and authorship.”
  • 15 Esmond was Thackeray’s only triple-decker (vs serial), giving it more "dignity" in the minds of him, his daughter/editor, and Charlotte Brontë
  • 16 Initial publication of the work in its entirety shifts attention away from the temporality of [serial] composition to the spatiality of form, a spatiality whose shapeliness is embodied in turn by the three volumes of equal size into which the novel is divided.
    • inclusion of paratext like a table of contents at the beginning rather than at the end (as with the "Preface" to Pendennis) adds to this finished quality: "The effect is one of heightened textual unity and autonomy, and therefore heightened authorial control.”— “less” materially contingent
  • 17 The book’s specific departures from c19 bibliographic norms...reinforce the qualities of spaciousness, luxury, and gentility that the "three-decker" connotes.
  • 18 [Esmond’s antiheroism] "I wonder shall History ever pull off her periwig and cease to be court-ridden?" Read the way Brontë and Ritchie read it, then, the format of the first edition— not unlike the cover of the modern Penguin edition— contradicts H Esmond’s stated political beliefs and corresponding aesthetic ideals. Given how characteristically Thackerayan Esmond’s anti heroic rhetoric is, we might well conclude that the monumentalizing format contradicts Thackeray’s own project too.
    • question of intent though— how involved was he with the bibliographic design? Could check Sutherland, Thackeray at Work
    • still a similar approach to PIper 2009, Lynch 2015
  • 19-25 somewhat deconstructionist reading of the play of linguistic materiality
  • 26 The very identification of a text as an abstract entity distinct from its material manifestation derives from print, or is at least given currency by it, since, as Catherine Gallagher argues, "the potential for seemingly infinite reproduction obviated the possibility of equating the text with any, or for that matter all, of its instantiations."
  • 28 HE is thus located at a critical moment in the historical transition from scribal to print culture, a moment when modern notions of authorship and literary property were being formulated, when the marketplace was beginning to replace patronage as the dominant system of literary production, when the distinction between abstract text and material manifestation strongly emerged [in the late C17? Not earlier?], and when the significance of various forms of linguistic materiality was a topic of sevate. But the novel is not simply located at this juncture: rather, it explicitly locates itself there.
  • 34 Thackeray removed this passage [playfully describing himself, Forster and Dickens as c18 authors] from the 1858 edition of the novel, also the first English edition not to feature the antique typeface. Together, these changes suggest that we can read the novel’s publication history as embodying the history of publication itself, as from one edition to the next HE detaches itself as a text from its material instantiation and ephemeral, specific referentiality.

2 Reading Matter in Bleak House and the "Bleak House Advertiser"

  • 37 No Victorian novelist devotes more attention to the physical materiality of writing and signs than does Charles Dickens.
  • ...again and again his novels explore the potential significance of writing’s materiality, asking just what can be "reasonably" derived from "the shape of...letters."
  • “Chancery as an institution dedicated to the production and proliferation of documents," more so (he argues) about the materiality of documents than “a document about the interpretation of documents” in Hillis Miller’s formulation
  • 39 Advertiser: "these advertisements are as filled with the products and paraphernalia of writing as is the novel itself."
    • to what end? Could use with framework in Freedgood 2006
    • ads about watching for the right color ink in product labels
  • D himself suffered from the publication of pirated issues and [40] "spurious imitations" of his works, so perhaps it is no wonder that his novels model the skills needed by the discriminating consumer.
  • 41 ...the antiquarian trappings of Henry Esmond point back in time, whereas the sandwiching of D’s text between numerous pages of advertisements...bespeaks cultural simultaneity and contiguity.
  • The recognition of the handwriting thus reminds Lady D of her experience of forbidden physical passion and results in an experience of vulnerable embodiedness. Heightened consciousness of writing’s materiality leads to a threatened loss of all consciousness and corresponding reduction to the sheer materiality of a corpse.
  • 42 maps same materiality/body poles with Mrs J and Caddy: her refusal to engage materially in writing keeps her abstracted, Caddy’s nature is "subdued" like the dyer’s hand
  • l/u Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
  • 43 By emphasizing the materiality of texts and the semiotics of bodies, BH reduces the difference between texts and bodies. This chiastic convergence has ethical implications, as the mother-daughter relationships reveal. As the novel also stresses, however, this convergence has epistemological implications as well, in that it aligns the activities and [44] protocols of interpreting and manipulating linguistic signs, on the one hand, with those of observing and interpreting corporeal phenomena, on the other. This alignment suggests in turn that expertise and thus authority in one of those spheres extends to both, and this question of authority comes to the fore in the fallout...from the event that occurs immediately after Esther falls ill [i.e. Krook’s spontaneous combustion].
    • foreshadowed by the dissolving body simile with Lady D, "struck by the air like lightning"
  • 46 key word that his sooty remains are all that "represent" him: "...the convergence here of empirical [47] observation and semiotic decoding, inference and interpretation: in discovering Krook’s remains, the characters discover what is at once a clue and a sign.”
  • 48 ...just as the discovery of K’s remains prompt an allegorical turn on the part of the narrator, the discovery of Tulkinghorn’s corpse produces a turn to Allegory [the Roman].... This scene not only literalizes the earlier scene’s turn to allegory but also, like the earlier scene, narrows the gap between the figurative and the physical. To shift one’s gaze from Tulkinghirn to the Roman is to turn from one body to another, equally uncommunicative one.
  • 50 ...We might better say that D’s desire to respond to criticism such as Lewes’s dictates the logic of the novel: that is, BH weakens the distinctions [bodies/signs, empirical/symbolic explanations] in order to legitimize D’s interventions in questions of public policy having to do with physical matter, in particular the disposal of dead bodies and the circulation of noxious substances.
  • 54 BH...emphasizes commonalities between documents and bodies, symbolic and material processes, and reading and empirical analysis in order to extend D’s authority from the realm of texts and tropes to that of physical phenomena— including, paradigmatically, spontaneous human combustion.
  • 55 Lewes and his source, Liebig, discredit witnesses of combustion based on their low class, where "D’s defense of spontaneous human combustion can be seen to function as part of the novel’s more general argument against the silencing or discrediting of individuals lacking what those in positions of authority deem sufficient cultural capital."
  • 57-60 Liebig’s authority also called in #5 ad disproving adulteration of Allsop beer.
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