Freedgood 2006

Elaine Freedgood. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

General Notes

• how to connect the narrative unconscious and the textual unconscious? A McLeodian and Freedgoodian reading?
• wgat about anachronistic things like old books?

Chapter Notes

Intro

• 1: [Epigraph] The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object...which we do not suspect. -- Proust, Du cote de chez Swann
• Even with the recent critical attention to the detail, the fetish, and material culture, the "things" of novels still do not get taken seriously - that is to say, they do not get interpreted - much of the time.
• Claim: The Ideas in Things assumes that critical cultural archives have been preserved, unsuspected, in the things of realism that have been so little or so lightly read.
• 3: [Weak metonymic reading vs strong] ...understanding the widest possible range of meanings for, let's say, the mahogany furniture in Jane Eyre requires that one learn about the history of the depletion of mahogany in Madeira and in the Caribbean (the two major sources of wealth in the novel)...and what those innovations signified, culturally speaking, in the Victorian period.
• This process does not tend toward a "reading" of the novel in any traditional sense. Instead it seeks what Pierre Macherey has described as a moment of "splitting" within the novel, the point at which we can catch sight of the "division which is its unconscious, in so far as it possesses one." This divided unconscious allows us to glimpse the "play of history beyond its edges, encroaching on those edges." This splitting, this less-than-fully-narrated appearance of history makes it possible "to trace the path which leads from the haunted work to that which haunts it."
  • cf. Randy McLeod about the "textual unconscious"
• 4: Conceptual method: ...I do eventually develop interpretive allegories in which I follow the narrative logic of the novel more closely than I do in the strong metonymic readings which I begin, but I delay such readings until I have the knowledge of the collector. [cf. Benjamin Arcades about allegorist/collector]
• In the nineteenth century, "what Barthes calls the 'world of goods' got used to itself" and things began "to demand visibility." [qting Cynthia Wall] The increasing respectability of increasingly detailed description makes for the emblematic hodgepodge of the Victorian novel.
• 5: ...it allows me to avoid the routinized literary figuration that precludes the interpretation of most of the things of realism.
• ...method of the first 3 chapters of this book: one in which the historically and theoretically overdetermined material characteristics of objects are sought out beyond the immediate [6] context in which they appear. These objects are then returned to their novelistic homes, so that they can inhabit them with a radiance or resonance of meaning they have not possessed or have not legitimately possessed in previous literary-critical reading.
• 6: I argue that George Eliot...begins to restrict and assign meaning to fictional objects
• ...structures of meaning-making build up in such hermeneutic displays [as the plain dress in Middlemarch]: this is the readerly text in the process of becoming a writerly one, that is to say, this is a text that teaches readers how to rightly "write" that which is unwritten in literary language....In my account of it, the readerly text is a structure in which a reader can be writerly with objects.
• 7: ...where desire emerges and dives to its death, repeatedly - fortunately enough for nineteenth-century publishing [what to make of this?].
  • how to connect the narrative unconscious and the textual unconscious?
• Reliability and reproducibility in literary meaning making require the stability of metaphors rather than the unpredictability of metonyms.
• ...I will argue that mid-Victorians, and the objects in their novels, were not fully in the grip of the kind of fetishism Marx and Marxists have ascribed to industrial culture.
• 8: A host of ideas resided in Victorian things: abstraction, alienation, and spectacularization had to compete for space with other kinds of object relations - ones that we have perhaps yet to appreciate.
• [Definition:] Victorian thing culture: a more extravagant form of object relations than ours, one in which systems of value were not quarantined from one another and ideas of interest and meaning were perhaps far less restricted than they are for us.
• thing culture vs. the reality effect: In his pervasively influential definition of the "reality effect," Roland Barthes argues that many objects lie around in the realist novel to signify a generic real rather than to suggest something particular about it. He suggests that we must understand the significance of "insignificant notation" (which can be determined only in the context of the entire work) as forming the "referential illusion" of modern realism.
• 10: In literary criticism, with a few notable exceptions on which this work depends, even the use value of most novelistic objects has largely been an abstraction: things are reified as markers of a real in which they can participate only generically. As exchange values, they are indentured to a metaphorical relation in which they must give up most of their own qualities in the service of a symbolic relation. They must do the "metaphysical capering" Marx ascribed to the commodity fetish - in the service of producing the effect of reality, or in service to a meaning that belongs to something or, more precisely, someone else. The object as reality effect loses its potential as a material thing outside the conventions of representation; the object as metaphor loses most of its qualities in its symbolic servitude.
• 11: Roman Jakobson noted that literary critics, like some aphasics, suffer from a disorder in which the "actual bipolarity [of poetical tropes] has been artificially replaced...by an amputated unipolar scheme which, strikingly enough, coincides with one of the two aphasic patterns, namely with the contiguity disorder."
  • metaphor <----- - - - - - > metonymy
• The problem with the kind of typically constricted reading Barthes rightly dismisses is precisely that it does not allow for causal, material, and conceptual connections beyond the covers of the text, or outside the frame of the narrative -- such are the basic rules of literary reading. But a literal approach to literary reading -- an approach that breaches, temporarily, the narrative frame and the symbolic system of the novel -- would assume that the barometer [in Flaubert's A Simple Heart ex. from Barthes] might be an index of something culturally significant both within the novel and outside it, especially given that the barometer does literally provide an index.
• 12: IN the metonymic readings I perform in the first three chapters of this book, the object is investigated in terms of its own properties and history and then refigured alongside and athwart the novel's manifest or dominant narrative -- the one that concerns its subjects.
• 13: Metonymy tends to be read according to habit - that is, according to a frame of reference that goes beyond or lies outside the symbolic structures of the novel - and its meanings are therefor often sought or recuperated in the social structures outside the novel, but inside the social world in which it is read. So the seemingly mundane issue of habit is actually fraught with contingency: whose habits? When and where?
• 14: Metonymy is the figure of arrested development, "thick description," the readable, the readerly. It embarrasses interpretation because of its apparent contingency, its seeming inability to provide a unitary or singular meaning, or a kind of critical "truth" (or the appearance thereof). It is the nightmarish opposite of the interpretive dead end: an interpretive open end of dizzying potential, metonymy has understandably been read, when read at all, weakly.
• 16: The contingency of metonymic relations may more proerly rest, in many cases, on our ability and our willingness to recuperate historical necessity. Metonymy's apparently subversive ability to disrupt meaning, to be endlessly vagrant and open ended, may be attended by an equally subversive ability to recuperate historical links that are anything but random.
• 17: A strong, literalizing metonymy can "start" fictional objects into historical life and historicize our fictions against the grain of the kinds of allegorical meaning we already know how to find, read, and create.
• 20: Unlike fetishism, literalism has received no official rehabilitation. But I would venture to argue that many major critical paradigm shifts of the last thirty years have depended on broaching the literal, or on taking something literally that was traditionally taken figurally, if it was "taken" at all.
  • Poovey - governessing
  • Sedgwick - anal eroticism in Our Mutual Friend (Fanny Cleaver)
  • Said - Mansfield Park and sugar and slavery
• Literal women as opposed to female figures, literal slaves as opposed to metaphorical bondsmen - each of these interpretations violates the decorous reading practices [of "humanist and New Critic[al] readings"] that have [21] often rendered the study of literature (and philosophy) a form of moral and political hygiene.
• 21: We "follow" novelistic things out of novels; we wander along the contiguous connections that are available to us given the states of our knowledge, our unconsciouses, our memories, the archives that remain and that remain available and valuable to us. We then bracket most of these connections, if we have had even a year or two of literary study at the secondary school level, as illegitimate: many of these constitute the "irrelevant associations and stock responses" that I.A. Richards attempted to "reorganize" with the procedures of Practical Criticism, and that criticism in general has continued to try to rein in, sort, and hierarchize.
• 22: [Somewhat eccentric intellectual genealogy, but it makes sense if you think about Marx/Engels reading Vico's Principles of a New Science and/or Michelet [cf. Wilson 1940 To the Finland Station ]] Giambattista Vico's work on the material basis of language describes how cultural knowledge may be stored outside individual minds and thus beyond the boundaries of memory or the unconscious as they are usually conceived. Robert Pogue Harrison adumbrates this "storage" process: "...OUr institutions, laws, landscapes, cities, statues, scriptures, houses, books, ideologies -- these are among the many places in its secular typography where the human mind stores both the past and future of what it retains." To follow in a Viconian manner the emanings of blue and white checked curtains in and around Mary Barton (a novel about MAnchester cotton mill workers), for example, may require that we place these curtains in the context of certain institutions, cities, and landscapes and that we try to find out about their origin, their production, and their use in various houses, books, and ideologies. To do so would allow us to find out what they may once have meant and what they can now mean inside and outside various moments of memory: the sources of knowledge about calico that were available in C19 Britain and the sources that are available now can be at least partially cataloged.
• 23: Cultural knowledge is stored in a variety of institutional forms; importantly for my argument, it is also stored at the level of the word. Vico's theory of cultural knowledge is grounded in language, and his idea of language is grounded in material practices[.]
• What did Victorian readers - who were reading in the periodical press about the "extinction" of indigenous peoples throughout the British Empire - make of the Negro head tobacco that Magwitch smokes when he returns from Australia to see the gentleman he has made of Pip? [Great Expectations]
• 24 antiquarian Walter Johnson - Folk Memory (1908) - look up. Not in ONDB or Wiki.
  • how did she come on this?
• 25: In Vico's theory of language, the first form of writing for Christians, as for the Egyptians and Chinese, was hieroglyphics. The words and tropes that developed from pictographic symbols are always rooted in the material practices that generated them, even if those practices are forgotten. In Marx's theory of exchange, the commodity fetish is a social hieroglyphic...[26] What knowledge can the specifically "social" hieroglyphic retain? Value is secreted in commodities, filling them with meanings that are both literal and figurative. We might say that the commodity is both a material object and a trope: it is literal as a lion is a lion, and figurative as a cubit stands for justice. The commodity stands for something that is and is not immediately clear to its beholders, but the extraordinary thing is that we have imagined commodities such that they are somehow capable of letting us know we have turned them into figures: we need to literalize them in order to re-figure them, that is we need to re-materialize them in order to understand their value differently, less abstractly.
• 28: The things of realism have been fetishized by an emphasis on metaphorical reading: the kind that tends to slight the literal, material qualities of things, and the large, historically enriched figural possibilities these qualities might eventually generate, in favor of their immediate, contextual, conventional figural possibilities. And although this kind of very basic literary reading has of course been supplanted many times over by waves of critical and theoretical change, it has remained largely stuck in place when it comes to the realist object. The Ideas in Things tries to subvert or upend the literary reading - and not reading - of the things of realism.
• 29: As yet unseen connections between historical knowledge and fictional form are recorded in the letter and letters of novelistic things: things that are at once material and figural, fetishized and fugitive, here and gone.

Ch. 1: Souvenirs of Sadism: Mahogany Furniture, Deforestation, and Slavery in Jane Eyre

• 31: Jane Eyre has been widely discussed as a text of empire; it has less often been commented on a s a work about interior decoration.
• mahogany and deal [planks of pine or fir] are two of the great class markers in Victorian fiction
• 32: she thus creates for herself [by recreating the red room at Gateshead in Moor House] a souvenir of the sadism she endured at the hands of her cousins and her Aunt Reed at Gateshead; she makes it her own. Jane also buys souvenirs of what might be described as another form of sadism: the deforestation, colonization, and implementation of plantation slavery in the two critical sources of wealth in the novel, Madeira and the Caribbean.
• 33: LIke the fictitious but still convincing "blank" spaces on the map of empire, the idea of empty space invites the exercise of habitation as a demonstration of power [cites Lefebvre Everyday Space]. The disposition of things in space is also a way of externalizing an internal arrangement of objects and of enacting, however unconsciously, a strict control over them.
• 35: The world of Jane Eyre is decorated with the literal and figural proceeds of Atlantic trade in these two crucial locations. Both places were deforested of mahogany and planted with the cash crops that allow Jane Eyre to to furnish her world with souvenirs, in the form of mahogany furniture, of the original material source of her wealth. I'm going to argue in this chapter that Jane's purchase and placement of mahogany furniture symbolizes, naturalizes, domesticates, and internalizes the violent histories of deforestation, slavery, and the ecologically and socially devastating cultivation of cash crops in Madeira and Jamaica.
• Charlotte Sussman has argued that colonial products like tea and sugar made consumers [in the C18] anxious because they threatened to bring home the violence that attended their production. This anxiety suggests the ways in which acts of consumption were regarded as moral choices at a moment that seems to be prior to the development of the consciousness Marx called commodity fetishism.
• 36: The ability to read fables of gender into the nineteenth-century novel, or to historicize the stories of poor governesses and creole madwomen, has revolutionized the criticism of the novel, and without it, the reading I do here would be impossible. But the intransigently allegorical mode of criticism blocks the reading of the material properties and relations of objects that don't give us immediate clues that will help us construct but we have come to understand as literary, rather than literal, meaning. For "the allegorist," Benjamin reminds us, "objects represent only keywords in a secret dictionary." In the secret dictionary of novel criticism, -- the dictionary about which initiates must prove their knowledge -- objects are weak metonyms for the subjects they adorn or generic markers of the real they indicate.... My project here is to imagine, like Benjamin's collector, that "the world is present, and indeed ordered" in certain objects. That ordering is not an allegory, but a history. And it is not the history that the novel narrates, but the history that the novel secretes: the history it hides and emits, the one it conceals and produces as it calls to mind the locations of deforestation and slavery for which mahogany is a metaphor, a metonym, and a literal representation.