Bodies and Books
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In nineteenth-century America, Gillian Silverman contends, reading—and particularly book reading—precipitated intense fantasies of communion. In handling a book, the reader imagined touching and being touched by the people affiliated with that book's narrative world—an author, a character, a fellow reader. This experience often led to a sense of consubstantiality, a fantasy that the reader, the material book, and the imagined other were momentarily merged. Such a fantasy challenges psychological conceptions of discrete subjectivity along with the very notion of corporeal integrity—the idea that we are detached, skin-bound, and autonomously functioning entities. It forces us to envision readers not as liberal subjects, pursuing reading as a means toward privacy, interiority, and individuation, but rather as communal beings inseparable from objects in our psychic and phenomenal world. While theorists have long emphasized the way reading can promote a sense of abstract belonging, Bodies and Books emphasizes the intense somatic bonds that nineteenth-century subjects experienced while reading. Silverman bridges the gap between the cognitive and material effects of reading, arguing that the two worked in tandem, enabling readers to feel deep communion with objects (both human and nonhuman) in the external world. Drawing on the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century readers along with literary works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Susan Warner, and others, Silverman explores the book as a technology of intimacy and ponders what nineteenth-century readers might be able to teach us two centuries later.
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Bodies and Books
Reading and the Fantasy of Communionin Nineteenth-Century America
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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.
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