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Introduction

The Fantasy of Communion

Sometime in the 1840s, Massachusetts resident Sarah E. Edgarton paid a visit to her intimate childhood friend Luella J. B. Case and left behind a book of poetry by William Wordsworth. This Wordsworth volume took on special significance for Case, who suffered from an acute sense of loneliness following the departure of her friend. In a letter to Edgarton written shortly after the visit, Case elaborates:

in the evening feeling very lonesome, and also being visited by some mournful reminiscences of our old home, and “lang syne,” I went involuntarily to the volume of Wordsworth, hoping to find something like companionship in passages marked with your pencil … [In] impatiently turning it over to find some traces of yourself, I accidentally met with that one as delicate, and affectionate, in its revealings as the heart that dictated it. I cannot thank you, for words seem to me inadequate to express the sense I feel of your … affection.… I shall most certainly read, and love it, for the sake of the donor and as certainly fancy there is something of a communion between us when reading your favorite passages.¹

In these remarkable lines, Wordsworth’s poetry becomes the medium through which two readers, separated by distance, unite. While Case first picks up her friend’s book in quest of “companionship,” what she ultimately achieves is “communion”—a deep sense of psychic bonding with Edgarton brought on by the experience of reading and appreciating a common text. Hers is a desire not for abstract or intellectual fellowship, but rather for sentient experiential contact, signaled in part by Case’s confession that she turned to the Wordsworth volume, impatiently looking for “some traces of yourself.” Edgarton’s pencil markings are the metonymic extensions of her writing hand, and Case suggests that this trace of materiality is as significant as the mutually appreciated language of Wordsworth in producing a felt connection between the two women. Indeed, there is some ambiguity in Case’s description of finally hitting on “that one as delicate and affectionate in its revealings as the heart that dictated it.” Does she mean by “that one” Edgarton’s markings or Wordsworth’s poem? One presumes the latter, but Case’s italicization of these words links them to the “yourself” (i.e., Edgarton) in the previous sentence. The ambiguity here is precisely the point. The Wordsworth poem has become so inseparable from Edgarton’s felt presence that reading it gives way to Case’s intimate apperception of her friend (“the sense I feel of your … affection”).

This study argues that the ability of reading to produce experiences of mental and bodily contact was typical of nineteenth-century American life. Reading, and particularly book reading, could precipitate fantasies of communion—between reader and author, between reader and character, and (as in Case’s example above) between like-minded readers. In using the word “communion” I mean to emphasize the intimate and exclusive nature of the imagined bond that reading engendered. In contrast to the more abstracted term “community” (about which, more later), “communion” suggests psychic unity, rootedness, confidentiality, and kinship.² It is a word that implies not simply association but mutuality and oneness. This connection was often felt on or with the body, and the word “communion” also conveys the physical aspect of the imagined bond—the sense of indwelling or bodily incorporation that reading could create. As nineteenth-century philosopher Noah Porter put it, “Every book which [attentive] persons read enters into the structure of their being—it is taken up and assimilated into the very substance of their living selves.”³ While Porter described the book itself as the object of bodily assimilation here, more often readers characterized this consubstantiality in terms of physical incorporation of an author, as is apparent in Herman Melville’s response to reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s collection Mosses from an Old Manse:“already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.”⁴ Melville’s repeated references to the “soul” are articulated alongside more corporeal images of amplification and discharge (“dropped,” “expands,” “deepens,” “shoots”), making communion in reading at once a spiritual and carnal project.

As Melville’s comments suggest, the sense of intimate bodily contact brought on by reading could have a distinct erotic component.⁵ This could manifest itself not only in relation to the figure of the author, but in the mutual experience of two readers. Consider, for example, Margaret Fuller’s description of reading in her “Autobiographical Romance” published in 1840. Fuller, in the throes of an infatuation with a young woman from Liverpool, describes a brief separation she was forced to endure when her beloved momentarily left her to greet some visitors: “She went into another room to receive them and I took up her book. It was Guy Mannering, then lately published, and the first of Scott’s novels I had ever seen. I opened where her mark lay, and read merely with the feeling of continuing our mutual existence by passing my eyes over the same page where hers had been.”⁶ As with Case, for Fuller the activity of reading a shared text gives way to a powerful sense of merged subjectivity or what she calls “mutual existence.” The erotic implications of this are highlighted through Fuller’s language of virginal encounter (“It was … the first of Scott’s novels I had ever seen”), her innuendos of invasiveness and compromised privacy (“I opened where her mark lay”), and, most significantly, her description of reading as a comingling of body parts (“passing my eyes over the same page where hers had been”). Indeed, the intensity of this description of reading is notable in part because it seems to exceed Fuller’s descriptions of her actual encounters with her beloved, descriptions that appear somewhat attenuated and sentimentalized.⁷ In Fuller’s account, then, reading creates an alternative space to that of lived social relations, one in which fantasies of bodily contact with love objects can be realized more fully. These objects might include same-sex individuals (as with Fuller and Melville above), but also the racially other, the geographically distant, and even the dead.

No doubt there is a Romantic sensibility to these descriptions. The intimate communion that nineteenth-century readers report resembles the spiritual affinity between subjects articulated by Romantic writers on both sides of the Atlantic; indeed, in this context it is significant that the texts I have cited as evoking these reactions in readers (Wordsworth’s poetry, Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel Guy Mannering) are themselves classic examples of the genre. And yet, I hesitate to conflate the merger articulated in the instances above with the Romantic sublime, because the latter, especially in its American incarnations, tends to take on an abstract universalism distinct from the imagined specificity of contact that I am identifying with the work of reading. In Emerson’s famous “transparent eye-ball” section of the essay “Nature,” he writes, “I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.”⁸ While this is clearly a variant of the oneness fantasy I invoked earlier, its emphasis is so all-inclusive that it tends to ignore and even denigrate the specificity of the other; by contrast, in the strain of reading I am highlighting it is precisely the exclusivity of the bond (in Emerson’s language, “the name of the nearest friend”) that is valued. When Fuller picks up Guy Mannering, she uses the historical romance as a way of reinstating her singular connection with her beloved, turning absence into presence.

In this way, reading had a psychologically adaptive function. Through her engagement with the book, a reader like Fuller was able to remain intimately connected with another reader who was otherwise elusive (either through distance, death, or social prohibition). The book’s portability aided this process, since it meant that the reader could quite literally carry with her the ideational and material traces of a beloved fellow reader. In psychoanalytic terms, then, reading was a kind of grief work, a way of internalizing the absent loved one. When a relationship is shattered due to death or abandonment, writes Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia,” the libido of the bereaved is not simply removed from the object and redirected. Rather, the ego forms an “identification” with the abandoned object, and aspects of the other get incorporated into the self. “Thus,” in Freud’s famous formulation, “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.”⁹ Translated into the terms of this study, books could be a way of preserving the inaccessible love object. Through reading mutually valued language and physically engaging the same material text (if not the actual copy belonging to the beloved, then a simulacrum thereof), the reader incorporated into herself aspects of the other, thereby keeping that other psychically present.¹⁰ This grief work could be directed not only at fellow readers but at a book’s author and characters as well. After all, reading entails intimacies and renunciations that are often out of the reader’s control. Characters may die or be left undeveloped, and a book’s ending can entail a painful separation. But by returning to the book at will (rereading passages, coddling the material object, and so forth), a reader could attenuate and manage the loss, by imaginatively taking the author or protagonist into herself.¹¹

This incorporation of the other is significant not least for the ways it transforms the reader. For Freud, identification is accompanied by an altering of the ego. The self in taking in alterity always partially disavows and reorients its own subjectivity.¹² Self-psychologist Heinz Kohut uses the phrase “transmuting internalization” in order to get at the profound refashioning of the self that identification entails.¹³ For many post-Freudians, such a process troubles the very idea of identity. As Diana Fuss has written, “Identification is a process that keeps identity at a distance, that prevents identity from ever approximating the status of an ontological given, even as it makes possible the formation of an illusion of identity as immediate, secure, and totalizable.”¹⁴ It is in this strange play of coherence and diffusion that we must likewise locate the reader. Reading’s uncanny effect, in other words, is that it produces the experience of wholeness even as it insists on the self’s own partial divestiture.¹⁵ For this reason, reading is never simply an act of appropriation, never simply an incorporation that leaves the reader untouched.

Indeed, the real danger that most nineteenth-century readers and cultural authorities perceived was not that the reader would be unaffected by the book, but that the book might act too forcefully on the reader, subordinating her rational faculties and transforming her into a consenting replica of the authorial mind. And yet, even as nineteenth-century readers acknowledged this troubling loss of autonomy, they also reveled in the feelings of oneness with the author that accompanied the fantasy. It would be easy to denigrate this vision of likeness as less “democratic” and more coercive than an acceptance of difference, and to argue that we should therefore be wary of the desire for similitude that could attend the practice of reading.¹⁶ But as Marianne Noble reminds us in her study of the productive uses of masochism, “To repudiate a fantasy because it differs from an ideal desire is to refuse full aliveness”; it is a rejection of “human complexity and human weirdness.”¹⁷ It also risks reinforcing the value modernist aesthetics places on experiences of defamiliarization—encounters with the alien art object—at the expense of a more therapeutic understanding of art.¹⁸ In other words, condemning symbiotic wishes as merely experiments in narcissism fails to recognize the rich role they could play in a subject’s psychic life, both in assuaging feelings of isolation and in forging new vistas of relationality.

Of course, the fantasies of communion that I have begun to describe were not exclusive to nineteenth-century America. On the contrary, as my psychoanalytic orientation (as well as the contemporary examples in my preface and epilogue) suggests, the ability of books to create imagined experiences of contact for the isolated individual is a transhistorical feature of the technology. But what distinguishes the nineteenth century within the larger history of the book is the prominence of this fantasy, as measured by its incorporation into the letters and literature of the time. These documents are shot through with the language of loss and the dream of reconnection through books. Thus while the psychic relations I am identifying transcend their specific context, it is still possible to speak of the nineteenth century as a period in which these dynamics took on particular historical force.¹⁹ No doubt this phenomenon was motivated in part by the immense dislocation of the period. The economic vicissitudes and “great uprooting” of families and communities that accompanied what Charles Sellers has designated “the market revolution” created a vast middle class characterized by fragmentation and social stratification.²⁰ Pressed by the relentless forces of urban and industrial growth, inundated by norms of discipline and self-repression, and increasingly isolated in the nuclear household, the American bourgeoisie partially consoled themselves by turning to the acceptable leisure activity of reading, where they experienced dimensions of wholeness and attachment in psychic form. In this context, the book emerged as at once a symptom of, and a correction to, the anxieties associated with modernity: in its mass production and distribution, the book contributed to the dizzying sense of proliferation and excess wrought by industrial change; yet, related to in a singular and profound way, the book could also assuage precisely these feelings of unanchored insecurity.

The psychic stability created through reading should not be understood as a weak substitute for real community, as some historians of the book have claimed.²¹ On the contrary, given the tremendous restrictions placed on face-to-face interactions in the nineteenth-century public sphere—where forms of behavior from mingling with strangers to dining with friends were extensively dictated²²—we might understand reading as providing an alternative route to intimacy. It could be a way of imaginatively skirting regimented or compulsory interactions while constituting new and potentially more vital relations, especially across proscribed social fields. It could enable unfamiliar or illicit forms of social intercourse, avenues for imagined contact with individuals who were otherwise unreachable. In so doing, reading offered a different mode of being in the world, one less constrained by norms of privacy, propriety, and individuation.²³ The paradox of the book, then, is that it was through its private engagement (often in the insular setting of the bourgeois home) that readers experienced profound forms of self-diffusion, imagining themselves as interwoven or conjoined with distant others. Historically tied to the emergence of the privatized liberal subject, the book nonetheless offered its nineteenth-century readers an alternative model of identity—a sense of wholeness based not in autonomy and terminal existence but in accretion, correspondence, and extensivity.²⁴

I have been claiming that books in the nineteenth century were significant for the way they aided the psychic life of readers, positioning them in intimate even bodily relation to imagined others and thereby helping to assuage an isolated or fragmented sense of self. But this mentalist or symbolic aspect of reading is only part of the story. As historians of the book have established, reading is also a material practice, in which books are shared, read aloud, torn, scribbled on, cradled in the lap, and so forth. Here I am referencing the book’s curious dual status: “On the one hand, the story I am reading does not exist except in my head; on the other, the book is an external stimulus.”²⁵ As an external stimulus, the book interfaces physically with the reader, affecting the body with its weight, texture, size, and smell. Perhaps, then, the sense of cohabitation produced by reading is not simply an imagined phenomenon; it is also produced by the sensual reality of the book itself. Readers have a voluptuous relation to books, and in handling these texts, they initiate the fantasy of touching and being touched by those people affiliated with a book’s narrative world, particularly the author or a fellow reader. Luella J. B. Case (with whom I opened this introduction) demonstrates this in her account of “turning … over” the pages of Edgarton’s Wordsworth volume in the hopes of finding “some traces of yourself.” In this context, recall, too, Whitman’s lines, quoted in the preface: “This is no book / Who touches this, touches a man … / It is I you hold, and who holds you / I spring from the pages into your arms.” For Whitman the tactile dimension of the book (experienced both through his own touch and the proleptically fantasized touch of his reader) creates the conditions through which self and other establish a mutual “hold” on one another. The material book is thus essential for the erotic communion between author and reader, even as it creates a bond between the two that is imagined as direct and unmediated (“This is no book”).²⁶

This emphasis on the sensual aspect of reading is at odds with scholarship that insists on the book’s denuded materiality. Elaine Scarry, for example, claims that, unlike other aesthetic forms like painting, music or sculpture,

Verbal art, especially narrative, is almost bereft of any sensuous content. Its visual features … consist of monotonous small black marks on a white page. It has no acoustical features. Its tactile features are limited to the weight of its pages, their smooth surfaces, and their exquisitely thin edges. The attributes it has that are directly apprehensible by perception are, then, meager in number. More important, these attributes are utterly irrelevant, sometimes even antagonistic to the mental images that a poem or novel seeks to produce.²⁷

Such an account denies the interactive dimensions of the book, the way it can engage a range of bodily modalities, particularly the tactile and proprioceptive, aspects stressed by book historians.²⁸ Nineteenth-century writer Anna Warner, for example, describes her sister Susan lying in bed on Christmas Eve with a book-filled stocking: “she would fumble and feel and guess; spinning out the delightful mystery. What could these sharp corners be? … Searching further as the daylight came on; trying to read titles, imagining colours. Lying back then again in bed to muse and wonder.”²⁹ Surely this description speaks to sensory satisfactions in book possession that exceed that of pure cognition and that may not, for all we know, be “antagonistic to the mental images that a poem or novel seeks to produce.” Indeed, Warner’s language attests to the impossibility of separating ideation from the body’s physical engagement and responses. Susan interacts with her books across a number of nondiscrete sensory and interpretive planes—feeling sharp corners, reading titles, lying back, imagining colors. Reading for her is a process of “spinning out the delightful mystery”—a mystery that includes the book’s content but also its unique materiality and unpredictable synesthetic effects.

Warner’s description allows us to recognize that reading is never merely a cognitive experience, or, stated in more phenomenological terms, understanding is always gleaned from concrete existence, a lived response to objects in the world. Even before a reader makes sense of a book, she engages in what Heidegger calls “pre-understanding,” an intuitive apprehension made possible by one’s existence in time and space. By this reasoning, knowledge is not an act of isolated ideation but rather a dimension of being-in-the-world (Dasein), a situated response to interconnected objects and our own place among them.³⁰ Knowledge is thus always subjective, insofar as it arises out of a particular lived experience: understanding is always someone’s understanding. At the same time, consciousness is never abstracted or ideal, but rather organized around and inspired by specific objects; or as Husserl might put it, consciousness is always consciousness of something.³¹ (Hence the mandate of phenomenology to focus on concrete phenomena, to return to “things in themselves.”) This dual emphasis on situated subjectivity and material objects (separable on the plane of analysis but always unified experientially) inspired later phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty to focus on the body as the site of perception: “My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my ‘comprehension.’”³² Consciousness here is not reducible to Cartesian “cogito”; rather, it is a lived phenomenon of the body-subject, a consequence of one’s incarnate subjectivity and interactions with the life-world (Lebenswelt).

These claims concerning the embodied nature of consciousness have been developed further by cognitive scientists and linguists, who have demonstrated the links between thinking and the neural-skeletal system. The research of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, for example, has revealed that “reason is not a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.” The authors give the example of “neural modeling,” which “can show in detail one aspect of what it means for the mind to be embodied: how particular configurations of neurons, operating according to principles of neural computation, compute what we experience as rational inferences.”³³ Neuroscientists have reinforced these claims by demonstrating that the act of perceptual cognition serves to stimulate the frontal cortex—the part of the brain associated with planning and coordinating motor behaviors. For example, simply watching another person pick up a pen activates those regions of the brain associated with holding and grasping. Cognition, then, “involves not just the rule-based manipulation of abstract symbols, but also the reenactment of perceptual and motor experiences.”³⁴

Even more relevant for my study have been data suggesting that reading produces similar changes in the brain. In multiple experiments, researchers have found that reading phrases describing object-directed actions (like kicking a ball) stimulates regions of the frontal cortex much in the same way accomplished by both observation and direct experience.³⁵ In other words, reading evokes specific perceptual and motor responses that prepare the subject for interacting with concepts as if they were real objects in the world. This is the case when individuals are exposed to longer narratives, too. In a 2009 study, for example, a team of researchers measured brain activity in subjects reading a 1,500–word short story. They found that changes in a character’s spatial location (e.g., moving from one room to another) resulted in the stimulation of that part of the reader’s brain responsible for navigating spatial environments; changes in a character’s interactions with an object (e.g., picking up a candy) were associated with activation in precentral and parietal areas of the reader’s brain associated with grasping and hand movements.³⁶ The implications of these experiments in embodied language comprehension are rich, for they suggest, first, that the reader experiences the actions of the text on a physiological level; and, second, that reading precipitates an emulated response such that author and reader are doubles of one another—converging through the shared identification each has with the protagonist. Communion in reading, then, is not just imagined, but a neurological reality.

Studies exposing both the sensual aspects of the book and the neurophysical qualities of cognition are necessary correctives to “a long tradition that imagines reading as a disembodied, intellectual, and frequently spiritual experience.”³⁷ They encourage us to think in nondualistic terms about mind and body, and perhaps even about body and book. Here the work of Merleau-Ponty is especially relevant. In his last unfinished manuscript, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty attempted to free his research from any vestige of Cartesian dualism by positing that body and world are necessarily interwoven and coextensive.³⁸ His example of the “double sensation” (something initially explored in Phenomenology of Perception) demonstrates this idea. By “double sensation” Merleau-Ponty means the complex experience produced when one part of our body touches another. When the right hand touches the left, for example, it has the “double sensation” of being both the subject and the object of touch: “When I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous set-up in which both hands can alternate the roles of touching and being touched.”³⁹ Such a phenomenon demonstrates the reversibility of active and passive roles, the ability of subjects to slip into objects and vice versa. As Elizabeth Grosz glosses it, “the double sensation makes it clear … that the subject is implicated in its objects and its objects are at least partially constitutive of the subject.”⁴⁰ This has important ramifications for reading, where identification with an author, character, or fellow reader may already inspire a sense of shared consciousness: To touch a book is also to be touched by that book, to feel the book touching back, and this sensation, in blurring the distinction between subject and object, necessarily destabilizes the boundaries of the discrete self.

Reading books, then, insofar as it involves a tactile dimension, can give rise to a sense of merged materiality with the book itself, an important corollary to the imagined somatic bonding with another that I am claiming reading also engenders. Indeed, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes of the mutual imbrication of the body’s “leaves” and those of the physical world, establishing a metaphor particularly appropriate for the material book.⁴¹ While all reading might engender this sense of physical cohabitation, the book seems particularly appropriate for this function: its bound heftiness and soft, hidden interior approximate the human condition, while its anthropomorphized qualities (spine, header, footnotes, etc.) create a plane for imagined bodily equivalence. Our engagement with the book, then, can involve identifications with the book as object, and not simply with its author or characters. The bodily correspondences and material interactions of reader and text blur the boundaries between the two, establishing a continuity between (in Mark Amsler’s words) “the skin of the page and the reading body.”⁴² This meeting of subject and object in the world of matter (or what Merleau-Ponty calls “flesh”⁴³) creates an openended process of contact, overlap, and reversibility, such that the book becomes an object coextensive with the reader’s situated and experiential sense of self.

Indeed, to carry this point further, we might understand the book as part of the “body image” of the reader. First articulated by neuropsychologists in the early twentieth century, the term “body image” refers to the psychophysiological conception that we carry with us about our bodies. It is an image forged out of the subject’s mental and visceral self-perception, his/her interpersonal relations, as well as his/her contact with the material world.⁴⁴ According to Austrian psychiatrist Paul Schilder, body image is not stable, nor is it clearly boundaried. On the contrary, it “can shrink or expand; it can give parts to the outside world and can take other parts into itself.”⁴⁵ Schilder gives the following example: “When we take a stick in our hands and touch an object with the end of it, we feel a sensation at the end of the stick. The stick has, in fact, become a part of the body-image … part of the bony system of the body.”⁴⁶ Schilder includes other examples (the feather at the tip of a woman’s hat, a mask) that speak to the “plasticity of the body-image,” its ability to blur the distinction between self and world.⁴⁷ What is crucial here is not the size or shape of the object in question, but its capacity for integration, its use as a medium through which the body operates and (through that operation) perceives itself as whole or complete. Books, I am arguing, can constitute a part of this body image, achieving what neurologists call “incorporation,” and machine theorists call “intimacy,” with their readers.⁴⁸ Reading precipitates both the experience of shared consciousness (usually with an author or a fellow reader) and a bodily engagement with the book’s materiality, and this combination serves to expand the reader’s sense of self, creating a reading body without clear boundaries, a subject who inhabits a space “beyond the body proper.”⁴⁹

This way of relating to the material book was central to accounts of reading in the nineteenth century, as is apparent in Noah Porter’s 1870 study, Books and Reading, Or What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them? In a chapter called “The Library,” for example, Porter, a minister and academic philosopher, writes of the profound physical intimacy between a reader and his books:

It is often a wonder to the fastidious observer or the careful housekeeper, who looks at books with the bodily eye, why in an expensive and luxurious library there is often carefully preserved some shelf of these worthless and battered volumes which they would consign to the paper maker or the flames. They little know what precious memories are stored upon that shelf and gather about each of those soiled and damaged books. But the books which most vividly bring back to the owner his youthful self will be those few favorite authors, which he longed so earnestly to possess when he first conceived the idea of forming a library of his own. … How often did he go into the bookshop and gaze upon and handle the much coveted volume! … What fresh and fervid associations are wakened within him as the identical volumes are taken in hand which twenty or forty years before he carried home without weariness and installed upon his empty shelves with such positive delight. Upon these shelves they still remain…. Other shelves testify to later passages in his life’s progress; … In one division stand the sophists who weakened the faith of the owner in the fixed principles and the severe moralities of his childhood’s faith. In another the wise teachers who recovered him from these sophistries and bewilderments. The field of the intellectual activities and the objects of the prevailing tastes of one decade of his life are here. Those of another are there.⁵⁰

For Porter, the personal library tracks the reader’s own growth, allowing him to locate on the shelves the writers who influenced him, in positive and negative ways. In perusing the shelves of his private library, the collector thus traces with satisfaction his development and self-definition.⁵¹ And yet, even as this activity creates a sense of growth and differentiation in the reader, it also highlights the correspondences between reader and book, the way the latter is imagined as a reflection and extension of the former. The young man hasn’t simply incorporated the content of his books through reading; rather, the books have incorporated him and stand as material representations of his existence (“The prevailing tastes of one decade of his life are here. Those of another are there”). Porter reinforces this uncanny sense that the book has appropriated its reader by referencing the collector’s life in textual terms—the volumes on the shelves “testify to … passages in his life’s progress.”⁵² A reliquary of sorts, the book contains the life of its reader, integrating that life within its own narrative.

But if the book on the shelf is in some sense a receptacle of a reader’s past, it is also, by Porter’s account, easily reincorporated into the body image of its owner. Once the collector takes “in hand” the very volumes he would “gaze upon and handle” in his youth, he experiences a continuity both with his earlier reading self and with the material text he engages. The “soiled and damaged books,” in other words, reunite the mature reader with his former presence, even as they also produce a correspondence of subject/object being—the books’ leather bindings, like the skin of the older reader, are vulnerable to decay. Porter’s concluding remarks reinforce these parallels:

As the eye of the industrious reader runs along the shelves of his library in an hour of musing, it can read upon them the successive passages that make up the history of his life. In view of facts like these it is not in the least surprising that so many have cleaved to their libraries with so fond an affection and have learned to conceive of them as parts of themselves, as in a sense visible and tangible embodiments of their own being.⁵³

The uncanniness of these lines is again the result of the strange juxtaposition of bodies (and their parts) with books—the “eye” that “runs along the shelves” as if independently, the “passages” that belong not to the books, but rather to “the history of [the reader’s] life.” When Porter concludes by suggesting that readers “have learned to conceive of [their books] as parts of themselves,” he invokes an image of the book as prosthetic, at once a foreign object and an integral part of the reading subject. It can readily be taken in hand, and when it is, it creates a sense of wholeness in the reader, conjuring up both the influence of the author and an earlier self, made discernible through the well-worn pages. As a “visible and tangible embodiment” of its owner, the library calls into question the assumption that subjects and objects, bodies and books, exist independently of each other. Perhaps we might think of the book-bearing reader as anticipating the cyborg, that boundary-crossing figure that Donna Haraway credits with confounding the distinction between humans and technology.⁵⁴ By Porter’s account, the reader resides physically in his book, which is itself an extension of the reader’s own body; the two are woven inextricably together in the world of matter.

In positing the book as psychologically and physically tessellated in the life of its reader, this study intersects with the work of book historians who deny the transcendent status of the (literary) text, a status that dates back to formalist New Criticism and that has continued in the scholarship of classical bibliography, which is concerned with the physical aspects of the finished book.⁵⁵ Rather than seeing the book either as a self-sufficient and stable organization of linguistic signs (the formalist approach) or as a complete and static material object (the approach characteristic of classical bibliography), book historians have emphasized the complex sociohistorical processes that occur both before and after book production: authorial struggles, editorial decisions, print-shop policies, circulation practices, reader reactions, and so forth. These processes necessarily involve the contributions and interactions of a series of players, and it is for this reason that Natalie Zemon Davis characterizes the book as, above all, “a carrier of relationships.”⁵⁶ Those interested in the particular relationships forged at the site of reception have rightly stressed that the reader does not represent the final stop of the “communications circuit,” since books continue to play a socially dynamic role even once they are purchased by individuals.⁵⁷

But while these scholars have recognized the important relational aspect of reading, they have generally discussed this in terms of “community” rather than what I am calling “communion.” Their approaches tend to take one of two forms. First, they have emphasized reading as a social act, often involving public gestures of articulation (reading out loud), circulation (book lending and borrowing among friends and family), and face-to-face contact (book groups, reading societies, etc.) In this scholarship, reading becomes important as a way to forge bonds with proximate others. Such an understanding has been crucial in defying earlier notions of reading as a largely private or autonomous activity—what Alan Kennedy calls “a solitary affair, involving one person and a book.”⁵⁸ It has been, moreover, an important corrective to text-based studies, celebrating, instead, actual readers and the social and political solidarity they create through their shared interest in books. And yet, this scholarship, while of great value, tends to ignore the individual’s psychophysiological relation to the book in favor of more empirical evidence: library records, transcripts from book groups, and so forth. Relatedly, it tends to emphasize actual group bonds over imagined forms of association.

The second approach, by contrast, does focus on internalized or symbolic forms of sociality, but it generally understands reading as creating expansive and impersonal “community” rather than more intimate relations. Benedict Anderson, for example, writes about the ability of reading to forge “imagined communities”—large anonymous group formations that cohere especially along national lines. Anderson gives the example of reading the newspaper—an everyday act that triggers a sense of national belonging: “each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” Anderson concludes: “Community in anonymity … is the hallmark of modern nations.”⁵⁹ Michael Warner has argued similarly that reading in early republican America was “impersonal” because it involved “an awareness of the potentially limitless others who may also be reading. For that reason, it becomes possible to imagine oneself, in the act of reading, becoming part of an arena of the national people that cannot be realized except through such mediating imaginings.”⁶⁰ Even when not articulated in national terms, the “imagined communities” associated with reading tend to be understood as remote and impersonal. Stanley Fish’s concept of “interpretive communities,” for example, is predicated on the idea that groups of individuals, while personally unknown to one another, are informally aligned through shared interpretive strategies.⁶¹

But as I have tried to indicate above, the creation of impersonal community was hardly the most significant aspect of nineteenth-century reading practices. The letters, diaries, and novels of nineteenth-century subjects attest that reading forged imagined bonds that were intense, intimate, and highly exclusive. The result was not “community in anonymity” but rather a heightened connection to a specific other (usually an author or a fellow reader) because of the experience of sharing a common text. Instead of seeing reading as resulting in attenuated forms of association—what Ronald Zboray describes as an “illusory, print-oriented connectedness that could pose as community”⁶²—I suggest that reading, in certain instances, could become more vital and personally fulfilling than actual face-to-face interaction. That is, for a segment of nineteenth-century readers, the book could supersede actual social relations as the primary locus of affective experience and the preferred medium of libidinal exchange.

Focusing on the deep interpersonal bonds engendered by reading means rethinking the polarized discourse of freedom and constraint often associated with scholarship on reception. Much early criticism in this field was dedicated to heralding alternatively the role of the reader or that of the text in the creation of meaning. Thus Michael Riffaterre, Georges Poulet, and Wolfgang Iser emphasize the limits imposed on the activities of the reader by the text or by the dominant cultural traditions in which reading occurs. Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, and David Bleich, by contrast, all argue for the relative autonomy and creativity of the reader in relation to text and context.⁶³ Critics attempting to mediate between these positions have staked out a middle ground, arguing, as Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier do, that “texts are always communicated to their readers in forms … that constrain them but do not destroy their freedom.”⁶⁴ But as these lines illustrate, even in forging a compromise position, book historians tend to imagine relations between author and reader as fundamentally antagonistic. For H. J. Jackson, for example, the “experience of reading always involves an element of contest or struggle, and an oscillation between surrender and resistance.”⁶⁵ Chartier, writing elsewhere, argues against “the absolute efficacy of the text tyrannically to dictate the meaning of the work to the reader.” He asks: “How can we consider at one and the same time the irreducible freedom of readers and the constraints meant to curb this freedom?”⁶⁶ Although Chartier is correct to insist that a text’s origins (its author, the dimensions of its publication, etc.) limit while never fully determining a reader’s understanding, he errs, I think, in imagining readers as primarily invested in liberation from these limits.

Indeed, such an understanding is very much a product of our present cultural moment, in which “resistant readings” herald the triumph of subversive politics and minority identities. To “poach” or “appropriate” meaning in this context is to wrest it away from the author or the established tradition of reception and, in so doing, invest the (otherwise dispossessed) reader with agency and significance. Much of the work we do as scholars and teachers is bound up in this understanding of reading; our creative contribution hinges on our ability to differentiate ourselves from the text and its prior receptions, to offer something bold and original that frees the book—and ourselves—from its problematic origins. But while this approach to reading is often deeply satisfying as an academic exercise, it seems removed from the kinds of symbiotic experiences of pleasure that nonacademic readers (even the most elite) often associate with the book. At fifteen years of age, Susan Sontag wrote of reading the journals of André Gide: “Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to! Thus I do not think: ‘How marvelously lucid this is!’—but: ‘Stop! I cannot think this fast! Or rather I cannot grow this fast!’”⁶⁷ Sontag’s rejection of judgment (“How marvelously lucid this is!”) in favor of the language of mutual experience (“I cannot grow this fast!”) suggests the limitations of critique and resistance as models for understanding the activity of reading. Because accounts of reading in the nineteenth century are largely free of this liberationist approach, they are a particularly rich archive to mine for an alternative account of reading as communion.⁶⁸

To be clear, I am not suggesting that reading during this period always resulted in an adaptive psychophysiological sense of oneness. Certainly, merger with an author held the capacity to overwhelm the reader, leading to a sense of dissolution that could be more threatening than fortifying. At other moments, readers could be alienated from texts, especially those they perceived as confusing or fallacious. By their own accounts, critical judgment was crucial at these times to stave off the injurious influence of the author. But even when readers experienced cognitive dissonance with their books, they tended to articulate this through the rhetoric of loss rather than interpretive resistance and identity formation. Writing to her friend Lucy Osgood in 1847, Lydia Maria Child comments:

Newman’s book on The Soul seemed to me a very admirable work. The Phases of Faith pleased me by the honesty of its confessions, and I read it with all the eagerness we all so naturally feel to arrive at the inmost spiritual secrets of another soul; but the conclusion left me very uncomfortable. It seemed as the collegian said in his theme, “to land me in the great ocean of eternity.” I had traveled so far, and so confidently, with him, to arrive—nowhere!⁶⁹

Here, Child specifies that she initially approached Newman’s text with the dream of affinity—“with all the eagerness we all so naturally feel to arrive at the inmost spiritual secrets of another soul.” But in the end, identification with the authorial mind proved impossible—“the conclusion left me very uncomfortable.” This dissonance leads to a feeling of profound isolation, figured as emotional and physical displacement—a sense of being “nowhere.” Indeed, Child’s experience of having landed (and here she ironically quotes Newman’s oneness metaphor to register her disidentification) “in the great ocean of eternity” suggests that the failed author-reader connection is akin to a kind of death for each. Newman’s book becomes a radical instantiation of the nineteenth-century “dead letter,” a text which failing to reach its audience leaves both in a state of isolated oblivion.⁷⁰ It is hard to square such an account with the triumphalist narrative of reader resistance as articulated in the contemporary academy.

I also do not mean to suggest that identity plays no role in reading, or that all nineteenth-century readers read in exactly the same way. On the contrary, many fine studies have demonstrated how reading both impacts and is shaped by the categories of gender, race, class, nation, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.⁷¹ And yet, this emphasis on “difference” obscures the extent to which reading can be motivated not by opposition and hierarchy, but instead by a fantasy of harmonious union both with others and with the material world. Leo Bersani has argued that the “prioritizing of difference … as a foundational relational structure” emerges from an understanding of desire as motivated by lack. When we imagine that the ego wants only that which it does not have, that it is poised between lack and possession, then we can only think of relationality as turning on difference. This precludes for Bersani a concept of desire that is motivated by “the extensibility of sameness,” the possibility that

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.