Gumming up the Works

In the September 24, 2007 issue of New York Magazine (which I typically thumb through while waiting for the kettle to boil or waiting for The Simpsons to come on), I came across a brief article that rather flipped my switch. Other dissertators I know have spoken of the eerie synchronicity that comes with deep involvement in a project--the sense that somehow everything is relevant, that everything everyone is talking about somehow relates to your own work. Those of you who know me well will know that I already thought everything was about me, dissertation notwithstanding. Nevertheless, even the most hardened amongst you will have to acknowledge the appropriateness of what follows.

Gum, apparently, is proliferating. I've been writing about organizational mechanisms arising subsequent to proliferation, and have even gone so far as to suggest that the rise of the novel is more intimately involved in this than has usually been stipulated. A reading audience with a taste for poems, plays, romances, epics, comedies, treatises, sermons, essays etc. can have their thirsts slaked by the super-enriched vitamin smoothie that the novel becomes over the course of the first half of the 18th century.

But back to the gum.

"It seems that new kinds of chewing gum proliferate daily," Ben Mathis-Lilley writes. "With bodega cash registers now besieged by both the classical brands and tortured-sounding variations thereon. We decided to determine the best of each genre--mint, fruit, and bubblegum--by doing a comprehensive taste test" (62).

If Fielding's comic epic in prose isn't a novelist's answer to Trident Minty Sweet Twist, I don't know what is. The "new" province of writing that he shaped into Tom Jones takes your classic brands (comedy, epic, mint) and combines them with new flavors (realism, moral ambiguity, Sweet Twist). But the point here is that as soon as there is proliferation, or the perception of proliferation (and I have to say I think it was "5" gum that put ME over the top), there follows a need or desire to establish a hierarchy of value. Some critic shows up to read/chew it all up and tell me what I can leave on the shelves with respect to book and gum alike. Wylie Dufresne and Alex Stupak, a chef-proprietor and pastry chef, inform me that in chew-wise the classics are actually the best. So your Iliad is Wrigley's Spearmint and your Margites (if we hadn't lost the thing) would undoubtedly be Bazooka Joe (valued by the critics here for its "classic" flavor).

Between them (both in flavor and on the actual magazine page) in the fruit category is Adams Sour Cherry, which I haven't tried, but which I am nonetheless confident would to an adept synaesthesiac taste like Tom Jones reads.

All other gums--and books--you can discard as being both literally and figuratively beneath your taste.

There's what we know, there's what we don't know...

~or, Sometimes you write your dissertation with the body of knowledge you have, not the body of knowledge you want.

I have started the real research phase of the dissertation, and I don't know about you but for me that means picking a secondary source almost at random and hoping it points me in the right direction. There are a series of questions I'd like answered, and at this point it's as though I'm just issuing subpoenas to everyone in the field of English literature in order to define the scope of the inquiry. I'm not entirely certain what's out there. So far, I've seen my buzzwords in quite a few places, but they're being deployed without, I think, careful attention, and no one I've yet read (SO early to say this with confidence) has yet referred to "durability" in quite the way I think they need to. This gives me hope.

First things first: if you're in this field, you should read David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery's The Book History Reader. The 2nd edition is available new in paperback for under $50. It's simply no longer reasonable to participate in literary studies without at least a smattering of book history. As always, I'm coming a bit late to the game, and while I've read a number of the works excerpted in the reader, I have also encountered a number of perspectives hitherto unfamiliar to me. As an eighteenth-century person, I've also gotten into the bad habit of undervaluing periods not my own, which has left me a bit ignorant regarding manuscript production and oral culture. This in turn has left me unable to appreciate fully the impact of print, which has in turn left me a blithering idiot. Thus do I blither on, but to a lesser extent for the survey this book provides.

I was struck today by what I'm calling the Myth of Knowledge until someone tells me what proper scholars call it. The shorthand for it is my frustration at not being able to know everything, and the suspicion that short of my possessing total knowledge, I'm really just making things up. In reading Elizabeth Eisenstein's important The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, I was uncomfortable with what I perceived as a number of abstractions and assessments supported by individual examples. I don't accuse her of shoddy scholarship--leagues and leagues from that; honestly, it's quite the book. But I began to wonder at what point it is -- how much knowledge we have to possess -- in order to draw a conclusion.

For example: say I'm writing about the usage of a particular term in a given period. The word "widget" is used in this context, in these genres, to mean this, applied to that, etc. In how many texts does it have to occur before I can fairly assess what was at work? If I find it in 1000 texts, and there are 10,0000 to look through, is that enough? What if there are 100,000 texts to search? As if I could ever look through that many? If I don't discover the term and what I think is a telling usage in 51% of extant works from the period, am I not fooling myself? And what happens when I discover the single example of a text in which the term is used in a way that does not come into general use for another century? Just because one guy thought about the same thing a bit differently than everyone else, to what extent is my argument unraveled? What is the value of the individual counterexample?

And here's another question, which stems from D. F. McKenzie's reading of the punctuation in the epigraph opening Congreve's authorized version of "The Way of the World" (1710). He compares it to a slight misquotation of the epigraph by Wimsatt and Beardsley in "The Intentional Fallacy." A comma here, a comma there, and you get a whole different interpretation. I'm reminded here of an episode of The West Wing, in which Toby discovers a potential typo in the U.S. Constitution. Could be a comma, could be a smudge; if a comma, a substantive difference results. If a smudge, a smudge. Now then. To understand Congreve, I have to understand his times, what it meant to write, what it meant to write as a dramatist, what it meant to bring out a version of your play in print or manuscript, and therefore what the differences between print and manuscript were, how those differences affected his position as author and playwright, and so on and so forth. One must historicize. What did it mean to "toil" in 1710? What connotations did the word "wrought" carry? And once I know that, can I even be certain that punctuation worked the same way in the early 18th century? McKenzie suggests that the commas isolate and emphasize a particular phrase. I think he's probably correct, and I don't mean to challenge him on this particular point. Rather, I'm using it as an example to demonstrate the impossible depth and breadth of knowledge required to understand what we might think of as the simplest thing about a text. Commas probably did serve the same function as they do now, though based on some of my students' writing, there's no reason to think that the use of the comma and other syntactical devices hasn't changed dramatically over the years. (Some of my students seem to just write a paper and then sprinkle punctuation marks over it like glitter. But that's for a different day.)

Texts, like people, emerge out of ridiculously complex systems that are scarcely understood in their own times much less hundreds or thousands of years later. If I don't fully comprehend everything that went in to the creation of a text, how can I make an argument about it that isn't some discrediting percentage of rubbish? I'm trying to recreate dinosaurs and I have to use frog DNA to fill in the gaps. We all know what happens when you do that. Raptors try to eat you.

Which brings me to yet another problem I've had with some of the criticism I've been reading. These very clever fellows go back and do the research and present pictures of the past that are utterly contradictory. That's fine, you say; that's the nature of the beast. Some people are going to claim that the printing press was better than scribal culture because it cut down on errors and texts didn't have to get more and more out of whack with every generation. Others are going to remind you that a shoddy printer who was in it for the money would have made things worse precisely because he could work faster without carefully checking his work. That's how you get your "Wicked Bible" of 1631. Sheesh, says the poor printer, you leave one "not" out of the seventh commandment, and everyone goes nuts. (The following lovely moment occurs in Walter Ong's contribution to the Book History Reader: a paragraph ends with, "The printing press simply represented a handy means of multiplying indispensable texts even more rapidly and accurately than was possible under the pecia system." Three sentences later, we get: "more than 2,000 copies of Aristotle's works have come down to us from the and 14th centuries" (151). Accuracy, ha!) But fair enough; different research turns out different results, that's no problem. What we're going to discover is that everything was far more complicated, that everything was going on at once, and that unless you do read everything you can you're going to leave out some nuance, some exception, some thing or other that would have given you "truth" at the expense of clarity.

And this is not to mention the somewhat disturbing tendency a few of these scholars have to treat what they have found in history as though it were available to those alive at the time. Did Pope have the understanding of literacy rates and manuscript v. print production that we have now? I sincerely doubt it. In order to better understand the system of literature at any given period, I should think we'd have to synthesize what was with what was perceived. To which side of the equation you give more weight depends, I suppose, on the sort of work you're trying to write. I scarcely understand how one can write anything that doesn't need to wrangle with both, particularly in the eighteenth century, which I associate with almost staggering self-awareness. There is a system; there are agents within it that can, at best, merely think they know that system. Mmm, dense!

I imagine that those outside the humanities must look at these problems and wonder what on earth we imagine to be the point of these tomes we write -- these theories we offer that can never amount to much more than hopeful essays and well-intentioned approximations. If we're not going to get at the thing as it is, I wonder if we shouldn't construct from the pieces of history whatever we think is useful to us now and for the futures we wish to design. Or more properly, because we already do this by default, why we shouldn't do it without hiding behind the skirts of science. I suppose, though, that that way lies a kind of fascism.

Or Enlightenment.

*addendum
In thinking more about this, as I will, I think a large part of the question is weighing the benefits of sampling against those of an actual census. We're fine with polling data, too, but I don't think anyone would want an election decided by it. If you want real credibility you have to count the votes. Most of them, anyway.

Scriblerus Detecting Agency

My dissertation, as I have now severally said, will explore the problematic of posterity in British Literature of the long eighteenth-century. While life-in-and-after-text has been the concern of authors for millenia, the futurity of writing changed under the pressure of print proliferation in this period. Print widens an author's reachable audience, allows mass production, etc. Do that for enough people and the promise of print is undercut by an unfortunate (from the perspective of the egomaniac) democratization. So how the hell do you manage to get to the top of the field? That's really the question I'm setting out to answer. I imagine you do a number of things. Trod on other authors. Offer more bang for the buck. Create hierarchies based on taste, or wealth, or morals. But you've heard all this before.

In my attempting to put forth an argument, I have apparently skewed too far towards the System. I have cowered behind emergences and mechanisms. Genres emerged to do this or that; some could or couldn't; some lasted or didn't. Where, a couple of my professors asked, is the human agency? You can't simply go around barking about how this or that occurred, because, as one rather poignantly put it, you end up with a dissertation written entirely in passive constructions. Everything is acted upon and nothing (or no one) acts. And this won't win you any friends at parties.

I never intended to leave out the human element. Despite the influence from certain quarters that would have had me taking the human out of the humanities, I never imagined ceding that ground. When we say human, of course, I think what we usually mean is "unpredictable." Samuel Johnson manages to get himself into a position to make pronouncements about the quality of literature. Who on earth could know what he would say? How does the system account for that? The Licensing Act drives Fielding from the stage, so he takes up novel writing. Who's to say he couldn't have gone to law school, like a normal person? If the human didn't matter, then you'd have to conclude that even without Fielding Tom Jones, or something very much like it, would have been written anyway, and done the same work. And to some extent, this is what Foucault has been said to have said. Though I think his position on the matter has been largely overstated.

So I have encountered skepticism in one person, bewilderment in another, and encouragement in the last. And here's me thinking about law school.

Genre is where agency meets system. It's the mediator between the forces at work and the worked upon; it is also what enables the worked upon to work upon the forces at work. The power flows both ways through the gate. This, as I understand it, is feedback. So what I want to do is figure out is the role of genre in organizing literature with respect to time. And when I say genre, I do it with the understanding that human agency is implicit. How do you tweak the genre you've chosen to position yourself at the top of the temporal hierarchy? Ensure you'll reach the future? And how do those genres become durable in themselves? Do genres become disciplines? I think they do. Maybe. Possibly. Who knows.

I have felt utterly stupid now for a year.

Sapere Aude!

Today in 1707 and 1724, Henry Fielding and Immanuel Kant were born, respectively. I trust you are holding the appropriate celebrations. I, to honor the former, shall embrace the mixed quality of my moral character by robbing a charity to start another charity. In recognition of the latter, I shall calculate the exact value of the mathematical sublime.

In truth, I am thinking less about Fielding than Kant today, as I near the deadline for turning in my dissertation proposal. In speaking to two of my panel members who occupy quite opposite sides of the spectrum with respect to the beast, I was directed, broadly speaking, to make a choice between being the tip of the sword or its pommel. Do you want to run first into a new disciplinary future, though at the risk of being parried or broken off entirely? Or do you wish to write a reliable but fairly blunt instrument that distantly trails the leading edge?

One of them told me, as I dithered between these positions, to "write the dissertation you want to write." So I come back to Kant, who famously described Enlightenment thus:

Enlightenment is man's emergence from self-imposed immaturity for which he himself was responsible. Immaturity and dependence are the inability to use one's own intellect without the direction of another. One is responsible for this immaturity and dependence, if its cause is not a lack of intelligence, but a lack of determination and courage to think without the direction of another. Sapere Aude! Dare to know! is therefore the slogan of the Enlightenment.

~ from "What is Enlightenment" (1784)

I begin to understand that while you get the most formal direction during your dissertation--after all, you have a dissertation director--it is also the first real step towards maturity.

Why then, do I want to curl up with a stuffed animal and watch cartoons all day?

Less is More

In part of my ongoing dissertation proposal avoidance, I am writing here about my latest realization of the obvious: that the technological developments that permitted the widespread possibility of arriving at posterity in the eighteenth century are the same that made it more difficult to do so. This is sort of the verbose way of saying that to believe in everything is to believe in nothing. It is also the same problem that we're currently having with respect to the digitization of the archive. Anyone who's ever written anything will know that there's some as of yet indeterminate saturation point--a point at which one must simply put down the book, pick up the pen, and make peace with the knowledge that not everything that could be accounted for will be. The accessible archive grows with each pass of the scanner; the field of knowledge spreads out like a centerless universe. And here we are trying to make maps. We cannot read it all.

This of course is not new. The eighteenth century saw the same problem at work; in the field of what became the sciences, the encyclopedists sought to answer it. Chambers' Cyclopaedia aspired to be both 'compleat' knowledge and to render other texts superfluous (of course, Chambers knew it was not, in fact, complete, as some things were surely left out and the pace of knowledge production quickly rendered each edition out of date). One couldn't hope to waltz into the library, start at the lower left corner and read one's way around and to the top. One, after all, has to eat at some point before one dies. The encyclopedia was intended--or so its author-compilers professed--to make the whole field of knowledge available and relatively manageable. You can't walk around the whole circle of the library, but you could the encyclopedia (which word, of course, means walking a circle).

Of course, this period also witnessed the problematization of complete reading's other half--complete writing. The encyclopedias had their own answer to this--future editions, supplemental entries, and so forth. But the novel, which under Fielding and especially Richardon's direction tried to play the same game, couldn't quite hope to survive that way. It doesn't constitute an enclosed generic system. How does an encyclopedia arrive at posterity? By making offspring (to follow the metaphor) and its own futurity a generic convention. What on earth is a novelist to do? Once Tom Jones marries Sophia or Clarissa dies, the story is more or less over. How do you--you're a novel--remain relevant? What's your generic future look like?

What I'm getting at here, to break the flow of thought, is the extent to which arriving at posterity (sub-construed as generic and/or textual--and not necessarily material--durability) depends upon, in the eighteenth century from, say, 1700-1771, the ability of a text or genre to contain and control the threat rendered by proliferation. As an organizational function, the ability to stand in for other texts would serve a text well in keeping it afloat upon the ocean of printed material. You don't need to read epistles, poems, essays, plays, etc. separately if you can read them all in this new thing, the novel. Hence the novel becomes an encyclopedia of genres.

This is all about principles of reduction and substitution as necessary to generic durability. Take, for example, Pope's translation of Homer. It's Homer, OK, but it's Pope. And perhaps a lot more Pope than Homer. Two collapse into one; the field is reduced and contained by Pope's translation. There's a better example than this to use--translations are a tricky matter.

Concerns about proliferation came very early in the period. Swift openly fretted them. If you want to last at all--even in the short term--you have to get above the field (you're still a book). At the beginning of the century, you emulated or imitated what had already proved its ability to reach posterity--the Ancients. Pope updates and stands in for Homer--bingo, instant classic (or so he might have had it). As the century wore on, you would do this be being new, a work of "original" genius. How do you be original? Well, Fielding thought it was by combining (and thus containing) other genres within his narrative framework. He writes himself a comic epic in prose. Criticism also emerged as an organizational mechanism. Rather than represent all knowledge, a text would represent "good" or "bad" knowledge according to whatever critical standards were in place, or which critics were trying to put in place. Then the anthology, and then the canon--which is the ultimate in reduction and substitution, if not fair representation (thanks largely to criticism). If durability is usefulness over time (as I have defined it elsewhere--though this definition might be genre-specific, and in turn depends on the definition of utility, a loaded, protean term in the period, especially towards the end), then would a text not maximize utility by "doing the work" of multiple texts?

In case you're wondering, yes, I link the rise of the novel to these principles of reduction and generic durability. Novels were the frequently the longest fictional texts, but compared to the amount of print out there, they were very short--just like the encyclopedia.

Hm. Does the epic "die off" in part because it has a relatively low length-to-utility ratio in the context of antiproliferation principles of reduction/substitution? An epic is just an epic? So it can't compete with other forms that "do more?"

Enough for now.


As an aside, does my posting this stuff open my ideas to theft, or by posting them do I stake a kind of claim to them in time? Or should I not be worrying about this? Or am I revealing a shocking arrogance by suggesting that my ideas are either worthy of theft or laying claim to?