still than mechanical reading was the state of absorption that particularly characterized forays into fiction. Here the mind didn’t simply memorize material by a rote, unthinking process; it surrendered itself entirely to the book. Or, to state this slightly differently, the mind ceased to be the active, absorbing agent and, instead, was itself absorbed by foreign and often threatening material. “The reader must master the book, instead of the book mastering him,” wrote an anonymous authority in 1866; “otherwise he forfeits his own mental individuality, his freedom of mental action.”68 Nina Baym has suggested that while novels were expected to rouse interest and emotions in the reader, too much of this amounted to a “possession” that threatened to subordinate the reader’s control. Baym cites an 1838 review of the novel Richard Hurdis in The Knickerbocker, which bemoaned that the “object of novelists in general … appears to be to seize the public mind, and hold it with a sort of enchantment; a fascination which arises from the power which a master will exercise over the volition of inferior spirits, leading them captive, and exciting them with the stimulus they love most.”69 I will be investigating this phenomenon of the author as enchanter or mesmerist in the next chapter. For now, suffice it to say that the remedy for this kind of authorial takeover (in novels as well as other texts) was, again, mindful exertion on the part of the reader. As the contemporary critic J. Brooks Bouson puts it, “If to read is to feel temporarily merged with and carried away by a text, to criticize is to be ‘back in one’s own mind,’ to act ‘upon the work rather than being acted upon.’”70
The second prescription for dutiful, productive reading was systematization, a process that, as mentioned earlier, referred both to reading continuously (rather than skipping or skimming) and to reading with a plan or regimen in mind. “The main reason for the ill success of our reading and our education,” wrote W. P. Atkinson, “is because they lack point, lack system, lack concentration.” Atkinson was not advocating that people read less, but that they come at their studies methodically, a point that he articulated through (mixed) metaphors of concentration: “we must not dissipate our forces. It is the bad farmer who just scratches the surface of too many acres; the good general who fights it out on the same line.”71 Other writers focused on the issue of temporality, insisting that readers approach books “with the utmost economy of time.”72 Significantly, economizing here often involved slowing the pace of reading, a paradox not lost on the advice writers themselves: “there are endless subjects which you may be pursuing while you seem to be aimlessly turning over the leaves of one book after another, and to be wasting time which you are, in fact, employing most profitably as well as most diligently.”73 Here, slow reading, while bearing the appearance of “wasting time,” is in fact far more productive than the “busy idleness” characteristic of modernity. This purposeful approach to reading is captured by Lydia Maria Child in an 1819 letter to her brother:
I am aware that I have been too indolent in examining the systems of great writers; that I have not enough cultivated habits of thought and reflection upon any subject. The consequence is, my imagination has ripened before my judgment; I have quickness of perception, without profoundness of thought; I can at one glance take in a subject as displayed by another, but I am incapable of investigation.74
Child’s letter evidences the internalization of the self-improving model of reading, particularly its emphasis on “habits of thought and reflection.” It also betrays a more general suspicion about celerity, since her “quickness of perception” and her ability to “at one glance take in a subject” are understood as deterrents for the more appropriate activities of “profound.… thought” and “investigation.”
What is significant in these and earlier descriptions is the way the crisis of reading is redressed through a turn toward instrumental efficiency, what Max Weber has called “the specific and peculiar rationalism of Western culture.”75 As indicated earlier, the plague of new books is blamed on overzealous production on the part of the printing press, that “great engine of civilization.”76 With the advent of so many new texts, readers find they must skim and skip to get through them all, and this accelerated pace of reading comes to mirror the frantic chronometry of capitalist modernity itself. Such a crisis is resolved not through a rejection of the market altogether, but through an appropriation of its instrumental and bureaucratizing logic. This is evident in the calls for “supremacy and efficiency” in reading, its characterization as “a discipline … an efficiency of all our mental powers.”77 Stated slightly differently, authors of reading manuals were not calling for a return to an older model of reading, what Rolf Engelsing has famously characterized as an “intensive” paradigm in which individuals read only a few religious texts closely.78 On the contrary, these authors clearly sanctioned an extensive variety of secular books. But by emphasizing system, method, and time management, they were importing a particular conception of rational instrumentality specific to the industrial age. They rejected the phenomenon of “mechanical reading” with its associations with machine culture, but at the same time their emphasis on “fixing the attention …; of detecting and uniting …; of comparing, analyzing, constructing”79 indicates that reading could be subject to modern processes of order and management, mobilized in the name of a superior, goal-oriented end. This “end,” of course, was the creation of the middle-class subject. As Thomas Augst has written in relation to the mercantile libraries of the mid-nineteenth century, “books were the medium of individual development in a civilization organized around the forces of market capitalism: one could become a responsible ethical agent in economic and public life only through the process of reading.”80 Thus, despite the fact that reading was primarily situated as a leisure activity—something generally pursued outside the limits of the paid work day—there was a consistent effort on the part of cultural custodians to align it with notions of productivity and work.
If discontinuous reading is redressed through an increased systematization of readers and reading practices, a similar reconfiguration goes on in relation to time, which must also be subject to market discipline. Advice manuals may begin by invoking a frenzied chronometry as a way of signaling modernity-inspired apocalyptic anxieties, but ultimately this is replaced with a controlled vision of the time of reading, one carefully calibrated by clock, timetable, and calendar.81 “Take care of the minutes, and the days will take care of themselves,” advises Eliza Ware Farrar in The Young Lady’s Friend. “If the minutes were counted, that are daily wasted in idle reverie and still idler talk … they would soon amount to hours, and prove sufficient for the acquisition of … some useful science.” By “scrutinizing her appropriation of every hour in the day,” and “by turning all the odd minutes to account,” the young lady learns “a spirit of order and method” in all her occupations, including reading.82 “There is time enough, in a well-ordered day for everything that a young lady ought to do… nothing need be left undone for want of time; if only you know how to economize… and are resolute to perform all that you can.”83 Farrar thus suggests that reading be subject to the same forms of routinized efficiency that characterized America’s burgeoning markets. Rational and ordered, its pace becomes a figure for the teleological, productive movement of modern society, or what Lee Edelman calls “the promise of sequence as the royal road to consequence.”84
The relationship between the prescribed time of reading and the controlled linear progress of modernity is evident if we return to the trope of the train. As already mentioned, the train could stand as a metaphor for tremendous power and inevitable forward movement. In Hawthorne’s words, it conveyed “The idea of terrible energy,” “the swiftness of the passing moment.”85 But the train was also, of course, a figure for discipline, a meaning that it carries homonymically—to “train” as to develop the habits, thoughts, or behavior by regular instruction. Indeed, the significance of the train for modernity was principally that it could combine tremendous force with precision and predictability, harnessing all the energy of nineteenth-century techno-industrialism in a controlled and systematic way.86 Such is evident in Herman Melville’s description of the train in Moby-Dick:
the
