time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour.87
Although Melville invokes the “iron Leviathan” here as an analogue to that other natural Leviathan, whose direction and “probable rate of progression” can likewise be accurately predicted by the discerning whaleman, in fact, Moby-Dick’s notorious resistance to pursuit, ownership, and dissection (both metaphysical and actual) would seem to suggest that the great whale cannot be controlled by a civilizing force bent on rational calibration and possession. The “iron Leviathan” or train, by contrast, stands as a figure for the triumph of instrumentalism in modern society. It could thus function as an appropriate metaphor for a certain kind of productive reading whose hallmarks were also “supremacy and efficiency.”88
In exploiting this metaphor, cultural authorities emphasized that train travel provided a crucial opportunity for reading. Collections such as Reading for the Railroad (1848) were published explicitly for the traveler “in want of employment for his time and his thoughts.”89 Hamilton W. Mabie, another conduct advisor, also extolled the benefits of reading when traveling:
Always have a book at hand, and, whether the opportunity brings you two hours or ten minutes, use it to the full.… Every life has pauses between its activities. The time spent in local travel in streetcars and ferries is a golden opportunity, if one will only resolutely make the most of it. It is not long spaces of time but the single purpose that turns every moment to account that makes great and fruitful acquisitions possible.90
Here the effects of modernity on reading are recalibrated. No longer is reading comparable to the fragmented, impressionistic blur produced by accelerated travel. Rather, this travel now provides the opportunity for regulation and control in one’s reading practices. In particular, the time associated with travel (heretofore accelerated and apocalyptic) can be systematized and disciplined so that every interval, from “two hours” to “ten minutes” can be used “to the full.” Foreshortened and fractured time can be made productive if it, too, submits to rational ordering. It is “the single purpose that turns every moment to account.” Thus reading on the railroad (or in street-cars and ferries) is an activity capable of exploiting all the disciplinary force of market capitalism for its own use.
In Mabie’s account, books are valuable as a means toward self-improvement, a way of making “great and fruitful acquisitions possible.” Indeed, even when he writes of the joys of “mental traveling,”91 it is always with an eye toward how this can consolidate (rather than disorient) the self. In another passage, for example, he ties the movement of the railroad to the imaginary transport of books, emphasizing the acquisitive benefits of both kinds of travel:
To sit in a railway car, and by opening the pages of a book to transport one’s self in a second into the age of Pericles or the gardens of the Medici at Florence, is the modern version of Aladdin’s lamp, and makes one master of treasures more rare and lustrous than those which adorned the palaces of Bagdad.92
In this “modern version of Aladdin’s lamp,” the reader mentally visits foreign parts (“the age of Pericles or the gardens of the Medici”) even as he makes physical progress toward a more realistic destination. Railroad reading thus provides the illusion of unfettered travel, while actually participating in highly regulated movement. It engages the reader in imaginary flight, while assuring that he always stays on course. As “master of treasures,” Mabie’s ideal reader thus appropriates the book, without getting lost in it.
As we shall see, however, other nineteenth-century readers played out the potential of Mabie’s vision to more dramatic ends. In their accounts, reading is aligned not with ideation and time management, but with a wayward, deroutinized, and sensual subjectivity. It makes use of cognition, but it also engages the body, so as to remain persistently consumptive, despite rational producerist imperatives. At its most extreme, such reading reconfigures time by imagining author and reader as merged and thereby collectively resisting the chronological expanse that separates the act of writing and its reception. This is a vision of reading that relies less on principles of appropriation and self-improvement, bending instead toward the promise of diffusion and merger.
“And the Hours Were Seconds”
I begin with an excerpt from the journals of Susan Warner. Warner, best known as the author of The Wide, Wide World (1850), began keeping a diary at age twelve, mostly as a way to account for her days and to rid herself of her most persistent bugbear—idleness. Thus many of her journals keep careful record of her minutest activities, as is evident in this entry, provided in full, from 29 May 1832:
After breakfast I made my bed; then from 40 minutes after 8, to half past 9, sewed. Watched the little bird on her nest till 25 minutes past ten. From half past 10 till 25 minutes past 11 played on the piano. Did nothing very particular till 5 minutes past 1, at which time I sat down to read Rollin, but I do not know when I left off. From 4 to 10 minutes past 5, I painted. While I was painting Mr. and Mrs. Clark came in.93
Warner’s painstaking chronicle of her movements is remarkable; even the trifling activities of watching a bird on its nest and doing “nothing very particular” are recorded in exacting detail. It is crucial, then, that reading seems to be the lone activity that resists such temporal calibration. It disrupts her self-scrutiny, creating a zone of unaccountability (“I do not know when I left off”). Importantly, Warner is absorbed not in a sentimental novel or a penny paper, but in the work of Charles Rollin, an eighteenth-century French historian. To be sure, reading history often has the paradoxical effect of causing Warner to forget time, as is evident in this entry recorded eight months later:
I learnt my Latin before 12 o’clock this morning. I did nothing very useful after that, until 1 o’clock, at which time I sat down to practise. I was thus occupied until 2 o’clock. I after wards took up history, but instead of beginning at the pages for the day, I spent some time in looking at other parts of it. At last however, I recollected myself, but did not quite finish it before dinner.94
Here, as above, Warner’s own sense of self-improvement and progress are in lock-step with the advancement of time (“morning,” “12 o’clock,” “1 o’clock,” “2 o’clock”). Indeed, even when she recognizes that she “did nothing very useful,” it is within an acknowledged and limited temporal frame (“until 1 o’clock”). But the sequential and forward-moving momentum of Warner’s day is arrested by her engagement with a history book—itself, ironically, the symbol of a progressivist logic. Rather than “beginning at the pages for the day” (that is, beginning at the beginning, history-like), Warner’s reading is stalled, recursive, indulgent, and retrospective—at least until she has “recollected” herself and returned to linear time and its associated routines (“before dinner”). Hers is a textual engagement characterized by spatial dislocation (“looking at other parts”) and atemporal pacing. Despite her attempts to funnel the time of reading toward instrumental ends—self-improvement, acquisition of knowledge—she finds herself lost in the book, her efforts at mastery replaced by a self unrecollected.
Warner’s characterization of reading as self-forgetting invokes the “rewiring of the senses” that queer theorists have posited as one of the effects of alternative chronometry.95 To engage in practices that circumvent (if only imaginatively) the linear flow of time is to experience one’s self and one’s body in new and different ways.96 M. Carey Thomas offers another example of this phenomenon. Thomas, who would later in her life go on to become dean and then president of Bryn Mawr College, describes returning from a vacation in the Adirondacks in August of 1878. Almost immediately, she heads to the mercantile library, where she does nothing but read for four days: “And the hours were seconds. I was thirsty with an unquenchable thirst. It was like treading on air. It is the purest happiness—the
