distort the chronological time between them. When Thoreau writes “The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech,” he describes a book’s trajectory not exactly through time but, asequentially, across it—the “becomes” signaling a transmutation from “thought” to “speech” that is less historical than spectral.
I have been arguing that reading in the nineteenth century could create new modes of perception, feeling, and identification. Thus, alongside the discourse of improvement that issued forth from conduct books and that was readily taken up by readers, there existed another narrative embraced by both cultural authorities and everyday subjects—an alternative to the emphasis on realized potential, measurable gains, and ineluctable progress. Anne-Lise François has described this latter rhetoric as an embrace of “uncounted experience,” “freeing desire from the demands of goal-oriented action.”106 For Susan Warner, M. Carey Thomas, Mary Austin, and Henry David Thoreau, reading involved satisfactions that were not always tied to the advancement of knowledge or the productive realization of the self. It was a practice that was not necessarily plot-driven, indeed, not even propelled by a desire for comprehension or understanding. It engaged the mind but also a wider conception of self that included both spirit and body. It was often voracious and yet could rest content with partiality and noncompletion. It was marked by a sense of recursivity, belatedness, dislocation, and convolution, all of which challenged its placement in normative temporal and spatial frames. Finally, in the case of Austin and Thoreau, it was characterized by a bodily intimacy with the book itself or with a figure associated with the book’s narrative world. It bears repeating that such a reading experience was not simply an effect of the novel—the genre most often associated with imaginative flight and the vitiation of normative experience. On the contrary, history, geology, and classical philosophy (in the case of Thoreau) were equally capable of producing this nonunitary sense of being in the world.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this study, it is tempting to align this kind of reading with a Romantic sensibility, for indeed the two have much in common. This is especially evident in the language of immediacy, personal transformation, and spiritual longing that accompanies the accounts of Thomas, Austin, and Thoreau, each of whom can easily be placed within an American Romantic tradition. All three align reading with a desire to exit the predictabilities of their everyday existence, to partake of “experience disengaged … exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it”—the premier attribute that Henry James ascribed to the romance.107 In this way, the alternative time connected with reading is a version of the “transport” associated with the Romantic sublime. And yet, there are also important differences. The commitment to “totality” characteristic of many strains of Romantic writing—what one critic describes as the “possible-impossible expansion of the self to a seamless identification with the universe”108—seems more abstract and all-embracing than the specificity of connection to another that I have discussed in this chapter. Even with Austin, the desire for merger was directed at a particular landscape rather than at the universe in general. For many Romantic writers (especially in the American transcendentalist context), the interest is in the “currents of Universal Being”109 and the speaker’s place among these. Thus when this writing celebrates the oneness of the world, it is often with an eye toward how this makes possible a renewal or coalescence of the self.
The visions of reading articulated by Warner, Thomas, Austin, and Thoreau, on the other hand, do not speak to self-realization so much as they offer possibilities for removal and self-forgetting. To be sure, each of these thinkers associates reading with power, but it is hardly themselves who are emboldened by this activity. Warner’s account of a self un-recollected and Austin’s description of being “mazed by the magic” of books invoke less Thomas De Quincey’s Romantic vision of a reader “ascending as upon a Jacob’s ladder,”110 than of a reader scattered and nomadic. Likewise, when Thoreau describes how “The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil …; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did,” he invokes an attitude toward books that is marked not by acquisition and ascension but by deference, deferral, and diffusion. Such an attitude suggests an important resistance to the logic of self-formation associated with some strains of Romantic exploration. As Bersani and Dutoit put it, “We cannot dominate a space in which we are disseminated.”111
Thoreau’s “trembling robe” is a powerful figure for both the suspended time and the erotic intimacy he associates with reading. First “raised” by the philosopher, it “remains raised” for the contemporary audience. It evidences both the erasure of chronological time—“No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed”—and the intimate merging of writer and reader, who are joined by the simultaneous “gaze” they direct beneath the garment. For Thoreau, then, reading is significant for the ways it eradicates the distance between author and reader, leaving the two in a libidinally inflected state of mutual existence. To read in this scenario is to insist on sensual proximity in the face of natural deterrents—to circumvent time, geography, and even death itself. As the next chapter will elaborate, Thoreau was not alone in this conception. Many nineteenth-century subjects valued reading both as a model for achieving contact with the dead and as a way of reconfiguring separation as mutual presence. But why was this mutuality so satisfying to nineteenth-century subjects? What were its limits? And to what extent did it threaten the autonomy of readers? The pleasures, dangers, and ambiguities of author-reader communion are the subject of the following pages.
Chapter 2
Books and the Dead
For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
—John Milton, Areopagitica
The concept of a book as alive most likely originated with the Bible—“a living and breathing human expression of the thoughts of Jesus Christ”1—although as this chapter will explore, the idea soon came to characterize more secular texts. Lecturing in 1856, the British clergyman F. D. Maurice criticizes those who would understand popular books as “dead things in stiff bindings.” He counters that “there is a living and productive power in them.”2 Echoing this claim, the American author Lydia Maria Child declares about the novel John Brent by Theodore Winthrop: “How all-alive the book is! Glowing and effervescing, like champagne poured out in the sunshine!”3 Child’s comparison of the novel to alcohol is quite different from the drinking metaphors examined in the previous chapter; here, the figure works to represent the book not as a depraving agent, but as a vital force, “glowing and effervescing” as if imbued with life. Although occasionally, the book’s animation manifests itself independently, more often its cause is the haunting presence of the author, whose “soul” is, in Milton’s formulation above, “preserve[d] as in a vial.” According to the Universalist minister Edwin Hubbell Chapin, books are “like wondrous mirrors that have caught and fixed bright images of souls that have passed away.”4 Noah Porter adds that books “recall the history and achievements of the forgotten past. Every volume suggests a living author who thought and toiled in history.”5 Books, then, are the repository of ghosts, belonging (in Friedrich Kittler’s words) to the “realm of the dead,” but reanimated through the act of reading.6
This animate quality of books meant that they were often envisioned as interlocutors, capable of dialoguing with their readers. William J. Gilmore and Matthias Rothe have both demonstrated that, beginning in the eighteenth century, reading was increasingly understood as “recreating an author’s words” and imagining that author as “talking to the reader.”7 According to Rothe, in eighteenth-century western Europe, books were consistently figured
