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
