among the ancient Egyptians, was called a —.”57 Through these stylistic gaps, Melville imagines public identity, within the demands of reformist institutionalism, as an instrumentalization of one’s social self, a singular reading and affirmation of identity in a proscriptively static interpretative mode. In this mode, which Melville lambasts through his much commented on metanarrative asides, bodily feelings of anxiety linked to chaotic and competitive interiorities were regulated by performing the self as a consistent decision algorithm, a state machine like Simonds’s fill-in-the-blank story. Melville’s marks cede their capacity for agency to the Confidence-Man, who reaffirms their desired identity—defining their structured incompleteness for a price they are all too willing to pay. In his triumph, the Confidence-Man represents the importance of “playerliness,” a term I ascribe to the ability to read broadly across layers of medial address (operational, affective, and more traditionally textual). The playerliness of the novel’s fourth-wall-breaking narrator, as well as its “Mississippi operator,” stages a critical supplement to the enactments of state and consistency that dominated U.S. reform discourse and documentation in the mid-nineteenth century. As institutionalism sought to flatten time in a manner that would ensure a consistent future, both The Confidence-Man and Peter Coddle reconfigure focus onto the differential and associative moments when character could be invented anew. Yet though Simonds was somewhat freer to invite the interplay of tone, scene, and textual object as a consequence of generic fluidity in games, the failure of Melville’s novel may reflect a reading public less willing to accept the alternative notions of literary protocol required by his inventive experiments in the novel as mechanism.
This important historical connection between a personal and a mechanical aesthetic of invention is made explicit in my third chapter, “The Power to Promote: Configuration Culture in the Age of Barnum,” which situates the success of P. T. Barnum within a framework of advancements in U.S. patent law that reinforced a growing configurative focus in society at large. By keeping the cost of patenting significantly lower than in Europe and by creating managed public archives of existing inventions like the USPTO, the Patent Act of 1836 contributed to a wider culture of exhibition in the United States and encouraged middle-class inventors to make their names by reconfiguring preexisting materials. Aligning this development with the emergence and persistence of a seven-piece configuration puzzle popularly known as “The Chinese Puzzle” or tangram, I explore Barnum’s use of physical, oral, and documentary paratextual arrangement—supporting materials he dubs “outside show”—as a variety of inventive associational puzzle play. The obsessive configurational intimacies of “The Chinese Puzzle,” which prompted international outcry over “puzzle madness” in the early nineteenth century, offer a way to read Barnum that is sensitive to the thresholds of agency limned by the association of bodies and things. Seeing this through, I pause on the troubling case of Joice Heth, the elderly African American woman who arguably made Barnum’s career as a promoter. If outside cues were a crucial element of invention and playful communication, Heth’s exhibition—first as George Washington’s improbably ancient nurse, then as an impossibly sophisticated automaton—demonstrates the sinister range in which these practices could be used to naturalize dehumanizing attitudes toward nonwhite, nonnormative bodies. At the same time, I explore evidence of audience mediations that may have gone beyond the intended studium of Barnum’s carefully designed stage pictures to produce a puzzling performative punctum, transformatively challenging viewers to play a different game. Haunting the “tact” of Barnum’s career, Heth’s airy and tonal control of atmosphere seeps into his success at the American Museum, where he places focus on murky contexts of enactment and on the reciprocal and embedded interface of spectator and exhibit, rather than simply on the subject-object relationship between viewer and artifact.
Expanding on the thematics of scope and focal control introduced via “outside show” in Barnum’s career, Chapter 4, “Social Cues and Outside Pockets: Billiards, Blithedale, and Targeted Potential,” investigates an unlikely pairing: the high literary genre of Romance and the low hustle of the billiards hall. An Irish immigrant with a knack for the pool cue and an ambitious take on the value of his beloved game, Michael Phelan made his name patenting modifications to billiards tables and codifying American slants on both strategy and rules in his immensely popular Billiards without a Master (1850). Throughout this otherwise functional and geometrically inclined manual, Phelan fixates on the ways in which proper targeting—particularly in the iterative and improvisational mode of “nursing” the table—can be used to “cue” behavioral change outside of the game through shifts in “disposition,” imagination, and mood. Though developed around the table, a set of visual habits and their reversals bleed into associated spaces: the city, the tavern, and the home. I use Phelan’s explorations of the interface between eyes, cues, and social bodies to take a different approach to the work of “Romance” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Brook Farm reverie, The Blithedale Romance (1852). In a narrative framed by scenes of nursing, Miles Coverdale’s ostentatious visual targeting and iterative rearrangements of view enact a logic of scopic manipulation that is central to Hawthorne’s genre intervention. Stories within stories, fixations on point of view, and figures of “reticules” (small netted purses, but also gun targets) permeate a novel that is fronted by a character with a deep attachment to his evenings “at the billiard-hall.” By investigating the shared territory of utopic operation in both Hawthorne and Phelan, I consider “Romance” not merely as a genre defined by tropes of atmospheric marvelousness, but also as a way of thinking about relationality and reframing as ways of affecting social change in directedly indirect ways, a kind of motivated vicariousness native to both billiard playing and reading.
In my closing chapter, “The Net Work of Not Work,” such “reframing” itself becomes the major topic of focus, as I double back to Milton Bradley to analyze his post–Civil War fascination with thinking across thresholds and training habits of scalar or scopic thinking. In a bizarre follow-up to the kinetic judgments of The Checkered Game of Life, Bradley’s Game of Bamboozle, Or the Enchanted Isle (1872) produces a Gordian knot of visually arresting entanglements that force its players into a series of waiting games and paratactic associations. Advertised as having “no instructional value whatsoever,” Bamboozle demonstrates Bradley looking in two directions at once: at a future of games sold by virtue of their graphic effusiveness and a past of games as places of “simple” bodily proximity and storytelling. In the first case, the full-color depth of Bamboozle’s board speaks to developments in lithographic technology that were allowing competitors like the artistically savvy McLoughlin Brothers to encroach on Bradley’s business by producing beautiful but operationally unoriginal board games. With a board that represented the most colorful effort in chromolithography by Bradley to date and rules as difficult to pin down as the sperm whales and sea creatures gracing the edges of the playfield, his long-selling amusement was a tangle of race-style games folded in on themselves that may have been intended as a procedural satire of the industry. At the same time, I unpack its deep indebtedness to the alternative sensibilities of undirected gameplay, social narrative, and transmedial reframing that characterized the massively popular card games and novels created by Anne Abbot some thirty years earlier. Pushing back against the aspirational culture that he had emphasized in The Checkered Game of Life, Bradley’s later output highlights the value of proximity and indirected association, making waiting itself a mode of social agency and group formation.
Over the course of these chapters, the problems of creating, performing, and reinventing public character mirror a certain strain of critical discourse within American Studies. How does one attain genuine social agency—the power to change one’s world—despite the normative mechanisms of control that structure that world and make it available for such an agency? As Walter Benn Michaels put it three decades ago, critical transcendence cannot be taken at face value, “not so much because you can’t really transcend your culture but because, if you could, you wouldn’t have any terms of evaluation left.”58 The issue of scholarly agency here is synecdochic for the wider issue of agency as a whole; six years after Michaels, Sacvan Bercovitch frames the problem as a decision “to make use of the categories of culture or to be used by them.”59
